U.S. companies back Sam Altman's World ID even as much of the world pushes back | Hacker News Reader

U.S. companies back Sam Altman's World ID even as much of the world pushes back

restofworld.org

148 pointskelnos90 comments

Judging solely by their FAQ, this is not enough. Iris photos can be fabricated client-side, including by AI, and can be shared.

So it's invasive AND worthless? Why is this getting support?

You need an offline/IRL verification step and measures to prevent sharing/cloning. AND you need to never phone home revealing services you're using.

Total garbage

    Proof of human verification powered by the Orb only involves one type of data: images of your eyes and face. It does not require your name, email, gender or anything else.
    
    The iris images are used to verify unique humanness, while the images of your face are used for Face Auth, a security feature that ensures only the person who verified their World ID at an Orb can use it.

    The Orb takes high-resolution images of your irises and face.
    The Orb uses these images to confirm your humanness and converts the iris image into a unique code which is then split into randomized multi-party compute (MPC) fragments.
    The Orb sends the images and MPC fragments to your device (your personal custody package), before permanently deleting them.

Your device sends the fragments to the AMPC service to confirm you have never verified before. Your World ID is verified.

Calling it The Orb does not help anything but adding to the creepy factor. Also, Alex Patterson is not involved with this, and I refuse to accept it being called The Orb.

Agreed. Gives me Palantir vibes.

>You need an offline/IRL verification step

That's what the orb thing is about. You go visit, meet humans, have a photo of your eyes. You can't just hold up an AI photo or scan your dog or whatever.

Let the bot mess get bad enough, then charge users to prove they're human. That's the business model.

I tried to track down the original source of the news that World ID is being adopted by Zoom and Tinder and DocuSign and it looks like it's an event they hosted on April 17th. Here's their blog post about it: https://world.org/blog/announcements/the-new-world-id-and-th...

There were more logos on that title slide: Tinder, DocuSign, Zoom, Okta, Vercel, Shopify, Browsnerbase, AWS, exa, RAZER, Coinbase, VanEck

World id, meta verifier, how many other military funded establishments are pushing to require mass surveillance of everyone doing anything. Meanwhile their bots run rampant all over the Internet without any concern for anyone else's infrastructure, copyright, or ip. The irony...

so take down the internet. or take down their company. or just stop using the internet

will posting this on forums that are run by these same people actually be able to drive change?

Yes.

Your message needs to find other people. The how is irrelevant, it just shapes and transmits it.

You'd be silly not to, if you think about it. There's demand for ID verification, and don't you want to be the one with copies of everyone's documents, instead of the other guy? Do you want to make the money, or do you want Peter Thiel to make the money?

The prisoner's dilemma of stupidity.

You mean to tell me that companies that got rich by hoarding data are excited to hoard more data? Never would have guessed.

Also, why wouldn't anyone want to have data about everyone? Seems like a valuable asset.

Defense contractors can sell it to the military and related agencies for top dollar. That's probably number 1, number 2 is higher fidelity correlations to other data.

It's only considered an asset because companies are allowed to externalize the cost of breaches.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E (Mitchell and Webb on "identity theft")

so we're trusting the guy who created tech to make it easier for bots to exist on the internet to then sell us the solution to fix the problem he made worse?

I guess it would be worse if he was doing nothing to address the problem.

Incorrect. Completely and utterly.

Trying to make money on selling the solution to the problem you caused (while also probably tracking literally everyone with the solution) is much worse than causing the problem and doing nothing about it.

I saw someone in another thread put it quite succinctly:

Shit in the pool then sell the nets to clean it up.

he didnt create anything

Ironically, of the only thing he did create (ostensibly), a copycat never went anywhere "social network", its claim to fame was the app (preinstalled by paying carriers) spamming your entire contact book with SMS invitations to join their failing network. Splendid privacy record!

I've seen this take a lot and I don't really understand it. IMO if there's anybody to blame here, and I don't think there is, you could go back and assign blame to the authors of the Attention is All You Need paper, or Google as its publisher.

Once that was out in the wild it was only a matter of time before someone productized it, but there was no conceivable world in which nobody decided to, and there was no guarantee that it was going to be public in all cases. The basis for LLMs is so simple in hindsight that it's not even impossible that it'd been independently discovered and privately weaponized for many years before 2017.

> Once that was out in the wild it was only a matter of time before someone productized it, but there was no conceivable world in which nobody decided to...

By this logic, we cannot blame anyone who is the agent of anything that we deem to be inevitable. Just because it is eventually going to happen, that means you are completely non-culpable for being the person who does it. This could obviously be extended into justifying pretty much anything.

