I know age verification is stupid bullshit pushed on us by conservative morons who hate queer people... But since those clowns are the ones writing the laws right now, would anyone be interested in building a service that looks like this:?<li>Authenticate with FIDO2 tokens.</li><li>Upload photo ID for manual verification into an isolated subsystem. (TODO: Figure out how to remove this step with help from local governments.)</li><li>After verification, issue privacy pass tokens (with Ristretto255) that other apps can consume/verify as proof of being 18+.</li> I'm not happy with the prospect of this being necessary, but being able to use cryptography to limit the blast radius of privacy violations is something I'd be interested in working on. I'm sure I can convince my peers in cryptography to help, too, if there's sufficient demand for it.
The Authenticity Drought The types of people that proudly call themselves "influencers," and describe what they create merely as "content," are so profoundly allergic to authenticity that it bewilders the mind. Don't believe me? Look no further than the usage of "unalive" in the modern lexicon. The verb "unalive" became a thing because content creators (predominantly on YouTube) were being penalized by advertisers for talking about suicide and other heavy topics.
The next blog post I publish will either be met with riotous laughter or extreme butthurt. Weeeeeeeeeeeee!
Another example of the tech industry being absolutely shit at respecting consent. image
Constantly torn between "I don't want to be an annoying, attention-seeking bastard that spams links to his blog all the time" and "Holy fuck how have you people not read about this? You're supposed to be professionals! I even blogged about it!" whenever I read news sites.
Prediction: There will be zero meaningful accountability for Hegseth or anyone else involved in the Signal chat. The reason is that too many elected officials treat politics as a team sport, and no matter how bad someone fucks up, they put party loyalty over all.
The Practical Limitations of End-to-End Encryption Internet discussions about end-to-end encryption are plagued by misunderstandings, misinformation, and some people totally missing the point. Of course, people being wrong on the Internet isn't exactly news. XKCD: Duty Calls "What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they'll keep being wrong!" Yesterday, a story in The Atlantic alleged that the Trump Administration accidentally added their editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, to a…