Google broke reCAPTCHA for de-googled Android users(reclaimthenet.org) Related: Google Cloud fraud defense, the next evolution of reCAPTCHA - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48039362 also: Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48063199 |
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[09/May/2026:11:31:32] notice: exiting: exceeded max connections per thread
The internet is a failure. Congratulations us.
Even competent people got completely brainwashed, crazy.
Spread the news, tell everyone you know, before it's too late. I wish we won't have to resort to even more drastic methods in this fight.
"Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."
Here's the obligatory: Google, FUCK YOU!
>Incompatible browser extension or network configuration
Whether it's from companies that create the tech, or companies that use it.
In the orgy of money, we've had a kind of industry-wide sociopathic convention of individual engineers considering it perfectly OK to further surveillance capitalism.
Can we reverse that?
If someone says we can't, because "everyone does it", are they saying that we're a field of baddies?
I think we are already starting to have that with a couple more infamous other companies in the news the last year: if someone goes to work there, I suspect a lot of people are going to think what is wrong with you, since you must know that company does very harmful things,
Maybe it's time to start wondering that about anyone who'd work for a lot of additional companies?
(I actually had a recruiter recently who was pitching a startup, and the headline featured the "ex-" pedigrees of the founders, including an especially infamous company. I figured any company touting that pedigree as a selling point is probably a bad fit for me. I thanked the recruiter, but said that infamous company as selling point probably isn't a fit. The recruiter seemed to not only understand, but to agree with my vague sentiment about that pedigree company.)
Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather a kernel—a core component that manages hardware resources. Android uses the Linux kernel, but replaces the traditional GNU userland with its own runtime, libraries, and system framework.
Many users run Linux-based systems every day without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the Linux kernel combined with Android’s userspace is often simply called “Android,” and many of its users are not aware that it is built on Linux at its core.
There really is Linux in Android, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs you run. The kernel is an essential part of the system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system.
Android is normally used in combination with the Linux kernel: the whole system is basically Android/Linux, a Linux-based operating system with a distinct userspace, not a GNU/Linux system like traditional desktop distributions.
And let's not pretend that we mean the kernel when we say Linux distribution
How so?
and on behalf of the Government,
and said “data, so piss off”:
https://abcnews.com/Technology/google-hit-antitrust-lawsuit-...
https://macdailynews.com/2026/02/04/u-s-files-appeal-in-goog...
> Lawfare is the use of legal systems and institutions to affect foreign or domestic affairs, as a more peaceful and rational alternative, or as a less benign adjunct, to warfare.
Strap in, the ownage will be hard.
Google Cloud fraud defense, the next evolution of reCAPTCHA
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48039362
Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged
> To complete the mobile verification, you must use a compatible mobile device.
At first glance, reading this made me wonder: what is exactly a compatible mobile device? But they quickly answered this question just below:
> If verifying on iOS/iPadOS...
> If verifying on Android device with Google Play Services...
OK then, got it! These are the ONLY compatible mobile devices. No de-googled devices are being welcomed here.
I'm not going to use any sort of hardware attestation, especially one controlled by Google. You shouldn't either, even if you have an unrooted Google-certified Android phone.
Unfortunately I see the regulatory environment more likely to go the other way of requiring attestation. I sure hope I'm wrong.
Google doesn't give a shit, but smaller companies are the ones using reCAPTCHA and that kind of shit. Consumers need to complain to those smaller companies. And citizen need to complain to their government, if those case. In the EU there is the DMA: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/contact-dma-team_en.
What's sad is that the few citizen who care are often complaining against regulations. And it is the lack of regulations that got us here. We need antitrust, period.
See the explanation associated with Manifest V3.
Nobody trusts web browsers nowadays.
I would have no idea how, nor desire to purchase a Google account on the black market, and I do in fact still trust that my web browser can do TLS correctly.
"easier just to buy a Google account ...." for those who would choose to do that in quantity. That is, the scammers and fraudsters for whom this is a financial decision. Which suggests that Google's latest moves shift the needle only slightly against actual abuse at a huge cost to the rest of us.
"Nobody trusts web browsers ..." applies to the publishing side. Content (that is, advertiser) sites and commerce most especially. The prove-yourself hoops that those opting out of that approach (de-Googled Android, privacy-hardened browser, alternative OS) must deal with are mind-bogglingly insane, speaking from personal experience. The Web no longer brings joy.
Incidentally, Google plays strongly in the second space, such that its incentives are aligned with pushing people into the "Google Play Services" ecosystem, and to both its own browser and ad-tech personal surveillance tools.
In conclusion, Google must be destroyed.
I'd go as far as to say that still having Google reCAPTCHA on your website is a sign of your website being unmaintained. Half of them even have the "reCAPTCHA is changing terms, take action" text on them.
This move will cause the last users to stop using it, and reCAPTCHA will be on the "Killed by Google" list in a year or two.
Verify that.
(edit: and it definately won't be an iphone, although that would fit the description above, those only run non-free software by design)
I don't know what services a TPM chip does provide. Wild guess, some private keys, hidden to the computer user, are used to sign stuff and/or encrypt ?
the trajectory has been clear since AMP-convenience for site owners, attestation pressure on users
People there be like, “but I’m not evil! I’ll never do anything bad with all of this incredible power!”
But if you create a nuclear bomb, someone unsavory is going to wrest control of that power from your stupid little painted fingernails and destroy the rest of us with it.
How about, don’t make an effing privacy nuclear bomb if you don’t want to contribute to making the world more evil?
> In conclusion, Google must be destroyed
Yeah they've had their time XD
Re: stolen accounts, you can examine account details, history and activity after purchase, check for emails from social networks and return stolen account to the owner. The posting usually also mentions registration period (new accounts are unlikely to be stolen). But it seems that registering new accounts is cheaper than stealing - old accounts are much more expensive.
I didn't use the account for any illegal activity, there are just sites that use Google Account as a "verification" that you are not a bot, and to issue bans. And I am not interested in jumping through the hoops of searching a locked smartphone with Google Services and filing a visa application to register the account. I strongly dislike proprietary software and locked smartphones.
Turns out that Presidents, once elected, largely do what Continuity of Government, and business interests, ask for.
I’m Canadian and watching our government sell our souls to American tech companies is beyond scary.
PS: Sure, there always were a handful of exceptions. If you are one of them, you know what I'm talking about. I don't refer to you. But to the other 99.x%.
> If you are one of them, you know what I'm talking about. I don't refer to you. But to the other 99.x%.
Reminds me of Facebook engagement bait
If it didn’t affect those of us that tried to resist, I wouldn’t care, but we got dragged along unwillingly and now it may be impossible to hit the brakes before corporations control everything by usurping control of our identity systems.
