As a rule of thumb, if there's something in computing you've heard about, expect IBM to also have heard about it and made something like it for their machines. Sometimes they lag a bit but eventually they converge towards having their own of all things computational.
I run into that all the time during periods of more intense posting, I just hit the back button or Shift-H for the same from Vimium to get back to the form with my text in it, and if I really want to post it I send it the next session I'm around.
E.g. gemma3:4b can fake simple conversations in several european languages, including portuguese, swedish and finnish.
It's just a database. If you push text in one language into it, it'll likely crap out stuff in that same language, unless the system prompt that also goes in with your query causes it not to.
It's not really about kids looking at porn, it's about tracking everyone else and making it easier for state surveillance and corporations to identify people.
Kids don't have money and hardly ever manage to do crime without getting caught so they're profoundly uninteresting to surveil in this way, but adults are and here the interests of the state and corporations converge so they'll make a push for tyranny.
But how to make people accept it? Tell them they want to expose kids to gruesome tentacle porn, or else they'd support this. Few adults are willing to admit they even look at porn, let alone argue that this is an important activity that needs to be protected, which it is.
If you think that there is a need for new technology to identify people, I suggest you wake up and start getting informed about surveillance capitalism.
There is absolutely no need for new technology to track people, it's there already.
Also I feel like a big reason for age verification is social media. Many countries are trying to prevent kids from accessing social media (because we know it's bad for them), and age verification is the way to do that.
Badly implemented, age verification is bad. But there are ways to implement it in a privacy-preserving manner, which wouldn't make the current state of surveillance capitalism worse.
People who are actually interesting, are often aware of that fact and avoid surveillance at the moment. You can use tor/i2p, proper VPN setups, VMs, alternative mobile ROMs and other tech and cut most of the fingerprints, trackers and identification. Pretty sure the trash from state agencies doesn't like that.
But the current push from all sides to provide id for everything and remote attestation through Google and apple will make the alternatives very hard to use as it basically cuts such people from the economy altogether.
Need is a very strong word. I'd call it a desire. Currently you can often identify people, sure, but there's hassle involved. What they want to do is to plug in a private corporation separate from whatever service that is likely to be more loyal with the state apparatus than the service, or else it is easily switched out for another.
And corporations are having issues discerning bots from people without making access to their services a fuss or dependent on possibly idealistic and troublesome open source projects, like Anubis.
It's truly, absolutely, not about "age verification". If it were about protecting kids from harm they'd take money from corporations post factum that are offending. Instead they're preparing to spend a lot of money. You could also look at who is heavily lobbying for this, you'll find it is fascist tech oligarchs from the US. They couldn't care less about kids except for obscene or profitable purposes. It would be weird for them to be cosy with epsteinian networks of power and at the same time be mindful about the wellbeing of children.
> Currently you can often identify people, sure, but there's hassle involved
You vastly underestimate the current state of surveillance capitalism.
> You could also look at who is heavily lobbying for this, you'll find it is fascist tech oligarchs from the US.
Go in the street, and ask a bunch of random people: "If there was a way to prevent kids from accessing stuff that is bad for them, and it had no downsides. Would you want it?". I'm absolutely certain that not only fascists will say they would want it.
No one is doing it that way though. Also to be truly privacy-preserving you cannot rely on anything that requires any specific OS (especially Android or iOS) as every single OS requires some compromises to privacy.
The only privacy-preserving (effective) age verification is asking user if they are over 18 and requiring that they answer truthfully under penalty of perjury. Then prosecute the kids who claim they are over 18. For reason or another no one seems to be pushing for that option.
Well it exists in Privacy Pass, which is deployed in production. And there are countries that are currently actively looking into privacy-preserving age verification. I don't think that "I keep saying that age verification fundamentally leaks your ID, which is wrong, but it's still valid because nobody will notice" is a good argument.
> The only privacy-preserving (effective) age verification is asking user if they are over 18 and requiring that they answer truthfully under penalty of perjury.
I disagree, I think that there could be a sane debate around ZK age verification, if we could elevate it to that.
There are a lot of things that most people in the street want that aren't even on the road map to happening, so you have to ask yourself why this thing (which isn't hardly anyone's top motivating issue) is gaining traction.
> this thing (which isn't hardly anyone's top motivating issue)
Do you have kids growing up with social media?
My experience is that parents with kids growing up with social media generally care about whether or not social media are bad for their kids. And generally, parents try to give kids a smartphone and access to social media as late as possible, generally when "everybody else has it" and it feels like it becomes counter-productive to make an outlier out of your kid.
I wouldn't say nobody cares. If anything, I think most parents would care a lot more about limiting access to social media than about privacy. It's pretty obvious that nobody gives a shit about privacy.
My argument is: it is possible to do privacy-preserving age verification, and that technology is already deployed (look at Privacy Pass). We should acknowledge that and stop claiming that the age verification issue is the same as the E2EE one, because it is NOT.
And then we could maybe have a constructive debate about whether or not we as a society want that technology. That would be more interesting than "if I keep yelling that it's fundamentally stupid, maybe people on the other side will start believing it".
You're still just stating your opinions. What do you mean by "it is possible"? Are you sure there are states that are privacy respecting enough to actually be able to, or have all the relevant states broken down walls between government agencies that would shield citizens from secret surveillance and registers?
