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Comment by mmooss | Hacker News Reader

> They argue that SIM card regulation could help “disincentivise” online manipulation, and say their tool can be used to test policy interventions the world over.

Their solution is to deanonymize communication, which you're probably familiar with. That's not a tool for social good, but for government power. We could give government virtually any power, if we assume it will be used only for good.

What's a solution to online manipulation that is actually a social good or cannot be misused? What's a freedom-promoting technology that can replace the disaster that is current social media?

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It's done little to nothing to stop phone-based scams in European countries. It's unbelievable how many calls and SMS we get with scams, supposedly for SIM cards that require ID (Belgium and France).

India is one of the countries widely known to be a hub for social media bots.

India has also always required buyers to submit their government IDs to buy SIM cards.

So how do they do it? Do all Internet connections require SIMs?

Yeah I don't think we should expect cell networks to secure or protect these third parties.

We have to solve universal beauty somehow. People like to take part in beauty, so it isn’t fair to admonish it outright as pure vanity. If you stared at the most beautiful people all day what need do you have to survey the world like Quasimodo from the social media bell tower?

The Hunchback struggled with an apparent vacancy of physical beauty and the burden of exclusion. He constantly doom scrolled from the tower above looking down. The solution required everyone in town to have a literal fucking epiphany.

I've become a fan of Passkey instead of worrying about 2-factor, my phone or my Mac is how I authenticate with encryption keys only on my device.

Just wait until you lose your devices

all at once? I find that unlikely

No one has ever had a whole house disaster after all!

Sure, but iCloud still has my entire phone encrypted and will backup restore to a new device, I would imagine my Passkey which is stored in the Passwords app regardless would be fine. Alternatively you can put Passkey in your Bitwarden vault as well.

You don't travel? Easy to have all your devices stolen at once on the street.

Backup codes somewhere safe. I mean if you're traveling and your bank cards or passport gets stolen you're similarly in trouble, but there's a contingency plan for those kinds of things.

Yes, but unlike with 2FA and SaaS, there's always some recourse. Worst case, you may need to physically visit some bank or government branch, send some registered letters and/or notarize some statements, but there's always a way to recover from losing your ID, passport, or access to a bank account.

Until similar process exist in digital space (read: is legally and culturally forced on SaaS vendors), 2FA is frankly dangerous - it demands standards of diligence and long-term care that not even government affairs do. The back-up codes users are instructed to print out and store securely? No other document in most people's lives requires such long-term protection.

I thought the working group making the standard was threatening to blacklist any implementation that allows passkeys to be exported for backup, no?

I can't say that I fly with everything valuable I have to my name, no. I leave my iPad and my Laptop at home usually, unless I am staying within my state visiting family and even then, I'm pretty sure my iCloud backup will still work on a brand new iPhone, heck I know it will, since it pushed everything to my newer iPhone even things I don't sync were in the encrypted backup of the whole device.

or people could just start to realize that social media is junk food and stop eating it.

>or people could just start to realize that [A] is [B] and stop [C] it.

Possible values for A = heroin, alcohol, tobacco, weed, porn, TV… B = addictive, causes cancer, has an effect on brain health, spreads HIV… C = using, consuming, eating, injecting…

Seems that this “people realizing” does not seem to work with other highly addictive chemicals or electronic media, since healing oneself from addiction requires far more than just “realizing” it is bad for you and the society. Perhaps there is a reason why we limit by law the sale of tobacco, drugs, alcohol and other highly addictive substances.

Or we could start treating people like adults and let them make their own decisions/mistakes.

Progressives will never let that happen.

In fact progressives are much more oriented toward freedom than others. They just don't think the powerful need much assistance and instead focus on the freedom of LGBTQ people to make their own decisions about gender and sexuality, the freedom of racial minorities to do what everyone else does, the freedom and opportunity of undocumented, unhoused, and addicted people. Freedom is the heart of progressivism. (I don't subscribe to any group, but HN usually does not understand and mischaracterizes progressivism.)

Trumpists tell a similar story about themselves. "Freedom" for the few, ignorance & hate for the other.

Rhetorical bumper stickers do feel good; they may even be, on some surface level, true. But they ring like lies to anyone who seen the deeper, realer and truer beliefs of the self-righteous.

It doesn't have to work for everybody, just a critical mass that it doesn't rot the whole country. I can buy enough cigarettes,booze, and weed to run a party 24/7/365, so what are these "limits" you speak of? I don't party like that for the same reasons I quit eating taco kfc mcd's etc. They're still in business, but there will always be a few junkies.

In your jurisdiction, are there regulations and taxes on the sale of cigarettes and alcohol?

And are there any comparable regulations on social media?

Can people considered underage, ie. children, buy these substances in your jurisdiction? Are there taxation, or limit when and where certain substances or media can he bought or consumed?

If you can sell guns and porn in kindergarten, well yes, you live in a very very ”liberal” society - one that is a dystopian hellhole, that is. Unless there is something very wrong with you, you do not want to live in such a society either. Therefore we have laws, regulations, social norms and taxation to limit unwanted behaviour as well as to protect those in the most precarious position. We all know for instance how mental illness affects likelyhood of addiction, or how such a simple thing as _pain_ made legions of people opioid addicts across the USA.

So no, it is not just few junkies that fail to realise.

Have people stopped eating junk food yet?

We are in a situation where it's a choice between unchecked corporate/oligarchic power or government power, at least the latter is nominally accountable in a democracy.

And the unchecked corporate/oligarchic power is often just government power funneled through disposable, if rich, patsies.

The unchecked oligarchy just buy the government.

X controls Musk, not the other way around. Foreign influence campaigns control X. Thus governments buy the services of a rich patsy to control/destroy their opponents.

No, you can choose to opt-out and DIY your solution. It may not be for everyone, but oh well.

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