If you say so. I don't know. I was never an active part of that big problem (so btw I also had nothing to "solve"). You were?
Everyone in power wants it, across the entire globe.
That's very different from requiring hardware attestation, though.
And to think, people said consumer choice was dead...
The amount of stuff councils and state governments gatekeep about road specs alone... Argh.
Good that some people are able to translate my thoughts into actual English... :D
Remote attestation doesn't use blind signatures (as that would be 'farmable') so tying the device to the 'attestee' is technically possible with collusion of Google servers: EK (static burned-in private key) -> AIK (ephemeral identity key in secure enclave signed by a Google server) -> attestation (signed by AIK). As you can see if the Google server logs EK -> AIK conversions an attestation can be trivially traced to your device's EK. This is also why we don't really see and probably never will see online services which offer fake remote attestations, as it will be pretty obvious that the next step of running such a service is getting Google as a customer and having all your devices blacklisted. Private farms probably won't last long either as I'm sure Google logs everything and will correlate.
Unless something special is done with this new reCAPTCHA not only are you locking internet services behind TPM chips but you are also surrendering anonymity to Google. Unless you acquire untraceable burners for every service, the new reCAPTCHA will be technically capable to tying all your accounts across all these services together. Much like age verification. It may appear that the service would need to cooperate to link the reCAPTCHA session to your registration but the registration time alone will likely be sufficient (the anonymity set will be all but destroyed).
so while this comment is apt, i would ask them what they think of the previous chicxulub impact of the 2012 era collusion - which to this day has not been reported on
(just realized emacs bindings work in comments, nice, no ctrl-x tho)
Are you using macOS? If so, those keybindings work everywhere.
As far as I can tell, Hacker News doesn't impose any custom keybindings (the client-side scripting on this site[0] is very simple).
Is this speculation, or has it been confirmed somewhere?
Also, if the implementation is competently done the phone will show the website for which you scanned the QR code. A user would be able to see whether or not that matches the site where they observed the QR code and proceed accordingly. In time Google will probably integrate it into the Chrome browser where a proxied QR code cannot even be shown.
Yes, somehow "parse this QR code" would not have made my top 500,000 list of 'tasks that a human can do more effectively than a computer'.
Age verification as a technical concept can be done in a privacy-preserving manner! Whether or not we want age verification is another debate, but let's stop making wrong technical claims about that: it doesn't help.
At some point someone will need to issue a key, which at some point will need to be verified against known good signatures.
These signatures will also need to be kept in case of lawsuirs/enforcement, so if somebody gets access they will know you visited that site
The only way to implement truly privacy preserving age verification is through zero knowledge proofs (or blind signatures) but what that would allow is undetectable token forging.
I think it's most likely to be attested by Google remotely; they might be using an app (with enormous access to the phone as the Play Services have) to be able to link a ton of data together, possibly including the local activity on the phone, officially to make better humanity assessments based on it all.
For people using a Google account it probably won't make a huge difference, in terms of data collected.
If that's how it would work, spoofing would probably be theoretically possible, but it would be easy for Google to detect attestations used by multiple people.
Let's not forget that this is an update to a very approximate system, absolute security is not (yet) required.
But there's a good chance that it will be extremely hard to sidestep, despite that.
But anything your phone can possibly do in software can be spoofed, so how would that help?
Doesn't Play Integrity use hardware attestation, but specifically checking the Google keys?
If you use the Play Services on GrapheneOS, you still don't pass Play Integrity because your system is signed by GrapheneOS and not by Google.
So basically Google can now ban your device from being able to access a huge portion of the internet, in addition to nuking any online presence connected to them.
You could wake up one day and find your device blacklisted from the internet, with no chance of ever reaching customer support. What a lovely future
Not solved at all: 99.999% of users don't give a damn and use a Google-signed Android.
My opinion is that because they don't give a damn does NOT mean regulations should not protect them. What Google is doing here is anticompetitive and they should be fined (antitrust and all that).
However much I hate it, right now among the sites using reCAPTCHA there are many that I strongly want to use.
Let's find a better solution please
> Ask HN: Did HN just start using Google recaptcha for logins? [0]
> dang
> No recent changes, but we do sometimes turn captchas on for logins when HN is under some kind of (possible) attack or other. That's been happening for a few hours. Hopefully it goes away soon.
No. Bigger problem created, since there are innumerable government, health care, and educational web sites that use reCAPTCHA.
I'm not going to give up reading the test results from my doctor because of some simplistic ideologue decides that it's "problem solved."
Edit: aaaand... That's another little sliver of my faith gone : https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2026/04/how-fake-people...
Also $1,500 a month for 10 "influencers" is wild. This doesn't seem that sophisticated unless they're doing something special to increase trust scores of accounts. They say they have "in house warming algorithm" which honestly doesn't inspire confidence for me.
Whats funny is its almost a certainty (if they are doing things correctly) that they have literal farms of phones (probably in SEA). The only real way to keep trust high is to have a real mobile connection and unique devices. Proxies are okay, but you really need to use the apps on real hardware.
It could be contextual, as in each user gets one anonymous id per domain name per day. Multiple uses by the same user at the same domain in the same day are linked.
But much of the purpose of these systems is to violate the public's privacy and exert as much surveillance and control as possible. If not for that schemes that mitigate the privacy loss would be a top priority.
Can de-Googled Android phones present themselves as iPhones?
And https://gdpr.eu/recital-49-network-and-information-security-... :
> Recital 49 - Network and Information Security as Overriding Legitimate Interest
> The processing of personal data to the extent strictly necessary and proportionate for the purposes of ensuring network and information security, i.e. the ability of a network or an information system to resist, at a given level of confidence, accidental events or unlawful or malicious actions that compromise the availability, authenticity, integrity and confidentiality of stored or transmitted personal data, and the security of the related services offered by, or accessible via, those networks and systems,...
It's funny how people after all this time think 99 Articles, 173 Recitals and a huge tech lobby equals a water-tight, pro-citizen, impenetrable privacy law with almost no exemptions.
It's a bit irritating but I'm glad I started down this journey because it looks more and more like I'm going to be avoiding the internet
My ISP regularly changes everyone's IP, and I apparently share an ISP with people who suck, so I get flagged just trying to do all sorts of normal things. Some examples:
- I've never bought anything from Etsy but I'm somehow banned from even viewing their site at all.
- Discord immediately bans me any time I try to create an account.
- Can't buy flights from Delta, always gives a non-descript error.
- Can't buy concert tickets, it thinks I'm a fraudulent buyer.
- Most CF sites produce a "Sorry, you have been blocked" page, or just loop.
- Trying to buy products on a shopping cart will have my order silently flagged/canceled for "VPN usage" (I don't use one).
- Some sites/programs block me for being on the DroneBL or similar lists I did nothing to get onto, and have verified many times that it's not really coming from me.
