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Comment by the__alchemist | Hacker News Reader

This is an excellent point that will immediately go off-topic for this thread. We are, I believe, committed, into a mire of CG content enveloping the internet. I believe we will go through a period where internet communications (like HN, Reddit, and pages indexed by search engines) in unviable. Life will go on; we will just be offline more. Then, the defense systems will be up to snuff, and we will find a stable balance.

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I hope you're right. I don't think you will be, AI will be too good at impersonating humans.

"we will just be offline more"

I think it will be quite some time into the future, before AI can impersonate humans in real life. Neither hardware, nor software is there, maybe something to fool humans for a first glance maybe, but nothing that would be convincing for a real interaction.

My theory (and hope) is the rise of a web of trust system.

Implemented so that if a person in your web vouches for a specific url (“this is made by a human”) you can see it in your browser.

"Web of Trust" has been the proposed answer for, what, 30 years now? But everyone is too lazy to implement and abide by it.

Don’t worry, it’s coming for real this time. The governments have been proposing a requirement that web companies connect accounts to government IDs.

If that isn’t exciting enough, Sam Altman (yea the one who popularized this LLM slop) will gladly sell you his WorldCoin to store your biometric data on the blockchain!

If your solution to this problem is the web of trust, to be blunt, you don't have a solution. I am techie whose social circle is mostly other techies, and I know precisely zero people who have ever used PGP keys or any other WoT-based system, despite 30 years of evangelism. It's just not a thing anybody wants.

It's 99.99% an UI issue.

If Google wouldn't have let perfect be the enemy of good and had added PGP support to Gmail early on (even just the shittiest signatures that are automatically applied and verified), the world would be a completely different place. Scams just wouldn't exist at this scale when signing mails with a known key would be the standard.

The tech is there, now we have Matrix and XMPP and PubSub and god knows how many protocols to share keys. Even Keybase.io still kind of exists.

What is lacking is a browser ecosystem for people to use their known identities to vouch for a specific url (with smart hashing so that changing the content would invalidate the trust).

We have the technology. Someone(tm) "just" needs to build it :)

Indeed. I worry though. We need those defense systems ASAP. The misinformation and garbage engulfing the internet does real damage. We can't just tune it out and wait for it to get better.

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