EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation
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The real reason, of course, is to force people to connect strong real-life identifiers to online activity. Mobile first, then Windows. Then Linux is too weak to oppose on its own, and will adapt or die.
We restrict certain activities and places in the real world from certain people all the time. For example, not allowing people under 18 or 21 (depending on your country) into casinos. What we have now is essentially unrestricted access to pretty much anything and a fair assessment is that there is societal harm from that. We're creating gambling addicts (which is arguably the most harmful form of addiction), allowing predators to interact with children,, manipulating children through advertising and algorithms, flaming harmful behaviors like eating disorders, allowing mass cyberbullying and so on.
So saying "we should allow unfettered access to the internet" or even "it's the parents' responsibility" is naive, dismissive and has failed. The only question from here is what to d we do about it. You can say "nothing" but that's a losing argument.
I personally believe that the easiest thign to attack is advertising to minors. This will take away the financial incentive for these platforms to create addictive behaivors in minors. And most of these tech platforms have already built the infrastructure to do this. You don't allow advertisers to target an audience based on (actual or inferred) ages under 18. You extend that to proxies for age, like an interest in Minecraft. And you make advertising to children illegal.
Arguably, I'd go further and restrict certain features for minors, such as comments on Youtube and an algorithmic feed.
At the moment nobody is solving anything because it's simply a fight to move liability to someone else. Meta wants hardware vendors to be responsible because, guess what?, they have no hardware platform. Apple and Google likely want app to have to deal with it for the complete opposite reason.
I believe we should shift that liability to advertising.
It's as if the government first let businesses install slot machines at every street corner, then suddenly went "I'm shocked, shocked! that we have a massive epidemic of gambling addiction here, we have to mandate anti-gambling shock collars for everyone to tackle this urgent problem! There is no alternative!"
For example, "unfettered Internet access is just a series of tubes (shout out to Ted Stevens for that one) for pedophiles to rape your children." So now what? Is it your hyperbole against mine?
The problem is that people are operating under a myth that they have anonymity. You don't. You're one subpoena away from being unmasked online and individuals can do it (eg [1]). When governments do it, they can do it in secret. National Security Letters, pen registers, FISA warrants, etc.
So the idea that "age verification is the first step to a more comprehensive" is flawed in both logical construction (being a fallacy) and that ship has already sailed.
[1]: https://chambers.com/articles/internet-harassment-lawyer
These are not equivalent. Restricting access to a casino just requires showing an ID to a person. A few seconds later and that person has completely forgotten everything about you. They will not keep a record of your home address, etc. Perfectly privacy preserving. You have no such guarantee when you upload government IDs to a server.
I don't think anyone here minds restricting access, but that doesn't require completely destroying ownership rights over our own devices nor internet and device privacy.
All that really needs to be done is for servers to publish what type of content they show from a parental perspective in a machine-readable format and for devices to have parental controls that only allow access to servers that publish such info and which content is allowed by the parental settings.
This should be even more effective than solutions requiring uploading IDs since there's still going to be servers out there in other jurisdictions that simply don't care for such things.
The problem is that so many people here look at this purely from a USA perspective.
An age check in many European requires no uploading of any ID. It’s an API call toward an ID service, it will tell you which data the service gets access to, and there’s strict regulations and liability around data retention.
I’m not concerned about the government. If they become authoritarian enough to worry, they will impose far tighter surveillance anyway. What we have now is the naive idea that just by not doing ID check, government surveillance is a solved problem in the free democratic world. It’s not. Avoiding ID checks just makes the problem worse because it makes the regular person complacent. The surveillance is implicit and hidden. If we understand that it’s nearly impossible for a non-tech person to avoid being tracked by corporations and governments, then we start working on the things that really help: super tight regulations about what can and can’t be tracked. Requiring audits of large corporations. Solutions that give corporations access to only the data they absolutely need and nothing else (the lack of such things is how we end up by uploading whole ID documents)
We can't get perfect privacy so we should normalize not having any? Leave it to the government we're distrusting to handle our privacy?