No, I'm talking about cryptography. That is, maths.
When I say that it is possible to encrypt a message in a way that only the receiver can read it, and the server relaying it cannot, it is not an opinion. I am stating a fact. Zero knowledge proofs are maths, too.
> What do you mean by "it is possible"?
I mean that there are maths that do exist that enable it. There is code that is already written that does it every day. It does exist.
But nobody can be arsed to spend a few minutes getting informed before complaining. It's not just cryptography: people who are very vocal against 5G usually believe that "it boils your blood" or some variant of it, people who are very vocal against vaccination usually have absolutely no idea how it works, that's just how it is. It is frustrating, I guess I just have to accept it.
Saying "it's not possible to do age verification in a privacy-preserving manner" is like saying "it's not possible to deploy 5G in a way that doesn't burn people": it is at best uninformed, possibly just manipulative. Sure, it's possible to burn someone with a strong enough radio signal. But the fact remains that it is possible to deploy 5G in a way that does not burn people, and 5G is nothing special in that regard (it's just "electromagnetic waves", which is a well-known physics concept).
There would be a sane debate to have around 5G (e.g. ultra-consumerism or whatever), but I have never, EVER heard it. The 5G debate is "uninformed people claiming it boils your blood" versus people who find it useful and rightly don't believe the bullshit claims of the first group.
The age verification debate is "uninformed people claiming that it is impossible" versus people who find it useful, and can rightly dismiss the claims of the first group, because really, it is possible.
I don't see how any of these grudges of yours are relevant to the question I asked to try and put you on track to make an argument I'd expect to move us in a fruitful direction.
Sure. It might have been different in other places but when my folks took out traveller's cheques in the nineties to travel to e.g. the caribbean the 'cost' in the form of a slightly worse currency price wasn't a serious issue, in part because ATM fees/exchange rates were way steeper than piecemeal exchanging the cheques for local cash. Getting a bank to reissue cheques was easier than replacing a card too.
Some destinations were probably cash friendly, i.e. no one would scope you out for theft, but that's not the kind of travel I had in mind. I'm actually not that familiar with that kind of travel, I've mostly travelled on a budget or to less touristy places.
Yeah, if I wanted to pay the crazy spread on currency exchange, I’d use my credit card instead.
10 years ago I was still traveling with a bunch of $100 banknotes and reading blogs to find the most honest shady currency exchange place with good rates wherever I went. Fun times!
I even paid for two! iPhones in cash back then!
Today? I just stop by an ATM and withdraw some cash, everything else goes contactless on Wise.
As is the dominant e-ID platform, because our politicians are fond of bank cartels.
It kind of works and Swish does too, unless they're down which happens every now and then, but there is room for improvement that would be easier realised as a public sector endeavour.
"(the tales of 1001 nights maybe less so, but I might be misremembering)"
I think you should reread some collection of these that isn't disneyfied. They're great, but probably not what you want to read to a prepubescent kid because that'll start all sorts of conversations you'd rather not have them bring up at school and elsewhere.
The framing is that a king goes to hunt but has to turn back to get something and sees the queen and other women of the court have an orgy with his black slaves, so he murders them all and gets sad. So he goes away with his brother who is also a king to get over this betrayal and finds a threatening demon spirit, who has a human female companion who sings the spirit to sleep and then talks to the kings and tells them that she's taken captive. But, she survives by being unfaithful and fucking random dudes they come across and collect trinkets to remember these partners by. Then she fucks the kings and they return home.
One of the kings then starts fucking a virgin every night and kill her by the morning, until Sheherazade is chosen, who instructs her sister to intervene after the sex, rape in contemporary parlance, and ask her to tell a story. The king agrees to hear a story, and by having an unfinished or another story to tell when morning comes is how Sheherazade keeps the king from killing her.
To late or postmodern sensibilities there are a lot of things to take issue with in these stories, like the casual rape, or insults that are derogatory towards jews and blacks, like calling someone as stupid as the stairs to a synagogue.
Still, they're fantastic and hilarious, and have a lot of interesting information about life in Asia and Africa during ancient and medieval times. They also invite careful thought and deliberation. At least one swedish translation is quite suitable for reading aloud with a partner, something my wife and I had a lot of fun doing way back when we didn't yet have kids.
As for Pippi, she messes with cops and orphanages and refuses to go to school, so it's easy to see why some uptight jurisdictions would censor it. Personally I consider The Brothers Lionheart to be a better story, but its ethics are less obvious and it also starts off with a kid dying violently and another from disease so it's not immediately comedic in the way Pippi is.
Such repetitions can regularly be deterministically automated, like find -exec sed and similar medium level tools.
If you spend a lot of time performing monotonic tasks, then your organisation needs to delete and refactor for a while until change in 'hot' areas of the code base are easy to make. Reaching for some code synthesis SaaS to paper it over will worsen the problem and should result in excommunication from the guild.
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos-hot-topics?topic=new-kuberne...
As a rule of thumb, if there's something in computing you've heard about, expect IBM to also have heard about it and made something like it for their machines. Sometimes they lag a bit but eventually they converge towards having their own of all things computational.
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