It seems that age verification (much like chat control) is getting more and more inevitable.
Instead of arguing on the bad this brings, we should push our authorities to enforce mechanism that still respect the anonymity of a person.
France's "France Identité" started to implement an approach that respect anonymity by using what they call a "double anonymity: a principle that ensures that neither the adult site nor the age-appropriate provider can know who is accessing what. Using advanced cryptographic technologies—digital signatures and zero-knowledge proofs—the system generates proof of age without revealing identity or browsing history."
(source: https://entrevue.fr/en/police-justice/verification-dage-sur-...)
French's state should already have these informations from us (as a French citizen) so asking them to provide a certificate that guarantee my age seems like an obvious choice, and giving that digital certificate to any site without having to tell the issuer where I'm going is, I think, the best solution for the worst project.
(There a lot of news about this, but mostly in French. If you are curious:
Thank you for these links. Reading about pancognitivism and self sustaining closure is showing how complex the notion of consciousness can be, how its definition can vary from person to person. It also show how easy it can be for LLMs to give the illusion of consciousness when this is not clearly defined.
At first, I thought I had wrongly explained myself, so I checked what I wrote. Maybe it wasn't clear but I'm not looking for consciousness in the LLM era, but more about the philosophical research on what defines consciousness and the parallels that can be done with the LLMs era (parallels not in the sense of similitude, but in the sense of things that would appear similar but are not).
In a more generic and simple example, LLMs are good at producing language that resonates with us, and because of that, could be believed they have thoughts (they can write things like "I think you should .."), even thought they are not capable of thoughts, and are only producing the next logical word one after the other.
In the same sense, it would be interesting to read about philosophers that tried to define what consciousness is (or is not) and their age isn't relevant to today's LLM era. The connection can be done by the reader on what consciousness is, and what LLM is not, in the same vein as what thought and language is between our species and LLMs.
I agree with you here, this is an odd reaction to a non-problem.
A real-life scenario would be to refuse your snail mail because someone added an extra line in your address.
The only plausible reason would be to avoid polluting the data (like faking the ref= for marketing purpose) but that would assume you are already tracking the ref value for other services, so in a way, you either need it or not, but you can't have both.
If you don't actively track query strings, having them or not has no impact.
France is currently working on a solution that provides age verification using double anonymity.
The "France Identité" use the identity card of the holder and generates a cryptographic proof of the age. The website wanting to check the age of the holder request the cryptographic proof, validates it against France's public key without querying government websites (that way, the government won't know you are trying to access pornhub).
This is, I believe, I concrete and working solution to age verification without having to provide any sensitive information to any website that will surely loose it in an breach.
So your whole point is the *hypothetical* "what if Bluesky turns bad".
And just with that hypothetical, you scratch the whole effort Bluesky is currently doing to offer an open protocol ? Which is the opposite of almost (Mastodon) all other social networks ?
Come on..
It honestly feel like this was written by someone being paid by a competitor, just to discredit the service.
Of course they will provide an infrastructure to ease users on to creating and using their service, they can't just provide an empty shell just for the pure purpose of decoupling the protocol and the service. You can't blame them for that (well, you can apparently..)
> "Stack Overflow was multiplayer. A million developers contributing solutions that benefited everyone. We replaced it with a billion isolated sessions that benefit no one else".
I had the need for such a service back when I was working on ImprovMX.com.
The checking system I had implemented back then wasn't efficient and had a few false positive.
At the time, I thought the market for such a need was very low so I didn't bother, but now that I'm working on https://getfernand.com, I realize I also need it.
And with the advent of more and more products thanks to AI and the enthusiasm around tech, the market is growing, so it might be worth the effort to release it as a side project.
I took it as a challenge, on two simultaneous front: Technical, and AI.
On the technical side, the aim is to have a highly efficient script able to process millions of DNS record at the lowest time possible. I had to rewrite the script a few times and see how I could optimize it, but my tests lands me at around 500 QPS for now.
I'm testing against Cloudflare's DNS, and I know they have a limit at 1500 QPS, so I can't go much higher (per server), but once I reach that limit, I'll grow horizontally.
For the AI side, my approach was as follow: Use a standard web framework (Sanic in my case), build the API with a proper database structure, and once I'm satisfied with it, ask Claude code to write the OpenAPISpec file.
Once I had it, I used Mintlify to write the doc for this, and the help of Claude to have nicely written guides (rate limit, authentication, etc).
Then, I asked Claude to generate the landing page, and the dashboard system.
So, except for the API and the core of the service, the other parts was mostly written in AI (I fixed some issues, improved the code Claude gave me, but that's all).
Less than three weeks after, the service is almost ready to go live. I still need to clean the code in the Dashboard part, and finalize the touches on the API server, but it can be used already (and it's used by us at Fernand).
I agree that the best thing would be to buy all the various keyboard I hesitate, use them for a while, and finally decide which one is best ... but it's costly :p
Wow, thank you for all these. I didn't knew Incase picked up the Microsoft keyboard but that's a good news (too bad they haven't restarted the "Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000", this one was my absolute favorite!
One thing that makes me hesitant to buy one of these, is that I'm hoping that with one such as the Moonlander or the Glove80, I can replace the used part easily, which should cost less in the long run (but maybe I'm wrong here).
I saw that the rabbit hole is deep, and I don't want to fall into that one (already slipped a bit). I don't want to solder mine, so buying one already built (such as the glove80 or the moonlander) is already taking too much time for me.
Repairing mine is not possible, it's the wrist support that is worn out and it's glued to the keyboard...
For now, I'm highly hesitant to take a Glove80 with an extra keypad for the numbers, but I still hesitate with one of the original (Microsoft ergonomic desktop, Mobility lab ergo k30W or Logitech K860 ergo, even though most are wireless)
Instead of arguing on the bad this brings, we should push our authorities to enforce mechanism that still respect the anonymity of a person.
France's "France Identité" started to implement an approach that respect anonymity by using what they call a "double anonymity: a principle that ensures that neither the adult site nor the age-appropriate provider can know who is accessing what. Using advanced cryptographic technologies—digital signatures and zero-knowledge proofs—the system generates proof of age without revealing identity or browsing history." (source: https://entrevue.fr/en/police-justice/verification-dage-sur-...)
French's state should already have these informations from us (as a French citizen) so asking them to provide a certificate that guarantee my age seems like an obvious choice, and giving that digital certificate to any site without having to tell the issuer where I'm going is, I think, the best solution for the worst project.
(There a lot of news about this, but mostly in French. If you are curious:
- https://www.franceinfo.fr/societe/pornographie/l-arcom-impos...
- https://www.frandroid.com/culture-tech/web/2962099_france-id... )