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What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
When it comes to age verification. I seem to think this has been addressed with digital driver licenses/IDs that some states have already rolled out. Apple and I think Google support these and when you present those digital credentials you can select the information that is presented. For instance to get into a bar where they check your ID you can present your digital ID and all it says is You are over a certain age. Am I missing something? The government knows your age and can say whether you are over a certain age.
Yes, quite a lot actually. Do you want to have a “mark of the devil” to track you with EVERY SITE you visit… because that is the end goal. You can’t identify a child without also identifying “not child” and if the means of identification is a government issued identifier then every site will start demanding “paper’s please”.
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@dbsync, you can see the pertinent section of SN #1007 from the transcript:
But the larger point here to note is that there are consequences to this move from the real world to the cyber world and that the unfettered anonymity and freedom we’ve enjoyed through the first 24 years of the 21st century Internet may soon be challenged. […]
The timestamp for that discussion is approximately 0:30:29. These transcripts are a really outstanding feature of the TWiT networks.
WRT Pornhub’s banning content delivery to the state of Florida, it doesn’t take much imagination to see a new application of VPN’s location-hopping feature creeping into advertising: Use [our VPN] to get your Pornhub on in Florida!!!
The Register had recent story:
Pornhub pulls out of Florida, VPN demand ‘surges 1150%’
That story is a bit of clickbait: the “1150% surge” was cited by a website VPNMentor.com that provides VPN-recommendation services to anyone interested. The site noted the 11-fold increase between the clock striking midnight and 4am on January 1. I am gobsmacked; what the #!$$ is their normal count for this annual time window? Who are these people, and what sort of targeted advertising should they look forward to? I wish that public schools would use this as an opportunity for critical thinking: how to deconstruct self-selecting low-information samples in statistical data. Unfortunately, I fear no public school would touch this example with a 10-foot pole. Both the website’s quoted statistic and The Register reporting on the story rate a FAIL. The only redeeming feature: the website also recommended TWiT advertiser ExpressVPN. 
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Regarding browser extensions - at this point the only extension I need to have installed is for my password manager. Everything else I’d want is native to my browser.
For what it’s worth I’m using Brave because it builds in the other things I consider essential; content blocking, AMP redirects, tracking parameter removals, and a Torrent client for the 2 times a year I need to download something.
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That is not how the technology works. It can preserve anonymity. All your information stays on your phone and it only confirms your age. It works for proving your age at a bar the same way. You do not need to show your license. I provided a link to Apple’s documentation on how the technology works.
It does not share some “mark of the devil”.
Except that it can’t, and be legal. There is no way that some bar bouncer is trusting that is YOUR phone without the picture confirming that… and at that point it ceases to be fully anonymous. (Not that ever appearing in person is truly anonymous, obviously.) It’s the same problem online. You can’t just take the person’s word that it’s their ID, if you’re doing age verification correctly and you want it to hold up, you’re actually doing ID verification first. Sure the law may well say that they can’t keep that information, blah, blah, but you know full well that there will be records kept in case someone comes along later to “enforce” a lawsuit or similar. It’s the same with call centres and their claims they keep recordings for certain purposes.
There are ways that it can be done that are better and those that are worse. Probably doing something might be better than what we have now (which is little more than nothing.) You just need to be VERY clear on what you’re giving up for what you’re getting and IMHO true anonymity is never going to be included and pass muster with the government’s requirements.
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