Yeah but I think that's precisely what makes it fuzzier than a zero-sum blame game. Given that this technology was going to be in public hands no matter what, the how matters more than condemning the first visible target. Instead of ChatGPT, the first wide use of this tech could have been a private endeavor to secretly kill the internet. The fact that anyone can see and use it, and learn it's hallmarks, arguably helps innoculate some of the populace against the worst things it could be used for. We're able to sit around and complain that the discourse has been poisoned by robots instead of blindly wondering why otherwise-indistinguishable fellow humans are all saying "delve" suddenly.

I'm not sure I have a specific point here other than that I think it's interesting that he became a target, not necessarily that he's actually blameless.

This is an odd topic. On the one hand, we do seem to have a problem where attention is hijacked by engagement farming. On the other, we also know of problems from draconian management.

I would actually like it if we had something that could say, only promote things on my feeds that are "liked" by people within a geographic radius of me. At the least, mute things that are getting pumped from hostile regions.

I just don't know that I see how this can get us there, though? Seems far more likely that it would lead to more abuse.

Or like, have chronological feed of accounts user follows. Simple. Produces less outrage tho, so it is a no go.

This assumes that most people would choose that feed? Which, I'm less convinced.

That is, this sounds like the idea that telling people if bad things happen when you eat too much candy, then people will eat less candy. Just flat not the case at large.

Yes, you also have to document the downsides of candy. Such that I'm also all for having that feed. But I don't see it being enough to move the needle much, on its own.

> That is, this sounds like the idea that telling people if bad things happen when you eat too much candy, then people will eat less candy. Just flat not the case at large.

Seems like there's an effect but it just takes time. The younger generations are smoking and drinking less.

Maybe the trend will be to abstain from social media feeds and chronological feeds will be their Zima.

This feels wrong, too? Younger generations smoke less because we have made it very hard for them to smoke more. Literally where are they going to do it? And the proliferation of zyn and similar isn't exactly problem free.

Alcohol is a trend that is talked about a lot. I'm not entirely clear on what we know of that. So many hot takes that largely seem conflicting with each other.

> only promote things on my feeds that are "liked" by people within a geographic radius of me

Ugh, really? I live in a part of town where I speak a different language than the vast majority of the people in this "geographic radius of me" which means I'd see very little content that I could understand.

Where do people come up with these wild ideas of anything other than show me the content of people I want to see in the order it was posted? If you want a "Feeling Lucky" type of feed, make it available. Otherwise, you're sending people content they don't want and are only too lazy to stop using it.

$trillions of global brainpower is spent yearly trying to answer "How do we get people to consume things they didn't ask for?" whether those things are products, services, ads, or online content.

I mean, I don't think it has to be quite so literal that you can't work with it. Translate is also a thing.

And if you are building your own list, that is still perfectly fine for how this would work. My suggestion was not to remove the ability to do that. It is to add the ability of ignoring "liked" things where the "likes" are not from people near me. And, I realize that "near" is not necessarily geographic.

Similar problems exist with "trending." It is far too influenced by bots to be at all a reliable indicator of what is actually trending.

I'm not even remotely-interested unless there is legislation that creates civil-liability and criminal penalties for abuse or mishandling of the data.

Also, companies shouldn't be able to refuse service just because the prospective customer's biometric data was leaked/stolen/duplicated in the past. I mean, when you think about it that's some Twilight Zone or Black Mirror territory.

Since when has that stopped companies from mishandling of data? :)

Perhaps it is time to return to meatspace for verifiably real interactions.

bring back PGP in-person signing parties

Yes it's cute on small scale, but also rhymes with decel movement.

I suspect that if we don't want to live in this future, we need some major open source tech leadership around making something like an anonymous version of this

I know, not exactly an easy problem to solve, but big tech or government is going to do it if we can't find better solutions first

Google and Apple already developed private age verification.

The interesting thing is that the issue is real, but that issue is artificially created. If we had the will, we could technically stop it today. Separately, there is too much money to be made ( or ,at least, people with the money think there is, which effectively amounts to the same thing ) and, unless corrected, it is obvious which way corporates will pick.

The good news is: this is the one tech that can be relatively easily stopped, if we so choose. Compared to data centers, this is easy. And yet, I am not sure, if it will be easy enough for most to care about.

Is there any technical solution to these centralized ID authorities doing sybil attacks and minting identities out of nothing to manufacture consensus on supposedly "human verified" sites?

An effective naive defense would be requiring ID to be verified with multiple sites

The axiom here is that both AI and the human internet are worth keeping.

Tech like World ID is scary. Agreed.

What is the better alternative? AI isn't going away and a human internet is worth preserving.

I imagine that in the future we will have less trust in strangers on the Internet and whether they're human or AI will be a side issue. Knowing that a correspondent is human will be neither necessary nor sufficient.

> What is the better alternative?

One alternative is https://self.xyz . It generates ZK proofs from the digital signature on your e-passport or national ID card. That allows you to prove "human" or "over 18" or "not on the OFAC list" without revealing your name, date of birth or nationality.

