Hacker News Reader

Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

This is going to create a mess and make the internet probably suck a lot more.

I don't have any solutions or ideas to float. Just painful acceptance that nice things are going to break.

That’s a succinct description of what seems to be the current state of most adults I know.

It’s clearly burning, nobody seems to be in charge, there’s little hope that anyone is going to fix it, and individual actions seem like shouting into the wind. Even worse, the problem is undefined and hard to measure - and different groups have different complaints and priorities.

Or, said another way:

“That pretty much sums it up for me” - drunk guy in the bar in the movie Groundhog Day

Find the adults who think otherwise; They'll embrace you.

I’m looking! Last year I started actively looking for pro social friends to - let’s say - do a “security and firmware update of my social network.” It’s been successful so far though not perfect or easy

Nearly all the failures of the internet come down to advertising. The surveillance state was built to sell you advertising. Spam isn't exactly advertising but it's not not-advertising either. Captchas are built to protect sites from being viewed without making advertising impressions, usually so the content can be stolen to sell to other advertisers.

We need a new foundation. I don't know what it looks like, exactly, but I think it's going to have to built around micropayments.

How is spam not advertising?

Obviously there will be a satellite that will zoom at your gps location, you have to do a special dance and your humanity will be verified by motion detection, obviously robots eventually will be able to do this and dance better than humans as well as wear fake skin but that's a problem for another generation.

I hope not, I really miss the times when I could curl any website I wanted, make myself "API" out of it, good times.

One solution was the universally hated worldcoin. I hate it as well and don't think it could work, but the problem they meant to tackle is very real and we should talk about it.

I think we are going to need some kind of certificates vouching for humans being humans.

I wonder if there could be a service which you use with your real identity registered, but the certs it gives you are untracked to still allow for possibility of being anonymous. Although it seems like it should limit it to giving you only a few certs a month. But then bad actors could start buying those certs from people themselves. Still would make it much harder to spam requests.

I could totally imagine Verisign or something doing this. Imagine a world where you have to pay a yearly renewal fee to keep your humanity. They’d love it. Of course, it’s not a claim that the user is a human, but rather the user has a slightly difficult to obtain certificate that had to be requested by a human.

Could slow spam down though.

> a service which you use with your real identity registered, but the certs it gives you are untracked to still allow for possibility of being anonymous.

The best you can do is pseudonymity. If the attestations are completely anonymous then you have no way of dealing with bad actors, like those who sell their digital identity to spammers.

> I wonder if there could be a service which you use with your real identity registered, but the certs it gives you are untracked to still allow for possibility of being anonymous.

This is possible with the German identity card. (I have no idea but my guess would be that this is possible with other identity cards from Europe or around the world too.) You can even make age checks with out transmitting the actual birthday. It just returns whether the card holder has or is above the age in question. You can't cross reference those certs with other sites.

It really grinds my gears if a identity check wants a video call or what ever instead of them using eID features.

Ah, yes, I absolutely trust Sam Altman to keep all of my personal data, to never resell it to people I have absolutely no idea of. Just like I absolutely trust him to not completely manipulate worldcoin and generate tokens that will be given to bots. He's totally not in a position where he creates both the problem and the solution.

This is why attestation standards are all the rage right now.

Yeah, Worldcoin is totally a solution because you can’t buy up heaps of identities from poor African people. /s

Ah yes, the infamous "the blockchain can solve this" solution.

Why blockchain, I never said that.

> One solution was the universally hated worldcoin. I hate it as well and don't think it could work, but the problem they meant to tackle is very real and we should talk about it.

No it is not a solution. What prevents me from "selling" my biometrics to someone to be used for nefarious purposes? Or you are proposing putting an orb in from of every computer and not allow accessing the Web without scanning user's iris every time they type web-site address? Even if such dystopia get implemented we will end up with situation when bunch of real people in third-word countries are getting paid 2$ a day to sit in front of a computer playing games all day while getting their eyes periodicaly scanned to allow spammer botnet to browse the Web.

> I think we are going to need some kind of certificates vouching for humans being humans.

Who are "we"? Me and probably absolute majority of other users are perfectly fine with the way the Web currently works and don't care about the cost of fraud for Google's ad empire.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com