I thought so too. I seem to remember it almost being a selling point. Like: “Your adventures are being used to improve maps and train AI systems for the future of humanity! Yay!”

But I had a look at their old pages from 2017-2020ish in the Wayback machine and there’s no mention of it. In fact, their privacy policies seemed to try to make it very clear that they don’t sell or share user data except where needed to deliver the service or in anonymised aggregate to third parties (48 people went to your business while playing Pokemon!).

There’s some mention of using it to advertise but none of them mention using it to build an advanced geo-spacial dataset for AI. Unless I’m missing something or reading it wrong?

Might be a Mandela effect.

Security yes, privacy not especially.

PGP lets you encrypt the messages and sign them to digitally prove you sent them.

It doesn’t help with the problem here which is that the metadata of who you are (the IP used to log into the webmail and the email address of the sender) and who you’re talking to (the email of the recipient) and when (timestamps etc.) were able to be leaked.

In fact, depending on the implementation, PGP could be considered slightly worse for privacy because you’d have the added identity proof of the message having a signature that only you could create with your private key (although that’s encrypted, it’s a stronger identity proof than the sender email address). It also generally leaks the recipients’ key IDs too (although that’s configurable) PGP is great for accountability, message confidentiality and non-repudiation. Not so much for privacy. For that you’d need other systems.

Ah misread that it was card, not a service. That mostly works and is the same kind of thing as the other crypto solutions.

Though a bad actor could still set up a service with a legit card that provides government signed anonymous “yes” responses on demand.

I worry that the response will be to require an account and a full ID from it. Social media sites saying “we need to verify your identity to ensure you’re an adult human and to combat bots. Scan your id card…”

Still one of the better technical solutions here though.

The difference with the asking an adult to buy alcohol is mostly that, because the whole thing is online, they wouldn’t need to ever really interact with an adult.

If the circumvention is as easy as looking up “free age verification” in a search engine, typing a url and clicking a button then it might not be very effective.

If it at least required them to steal dad’s id card or get uncle Bob to help or something that’s a different story.

I agree, although in this thread I’m mostly interested in the technical puzzle.

How do they deal with the other requirements though? What’s stopping someone from setting up a service that uses their yivi account to sign “I’m over 18” for anyone who wants to be over 18?

This is the first perfect solution I’ve heard!

Granted it’s a little slow but it meets all the requirements xD

It would also reveal to the government that the user was accessing 18+ content (though not what that content is if the token is blinded).

It also doesn’t stop the easy circumvent of someone who is an adult providing a service for children or others who don’t want to auth with the government.

1. The 18+ site provides Child c with a token T and it’s blinded to b(T)
2. The child sends b(T) to a malicious service run by a real adult (Mal)
3. Mal sends the token to the AVS to create s(b(T))
4. Mal provides s(b(T)) to the child who gives it to the 18+ site as a legit S(T)

How does this work to protect privacy though? Wouldn’t the site need to know who you are to be able to look you up with the government?

Or is it more like an SSO/Oauth callback style thing where you sign into the government and they send the “age bit” digitally signed and your browser gives it back the service? Either way the government would know when you’re accessing 18+ material and possibly what specific site you’re accessing? Or is there more to it?

So should we just assume that nothing is conscious?

Not at all! In fact, I believe that we should assume almost everything is conscious. I think it’s a bit of human arrogance to think that we brain creatures have a monopoly on perspective.

Nobody knows why they produce consciousness or what particular mechanism is responsible for human awareness.

Exactly my point.

That’s… irrelevant

I don’t think it is. If the argument is that it’s unethical to poke a neuron because it might have consciousness, would the same argument not apply to anything else? I think you might be getting a bit hung up on the “think like a human” thing. My point is not that it’s okay to torture something if it doesn’t “think like a human.” It’s that there are potentially a lot of things in the world that are conscious that don’t often get the same consideration.

capable of experiencing suffering

This is an interesting one. It shifts the question from “does it have a consciousness?” to “does it have a consciousness that is suffering or able to suffer?”. The idea of suffering is a very human concept that we have a whole section of our brains devoted to. There’s a lot of ethics devoted to alleviating suffering (eg. Humanitarianism) and we sorta use it as a means of directing our goals - we avoid things that make us suffer and seek things that bring us happiness. What makes us happy or makes us suffer varies a bit from person to person due to experience and learning/training but a lot of it is biologically evolved. Physical and emotional pain makes us suffer for evolutionary reasons.

So in one sense, you could define suffering as a stimulus that some conscious system avoids? In which case, training neurons essentially teaches them what suffering is. They’re trained to activate or not activate based on what avoids irregular stimulus (suffering) and results in regular stimulus (happiness).

If that’s how you define it though, there could be many other systems that work the same way. Obviously animals and plants and fungi etc. But also Computers and lots of mechanical systems do that too. If making decisions to avoid or seek electrical stimulus is suffering then a computer is basically a pleasure/torture box.

Personally I think that suffering is more than that. I think it’s a larger system we brain creatures have developed that doesn’t necessarily apply very well outside the context in which we use it. Would a vat of 20 billion neurons be able to suffer? I think that depends on how they’re arranged and whether they have that concept.

Whether it’s ethical to murder an entire village of your enemies “depends on your ethical framework and philosophical worldview.” See what a slippery slope moral relativism is?