I just take my business elsewhere... eventually I'll probably just stop using technology at all.
This is wrong. Many (most?) users of alternative Android OSes do use a variant of the Play Services (be it sandboxed Play Services like on GrapheneOS, or an open source, reverse engineered implementation like microG that phones home just the same).
Google seems to be leveraging Play Integrity here, which requires that the phone OS is signed by Google. This is clearly anticompetitive, I hope the DMA will do something about that.
Only ones that are difficult for fraudsters to use to generate bogus traffic. Whether or not those builds come from Google, they are inherently gonna be pretty constrained OSs. It's not gonna let you spoof your location or simulate user input.
I do think it's a problem if only Google can provide these attestations but even if that organisation problem is solved there is still a fundamental technologic problem here now that humans can't be detected by their ability to solve puzzles any more.
None. The first rule of network security is you can't trust the client.
All attempts at remote attestation of consumer devices are someone wanting to break this rule. It's always a mistake; the OS being on the blessed list raises the difficulty level for fraud a little, but serious fraudsters have already perfected workarounds.
the web is ruined if you push for this, this is millions of websites that will suddenly force KYC? What...the...f
By KYC, obviously it's because there is very few non-criminal ways to have a SIM without KYC and get a Google account for Playstore without a number, so every website visits will be attached to a real ID.
I don't use a stock Android, right now I literally can't access many websites, this is genuinely crazy.
The result of this would be to upload it all to a bot-friendly alternative to archive.org.
Its whole point is undetectable archiving because it just saves what your browser already sees.
- pretended that it wasn't all about invading peoples' privacy.
- done a good ol' fashioned "but Apple does it"
- pretended to be standards-oriented
- advertised it as something completely transparent to the end-user
Seems like that would've caused a lot less backlash while still achieving the goal of having some form of device attestation -- but I'm guessing that's not the real goal.
The people who this method is most hoping to stop are the least likely to be impacted by it in the long run.
This is using another product to reinforce the search and ads monopoly.
You can’t scrape content to build a better google or Gemini, you can’t make an OS to compete with Google or Apple, and you can’t make a Google Analytics competitor.
It’s plain anti competitive.
Now everyone pretends like it's monopoly abuse because the Leopards Eating Faces company finally rang the dinner bell.
Amazon tablets don't have Google services either, which hints that the upcoming Amazon phones also might not work with this.
This makes it more difficult. But I don’t think it matters given how difficult it was prior to this.
This is blocking access to websites wholesale, so it’s on a whole different level.
It looks like a cloudflare page but it's not hosted by them. eg. https://bgp.he.net/dns/archive.is#_ipinfo It's hosted by AS49505 JSC Selectel
I think they now use their own Cloudflare turnstile if I remember correctly, but back then they switched to hcaptcha.
I have absolutely no idea what happened there. My best theory so far is that they clicked on some really, really wrong buttons when solving a captcha themselves while logged in to their Google account in the same browser. Bizarre.
The projects were named after a Google Doc they'd recently worked on (or a .docx attachment they'd received?) though, so my other guess is that they somehow created a Google Docs macro or similar by accident?
But his vision/prophecy is about 50 years old and while still valid it probably needs an update.
We are now dealing with a fully networked world where AI/bots have become dominant. I am not sure he did / could go as far in his vision.
There's hardly anything you can do to stop someone determined enough to spend money to spam your specific website. These kinds of captchas do raise the bar somewhat, but every single one of them is ultimately bypassed by paying people to solve them for you.
bots get pruned after an hour since 100% of the bots fall into the same trap, giving it a delay makes A/B testing really difficult and breaks most AI strategies.
You will also see this page if your smartphone is degoogled and you try to open the reCAPTCHA attestation URL in a web browser instead of in Google Play Services.
I would say it will be interesting to see what they do but I think rent-seeking, oppression, human rights violations would be more apt.
They were of course trustworthy proviers while they were untouchable but now I know how things are gonna go.
That's the reason companies are desperate to be first/biggest - once you're it, you're it until you finally fall on your face and dwindle to a nobody.
The thing here is that Google is building technology to prevent alternatives from connecting at all. We fundamentally cannot solve it by building more alternatives, we have to prevent Google (and TooBigTech in general) from doing it.
[1]: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/contact-dma-team_en
Let the commerce-driven, corporatized hellhole that the modern web has become eat itself.
I hear ‘web of trust’ pretty often and I like the idea but that’s not anonymous or accessible either
Obviously you immediately realise just how often you !g in DDG, use Google Flights, YouTube etc. Ok easy enough to fix
Then of course I can't use Play Store (Aurora didn't work either) so my phone would have eventually become quite obsolete
You can't compile many Go projects because the dependencies are pulled from Google
And if you had ALL of Google's ASNs that would include GCP and that's a whole other level of being cut off
If enough people complain, those services will start caring. If all they see is "one user complains every 3 years", they will just ignore it. That's how it works.
Banks are implementing terrible "security" checks. Users of alternative OSes should be a lot more vocal: change bank, but also complain a lot to the offending one, and make sure to leave them a bad review on the Play Store.
Actually people not using an alternative OS but caring about that should also leave bad reviews to those banks on the Play Store.
At the end of the day, the problem comes from humans in those banks who don't understand and don't give a shit. The only way to make them care about it is to complain enough that it becomes their problem.
I feel this more and more each day.
My current de-google project is categorizing all my pictures on my local NAS to create the memories feature (where it shows historic pics on multiple theme axes). You can get really far with just a few hours of work a month to de-google and some off the shelf image embeddings.
The hero project in this category — what one cannot do trivially as an indie dev — is creating a great fresh PoI dataset. This is tough to do on a planetary scale because its a societal cooperation problem.
If you need to share files externally, Nextcloud works very much like Google Drive and allows the creation of sharable links.
I'm on a similar journey and I use Radicale.
I had this problem recently with the Indeed website. (Cloudflare Captcha)
Thanks to someone on Reddit, it was discovered that anyone using a Chromium based browser (Brave, Vivaldi, etc.) on Linux was being punished.
Awfully frustrating having to set up a Virtual Machine just to be able to access one website via Firefox since even my hardened Firefox was being punished.
I know people like to think of suspicious android box setups but even a lot of "free" apps, extensions and other such services scarily seem to do that duty these days. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, but its sad how many people will use some free of cost vpn and not even think why that might be.
I fire up cloudflare warp and walk right through it
use wireguard with wgcf in environments without cloudflare client
yeah it's stupid we have to do this in 2026 but I guess cloudflare is the new AOL garden
Would you care to elaborate a little on how you did it?
It doesn't happen that often to me, but sometimes adblock setup I'm using results in such issues.
