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Comment by atmosx | Hacker News Reader

There is a surprising amount of engineers who don’t understand what’s happening. So they deal with it as if it’s a funny thing… yeah if two police officers come knocking your door with hard data, you will just explain… and yeah, I mean kids, can bypass it… right? Wrong. This is not 1995. They can make very harsh laws and they can make it borderline impossible to bypass should some authority choose to do so.

The danger here is control: total and absolute control of who will be able to see what, at any given time. Once upon a time this was a hard problem, not anymore.

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what's the current solution that's impossible for kids to bypass with a borrowed or stolen id, say?

I don't see any proposals yet that will actually work for what they say they'll do.

You want a proposal? Make a kids-only set of sites. And then make hardware/software that can access only those sites. Make sure existing and future "non-kid" hardware can't access those kids-only sites. You can allow companies to register that they are one of these kid friendly sites with the additional regulation that would entail. Then make a kid having hardware that can access the normal Internet like having a beer in the US. Now perhaps you can find a hole in this, but it can be patched with technology and the right regulation.

That we aren't doing something like this gives the game away. How the EU is going about this means the point of all of this has nothing to do with children and everything to do with controlling political speech.

PS Yea, I know its a very vague suggestion, it can still be implemented

One issue that I see with this type of system is that it doesn't allow for parental/guardian oversight of what kids are doing or discussing.

Ever gone down the auto-suggestion rabbit hole on YouTube Kids? You start getting into weird and potentially disturbing territory much more quickly than you'd expect.

That's a good point. However, its possible to police YouTube Kids without destroying free speech. Policing the entire Internet and everyone else...not so much. That's the whole point of having the companies providing "kids" sites to register and have a specific set of regulations about the "kids" sites. Perhaps those regulations include parental controls.

What's to stop an adult from using the "kids only" hardware?

Nothing. It won't matter on age appropriate sites.

So age appropriate sites could not have any private communication functionalities.

Then why make non-kid hardware unable to access it? This whole idea is ridiculous and would never work in reality.

You've mixed it up. They said make the kids' hardware only able to access kid sites, not make it so only kid hardware could access it.

They actually said:

>Make sure existing and future "non-kid" hardware can't access those kids-only sites.

Which is the inverse of what i suspect they meant.

> Make sure existing and future "non-kid" hardware can't access those kids-only sites.

No I didn't.

Seems like a good idea.

Who ever heard of a kid getting ahold of a beer?

> You want a proposal? Make a kids-only set of sites. And then make hardware/software that can access only those sites. Make sure existing and future "non-kid" hardware can't access those kids-only sites. You can allow companies to register that they are one of these kid friendly sites with the additional regulation that would entail. Then make a kid having hardware that can access the normal Internet like having a beer in the US. Now perhaps you can find a hole in this, but it can be patched with technology and the right regulation.

This is like saying you can stop world hunger by giving everyone food.

You have to stop thinking like an engineer and start thinking like a public health official.

'Something impossible for kids to bypass' is not the goal. It's akin to evaluating a flu vaccine on the standard of zero breakthrough cases. Such a standard has no relevance on the efficacy of the vaccine.

Likewise for underage internet access. Proponents would be happily satisfied with 90% compliance. They really don't care that coverage isn't complete or circumvention is complete. Once you realize that, you can start constructing counterarguments that dismantle the claim that digital IDs would solve the problems they're supposed to.

Lots have been made. It's not a hard technical problem.

Yup. Everything can be bypassed by kids as they have time, motivation and learn new stuff with blink of an eye.

Just like we once were.

The last time I had police knocking at my door, it was a lot more than two, and they were readying their battering ram when I opened, and then immediately swarmed me and told me to sit down, and then I just explained and they realized their warrant was for a different address and they left. It was scary in the moment, but I never had a gun pointed at me and I wasn't even touched, so overall it left me with a rather positive impression of how search warrants are executed in Germany.

By all means, if you have an adversarial relationship with the state, fight every expansion of its power tooth and nail. But conversely, if you think that everything is going basically fine and the police are reasonable folks overall, then giving them more power doesn't look like a slippery slope straight to dystopia.

> giving them more power doesn't look like a slippery slope straight to dystopia.

This only makes sense if you have no concept of "future", wherein different, less reasonable people can gain power. This should be especially obvious in Germany, where an adversarial relationship with the state can easily be had by merely criticizing it.

The solution then seems to be holding people in power accountable, no?

Digital ID or not, the situation won't improve until we get actual representation that works for the people.

> The solution, then, seems to be holding people in power accountable, no?

The problem is that this is an extremely difficult step to achieve, because it does not simply depend on the will of the people. It depends on cultural evolution. Human beings are not naturally rational; like other species, we are driven by evolutionary processes that are often irrational and self-interested.