Just because different ethical frameworks and worldviews exist, doesn’t mean they should all be treated equally. Sure, if someone is super utilitarian they might be fine with torturing people for medical research when they feel that the ends justify the means. If someone has a strict deontological code of ethics that tells them homosexuality is a sin punishable by death, they might campaign for that. I think those people suck and their beliefs are evil because of my own ethics and worldview.

When it comes to a question like “is an ant capable of suffering?” Or “is it okay to swat a fly or set a mouse trap?” Or “how many human neurons does it take to suffer while changing a light bulb?” You’ll get varying answers from people based on who they are. Personally, I think the right answer to those questions is dependent on the brain of the person answering them.

Moral universalists have the same slippery slopes you mentioned. If right and wrong are fixed and objective and not dependent on people, then groups claiming to know the one true morality will use it to persecute those labelled as evil or morally bankrupt (see the homophobic asshole example above).

Moral relativism doesn’t mean that morality doesn’t matter or that it’s wrong to fight against what you think is evil. I believe you should fight for what is right and I’m hopeful that the things that I think are good will win out against the things that I think are evil. Absolutism is maybe a bit easier for that because it simplifies moral choices a lot, but I think it’s hubris to think that evil is the same everywhere to everyone and not an artifact of the human mind.

There’s a lack of evidence for anything not being conscious.

Neurons work by generating electrical signals in response to stimulus (either electrical inputs from other neurons or physical/sensory inputs activated by light or touch etc.) and they do this in a physical way.

If they’re conscious, then there’s a pretty good chance that power plants are conscious, computers are conscious and pretty much everything else in the world is conscious.

I’m not sure there’s any requirement for consciousness to include “human-like reasoning” or “understanding” for it to have some kind of experience and perspective. Humans make a lot of assumptions about the world to make it for the patterns we’re used to.

A cluster of neurons trained to play doom might have consciousness but it’s not likely to think like a human, just like a rock or a plant or an ant or an iPhone might have consciousness.

Whether it’s ethical to squash an ant or turn off an iPhone or stimulate a lab-grown neuron depends on your ethical framework and your philosophical worldview.

I don’t think they’ve actually published this one? They have a bunch of related publications and they released the code on GitHub though.

Code here: https://github.com/SeanCole02/doom-neuron

Science here: https://corticallabs.com/research

Those things come with a big convenience and implementation trade-off that slows adoption.

If it’s hard to export for technical reasons (eg. Needs to be in a tpm) then that adds hardware requirements and complexity and makes it difficult to log in on other devices. If it’s a software thing, then it’s rippable. Either way “install our government app to watch porn” is not an enticing prospect for people.

Aggressive rate limiting is also frustrating if you want to log into multiple things and it keeps blocking you because you’re using your key too fast, but if it’s not aggressive then it likely won’t be effective unless all the kids sharing a key are trying to use it at once.

If it’s a temporary thing where you have to auth with the government to get a fresh signing key that expires, you have the issue of having to sign into the government when you want 18+ content which is super uncomfortable.

I can see it being a browser-based thing set up a bit like video DRM but that would still need to talk to a government server each time for a temp key (like how licence servers work) and you’d need to be logged into their systems. It might still be the best option but it does still leak “X person wants to access 18+ content right now” to the government.

I’m really interested in seeing a technical/cryptographic solution that actually works but so far I haven’t really and I’m starting to doubt that it’s possible.

I think they supported the pixel fold which has the same sort of second flippy screen thing. I think the multiple screen stuff is just in the aosp base.

Whenever this comes up, this style of zero-knowledge proof/blind signature thing gets suggested. But the problem is that those only work if people care about keeping their private keys secret. It works to secure eg. “I own $1” but “I’m over 18” is less important to people and it won’t be hard for kids to get their hands on a valid anonymous signing key on the web. Because the verification is anonymous and not trackable, many kids can share the same one too, so it only takes one adult key to leak for everyone to use. It’s one of the reasons they push biometrics that at least appears to need a real human. Requiring ID has a lot of the same issues on top of being a privacy nightmare.

I’m starting to think that actual age verification is technically impossible.

For the unprivileged container thing, containers tend to be lighter on resources than VMs at the cost of a little isolation (they share the same kernel as proxmox which could have security implications).

The ability for lxc containers to run unprivileged with all the restrictions that entails alleviates a bit of that security risk.

Both options are generally considered pretty secure but bugs/vulnerabilities could break isolation in either case. The only real 100% safe isolation is bare metal.

I tend to run containers unless I have a really good reason to need a VM, and run unprivileged unless I have a really really good reason not to.

My recommendation is a VPN server to connect in from outside and have the default gateway for the VPN clients be a server that acts as a router that’s set up with your commercial VPN.

That way, you can be outside on a phone or a computer, access your internal network and still have your public internet traffic go out through your commercial VPN without having to be able to configure multiple VPN connections at once (eg. Android doesn’t support that).

Eg. 2 debian proxmox containers. One that runs wireguard (head/tailscale might also work here?) for external access and one that runs mullvad(or whoever) VPN cli and IP forwarding to be the gateway for your clients.

Only downside is the extra hops to send everything through your home network first rather than straight to the commercial vpn which is probably fine depending on your speeds. You can always disconnect and connect directly to the commercial VPN for faster internet traffic if you need to.

The most popular brand of matches in Denmark is called Tordenskjold. In the late 1800s, Sweden had a large export production of matches, so a Danish manufacturer put Tordenskiold’s portrait on his matchbox in 1882, in the hope he could once more strike at the Swedish (Danish: give de svenske stryg).[13] The Tordenskjold brand was bought by a Swedish company in 1972.[14]

Ouch.