I guess my ISP allocates static IPs from a separate pool, and probably my IP block neighbors are better behaved (probably SMBs and other fellow nerds), aside from platforms learning that my IP is safe.
Captcha difficulties are way down now.
I wonder if they are seeing a decrease in traffic and somehow find that acceptable.
Mars? /i
Wow, This is really bad :-(
I think this is just gonna make viewing internet without a phone significantly harder especially with archive.is and the likes.
Not sure, how relevant this is to the discussion but if it helps, I have made a project[0] which allows to archive archive.is pages on archive.org/wayback machine (this uses singlefile)
Perhaps something like this can be used by community at scale too. Also, I hope that archive.is does something to fix this issue of requiring QR code and hopefully it doesn't become a permanent issue.
[0]: https://smileplease.mataroa.blog/blog/htmlpipe-and-how-we-ca...
All Huawei phones, which uses Huawei AppGallery after sanctions
FairPhone 6 /e/OS
Practically all modern feature phones: Nokia phones, HMD phones, etc. As I understand it, predominantly used by elderly and kids. But it's also gaining traction among millennials and Gen Z for digital detox and defeating mobile addiction.
Linux phones (Jolla Phone, PinePhone, FuriPhone, etc) - these you probably won't find in your local retail store but this is another competing platform being built from effectively an entirely different lineage minus the kernel
> April 2025: Apple fined €500 million for failing to comply with "anti-steering" obligations. Meta fined €200 million under the Digital Market Act for requiring users to consent to sharing their data with the company or pay for an ad-free service.
> December 2025: X fined €120 million under the Digital Services Act for breaching transparency obligations.
(Sure, not this year, but that's pretty recent by most standards. And not sure if they're still being contested and unpaid)
And recently, Google is working with the EU to avoid a fine: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-06/google-ma...
Yeah, I say it as "because the US bully the EU to prevent them from doing it".
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/meta-facial-re...
With apple there's no choices, so I'll continue to take my chances with Android
I'd rather have Google check an Apple phone attestation than have Google check a Google phone attestation, and vice versa, though, because you can assume each company is trying to keep as much information private to themselves instead of giving it to the other. Google is probably just getting "yes it's an Apple phone" and some kind of temporary token, instead of my IMEI, IMSI, phone number, all signed in accounts, biometrics and so on.
Could you justify that? Because to me it seems like Apple isn't doing anything even like this.
The way it's going, by the time the Motorola + GrapheneOS phone is out, it will be a lot more painful to use GrapheneOS than today. Not because of GrapheneOS of course, but because everybody accepts that bullshit Google is doing.
If you're waiting for Motorola + GrapheneOS, you could start complaining to banks and other apps that don't support GrapheneOS :-). If enough people did that, maybe those companies would consider it.
In the meantime, I'm currently using a low end Motorola moto g 5G 2023 which lets me turn off Play Services. Chrome and the Google Calendar don't run (really do need to find a replacement calendar), and I couldn't be happier. Motorola's interest in GrapheneOS makes me wonder if they did this on purpose.
My dad runs the family domain/emails/etc. The hard part will be convincing him to degoogle the whole family.
I'm also becoming open to using software that lies to google about what it is :) Google will treat us like sh*t, why shouldn't we reciprocate.
Why does it have to be new? Plenty of open source OSes exist... starting with Android! GrapheneOS is based on AOSP, you would call it Android. If I show you a phone running GrapheneOS, you probably won't even realise that it's running an alternative OS: it will be Android to you.
The problem is not that we don't have alternative. The problem is that Google is moving towards forcing everyone to run their OS (or the OSes they accept, since it includes iOS) to connect to random stuff on the Internet. They are literally building technology that will prevent alternative OSes from running properly.
No need to create new OSes if anyway they won't work, right?
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-key-theme "Emacs"
Hardware attestation is one feature, but it's still not used a lot.
The most common feature is the check that your Google account really downloaded the app you're using (and that the app wasn't modified); which requires using a Google account, of course. This is what the "pairip" that's been plaguing the store for a year does (it's being added by a ton of apps because adding it only requires enabling a preference in the Play Console).
But still, better multiple slightly crappy OSs instead of just one (plus Apple).
The problem is that most popular apps for Android outside Chinese app stores rely on Google services (specifically, Firebase) for push notifications.
(My phone is technically Android, but really old, not a touchscreen, you can't install apps, and most websites don't work in it, so... basically a dumb phone. But I did write a map web page that works in my very specific situation: https://lab.brainonfire.net/classicmap/ But mostly I just look up directions first and pay attention to signs, and the web page is a fallback that's nice to have.)
Even if you are a GMS Android user, they are going to make installing apps outside the Play Store much more annoying and these attestation-backed verifications are going to further deanonymize you.
Not that I really can tell what this was devastating to. Maybe United States v. Apple (2012), where Hachette Book Group, Inc., HarperCollins publishers, Macmillan publishers, Penguin Group, Inc., and Simon & Schuster, Inc. conspired with Apple to raise ebook prices?
I don't think it's that, because the Wikipedia article makes it seem like it was a force for good, but at the time, it wasn't certain at all that it would be that way.[1]
Beyond that, I'm not exactly sure what might be meant.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Association
[1] https://reddit.com/r/technology/comments/xs4qw/google_facebo...
https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-specification/d...
Which isn't necessarily a flaw, depends on the threat model. For actual age verification that we care about (e.g. make it harder for kids to access social media), it may be good enough.
Because what you described does not preserve your anonymity if the government and the service collude.
Calendar server: https://radicale.org/v3.html Sync: https://manual.davx5.com/
So, you run Radicale server, you can import Google Calendar.
Set up Davx5 on mobile to sync with the local server
Access from anywhere with Tailscale.
Antitrust laws have existed for decades. They just have to be honoured.
Also, Apple sells themselves as a privacy company, but often pick (possibly intentionally) insecure defaults. E.g. you might use end-to-end encrypted chats, but by default iCloud backups are not end-to-end encrypted, so law enforcement can just request your backups/chats from Apple. If you are vigilant and enable Advanced Data Protection for E2E iCloud backups, it probably still doesn't matter because the people that you communicate with probably do not have ADP enabled.
Besides that, they are enshittifying in the same way as Google. Ads in Maps, Ads in applications that you get with the OS (Apple Creator Studio ads in Keynote, etc.), Ads in your system settings for Apple Fitness+ (really).
At least Pixel phones and soon some Motorola models have the option of installing GrapheneOS.
Something that makes it expensive to initiate a connection and cheap (relatively) to accept or reject would probably help. I think that’s a hard problem though.
I’m not talking about the network itself but the servers on the other end.
I guess my point is that while Google is definitely malicious, I don’t think every site using recaptcha is and if we expect them not to use that tool there should probably be an alternative.