Most countries—and, more specifically, the majority of their citizens—have not yet reached this stage of civilizational development. The French are far from it, and I believe the Germans are as well. Despite belonging to the generation that emerged from a relatively recent period of cultural barbarism, Germany is currently supporting what is considered as the greatest genocide and one of the gravest sets of war crimes of our time. So I would not overestimate the level of civilization of a population whose majority appears unconcerned by what I see as such an obvious moral failure.

In my view, one of the roots of human barbarism is the tendency to overestimate either human nature itself or the moral achievements of one's own culture.

> Most countries—and, more specifically, the majority of their citizens—have not yet reached this stage of civilizational development.

While I do agree, I don't believe that the reason is barbarism. My view is that the general public have been imbued with a sense of smallness. We see powerful men twist the world to suit themselves and yet we can't do anything ourselves, alone. The solution is to embrace our agency and organize.

Collective action is necessary to counter authoritative threats. We can sit behind our desk all day and espouse the virtues of voting and to vote with out wallet, but fundamentally, they are individual actions with little power. Western Europe is slightly better in this case, where labour rights are better enforced and people have more free time. Sure, the shops are closed too early for our convenience, but that gives people the time and opportunity to organize locally for the betterment of themselves.

But yes, we do need a cultural evolution, one of better awareness of our capabilities as citizens to organise and demand better of our leaders.

>The solution then seems to be holding people in power accountable, no?

How do you hold people in power accountable if you get sued by them when you criticize them? That's the biggest reason why politicians want a full name / ID verification policy on the internet. It's so they can easily locate and sue their political enemies.

By fighting back in court. Better yet, by organising with others. I believe that it is in the interest of many to hold powerful people to account. Seek them out, share resources, organise a defense. It is not easy, and nothing good ever is.

ID verification is pretty much a non-factor here. No one's listening to a politician who's real name is unknown. For all anyone knows, it could be a foreign actor / spy anyways.

On the contrary, I don't think the current relative lack of arbitrary police brutality depends on the reasonableness of the people in power at all, only on the reasonableness of individual police officers. The police don't suddenly get softer when there's a left-wing government in power and tougher when there's a right-wing government.

That "merely criticizing" the state gets you into an adversarial relationship is, I think, also overblown. For example, insulting someone is a crime in Germany. This is usually not enforced on children's playgrounds, so many remain unaware of this until adulthood. Then they might insult someone who is aware of the law (e.g. a representative of the state) in public and get surprised by a lawsuit. Similarly, spray-painting slogans on someone's house without permission will get prosecuted as vandalism. But if you stick to publishing in ways that normal people publish pro-state opinions, you can publish your criticism in the same way and nobody will bat an eye. (Certainly, a large number of people are criticizing the state in exactly this way at any given time, without being worse off for it.)

> The police don't suddenly get softer when there's a left-wing government in power and tougher when there's a right-wing government.

They absolutely can though, through hiring selection bias, training, firing, promotion criteria, bonuses, performance metrics and quotas, oversight enforcement or lack thereof, etc. It's not quick, but incentive structures can absolutely change an organizational culture.

Unfortunately, reasonable men, perhaps virtually all reasonable men, can and will become more corrupted by expansive power. The fact that they were not corrupted when they had less leverage on the populace doesn't mean they will behave differently than other historical German (/human) apparats when they have a bit more of the intoxicating liquor.

>r warrant was for a different address and they left.

I am sorry but this is not something that I find "reasonable" or "positive impression" unless small children are the instigators or low stakes events are involved. If armed men are barging into sacred spaces they need to be able to triple, quadruple check they are performing what the warrant says and if not then nothing else they are doing shall be trusted either. Invading a home uninvited is a life and death matter and there is no room for policeman who make such glaring mistakes even if the natural untrained or undisciplined random person naturally might.

They didn't actually make any mistakes. The only way for them to quadruple-check was to knock on my totally featureless door and ask, which they did. There was never a threat of lethal violence, hardly a life and death matter.

>There was never a threat of lethal violence, hardly a life and death matter.

Do you suppose the state charge you with a violence linked crime if you showed up to Chancellor of Germany's private home with a battering ram and holstered weapons and started "readying your battering ram" to barge in? I realize there is the additional element that it was authorized against a different home and "just a mistake" but that is immaterial to whether the execution of a warrant involves threat of lethal violence (that is for good reason, checked by a judge).

Yeah, this read like someone reviewing a mob organization with "4/5 always polite when they come to collect".

I was initially convinced that it had to be sarcasm but since gp insists in keeping up the spiel in replies I am less sure now.

Do you think law enforcement shouldn't exist like the mob shouldn't exist, or do you think they should've gone differently about enforcing the law in this particular case?

> giving them more power doesn't look like a slippery slope straight to dystopia.

Are you seriously saying that with a straight face while (apparently) living in Germany of all places?

May I suggest picking up a history book or two?

