[rpigab]

I have a categorical swipe to make, sadly this is a human problem, and attempts to solve it using technology are doomed to fail or to be increasingly complex and require endless modifications.

Your solution sounds good and should work fine, and be easy to implement, which is perfect! But people will soon wonder what all the elderly people that are living in retirement homes without internet access are doing on porn sites watching mostly the overwatch and fortnite cosplay themed videos...

[Nevermark]

I am having trouble understanding how that is a swipe.

If you are pointing out that the technical solution I proposed isn't perfect, that children may steal their older family members identities, I agree.

As noted, imperfection is a common, unhelpful argument, against improvement. However, identifying imperfections is constructive, if the point is to continue to solve problems. (Kids stealing identities isn't great for many reasons.)

[rpigab]

I can't prove that there are no technical solutions to this kind of problems, but it certainly feels like so (to me).

It's like electronic voting, you can have the best cryptography hardware and software in the world, if the end user does not understand at least on a surface level how it works, it will be vulnerable against manipulation. You can certainly keep the same system and educate all users, but that's a whole other class of problem.

[Nevermark]

Well we can build out privacy preserving standards, with cryptography that already exists. (You can go to Wikipedia or many other places to verify for yourself what kinds of things cryptography can do.)

Or we can continue to have our identities and activities logged by more and more actors. And our online and even offline experiences “personalized” for us for ends that are not friendly. Now add AI, which is only in its early stages, actively participating in our surveillance and manipulation.

Privacy holes are serious security holes.

Ironic or not, zero knowledge proofs allow people to volunteer exactly the information needed for an interaction and no more.

Isn’t that the ideal? Maximize both freedom and trust? With existing tech.

Flip the parental concern upside down. Let’s take the side of genuinely responsible adult sites. Isn’t their ideal to be able to verify that visitors are adults, without surveiling them? Avoiding becoming a resource and target for other actors? A target for lawsuits if they are hacked or leak information.

Lots of adult sites are already unhappy for being put in that role in a growing number of regions.

[baobun]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46247515