I think SV was asking what onion services, which can't really use recaptcha, do to prevent the DDoS storm.
And I would imagine the answer is obscurity, since the dark web isn't nearly as well-mapped as the public web. That and some Anubis or other PoW would probably go far.
I do 95% of my web browsing via Tor Browser and it is very tolerable, most circuits are fast enough for 1080p video (Youtube, Twitch livestreams, etc) without any buffering.
Here is a speedtest I ran just moments ago, I would hardly consider this "painfully slow": https://www.speedtest.net/result/19172283165.png
Of course this is a single tor circuit with an exit node, so speeds are slower when going directly to .onion sites, but the only real slowness comes from the latency and not throughput.
Because they don't care. It doesn't matter that it's AI slop, it generates views. And Google and Meta can bill advertisers for those views.
Zuckerberg is paying people to put AI slop Shrimp Jesus on facebook. (Not directly to platforms like this, but with the incentive structure)
Really, they're not just cashing in on the views of AI slop being put in front of boomers. They're cashing both ways; While the low end spam industry is merely guessing and iterating on whatever generates views, the more refined spammer does not leave the performance of their latest slop post up to chance, and just uses good old viewbotting. Viewbotting that these days, is mostly done on real devices. Which show ads, to the bots or underpaid developing world workers. Google and Meta'll still charge you for those impressions though.
The losers? People who sincerely try to use these platforms, and whatever idiot businesses are still paying for ads by the impression or click, rather than conversions that immediately generate revenue.
Note that they do not mention any specific companies on that landing page. That is pretty intentional.
But realistically going after bots is expensive and rarely successful, so most companies don’t do it. Even if you find the guy, the chances they can be legally reached are pretty low.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Inc._v._Power_Ventur....
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzar....
In no way has it ever been about a functional alternative to something like Nextcloud. It's been about services primarily for LAN functionality, not stuff that should be going over the internet (mostly for security reasons).
So your expectations really don't align with what Samba has ever been about.
Source: I professionally support Samba for businesses.
Now to be honest, while it's optimal to archive pages from you browser view I am not sure I want a random web extension to be in everything I see from a security point of view.
I would rather have a local proxy doing it. Maybe something like the InternetArchive warcproc [0]. Haven't tried yet.
I am unfamiliar with web caching proxies like squid [0] but I am wondering if that might be the most straightforward way to do this.
So use squid and then have a batch job that go through /var/spool/squid every day and update your web archive according to some defined filters.
Is there an argument here that Google is creating a monopoly?
Could this be challenged on similar grounds that forced Microsoft to recommend other browsers to users on Windows?
Our antitrust laws have been toothless for decades, and both parties love billionaires controlling the rest of us with an iron fist.
GrapheneOS is looking more and more worth the headache that my limited free time generally does not like. I don't need Google to know my smut fanfiction is written by my IRL.
at my most pessimistic i can see a world where consumers pay MORE for attestation to continue to opt-in to society, or perhaps a ai-bot-free digital world.
Your privacy is dead, and you cannot do anything against it, except not using phones and internet... at all. I mean I still fight against it, but not by protecting my privacy by using tools, or using different tools, because I realized it's not possible. There is no "as less data as possible". They know regardless.
I used VPN, browser containers for everything, myriad of fingerprinting protection, nothing related to Google/Facebook/etc. And then I went up to Youtube once for something, and they knew exactly what were my thoughts at the time. That was the moment when I realized that I suffered for nothing.
I still support for privacy movements, and I strongly believe that the only place where we can do anything at this point is politics. You can't protect your privacy anymore at this current environment, that ship sailed decades ago.
My problem is that basically every larger for privacy push is against newly proposed laws (like age verification), and there is basically no large uproar regarding the current already fucked up laws.
This new reCAPTCHA setup is probably a good indicator that big tech wants to shift to verified access only. Personally, I’m just going to quit spending money via the internet and go back to piracy + retail stores with a physical location.
"Source code? We don't need no stinkin' source code!"
The bank I was talking about were the worst net loser of customers in the UK last year (around -8000) They are making excuses but maybe they would care about why.
I hate that this is the way it is, I’m a graphene user too, and I see a pretty bleak future for any unsigned OS, followed by a pretty bleak and authoritarian future for humanity.
But for companies that are not monopolies, you can complain to them, and you can give them a bad review on the Play Store. Most companies are not in the business of screwing you: if they screw you, it's just a collateral effect. If you want to be on their radar, you have to make noise.
If enough people complain, then the company sees a need, then they prioritise. If they believe that "it only affects 1 guy who complained 2 years ago", of course they won't do anything... and I don't even know if I would blame them for that.
He (Torvalds) had no power to do anything and sold out. Even if he did, big tech would just go and use BSD.
For over a decade both Torvalds, and Stallman sold everyone out. They don't make their money directly from "free software" or "open source" in the first place.
Stallman was right in that he knew digital surveillance was going to happen, but he was incorrect in believing that FLOSS was ever sustainable economically and especially with AI replacing the developer and that big tech and startups are weaponising that against them.
Even when Stallman is against AI, he doesn't care. He knows he doesn't make money from "free software"; but only by speaking about it. Torvalds is the same but likes AI.
Can any other developer do exactly that in 2026?
I think you need to read the comment again:
>> They don't make their money directly from "free software" or "open source" in the first place.
>> He (Stallman) knows he doesn't make money from "free software" but only by speaking about it. Torvalds is the same...
My (unanswered) question:
> Can any other developer do exactly that in 2026?
To avoid repeating myself, the point is the majority of these typical developers do not have the level of influence that both Stallman, and Torvalds have to make a lot of money from their open source projects, especially in the age of AI; making it pointless to maintain such projects.
Remote attestation is the thing preventing the app from running on your Android alternative, whether it's GPLv3 or not does not matter. GPLv3 does not say "it's illegal to do remote attestation".
If I’m hosting at some IP, I still need Anubis or something to serve up the challenge, so doesn’t that become the attack point?
The cost is the attestation keys of a real phone. Once it gets burned, the phone is useless to them.
https://www.penligent.ai/hackinglabs/inside-the-ai-phone-far...
Probably a decent amount of compute cost for video generation, but I'm sure they have access to free compute and inference for being in bed with a16z.
In this case, the answer is right there in the question: You have to pay to bypass it.
Maybe there is a better option out there, but if so, it has the disadvantage of being hard to find.
As for now, when I need to travel to Germany, I just book tickets through the national carrier of my home country, which for cross-border tickets often turns out to actually be cheaper than booking through DB. Thankfully I don't live in Germany proper and my need for travel there is not that high (once or twice a year at most) but I wonder what would I do if I had to move to Germany and use trains there more often.
Access is temporarily restricted
We detected unusual activity from your device or network.