Believe me, German history education is very thorough in making sure people know that the Nazis weren't some kind of slippery slope situation where people didn't know what they were planning to do. The Nazis were open in their idea that Germany could have won WWI if it hadn't been for those damn lefties and their revolution. They were open about their desire to crush those lefties. They were open about their hatred for Jews. Hitler wrote Mein Kampf about his ideology in prison after his failed 1923 coup. When people voted for him in the 1932 election, they weren't somehow unaware of these. They voted for him because they knew and because they agreed.

It was over a decade after the end of the war before the average German person realised the Nazis were the bad guys.

Germany is also involving itself in another war right now where it thinks it is a good guy.

Which war?

Would you think the same thing if you happened not to be there, came home half an hour later to find your apartment ransacked with the door smashed in, and had to wait a few months for compensation for the repairs?

They only threatened to break down the door because I told them to wait a moment as I was in the kitchen. My neighbor, whom they were actually looking for, was apparently not at home and they left his door intact. I guess for non-urgent searches they would get a locksmith to open the door in a less destructive manner. But sure, if they had caused significant damage and I had to wait for compensation, I would get upset. At the claims processing bureaucracy, not the police for acting on the information they had available.

Serious question - looking around, do you really think "everything is going basically fine"?

Yes. I didn't vote for either of the parties in power, they implement many policies I disagree with, but this makes surprisingly little difference in practice.

I think I'm like you in the sense that I'm a law abiding citizen in what I consider a high trust society. That said, I'm not naive to the fact that "having nothing to hide hence nothing to fear" doesn't cut it: privacy eroding laws are a slippery slope eventually leading to finding yourself on the wrong side of what's deemed acceptable. That, and to the fact that law enforcement association with political extremism has only increased in recent years, as evidenced by the number of reports about bursting neo-nazi groups and such.

You've seen Australia. Every kid who wanted had access to forbidden social media.

The control bit is the dangerous one, sure.

Kids can't bypass it because the systems they're trying to access are entirely different than they were in 1995. They are not accessing "the Internet" on which they connect to their friend's BBS's, irc servers, Usenet, etc. They're large, private systems which can absolutely be locked down by the parties that own them, on which activity has largely been centered.

Kids CAN absolutely bypass a lot still. Jump on Nostr and nobody can stop anyone -- a server can be run on any device (mine is on my phone), and it'll even run on non-TCP/IP networks (FIPS is in early days and still largely runs on existing infrastructure but absolutely doesn't rely on it staying there). Give it another few months with some LoRA build out (and enough motivation for the kids) and even the ISP gateway stops being a filter point. Not that ISP level controls have ever really been the most effective anyway, given the existence of VPN's and other tunneling methods (to say nothing of public wifi networks).

We see this happening in real time as India tries to stamp out Bitchat. The codebase has appeared on more and more repositories, and the most recent version of Bitchat is capable of transmitting itself for install to other devies without relying on any server or Internet at all.

So should we push back? Of course. At some point we would need to worry that they'll say enough is enough and make the hardware itself inaccessible. We're a long way off from that, and it'd be a surefire way to get a LOT more pushback.

But in the meantime, we shouldn't despair too much. The cypherpunks that gave us private and secure access on the Internet used by everyone today despite being once illegal to export didn't go anywhere. They're still here, kicking down every wall that gets put up, or at least pointing out that there are multiple ways around (or through) it.

Here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49080929

There is discussion about LLMs, models, CSAM, undressing people with AI, and posting those images to places.

No handy wavy stuff, makes this problem go away due to filtering at creation. That's because, open models are a thing. So you either ban all open models, or maybe make it a crime to publish uncensored models, or you punish what individuals do on the internet.

Slander and libel and defamation are a thing, and have been a thing forever, millennia. Suddenly, on the open and free internet, for barely an eyeblink, anyone could say anything with zero liability and responsibility.

Then, 2010s came. Then, doxing of people we didn't like, or didn't agree with, became OK. So suddenly, it was OK to "out" a person, but not to just force everyone to be de-anonymoized. In other words, unpopular opinions? Yeah, that's OK to remove the cloak.

And with AI, everyone and their dog will be able to render images of anyone they want naked. CSAM. Political lies, made up videos, slander, libel, literal wors in people's mouths, on and on.

What's my point?

Well, just as 2000 brought a new world to people, 2025 is doing the same.

This is only going to get worse. And I fully agree, the dangers for "control" are going to exist. But the dangers of people posting all of this stuff, has hit the point where a lot of people are uncomfortable with it. And if you think Grok creating CSAM is bad, then you must think anyone creating CSAM is bad. Or anything. So how to you prevent the harm?

Well really, you either heavily restrict software. Open LLMs, or?

You make people posting this stuff liable.