> If they become authoritarian enough to worry, they will impose far tighter surveillance anyway.
What is this logic? Let's not worry about creeping there because if they want it they'll force it? That's not how it works. Getting to a surveillance state needs acceptance. To get that, rather than dropping people in boiling water, you slowly heat the pot, which is what this is.
Did every American live in a "surveillance state" back then?
Every remote communication could only be had in the clear. Everyone was fine with that. Was the US in the 80s a surveillance state?
Today, and as things continue to progress with speech-recognition, LLMs, video recognition, etc. surveillance can be automated. It's looking conceivable to be able to process all communication population-wide in real-time. That would have been unimaginable back then.
Now, texts and calls today are only a small role of phones. For many people, it's their primary general computing device. It's how they interact with the world. It contains their entire digital life.
Couldn't look at your photo reels and videos, and diary, and every purchase you've ever made, every opinion you've ever said on a public space, every community you've ever interacted with, every location you've ever been in down to the room, from wiretapping a phone in the 80s.
> Some things are exceptionally hard to track now (like e2ee messages) that were trivial to track back then.
Can be easier than back then if stuff like chat-control comes to pass, because now the message can be obtained, processed and stored indefinitely in an automated fashion for everybody at once. E2EE becomes security theater for the most part.
If citizens still have a capacity to restrict the government via (enforced) laws, it doesn't matter much that the communications are in the clear. You can layer something on top just to be sure, but the foundation is laws and a functioning political system.
If there's no functioning political system, the government will just do whatever, like buying the same data they ostensibly can't collect from commercial providers (who weren't restricted from collecting it because there's no US GDPR).
If a country has a functioning political system, it can just do things like ban gun ownership, introduce mandatory IDs, publish everyone's yearly income, or criminalise calling other people slurs in public and not become an uncontrollable dictatorship. If it doesn't, corruption and democratic backsliding will happen regardless. Hyper-focusing on a few tools and superficial traits of a particular system in a particular moment is myopic.
Restricting the government via laws... The government implements the laws. Trying to restrict the government via laws is mostly just asking "pretty-please don't screw us over." They're not going to make a difference to a corrupt government. Government corruption will become more enticing too because of the added concentration of power it would have. How have laws been working for restricting Trump? He's shown how easily they can be sidestepped and manipulated.
Also, back then implementing end-to-end encryption of all calls wasn't feasible. That would have been the preferred option. It's feasible now. We have it. Why rely on something as fallible as government-restricting laws when we have better options?
It's better for power to be decentralized, as it is with every device owner having sole access to their own devices. As well as being able to communicate anonymously, which is huge for matters of free-speech and democracy.
Digitalization and now AI technology changes this drastically because it makes it drastically cheaper to record and flag human communications.
"Arguably" heroin addiction is the most harmful addiction because heroin is the most addictive substance, clouds judgement and drives the addict to all manners of sociopathic behaviour (not only theft or prostitition)
Heroin addiction was largely created by the criminialization of cannabis (the first so-called War on Drugs under Nixon) as a tool to persecute black people and war protesters and the overprescription of opioids (eg the Sacklers/Purdue).
We can all agree that yeah sure this social media stuff isn't great, but that's the whole point of freedom. Fast food isn't great either but lawmakers aren't pushing for a junk food attestation framework to make sure you don't consume it more than twice a week. In other words, your best interest is not interesting to them at all. They are happy that you think it is somehow self evident that we should subject ourselves to undue surveillance through!
So, wonder why they're pushing for this so hard. I'll take the brainrot if it means criticism and ideas can spread without permanently being associated with a trackable, unchanging identity.
I am not endorsing removing all anonymity from being online, but continuing the status quo with social media is a non starter for humanity. So tell me how we can help kids not get ruined by the internet without a mechanism specifically identifying that they're online in the first place?
But no, that's not what governments are doing. They want control and surveillance.
Regulation, on the other hand, is fine. How? I don't know.
Sure it can. I don't see how being old makes it immune.
- Slandering laws set a limit for what you can say about others
- Copyright laws set a limit on what you can share with others under which circumstances
Both those things seem similarly complicated to implement and yet we have them.