Reasons may include:
-Rapid taps or clicks
-JavaScript disabled or not working
-Automated (bot) activity on your network (IP X.X.X.X)
-Use of developer or inspection tools> -Use of developer or inspection tools
Gotta love it.
At which point you should contact your attorney general, and work to ensure such efforts face legal challenges at every turn.
I think open source works best when folks don't expect to make money off of it. I don't think Linus or Stallman expected to make money off of their free software. In some cases you might be lucky and able to get consulting contracts from firms related to your open source code but it's not reasonable to assume that will happen. It's possible it's harder to get lucky today than before but it was always unlikely.
If you don't have a static IP you need will want to think about a MX relay service too ~ although mail is surprisingly tolerant of offline MX hosts if you can wait a little bit for your mail.
I had an issue with yahoo a couple of years ago that's all. The "it read like there's a whole science" is sadly a trope mostly repeated by people who have never tried because it gets upvotes on Reedit.
There are some steps you have to take, but not many, and systems like Mox mailserver or stalwart guide you through it, and mail-tester will check if you got it right.
Email, other than tweaking spam filters, is one of my lowest maintenance systems. I can't remember the last time I touched Exim or Mox config
The science of not getting flagged is easy when you're not sending large volumes of untrusted mail; it only gets complicated if you start hosting mail for "customers" or let your system forward mail unfiltered into gmail/yahoo.
Here's my hit list of universal things to configure:
* Start with an IP with good or neutral reputation, non-residential, its nearly impossible to fix an IP that has been burned by a spammer. (Network)
* Valid reverse dns for your IP matching your mailhost forward dns (DNS)
* Valid SPF record; -all (DNS)
* Valid DKIM; with sufficiently sized key (DNS+Config)
* Valid DMARC; start with p=none to test and move to p=reject once you're configured (DNS)
* ARC if you or your users will ever possibly forward mail (Config)
* Don't get your messages flagged as spam anywhere ever, filter outbound mail even if its just you. All it takes is one piece of malware and a saved password and you'll have to get a new IP. (Config)
* Don't configure services behind your mail server with example domains that you don't control ~ I get so much mis-configured test mail from people who think its cute to use my domain as an example in their practice lab. It all gets reported as spam or bounces and then their smart host bounce rate goes up. (Config)
* Test for open relay; only relay for authenticated users. (Config)
* Use strong authentication, preferably with certificates or MFA. (Config)
* Secure everything; IMAP/SMTP/POP are old AF make sure you're requiring STARTTLS and setup MTA-STS to prevent downgrade attacks and enforce encryption in transit. Use a real certificate from Lets Encrypt don't self-sign. (DNS+http+Config)
* fail2ban your auth, you're going to get so much driveby password spraying and credential stuffing; I fail2ban block entire subnets at a time with iptables actions. I also have a bunch of "poison pill" rules for weird stuff I see in my logs eg block anyone who tries to auth with the NTLM hash for 'password'. (Config)
* Don't bother with BIMI at home, you can't get a blue check mark without deep pockets and a trademark (vmc) and most platforms only show logos that have a matching vmc. (DNS+https+config)
* DMARC reporting and TLS-RPT reporting are a pain to manage but are helpful troubleshooting deliverability be prepared to read some XML reports or setup a stack to parse them as they arrive (DNS + Config + https)
* setup the SMTP Submission port (587), so many networks block port 25 outbound and its the right way for clients to connect. (Config)
* configure BACKUPS, don't skip this step, encrypted restic backups to s3 or backblaze b2 is cheap and easy. (config)
* track your configs in git, don't commit secrets. (config)
* configure a free blacklist monitor on mxtoolbox for your domain(s) (config)
If you do those things you'll be in a pretty good spot, you could probably paste that list/this post into your agent and vibe up solid mailserver.
For me keeping the spam and phishing out is a bigger hassle than deliverability issues. rspamd does a pretty good job of keeping it manageable.
I do all of those things and with all of that setup the only place I ever run into issues with with users on AT&T's residential broadband mail servers. AT&T appears to block you if you're not known to them and they have a short memory. If you don't have regular correspondence with AT&T users they will block you after a bit. I'm a fairly low volume sender so I end up blocked every other time I try to send to AT&T by no fault of my own. I've talked most of those friends off of AT&Ts free email and on to ProtonMail at this point.
You could try handwriting and posting a letter to their CEO. I think that sometimes works. Probably not very often but there are more than zero CEOs who read those letters.
On the opposite, if they see reports of many visitors not completing the captcha, they're likely to think "Wow so many bots!!! This defense nowadays is indispensable..!".
Sometimes you need to pass a captcha even to contact them (if you want to tell them that you can't pass their captcha).
Most human visitors will never ever notice the change. reCAPTCHA is completely invisible for most human visitors because they are allowed to pass just by fingerprint.
It's not like an average user is going to have to scan a QR code every time they visit a site via web browser. If it were like this then it would be a non-issue because no sane website would adopt this system. But it isn't.
So every government website. Every website where people simply have no choice (DMV) or where failure to login results in them not claiming the money/benefits they are due (all tax websites). And every website handling post-sale complaints (Airlines, insurance).
Most human visitors will pull out their smartphone and just do it without giving it much thought.
Also, personally I care less and less. As long as my banks and government apps work, I'll just not use somebody's service if they put up barriers like this.
If most people care less and less, the result would be that banks and government apps will also work less and less.
Look, companies have to prioritise. And the obvious way to prioritise is to say "users are requesting X A LOT and nobody requests Y, so we will do X". Companies never, EVER say "it would be more ethical to do Y, let's do Y".
As people, we can do two things:
* Push our governments to regulate that shit. That means, complain a lot to the government.
* Be vocal to companies and complain when they don't support your system. If enough people do that, it will be prioritised.
The hardware attestation (which is used by strict Play Integrity) checks the signature on your OS. It is totally possible to allow signatures other than Google, but Play Integrity doesn't do that.
Companies could totally decide to use hardware attestation and accept systems signed not only by Google, but also other systems (like GrapheneOS). But they don't care because not enough users complain to them.
Users of alternative Androids typically silently move to another service or stop using it entirely. Which is understandable but doesn't help the cause.
It's possible this scenario is acceptable to them because it means they can still tie your access to something that's easier to ban without requiring a full account login.
CF turnstile is one, but of course that means Cloudflare owns even more of the web.
HCaptcha is inaccessible and actively discriminatory against individuals with disabilities and refuses to change, to the point that I suspect the only way that they will do anything is to file a class-action against them and sue them into the ground.
And I... Can't think of anything else. Other than to just get rid of Captchas entirely.
Enough to make it so bots are expensive to run.
People do care about such things.
I hope the same is true in other EU countries.
