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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

I don’t follow. The Dutch tax office has substantially more complete records right now. Even if they don’t track race or religion as explicitly as they did in the 40s, your hypothetical invading Nazis can run some local AI over people’s last names and get close enough.

How is, of all things, an age verification app going to make that worse?

I mean I understand your argument in principle but it seems you’re arguing against ~every present-day functional government and not against an age verification app.

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I'm not even saying your conclusion is wrong. But choosing Netherlands about how information control is safe in the hands of the government is a bit of an own goal.

Like if I was the boss of a train company I would probably not put up a photo of Mussolini as a motivational poster. Well… maybe I would, but only ironically.

> How is, of all things, an age verification app going to make that worse?

What are you arguing for, here? If everything were perfectly anonymous, maybe. But NOT ONCE in history has governments decided to not abuse power. It'd be so easy to just put a tracker in there or something.

All these "think of the children" arguments are ALWAYS red herrings. Literally any action, any freedom denied, can be justified in the fight against CSAM. And so they get rushed through and abused.

The EU DNS filter (CSAADF) was literally IMMEDIATELY abused to block other things too.

"It's just age verification". Is it, though? How do you verify age without verifying identity? How do you verify its use, without tracking. Provably without tracking. Provably without what's called "turnkey tyranny"?

I think if your argument, which is an extremely common argument, is "I just want to block children's access to bad stuff on the Internet", then you cannot possibly have been paying attention to this debate that's been going on since at least the mid 1990s. Were you even born when this was being discussed? If that's your argument then you have about 30 years of catching up to do before you should speak.

[1] yes, I know Mussolini did not in fact make the trains run on time.

>how do you verify age without verifying identity

zero-knowledge proofs

Then you only know that someone is over 18. You don't know who is over 18. In particular, you don't know it's the person who's accessing your website.

that's the same situation as children putting in their parents details/scanning their face/whatever, you're not going to solve this technically

the point is non-govt entities shouldn't get any information about you during age verification other than that you're over 18 and that's what ZKP can give you

Your comment sounds like a politician who has just heard a magic technical incantation that solves everything.

I'm sorry, you can't just drop "quantum computer", or "zero knowledge proof", or "flux capacitor", and think that you have solved the problem.

Just dropping "zero-knowledge proof" as if it's a mic drop moment is like when Turnbull said "the laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia".

The devil in all this is in the details. Just saying "zero-knowledge proof" is just barely more productive than saying "won't someone please think of the children?".

If you don't have a complete solution, then you're "not even wrong".

In addition to that, you have misunderstood how zero-knowledge even addresses the main problems. Not the technical problems, and DEFINITELY not the meatspace problems.

literally 0 substance in a 5 paragraph comment, I'm starting to think this might be a not-exactly-human poster

First: That was six paragraphs, not five.

Second: There was some substance. Maybe not six paragraphs worth, but there was some. Here it is: You, when you said "zero-knowledge proofs", did not give much substance. How, specifically, is that going to work?

It's a bit rich for you to be complaining that knorker didn't have any substance, when the problem is that you didn't give any.

Ironic, since LLMs have had problems counting, and so do you in counting paragraphs.

I felt your comment was so uninsightfully vapid and arrogant that it's uselessness could not be described briefly.

But sure, it does boil down to "sigh, that's not even wrong", but I suspect you not only don't know what that means, but that you would not be curious enough about life to look it up.

I note that you still did not provide a solution. You didn't even describe the requirements, and the problem here starts with a problem definition that doesn't inherently lead to it being either logically unsolvable, or leading to turnkey tyranny.

Edit: I use punctuation because I was born in the 1900s. And was on the internet when this issue started in the 90s, which makes me react to your "why don't we just...".

And if you look carefully, you'll find my punctuation choices are clearly un-LLM-like.

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