The world is at a fork. Everything will change. Because banning software requires immense control over hosting software, but so does deanonymizing the internet. And really, this is inline with how the political and societal landscape changes.

It's only been 20 years since a lot of people were on the Internet, and only 10 years since I'd label it 'mainstream'. As in, even grandma uses it. And so, now the laws are coming, as legislation and law and change takes time for politicians, and political bodies.

We're here. Right now. This is the moment.

So I 100% guarantee that absolutely nothing will stop the path to liability for slander, libel, and more that is coming. Nothing. Whatever it takes, you can be sure it will happen.

So how will it happen?

Well, by knowing who to sue.

Like it or not, that's the truth. And no, I don't like it myself.

Who cares if they undress people with AI. Its slop and not worth restricting liberties over it.

Underrated take.

Nothing ever stopped a sufficiently skilled pencil artist from sketching someone in the nude without their permission.

People have been making fake nude photos since the 90's with Photoshop and related software.

Is it crass and disrespectful? Sure.

I think it's also, however, more alarming because when it first happens it's something people worry that it will be accepted out of hand as real. Once it settles in that this is just the sort of media that is trivial to make, that matter falls off, and it's just like any other sort of harassment at most.

Attempts at censorship won't go well. Even blowing the whistle on it happening has likely added fuel to the fire of it happening more -- how many only know deepfakes are a thing because a news article exposed the practice and how awful it was?

It won't go anywhere. Especially as more and more models become capable of being run on cheaper and cheaper hardware at home. Time for society to adapt its expectations for what sort of media exists, and how trustworthy any of it is.

The people depicted in unauthorised AI nudes circulating the Internet might care.

The women being undressed care.

Let's not lie and say Ai can do things it can't: they are having their faces pasted on another body that is not theirs.

They're just protecting the kids, at least to start with.

From what?

I truly believe unfettered access to endless scroll dopamine is bad for adults, but even more terrible for a developing mind. It reduces attention span, increases anxiety, etc. Pushing the onus on parents for healthy internet consumption is probably not effective because most families have both parents working jobs and can't be on top of their kids 24/7.

Now... how to effectively address this problem without introducing a dystopian surveillance state? I don't have a good answer.

Zero Knowledge Proofs, but the fact this isn't being implemented, despite various popular open source implementation existing [0], speaks volume.

[0] https://github.com/google/longfellow-zk

probably because it's being explained about as well as your comment or this repo manages to

How about adding a blockchain and AI to complete the buzzword bingo?

> Pushing the onus on parents for healthy internet consumption is probably not effective because most families have both parents working jobs and can't be on top of their kids 24/7.

So, the choice is surveillance state or nothing? I guess we choose not to solve the actual issue of overstressed parents working too much to parent their kids because there is no way to profit from that.

It's almost like impoverishing everyone by debasing their currency to fight foreign wars for a century has had some knock on effects to public health.

Parents who have enough time to parent also have enough time to take a critical look at what the government is doing and that would be bad for national security (defined as the security of those leading the nation).

We had a world without the endless scroll just a decade ago. You don't need a totalitarian surveillance state to regain control over that, nor do you need perfect enforcement - just like illegal betting sites are a problem, but a marginal one.

> Now... how to effectively address this problem without introducing a dystopian surveillance state?

Forbid endless scrolling like the EU is doing? Or just ban short form video content altogether?

I think it's worth recognizing the impact that Gin had on 18th and 19th century England. It was at least akin to the meth epidemic across large parts of the US 15-20 years ago.

Not saying we don't have alcoholism now, but the scope of it has dramatically changed. Some of it is that people recognize the dangers, some of it is that people have found ways to mitigate the harm, and some of it is prevention methods.

People went into gin when it first hit the scene treating it like a relatively neutral new beverage that felt pretty good. They'd drank beer for centuries (small beers or regular), and it just seemed like a mostly harmless innovation. Or if not harmless, at least the harm wasn't as interesting as the positive experiences.

We find ourselves in many ways in the same boat now with our tech.

And the perhaps sad reality is, when we're talking about physiologically damaging innovations, these adaptations can take generations. Children seeing what they did to their parents deciding that they want something else -- parents who may have regrets but at least a difficult time detaching themselves from their addictions. Though also, in that process, some of them finding ways they can replicate to cease further damage. And, somewhat helpful, the regulation of the production such that some of the harmful aspects are removed simply by improving quality, giving people some of the experience without as many side effects (see: Bathtub Gin).

It's worth noting what didn't work as well: prohibition.

There are ways we can have a lot of the benefits of social media and dispense with the negatives. The brainrot dopaminergic algorithms. The constant surveillance. We can preserve the beneficial aspects: the exposure to diverse perspectives, and innovative ideas. And there is plenty of awareness that can be shared around just how harmful overexposure to even the best implementations can be. And we can iterate and adapt to see what works well for some people and what leads to ruin.

The way out is through.

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