Suddenly I have been made aware that, having lost my paddle on Shit Creek, I will eventually be taken downstream to Shit Lake (where it appears I will inevitably drop anchor).
You could just call them.
But in all seriousness, many services are making it difficult through to impossible to communicate outside of their web or app platforms. Call centres are expensive and messy, and it's now apparently acceptable as a society to treat customers/clients/whatever as adversaries so they can get away with making it hard to communicate with them.
reCaptcha is "invisible" by default. Although if you use a non-cheomium browser and/or block tracking, you are more likely to trigger a non-invisible prompt. Annoying as that is for people like me and maybe you, that isn't the experience most users have.
However he's been on it now for months and every time he shows me something on it I get a little more jealous. Everything seems to be working fine, including e.g. bank apps, and he has interesting features like some kind of app zoning thing limiting permissions on a zone to zone basis.
The only problem is it's only available on massive phones without headphone jacks and SD card slots, so I'm sticking with Xperia for now.
The finger-wagging about "Use of developer or inspection tools" is just outrageous. Akin to accusing users of thought crime.
The only solution to all this will be through elections and laws.
If you use mailgun or similar you have to setup dkim keys for them and add them to your spf.
I was thinking in the same terms: you put up a QR capcha, you don't get my traffic and money. Just the amount of extra work needed, let alone the Google tracking turns me off. As if traffic lights, crosswalks and bridges weren't enough of a hassle.
https://www.rei.com/newsroom/article/2026-rei-board-of-direc...
https://www.rei.com/newsroom/article/rei-announces-2026-boar...
https://www.reddit.com/r/REI/comments/1qw14k6/rei_hosts_thei...
What does that even mean?
That's possible... and they might change their mind if so, we will see.
I feel like it's a similar issue to when scrapers pretend to be an allowed-origin webpage in order to abuse "public" API keys for web services.
They could also require the mobile device to interact with the requesting webpage in some manner, similar to mutual PIN/codes for Bluetooth/TV pairing these days. That way bulk sharing of the codes would still require active participation from the device that requested it in the first place, likely with a short time limit.
What providers are good hosting candidates, I have a website on DO, but from my understanding their entire ranges are blacklisted heavily.
I can't speak for all of them but I use mythic beasts in the UK for one mail server (they are a very knowledgeable old school host) and it has been good. I also have dedicated with OVH which is fine, and a couple small scale (eg simplelogin, a notification server) with IONOS but they only deliver to me so I can't say how reliably they deliver elsewhere.
Mox is great but I think it's still alpha. I've been using it for 2 years in production for a small traffic domain. The other I use Exim (with mythic beast's Sympl that sets it up) but it's a little more hands on at the beginning
Are you comfortable with anybody being able to ring up the hospital and say "yo, it's majorchord, how are my gonnorhea results?"
No, that's why we have safety protocols in place. When you call a doctor they ask you for your birthdate or sometimes also a PIN/password on your account to protect your data.
How would that still be considered a breach of privacy?
But giving birthdate (available to anyone via a single query in a public database) and (sometimes?! - what?!) PIN over the phone wouldn't really be considered good enough here. Birthdate is, as I said, public knowledge. And a phone is too insecure a medium for transmitting a password.
I'm not super interested in an long argument about whether it's reasonable that this isn't considered secure or not. I'm just letting you know what reality looks like. And the reality is that "just call them" is not a solution, because such information will simply not be handed out over the phone.
It already is a solution, and has been in widespread use for many decades. I don't think it's going anywhere.
For example, imagine you put the same private key into the 'secure element' of every single iphone. You use code signing so that key is only unlocked when the phone is running unmodified iOS with all security updates. You use encryption and remote attestation for the front-facing camera and face id depth sensor. You use NFC to read government-authenticated age and appearance data from biometric passport chips (or digital ID cards) and you store it on-device.
Then, when you want to access pornhub, they send an age challenge to your device, your device makes sure your face matches the stored passport, and if so it signs the challenge with the private key.
Pornhub gets an Apple-signed attestation of age - but because every phone signs with challenges with the same private key, Pornhub can't link it to a particular phone or identity document.
So in a very narrow sense, privacy is preserved.
You can't use someone else's ID, as it checks your face every time. You can't fool it with a photo of the person because of the depth sensor. You can't MITM/replay the camera/depth data because the link is encrypted. You can't substitute software that skips the check with a rooted phone because of the code signing. Security holes can be closed by just pushing a mandatory OS update.
Sure, it doesn't work on PCs. Doesn't work on Linux, or on unlocked/rooted phones. It hands users' government ID documents over to Google and Apple. It requires people to carry foreign-made, battery powered, network connected GPS trackers (with cameras, microphones and speech recognition) with them. And there are non-negotiable terms of service everyone must agree to. But if you define "privacy-preserving" to ignore all that stuff and only consider whether Pornhub learns your identity, it's privacy-preserving.
Jesus Christ.
14 year old me ran into porn on the internet all the time. It didn't turn me into a serial killer.
Meanwhile we let kids have exposure to algorithms that pervert their sense of self worth, get them addicted to dopamine and gambling, and make them feel inferior to their peers.
We have the wrong priorities as a society.
And this bullshit is going to turn us into a completely tracked, monitored, controlled bunch of cattle.
We're building 1984 and we're happy about it.
They will always be able to access porn, e.g. over torrent. It will just be a little less accessible, and maybe it won't hurt.
Also even if it doesn't get leaked directly, the security of TPM chips is not absolute. Secrets from them can theoretically be extracted given an attacker with sufficient means and motivation. Normally nothing that's on a typical TPM chip would warrant a project of that magnitude, but a widely used private key can change that equation.
Plus a TPM chip doesn't really have means to tell the phone isn't being lied to. You could swap out the actual phone camera hardware and sensors for a custom board that feeds the entire phone camera data of your choosing and it would be none-the-wiser.
Maybe? But biometric passports, chip-and-pin payment cards and SIM cards seem to do reasonably well. And Apple can always push out a mandatory software update that rotates the key, if they need to.
> You could swap out the actual phone camera hardware and sensors for a custom board that feeds the entire phone camera data of your choosing and it would be none-the-wiser.
Apple's 'TrueDepth' cameras are serialised and paired with the rest of the device. The touch ID sensors were before that too.
I don't know the precise details, but reports from people trying to repair devices independently of Apple are that the phone is very much the wiser.
e.g. https://support.apple.com/en-gb/120567 https://www.reddit.com/r/iphonehelp/comments/1dl38kq/iphone_...
Better learn about the good one, but I guess it's harder than making up nonsense.
The website sends a request for age verification.
The app[1] on the user's device[2] forwards that request to the chip on the user's ID card. The user authorizes themselves with their 6 digit PIN stored on the card.