Good.
Added benefit: even adults will be less exposed to addictive material.
What would be the cons of this?
It's going to take a lot more evidence to get me anywhere near consideration that this is a trade worth making. Again, we know that fast food can be attributed to hundreds of thousands of early deaths per anum, but we regulate that not at all. In fact it's sadly a staple of the average kids diet.
Passing laws out of fear is not how any competent legislature should operate.
What if I told you it's very simple? We work at banning the harmful dynamics of corporate social media for everyone [0], rather than beating around the bush about kids. In fact, trying to avoid this is exactly why Faceboot et al are lobbying for this age verification crap in the first place - to escape the one tiny avenue of liability that has managed to exist, so they can keep kicking the can down the road.
Given how wholly top-down these proposals all are, frankly they would be better off being referred to as "give control of what your kids can see to the judgement of corporate attorneys.
[0] antitrust enforcement would go a long way here. Faceboot operates on online hosting service, so they should be prohibited from anticompetitively tying the client software used to access it (which necessarily includes "the algorithm").
There's HUGE demographics of people that would lobby against what you're proposing, sadly.
Pragmatically, what I'm saying could hopefully chip away at the surveillance industry's power without a full-on frontal assault. Maybe forcibly breaking up Faceboot and divesting them of their client software is a bit ambitious, but regulation that forces interoperability of third party clients that represent users' interests would seem to be workable.
Everything, from “anything” to “literally nothing”, has been marched up on stage as the latest thing that’s a danger to children. All of it is true. Existing is dangerous, and that cannot be legislated away. Parents are supposed to be preparing their children for the dangers that life brings with it, not grinding down the tips of forks.
Having a healthy fear of skateboarding saved more broken bones than knee pads, so maybe parents should help their children understand that their peer isn’t as cool as they look on Instagram… or they get bombarded with it when they pass the minimum Facebook age and we’re back here in a few years raising the social media age to 35.
Instead, limiting surveillance (which in this case is only linked to the issue at hand with what's explicitly a conspiracy theory, so the link is quite tenuous) was originally meant to limit the government's powers as a form of control over the government. Control over the government is just a part of the Enlightenment project of societies being able to shape their destinies equitably, which includes shaping political arrangements.
Americans have completely lost the ability to shape their political system (when was the last constitutional amendment passed again?), so instead the discourse turned to fetishising particular tools that might help, but were never the point of having freedom. This is a fallacy.
There are straightforward ways to have age verification without descending into a dictatorship. To use an analogy, most European countries have mandatory IDs, some even have digital IDs; many of those counties are freer than the US.
Freedom is being able to stop kids from accessing pornhub without fearing a dictatorship because you can just prevent the dictatorship through a million other means. Freedom is not paralysing the political system as technology and progress (and multi-billion dollar megacorporations) march on.
Otherwise societies just get superficial "freedoms" (like using slurs in public spaces because "free speech") while their governments, say, run a paramilitary murdering political opponents on the street.
How can we even trust these lawmakers when Blue Waffles, Tub Girl and Goatsee already existed??!
Unless it hasn't. And while it's grosser than finding a copy of Readers Wives in the park, the "think of the children" angle is overhyped.
If one of the most compliant actors is already "virtually unrestricted" then you just want to censor things you don't like and the censorship of porn is just a pretense for the things you actually want to censor.
How has it failed? Whats the measure of a successful freedom vs an unsuccessful one.
>The only question from here is what to d we do about it. You can say "nothing" but that's a losing argument.
No its the positive case for action that remains to be justified.
This is something.
Therefore, we must do this.
The market failure to provide an adequate solution wasn't natural. It was engineered by the tech companies and you are playing right into their hands. There is still a way to fix this from the root with software antitrust: force hardware vendors to ship their devices without an operating system.
Here's a more detailed explanation in a past comment about how the problem came to be in the first place, and why software antitrust can solve it:
Absolute bullshit. This "unfettered access" is the whole reason why I am who I am today, why I am here. Not only did it not fail, it's in fact so successful it threatens the powers that be, and that's the real reason why they want to ban it.