Disclosure: I'm an advisor for Self

The blind leading the blind. These companies and Sam are both devoid of any sort of ethical code aside from C.R.E.A.M.

protect ya neck is also one of their main ethical concerns

Nobody wants to live in an open air prison.

Necer hace i tgought i can have a job in age of jobless ai by being a human verified data scraper

Of course they do, when the age verification morphs into real personal identification (PI) all people's habits will be known to everyone.

Time to put a stop to this PI tracking trend. But we all know PI will be tracked by all entities in the future in about 10 - 20 years.

Pairs well with also-on-the-front-page https://app.oravys.com/blog/mercor-breach-2026

Khosla and Nilekani are to blame for this a lot more than anyone else. They got India to steamroll the iris scan in the AADHAR enrollment process and now that is used to justify every other expansion.

his mark of the beast attempt # ?

Weirdly, peter thiel is going on tour right now promoting the idea that the antichrist is coming and may be an organization or social movement rather than a person. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I only skimmed the articles about it

'And how do you know this is the case?' : 'Receipts, mostly.'.

yeah, always struck me as odd that Thiel is more obsessed with identifying candidate antichrists than almost anyone else on the planet, including some people who are actually observant Christians, and yet it doesn't seem to have occurred to him that the most messianic secular figures who treat themselves as above mere laws and the guys making millenarian prophesies about the scale of what they're going to deliver are basically the guys in his rolodex...

And he's funding them.

It's just the same boring dynamic whereby every accusation is a confession. Come out swinging, and then the obvious parallels between the antichrist and Trump or even Thiel himself fall flat. Basically "no yuo"

Peter Theil's only worry is that someone/something is going to beat him to it.

Oh, hell no!

This reminds me of outrage when facebook tried to create its own crypto.

>On April 16, it published a blueprint for how companies can grow their revenue with its digital ID.

that "blueprint", hilariously enough, starts with the title "How AI is eroding the foundations of the internet".

from a sam altman company. im afraid if i rolled my eyes any harder that they would spin out of their sockets.

To fix the internet, we had to destroy it first.

There is no way these guys don't know exactly what they are doing. It's the spam thing all over again, but on a 100x worse scale. Cue PG with an essay 'A plan for AI'. Except this time it is probably going to be game over.

I can see a real future for the likes of tailscale here: botfree networks of friends.

KYC to breathe.

As if I needed another reason to despise this continent. Who actually wants to uphold, work for, and build these systems in our society? This is seriously the kind of nation you want to inhabit?

Half of HN. At least.

Pay me enough and I'll do it. The only thing that matters anymore is money.

/shrug

Seems like a good point to remind that capitalism doesn't need democracy to function or survive

They have no problem helping to strangle democracy to death

I can't believe this idiotic project is running so long after the "blockchain for everything" mania ended. Seems like they can't believe it either since they changed their name from "Worldcoin" to just "World.

I'd love to see some credible reporting on the graveyard of blockchain projects.

So many obviously stupid ideas cropped up on the blockchain in 2021-2022. How many of those are still going concerns?

I guess the problem with blockchain stuff is that often there's no servers to shut down or other clear indication that a project has failed - presumably you can look at on-chain data to see if people have stopped trading various backing tokens, but does trade ever clearly stop or are there always bots exchanging tokens back and forth?

Transactions on a blockchain have a cost, so it's kinda hard to sustain faking usage. Unless they count random bogus blockchains.

I think we need less technology. Can we have a de-tech movement? Life-saving tech is fine but enough is enough with software, AI, surveillance, etc. It's too much. It's been too much for the past twenty years or so.

The Butlerian Jihad looms

It's already becoming a trend amongst the youngsters, though I can't say how widespread it is. I think it's inevitable and long overdue.

You shouldn't be down voted for this. It's a valid opinion and it's an acceptable lifestyle.

My personal line doesn't go back 20 years. But I think a lot of people can relate.

It's alright. Lots of people on HN aren't able to handle contrarian viewpoints.

Being hated by idiots is the price you pay for not being one of them.

- Jean Cocteau

Sama can ID my balls.

I’d guess that the pattern of ball wrinkles are quite unique. It could have applications for secure login - you’d could hold your balls above your phone camera or lay them onto a USB attached mini-scanner for authentication.

iphone 18: now with ball and/or pussy scanner!

Sam Altman doing his hardest to become more hated than Larry Ellison I see.

do not anthropomorphize sam altman

No one who has watched him talk would. (And yes I know the origin of the reference but at least Ellison doesn’t pretend).

do not anthropomorphize the Sam Mower...

The Blockchain is back, baby!

I would be happy if Tinder used this tech. The Internet is unusable nowadays because of bots.

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