Are you upset that Russia's attempt at occupying Kyiv was hilarious bad (from a military point of view, obviously not as far as the Ukrainians are concerned), and Russia has lost any chance of retaking Poland for generations?
Corporations already have a "digital ID" for everyone. As we know from WW2 (and more recent conflicts) private corporations would be lining up to work with the next Nazi regime if the price was right.
The article is actually one of the better ones I've read. The technical analysis is somewhat above my head, but appears reasonable, and it is suggesting solutions in some cases rather than just dismissing the concerns of parents, and going full privacy nut about our democratically elected governments.
All i would say is that the solution doesn't need to be 100% effective. The same as real world "age gates" or ID verification (which is just some random person looking at your ID in most cases) are not.
The precedent set -- that everything online should NOT be immediately accessible to children -- provides parents (the ones that care at least) with some backup when trying to raise their children. Ultimately society as a whole is responsible children, and i don't want to live in a society that thinks it is fine for kids to scroll any content on social media and watch porn as soon as they are able to work out how to use a smartphone.
The replay attack mentioned may always be a loophole, I'm not sure. But any site hosting the replay attacks should be targeted for shutdown/blocking. The "source" ID must come from somewhere as well, so that could be a route to shutting them down (there are 100's of age verification requests against one ID each day, that's a bit weird...).
If parents are helping their kids bypass age gates or straight up don't care their 11 year old is watching porn, then there is not much to be done in that case. The key thing should be keeping the majority of children in compliance to give cover to the parents that do care. Not giving all the power to bad parents and social media companies as is the situation the moment.
At the moment in the UK (where any mention of digital ID sends half the population mental) you have to email a whole raft of ID docs and personal data to estate agents, mortgage brokers, solicitors etc. to get an ID check done. Or use a private ID service that can have a cost associated and may not be any more secure than my passport scan sitting in someones M365 mailbox. You can't know.
I'd be happy to have a government service replace all that nonsense, where a one-time challenge code could verify my ID. There is now a UK.gov "One Login" authentication used by other government services that is essentially a digital ID as far as I can see. It just needs to be made mandatory for ID checks by law.
Such a service can also be used for age verification with the correct privacy controls in place, far better than all the dodgy age verification services that exist now.
Digital ID and age verification are going to be a part of the internet going forward. I'd rather have a government service that (in a functioning democracy) has accountability to the citizens that use it. ID verification is also a natural monopoly, so the government picks a winner anyway.
I will agree that governments are happy to bend the knee to corporations. But corporations control social media, so why would the corporations themselves not further their agenda using the platforms they control? Be that simply letting chaos ensue (see the UK Southport riots that were sparked by a "news story" from Pakistan) or from tuning the algorithms directly.
People have control over their government, at least in democracies that are functioning to a basic level (see Hungary recently). But they have zero control over social media, in fact the only organisations that can control global billion dollar tech companies are nation state governments...
How we measure things in the UK has been dragged into political debates (Boris floated the idea of forcing supermarkets to list weights in pounds and ounces "again"). So critical thinking or sane decisions are out the window on this front.
Although there is some logic to keeping miles per hour for road speed limits as there is a big cost associated with updating all the signs and associated "documentation".
An organisation like the BBC have to make sure to use imperial measures (as well the one most people actually interact with), otherwise Reform voters have a meltdown.
It’s not cost, it’s culture. Nearly every other country, including the vast majority of the commonwealth has managed to convert to metric distance. The UK and the US look like geriatric reactionaries, who refuse to change, not because they can’t, but because they won’t.
The US supports the genocide in Gaza, it supports the bombing of Lebanon. The US itself has now started (another) war and bombed Iran.
China is repressing the Uyghur and threatening Taiwan. I don't agree with these actions but is really "orders of magnitude" worse than the destruction the US facilitates in the Middle East?
With Trump they are now openly hostile to European democracies, and ICE and doing their best at repression within the US.
I don't the president can pardon away a lawsuit. He could pardon away a crime, and sometimes the crime can be a basis for a civil lawsuit, but in this case I don't think anyone has seriously considered criminally charging Jones for anything here.
> I don't [think] the president can pardon away a lawsuit.
Never underestimate Trump's ability in decreeing something and hoping for it to stick long enough to cause real damage before the courts eventually strike it down - it took almost a year until the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs, by the time the first large corporations get their refunds it will be over a year, and honestly I'd be surprised if the first consumers get refunds by the end of 2026.
Trump's ability to do that is solely caused by a lot of people across all branches and levels of government too afraid to say "no" to him and getting on the receiving end of "you're fired".
That is great for core principles. But languages and development environments have since assumed everyone has access to then internet. Meaning more "stuff" is the solution to problems (massive standard libraries or community created ones) rather that elegent language solutions.
The internet enabled all the complexity we have today. LLMs will have a similar effect, but instead of engineers actually having to understand the system (even in it's complexity) they will just be querying the oracle to build things or solve problems.
When the oracle can't help (or maybe refuses to) is when it gets interesting.
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