> I personally believe that the easiest thign to attack is advertising to minors.
Now this I agree with. I would be even more radical. It's not just advertising "to minors", all advertising needs to get banned straight up. Advertising is mind rape. Ban it and all the problems with the web will be fixed literally overnight, including the problems "mandated hardware attestation" aims to solve. There is no need whatsoever for this attestation nonsense.
Well then, let's regulate this instead? Advertising companies already make a pretty good guess about a person's age. It doesn't require 3rd parties and age verification.
But we won't — this isn't why identity checks are getting lobbied.
> I believe we should shift that liability to advertising.
I am confused. Are you saying that advertising companies should handle these identity checks? So let's just hand out a unique identifier to the companies who have monetary interest in this? Surely this will end well.
This is worse than that, this paves a way for corporations to shove anti-user crap (adware, spyware, "sideloading" restrictions etc) to devices that are mandatory for you.. and in a way you can't fight it, because now government is protecting that crap without even realizing it.
It's one thing that I can't install a custom OS on my credit card.. but it's a different thing when that device is actively connected to the network, sending my data to some US company, prevents me from removing bloatware / installing my own software.. and on top of that displays ads.
I don't think politicians are _so_ stupid (except some of them, of course). But business is business. See how they "fight" the big tech.
Maybe I'm naive, but I think there's no deeper motivation. There are activists and politicians who really believe this is a cause worth fighting for.
https://europeanpirates.eu/chatcontrol-eu-ministers-want-to-...
Maybe you are not naive. Maybe you are correct
This "real reason for age verification" trope might be just another braindead meme or conspiracy theory
No evidence has been presented to support what these commenters are suggesting
It stands to reeason that anyone who is truly concerned about "connect[ing] real-life identifiers to online activity" would be distancing themselves from using corporate-controlled mobile operating systems like Android or iOS, as opposed to thinking, something like, "I've got a good thing going here with Android and/or iOS and age verification is going to ruin it"
What specific generalized problem would you like to be solved that you advocate for such a generalized solution?
Bad actors can and will steal identifies.
Can't you just enroll your kid's devices in your home corporate and leverage MDM to force the network to call through your proxy, which denies or downgrades all ECH and then can actively filter to an allowlist or screen the material through your personal or contracted LLM?
This seems relatively solved to me.
I’m sorry, but if you don’t have a home computer in your living room for your kids homework, you haven’t put in any effort and I no longer care. Ideally nobody, anywhere, should care. You have to take actual steps. Very basic, easy steps.
Think about what you need technology for. To reach your kid, to do their homework. Okay. Now do you require 24/7 internet access on an arbitrary device for that? No. You can go to Walmart today and pick up a 20 dollar burner phone. But you didn’t, right? So do that first, analyze the landscape, and then I think there can be a conversation to be had.
Demanding a conversation or worse, a law, when the most basic steps have not been taken is frankly disrespectful. That’s how I view it, it’s a time wasting mechanism.
Does that 100% prevent bad things? No, but it’s obvious, cheap, and good enough that everybody stopped trying after that.
If you have a computer in the living room, I can guarantee that the odds that your son or daughter is watching something bad will be very low.
The great thing about these solutions is they require no complex machinery, either literally or politically. But if you look around, people just jump the gun past these solutions. Meaning, they’re not trying.
Which, IMO, if you don’t care about your kids, obviously then I don’t either. Which is fine because as a parent that’s your right, and I support that right.
Really ? Like what ? I never heard about mandated "working parental controls". I only heard about "protect the children" (where are the lawsuits against (church) rapists ?) and "protect about terrorism" ( where they twist the definition of "terrorism" to suit their political interests).
You know what Microsoft did with "parental controls" ?. It disabled Firefox. Of course you can still access ( "educational") porn sites through Edge.
The same parents who give smartphones to toddlers to keep them quiet? Good luck...
