Meta is funding a lot of the lobbyists pushing for age verification laws. Uncoincidentally, Meta both owns a stake in a company providing identity verification as a service, and serves to benefit from not having to moderate its own platforms.
It’s like Secure Boot, but without any of those pesky self-signing workarounds.
“But that’s unenforceable”, some will claim.
And to that, let me remind us all of a little-known concept called cryptographic attestation. If that doesn’t ring any bells, then the term “secure boot” should.
Once this shit passes into law, that’s the next step. Operating system vendors have their private keys to sign attestation tokens saying “John Johnson is an adult” and you’re only getting one if you verify your government ID. When you go to a website, your browser sends your signed token to the website and then the website checks if it’s a valid token signed by Microsoft, Apple, or Google.
But Linux?, you may be wondering. No. No Linux. Kiss it good-bye. Your bank will “require” identity attestation for “extra security”, and your bank doesn’t give a fuck about Linux. Your bank will check against whatever list of public keys they want to trust, and it ain’t going to include anything not backed by a global megacorporation.
They’re aware of their influence over the news cycle and public discourse. It says a lot that they prefer to focus the spotlight on a war even their supporters don’t want than those files.
If the files were a nothing burger, you know they would be bringing up them as a distraction instead.
But have you considered that Peter Theil knows the antichrist?
He’s part of the “you will never need to vote again” admin, so… yes?
The accuser, appearing on CNN in shadow, told Pamela Brown:
“I remember the next day, I can see flashes of that evening, of him on top of me, me pushing him off, him grabbing me. It was a lot more aggressive — it was aggressive.
“Did you say no?” Brown asked her.
I’m sorry, but why does this even need to be asked? When it comes to consent, anything less than an enthusiastic “yes” is auto-fucking-matically a “no”.
Victim-blaming scumbag.
Oh look. Still not a trans woman. And yet, the bathrooms remain closed.
Or do one even better and stay silent while also threatening any media outlets that report the terms. Now you get weakness, confirmation, and lying all in one package with a ribbon bow on top.
Time to invest in ivermectin suppliers.
Legal, probably. Whichever corporations push that hypothetical bill are going to write it very specifically to ensure that it excludes their use cases.
Here’s an example of how they could do it:
S.A.V.E.K.I.D.S:
Support Age Verification Environments Keeping Internet Detectable SignalsBlah blah pretext and background information…
Blah blah surface-level purported reason for the bill is to prevent kids from bypassing age verification checks by using a VPN to pretend they’re a resident of another country…
No entity operating in or doing business within <jurisdiction> may provide services or make available technology that irreversibly redirects, masks, or otherwise obscures internet-destined traffic to appear as originating from any source other than the internet-connected network in which it was generated.
Site–to-site VPN? Fine, it’s destined for the intranet.
NAT? Also fine, it is the originating internet-connected network.
HTTP reverse proxies? Still fine, they pass the origin IP along.
VPN that routes all traffic through it? You’re getting locked up and they’re throwing away the key.
“New legislation mandates that we no longer offer the VPN connections necessary for our remote workers to access the company intranet off premises. Starting immediately, all employees are to return to office 7 days a week. If this does not work for you, please reach out to HR and they will accept that as your resignation in lieu of a written document.”
— Meta (the corp pushing the age verification laws), probably.
If you thought Flock cameras were a bad situation, imagine not being able to query, read, write, or probably even speak about topics that they decide are “unpatriotic” or “satanic”.
The only difference between right now and then is that right now they aren’t doing anything about it. They already have the data about people’s opinions and leanings as a side effect of the massive network of tracking built for targeted advertising.
It will obviously be worse when we’re stuck renting computers, but what you’re describing is a today problem just as much as it’s a future problem. The only reason it hasn’t turned full 1984 is because they haven’t gone full mask off yet.
No, it won’t. It will cause more of the supply to be reallocated away from consumers into enterprise, and that is exactly what the big tech companies want to see happen.
Having access to a computer and phone is as much of a necessity to survive in modern society as internet is. When personal computing is unaffordable to the point where subscription computing is a good enough “deal” for consumers to jump on, the ball will start rolling towards the inevitable price squeeze that we have no choice but to accept.
Great, now we’re going to have them shooting more people because they felt threatened by large suitcases that “might have a bomb” in it.
The researchers said it was “maddening” that such easy action to fight the climate crisis was not being taken, and said people should be angry. Stopping the leaks can even be free, given that captured gas can be sold – methane is the “natural gas” that fires power stations.
It’s maddening but expected.
When corporate decisions are based solely on pleasing investors, fixing a leak isn’t a priority. It might be a long-term investment that eventually pays for itself, but it comes with a front-loaded cost that diminishes the profits of the current quarter.
The only way to get them to care about the problem is if it’s actively unprofitable or comes with personal liability for the leadership, and the only way that will happen is with regulations.
In other words: “why about the survivability of the species when we can instead care about making our investor’s loins tingle?”
Jones-Radtke family is planning to move across state lines with hopes of easier access to this treatment and more care options.
Better now than later. It’s only a matter of time before they start taking this to the same extreme as abortions and treating it like a crime to cross state lines while suspected of getting medical care.
They don’t know if they can trust the US government to protect them or pay out the insurance.
With how many of Trump’s lawyers got their bills paid in full and on time, I would be skeptical too.
For this one, they won’t even call it that. “It can’t be sex without penetration” or something like that.
It won’t at first. If more essential websites start to unnecessarily adopt it, it will start to lock Linux users out of being able to access the services necessary to exist in modern society.
Imagine if you need age/identity verification to: