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Comment by loftsy | Hacker News Reader

It should be possible to have a private chat without spying.

However I have an unpopular opinion, interested to hear what others might think:

We should eliminate anonymity online. If you go on the internet everything you do should be tied back to your name. This can be done using device attestation. Everyone gets a private key tied to their name/address.

This is compatible with free speech. In fact it promotes free speech because being a "troll" becomes a lot more personal.

I think this way of living would be closer to our nature as tribal primates. It would improve behaviour and overall quality of life. Our brains are designed to have checks and balances from wider society which you don't get anonymously online.

This would also reduce the need for govt monitoring because any chat online could be "turned in" by an informer and then any criminals identified.

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What technological measures do you propose to block Tor and VPN services to achieve this? Not even China's Great Firewall completely achieves this, though not for lack of trying.

VPN is straightforward to solve. For example Apple devices already have "Device Attestation":

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/deployment/dep28afbde6...

To do TOR you would need to look at the IP protocol and signing at the packet level. Definitely more difficult.

Device attestation is a way for a server to attest that a requester is e.g. an iPhone. Sure, it can be expanded to cover if the requester is, say, John Smith. But the server has to demand it.

Decentralized platforms tout not doing this stuff as a feature. You'd have to roll out the attestation system and require everyone running a web server to set up this attestation infrastructure; that is, the small guy running a model train forum on his laptop or whatever must risk prison time if he doesn't do attestation. That'd be so draconian that afaik not even China does it.

The attestation would be done by your ISP or the next level along. The ISP/backbone could pass this information along to Web servers.

The difference is that they aren't using this to make online conversations more polite or something (not that I agree with your point that removing anonymity somehow is better for free speech, at all). This isn't some sort of initiative to promote self policing. It's to get information that will allow authorities to arrest people and put them in jail. That automatically makes the entire argument that it could be beneficial for free speech and promote more "real life" like interactions online irrelevant, because that's not the point of this law.

> This would also reduce the need for govt monitoring because any chat online could be "turned in" by an informer and then any criminals identified.

This is where you completely break your premise, this is Stasi levels of informing, asking for the population to spy on each other. It's not healthy to society when you feel that any other person you interact with might be informing on you to the State, you leave a very wide avenue open for misuse when the State changes its rulings on what's considered criminal.

Maybe.

How is it different from now when you can record a conversation you have? or forward an email to the police?

> We should eliminate anonymity online.

Unless you're careful and quite tech literate this is already the case

I think it's worth debating the idea, exploring what it would look like. But I think there's a lot of hidden complexity there.

1. Who is allowed to detect, process or store your identity? For what purposes?

2. What about "right to forget"? Does the data need to be destroyed after a certain period?

3. Who manufacturers and sells these private keys? What happens if I lose mine, or it gets stolen?

4. How does this work internationally? Can a key from China access a system in the US?

Good points. Difficult questions. I was thinking it is tied to the physical device. So you would register a laptop when you buy it with the state and the key would be in the HSM. So the main differences would be:

1. Give my name and address to activate a device 2. "The internet" requires authentication via the HSM.

Kind of like how a car is tied to an individual, via the logbook (in the UK at least). You need to think who you let use your laptop, lest they get you in trouble. If it's stolen or you sell it, you report it. To be fair, people were against passports and license plate numbers when these were first introduced, and it hasn't lead to the problems people envisaged.

That said... I don't know if this is feasible with a laptop. It's much easier to pawn my laptop, than it is to steal my car and drive it without me knowing. And at what point does a computer become a server, and are those regulated differently?

Knowing that you're never anonymous online would certainly improve some conversations, and mitigate some of the ability for state actors to e.g. sow discontent online. But it would arguably be a huge inconvenience and risk for everybody, so I don't know if it's worth the cost.

> We should eliminate anonymity online.

for certain platforms. IMO platforms should be able to decide for themselves whether they want the option to have people verify themselves via ID or not.

It's the government's job to provide this service

What exactly would be the difference with what we have now? We already have physical addresses.

Surely then the government can easily censor anyone who disagrees with them

Very interesting point. Does a well functionality democracy require the right to be anonymous?

I don't know, no one has done "well functionality democracy" yet

It sounds like a solid idea (bot rejection anyone), but I wonder if governments would use it to quarantine users instead. Would I have to pay a bi-yearly fee to maintain and reissue my online passport?

All in all I would be willing to be quarantined if that meant the bots would suddenly die.

That’s an easy one to shoot down because it would lead to endless harassment of innocent individuals and suppression of popular opinion or critical thought. It goes counter to everything that the internet is about. It also would lead to mass genocide by governments seeking to kill of any resistance.

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