How about NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, FreeDOS, Plan9
What's the timeline on this outcome
Anyone willing to place a bet on a prediction market
"Let me be direct about this: the likelihood of any legislature specifically targeting FreeBSD or OpenBSD with age verification mandates is close to zero."
https://freebsd.consulting/freebsd-dispatch-bsd-age-verifica...
Good luck booting those OSs on a system with secure boot enabled
I saved money by opting out of secure boot
If I needed it I could add it later
But I boot NetBSD from USB stick to RAM-based filesystem (e.g., mfs ,tmpfs), there is no internal HDD or SSD
I do not boot with "secure boot enabled" because the computer does not have a secure boot TPM
This isn't only a digital sovereignty issue, it's also an anti-competition issue.
Our AI gods cannot save us soon enough.
AI is about many things, but a big factor is enclosure.
The EU politicians are just publicly paying lip-service to "digital sovereignty" while they quietly hope this all just blows over when Trump is gone in 2 years.
It's hard for sure but they are not even trying, the non-duopoly alternatives are run by hobbyists in their free time and just get shit on by EU bureaucrats
Most of the free hardware and software alternatives are already European, like MNT, and GrapheneOS. They just don't have market share.
Then if they could give a few millions to some open source communities, that could be the cherry on top
GrapheneOS is Canadian.
But if they really wanted digital verification without the surveillance capitalism built in, I’m sure there are plenty of companies that could do it. Especially if it was around an open source framework.
Most analysts expect sites will offer multiple ways, for a variety of reasons.
Eventually when the full EU Digital Identity Wallet is available age checks can be done using that and the age-only app will go away. For the full wallet the rules explicitly require platforms to have fallback mechanisms for users who are not using the digital wallet.
https://waag.org/en/article/european-digital-id-wallets-are-...
Websites will do the easiest, lowest friction, and most user-familiar thing possible to comply with the laws. And that is just Google or Apple device attestation.
Total bullshit.
There is no "effective" method without hardware remote attestation. If I control the system, I can just spoof whatever "verification" it is you're asking.
The whole point of hardware attestation is to put a cryptographic key in the computer that the users can't ever get at, then use that key to prove the computer booted a corporate owned operating system that's 100% aligned with government and capitalist surveillance and other cyberpunk dystopia nonsense.
Install a custom system that you control and they will say you have "tampered" with your device, and that transgression will get you ostracized from digital society.
This is what will happen, and if we let it happen might as well close down this site because everything the word hacker ever stood for will have been destroyed.
We use that approach in several other industries.
But.... that requires work beyond just complaining.
Ah yes. They're totally going to trust my self-signed certificates. They're totally not going to restrict their trust set to the corporate owned and surveillance friendly Google and Apple devices.
Come on now.
> minimum security requirements for digital ID use
Also known as "the user has no control over the device".
Because users who have control can simply spoof this silly "digital ID" and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
> We use that approach in several other industries.
Your industries include the user of the device in their threat models. They want the device secured against the user. Absolutely unacceptable.
That sounds mostly like copium just to motivate your complete inaction.
Again - independent, EU based, attestation database is completely possible to make and we're using similar approval processes across multiple industries to certify hardware - locally, here in EU.
But yea, if you think you'll be able to print passport at home and then go travel and demand that government recognizes that as an ID document, you're a bit optimistic.
Why not tell us more about the requirements for hardware certification?
Seriously doubt it's anything but the usual war on general purpose computing.
Requirement #1, the computer runs the mandated surveillance software.
Requirement #2, the computer does not allow the user to run any software not approved by the government.
Requirement #3, the computer resists tampering so as to preserve the previous requirements.
Err, it's actually pretty simple: the token/certificate representing your ID (or credit card, or anything really) cannot be exfiltrated by userspace or installed kernel space apps or intercepted on the way to TPM when issued. And it cannot be duplicated.
It's the same set of requirements that are put on credit card smart chips and biometric chips in EU IDs and Passports (which are essentially also TPMs).
But sure, it's a all an evil conspiracy against general purpose computing. And they're all out to get ya. Now smash that downvote for a vote against the evil establishment.
So it must be secure against the user, as expected.
Preventing the user from "tampering" with the token means carving out a section of the machine and putting it out of his reach. You just created a government embassy on the user's machine. There's no telling what it will be abused for, and there's no escape.
> But sure, it's a all an evil conspiracy against general purpose computing.
You just advocated for putting an inescapable persisent cryptographic government ID on everybody's computers. This is the literal implementation of the surveillance state. Everything you do online, this token gets sent. It's the end of anonymity. Not even Tor gets around this.
Prevents tampering even by the "user".
I have advocated nothing of the sort you're accusing me of. Please leave your strawman at home.
Having a physical card fallback here is a necessity and nothing in these proposals shows that the physical card ID is going away.
It doesn't have to go away. Once the capability is there, they can and probably will simply make it mandatory to even so much as get an internet connection from your ISP. No unbreakable ID chip? No internet for you.
The "fallback card" is exactly what added the necessary friction that prevented everything under the sun from demanding these sorts of verifications out of everybody alive.
It was somewhat tolerable when it was just a financial transaction. It's still highly problematic given that AML/KYC laws are just the financial arm of global warrantless mass surveillance, but at least it was contained to the financial domain and it was possible to avoid credit cards and use cash instead. Putting this stuff in every computer kicks it up into 1984 territory by allowing tracking of anyone posting wrongthink online.
So you need a proprietary browser running on a proprietary OS (both userspace and the kernel) with proprietary TPM hardware. You just proved the point. No more Linux.
So you have to build an entire parallel internet just because you want to use Linux? That's what your argument boils down to.
The people who are complaining on HN are not platform operators, the platform operators don't care at all. To them it's not even about whether it requires work, they literally don't care.
For the people who care, it's not a matter of work, because they don't operate the platform.
Yea, most analysts didn't expect the cookie banner nightmare we're living in either.
To think you can get only the narrow outcomes you want with zero unintended consequences while building root-level infrastructure for 1984 just illustrates the laughable hubris of the authoritarian impulse.
That's why you barely see anything being done and yet everyone can see how corrupt things are.
For a more detailed explanation of what the root of the problem is, see a past comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578
You feel bad because it touches your own personal toy, but if you zoom out you'll discover the vast majority of it was already fucked up
That's a weird way of putting it. You'll basically need a second non-Linux device if you want to use Linux.
If your reason for using Linux is "I want to continue using old hardware instead of quickly-obsoleted devices", then you're shit outta luck: you'll have to buy a (potentially second) device from one of those vendors who'll use the profits to further lobby against your rights.
(and of course even if they were to support computers, an age/id verification system either won't work at all or only work to be abused by those in power)
We did it before. We forgot at the time when things were more-or-less free.
(I don't know how we do this. I'm as dependent as ever.)
The key material must be DRM'ed, especially if some ZKP solution is used.
Otherwise all underage kids would download the cool older brothers private key and load it into their GNU Taler client, buy wine and be gateway'ed into heavier Stallmanisms. Before soon EMacs would be all the rage in highschool.
(Of course we can argue the bigger points, if X should require age checks, or if this even should be done digitally etc. But there's a reason why we don't allow the physical equivalent of self-signed keys for physical ID's, they're not trustworthy)
I don't.
This "think of the kids" nonsense is a psyop to manufacture consent for this shit. People really need to stop falling for it.
It's not like the car refuses to start if a dad tries to teach his kid how to drive.
The alcohol age limit equivalent would be to put the entire TPM + proprietary software infrastructure into the cash register, locking in a monopoly on what software can be used on cash registers. Not to mention, you now have to scan your ID, which then obviously gets recorded forever, allowing the government to track your alcohol consumption.
Yeah, I'm against that and I don't even drink alcohol, not even the alcohol I've bought myself as a gift to my parents.
While this is a good point, what's missing here is that this hardware doesn't have to have Google spyware and other bloatware installed. Yet with current design, this becomes mandatory.. security requirements are abused here to force unrelated software on my computer that I have to carry with me in order to participate in society.
This app should work on a dedicated device, something like a smartcard with e-ink display.. it would even be more secure because it would have less attack surface. Just like today I'm not complaining about not being able to install linux on my credit/SIM card, I'd not complain about that either. But locking down the whole OS on my smartphone is unacceptable.
Say you have a public service and a platform site (social media, gambling, whatever), and the user does authentication in a way that anonymously proves to the platform that they're of age while revealing nothing else, and without revealing to the public service what platform they're accessing. But the protocol requires some expensive data (token that provides access to a bond account) which anybody MITMing the protocol can obtain.
Then if Alice tries to sell her age verification abilities to Bob, the protocol could be designed so either Alice learns the negotiated key and can snoop on everything Bob does, or she has to let Bob do a man-in-the-middle over a channel and lose the ability to observe what's going on after the first key exchange; and then Bob can acquire the token and make use of it at a later time.
This is very handwave-ish, but I don't think such a protocol would be impossible to design.
Under normal use, Alice has no reason to drain her own bond account. But if she's selling to an anonymous crowd who might use the token at any time (hence she can't trace the traitor), some troll is eventually going to do it.
Firstly, you need to comprehensively ban VPNs, probably with some great firewall setup.
Secondly, you need to install CCTV in people's homes to make sure that nobody uses someone else's device to get around the system.
Then it's time for hardware attestation.
I think you're downplaying the real risk: if TPM becomes necessary for any single routine activity (banking, communication, etc.) then the usability of any non-TPM hardware to access the internet approaches zero. What's the point of a Linux desktop that asks for attestation for every HTTP request? Or an Android phone that can't legally allow you to install APKs from beyond the Play Store?
I can't pay for things with NFC on my GrapheneOS phone because my bank doesn't trust the hardware. While this is a slight annoyance, it doesn't meaningfully affect my ability to use cards or type in numbers or authenticate with a fingerprint on my phone; however, the forced use of TPM to access anything should be rejected and protested at every step.
Encryption can never be stamped out, thankfully, but hardware is not within one's control: you get what is allowed to be sold.
usually to make use of the exposure multi-party collusion is required. Google or Apple attestation intermediaries (they convert your static certificate into an ephemeral one) would need to be logging information and when combined with information from the party you attested to (done with the ephemeral certificate) they will have your unique device identifier (the unchangeable certificate burned into the silicon).
it's doubly insidious because nothing is preventing the manufacturer from recording the certificate identifier and connecting it to an order ID for the device. so not only can they tie together multiple accounts, they could tie it to the identity that purchased the device.
on mobile devices you can't even restrict this functionality as it's exposed via API (remote attestation and also DRM license request handshake initiation). not even grapheneos gives you to option to disable it.
also, the implication of the above is that there is no private way to have a google account on an android phone. they will know it's you or the previous owner of the device who sold it to you (makes VPN irrelevant).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
As the internet become the place where people do a lot of things, no government (and especially no security services) will be able to keep themselves from trying to control it or at least monitor it. And with the new LLM features they can automatically do much more than before.
Human nature is a constant and when the government sees an easy way to enforce something, many more bureaucrats will try to do it.
European "age verification" "app" forcing everyone to use Android or iOS
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48903777
Stop Killing the Internet: No Digital ID and No Age Verification
Hardware-bound is not a problem, limiting that to only iPhones and some Android phones is. Plenty of hardware can keep a key safe and it doesn't need Apple's or Google's blessing.
Tying any solution to specific companies is the major problem. Because even if the rest of the age verification scheme is well thought out in the user's interest, tying it to Apple and Google not only forces people's dependency on foreign private companies, it also invalidates any pretense of privacy.
Considering a significant part of the internet will be behind age verification gates, how are they imagining this to work? I should pull out my iPhone or Google Android phone and get its approval every time I want to visit a website?
That will not be fully ready until around 2028. They wanted the age verification available earlier and that is this app. It does not have unlinkability.
Here's the expected timeline.
The first version of the wallet app is suppose to be out by the end of this year or early 2027. It will still not be unlinkable because Apple's Secure Enclave and Android's StrongBox don't support the cryptographic operations needed for the methods that will eventually be used for that, BBS+ anonymous credentials or ZKPs. There is a variant of BBS+ that can achieve unlinkability on existing phones, but unfortunately the hardware security modules (HSMs) currently used by government when they issue you your identity credentials cannot handle BBS#.
In 2027-2028 they are supposed to upgrade the government servers so they can support BBS# or zk-SNARK and update the wallet to use those, achieving unlinkability and anonymous age (and other data) verification.
Don't believe that for a second. Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
- No more shell companies. - Only humans may own shares. - Public ownership registers.
Know thine enemy.
It does seem like an effort to connect all online activity to real-world identities.
Is the EU going to create a great firewall like China and start blacklisting siteshttps://diginomica.com/eu-policy-doc-recommends-building-eur...
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2020/6487...
"Like the Chinese firewall, this European internet would block off services that condone or support unlawful conduct from third party countries."
Sound familiar?
Absolute control over people's computers.
It's not your computer anymore, it's the government's.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572
How much do you love your systemd and the individual behind it now?
Can't wait to use your "amutable" Linux with hardware-bound attestation verifying your age now can you?
These people (the politicians behind such decisions, the people working on such platforms, those saying it's a good thing, ...) are enemies of freedom.
I'm sure there are enough proponents of "what's important is the content, not who and how exactly typed it," but my brain has developed something like ad banner blindness but for LLM writing - it just shuts off as soon as it sees "this distinction matters" or "does not automatically guarantee." This is not to mention that LLM generated texts are just really confusing and difficult to read, take for example this sentence:
> Linux is not explicitly banned. Desktop Linux users could access a website and scan a QR code using a supported mobile wallet.
At least two people here agreed it's a really weird way to put this, but at this point I'm honestly inclined to believe that this is just the product of AI putting together some words that kind of sound on-topic even though they are actually meaningless in the context (a.k.a. AI slop), and not someone's actual thought. --- 100% AI pangram: https://www.pangram.com/history/8c60b6ec-cd89-41fb-b8c8-abc0...
...but then again, this is the EU, not the US.
State mandates verification and stuff like this makes me suspicious that this is much more than "protecting the children". More advocacy of alternative solutions please.
You make it an opt-in feature to "self-broadcast" that this device is being used by a minor. Solves 99% of the use cases. And for the remaining 1% — the really determined teenager — they'd never be stopped by this anyway. They'd social enginneer their way to access somehow.
It has been discussed a few times here, and those threads are always full of people proclaiming that it will be the end of free and anonymous internet for all of us and allow tracking everything we do by both the government and any site we visit.
If after this is enacted the firewalls aren't perfect, the internet will probably instead splinter into the Westernet and the everywhere-else-net for the rest of the countries that are too disorganized or uncaring to join in on the fun, maybe with a few safe havens of something resembling the old web in between.
They don't need universal international cooperation - sufficient cooperation is enough for their goals, and they may get it this time.
Problem: corporations pushing harmful ads and arranging social media timeline in harmful ways to kids
Solution: restricting the individuals. Giving corporations more control. Giving people less choice.
Yeah makes sense.
The most privacy-obsessed people on earth are now handing a detailed log to their entire digital lives over to a group of barely-elected 3rd party overlords as well as foreign companies and intelligence agencies (if you think this won't be instantly compromised, you're tremendously naive).
...AND at the same time this is cementing monopolies for foreign tech companies within Europe. A double whammy of self-harm.
There's something very bleak about couching this under the 90s-era "protect the children" narrative too, given ultimately most Europeans care so little about children that they've rapidly stopped giving birth to them and in many countries have outsourced all childcare to the state.
It's not even a believable cover story anymore.
It seems more like the European officials looked over at the Chinese Communist Party's authoritarian control over the internet and thought to themselves, "Wow, look how little push back they get to their policies online! I want to do big fancy projects with other peoples money and have no accountability or transparency too!"
A surprising little amount of criticism considering the rhetoric in any political right adjacent threads on this website. There are three mentions of 'trump'.