The chip produces a signed reply containing the following payload fields: `issuing_country:string` and `over_18:bool`
[1] https://github.com/Governikus/AusweisApp
[2] iPhone, Android, Windows, MacOS, Linux or FreeBSD
> A law in the vein of HIPAA prevents collusion
No need if you use cryptography. This thing that, you know, works well for encrypting stuff? Spoiler: it can be used for age verification.
Such systems are deployed in production by privacy preserving cryptocurrencies as its the same problem: Prove you're spending a coin that exists without revealing information about which one, and prove that you're not spending it multiple times.
Less private but easier to implement is just simple blind signing. Site asks you to give them a signature of their domain name, your account name, and date. You blind the data using a random number, go to google and identify yourself (e.g. solve a CAPTCHA, check your mobile device, age verify, whatever) and ask them to sign the blinded value-- they rate limit you and give you a signature. You unblind and provide to the site. Now the site knows you passed the google rate limit but nothing else, but google never learns what site you authenticated to.
The blindsigning approach is kinda lame because it requires active communication with a third party that learns you're online and authenticating to stuff. So I think it's generally less preferred but the cryptography is hardly any more complicated than an ordinary digital signature.
A linkable ring signature lets you correlate multiple usage but only if they share a common 'context value'. Intelligent selection of the context value results in abusive use inevitably sharing a context so you can exclude or rate limit it, but honest use tends to not share a context so the privacy is preserved.
Then it's technically possible (and really not that difficult) for states to provide a service that issues zero-knowledge proofs of facts like "age > X".
(partly off-topic rant) One can argue this is a false premise fallacy. For most of the time states did not have this information about their citizens and the world progressed quite nicely. The only argument to know stuff about citizens that don't drive (increasing numbers) nor travel abroad (different problem altogether) is to tax them?
One of the foundational differences between humans and cattle was you cannot brand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livestock_branding) humans. Not physically, because we do it digitally and I see a slippery slope.
> For most of the time states did not have this information about their citizens and the world progressed quite nicely.
This is quite untrue. State bureaucracies far predate the modern era.
> Unlinkability is achieved by design through Zero-Knowledge Proof cryptography see the "Privacy by design" section below.
The problem is that while you might be able to trust the crypto, the government won't trust you to do the crypto entirely by yourself. And this introduces avenues for deanonymisation. Moreover, collusion between the government and the entity making the age check can also theoretically deanonimize.
It's a complicated problem.
We continue to seek a technological solution to a parenting problem.
Hmmm... no? That's not how zero knowledge works.
Teenagers, at that level of intelligence or are that determined, will find ways to circumvent whatever control mechanisms a parent or school is attempting to use. At some point, it is a matter of the teenager respecting their parents and rules. Same for if you told a teenager do not drink and drive. You can setup all kinds of technical barriers to block drunk teenagers from driving, but if they are that "smart", those committed to bad behavior or law breaking will find ways.
There's not necessarily wrong. Despite the vapid and damaging nature of most popular online media, isolating a child from it might have even worse social consequences when their real-life peer groups discover that they're not on social media or that their parents have neutered their phone. Some kids would turn out fine after that. Others would be socially destroyed for life (maybe with the right therapy they could become well-adjusted, but high quality therapy is rare).
No, they are a solution for parents who want to use them, and that's all they should be. Their existence demonstrates that it's possible to handle this without regulation, other than the desire of some people to inflict their preferences onto other people's kids.
The problem of "parents are negligent" is also solved by existing laws which have fines for parents who are negligent towards their children, and governments absolutely love collecting fines, so all the incentives are properly aligned.
Do they work currently? Not really
Are they too complex for the avg joe to work out. Unfortunately yes. (Something about the smartest bears and the dumbest humans)
That prevents trying to swap the module, but doesn't prevent swapping out the sensor on the module itself.
It's a bit like saying "no but Signal is not really encrypted, because the government can extract some metadata by looking at the network around the server".
From what I remember from being a kid myself, it definitely is not.
We could totally discuss whether or not privacy-preserving age verification is a good thing. But we can't, because most people can't be arsed to read about what age verification implies, and complain about something that is fundamentally wrong (i.e. that they would have to surrender their anonymity).
No.
> the easily trackable ZKP tokens
If it's easily trackable, it's not ZK.
Except that people can't read for 5min and understand that age verification can be done in a privacy preserving manner.
It would probably be possible to use the service that the parent is suggesting and try to link it to requests to the server based on timing. But I don't even know if anyone would bother trying to identify the OP: probably it would just be enough to rate-limit the requests.
As always: it's easy to criticise, harder to actually get it right.
If the children were the actual reason there are much less invasive solutions that enable reliable parental controls such as mandating self classification of content and fining service operators for inaccuracies.
Think for yourself and consider what the possible ulterior motives might be.
> Think for yourself and consider what the possible ulterior motives might be.
Sure, and in the meantime try to think and read about how privacy-preserving age verification actually works.
This requires you build a whole apparatus around controlling what people can see, say, and do.
The concept of "slippery slope" is often called a logical fallacy, but in reality it's more than often not a fallacy at all. It's the manner in which you boil the frog.
I think it's something like over 50% of adults do not have kids now. Why should we put the majority of people - for the majority of their lives - at risk for a mere 20% of the population to "not see boobs", when good parenting will suffice?
Let's not put a cage around our freedoms. Let's ask parents to be more responsible. In the edge cases where that isn't sufficient, is that really as bad as what could happen to all of our liberties should we go down that path?
We're burning down the whole village because someone saw a cockroach.
True for age verification, but not true in general. If you have something that can be used illegally, it's very handy to allow firms to rent / hire it out anyway but make the hirer responsible for any illegal activity.
An example is hiring a car, and the car is used to ram-raid a shop. Today this is solved by handing over a government ID to the rental company. Commit a crime in the car and they hand that over to police, but it has the sad side effect of handing over information to the car rental they can use to track you, and worse sell to others.
Using a zero knowledge proof for a valid driver's licence fixes the privacy problem, but at the expense of the hire company not being able to transfer responsibility for illegal activity onto the hirer. I suspect if that happened no one would hire out cars any more.
You can easily design something that is Zero Knowledge to the car hire firm, but includes an opaque token they can hand over to the government on lawful demand. It contains all the details needed to pursue the law breaking hirer. Thus there is still a role for the law here - you can't always do everything with crypto.
This is a very minor quibble - I agree completely with what I think is your main point. This Google change is a privacy disaster. It's a step towards an enshittified internet with the gateways onto it controlled by a few big tech firms.
But I don't think just yelling "just use ZK" is helpful. It's much harder than that - ZK is only part of the puzzle. Passkeys are currently caught up in the same attestation trap, and there is no workable solution in the offing. Banks and other high trust applications need some assurance your FIDO private key is being handled securely. The solutions on the table are Apple not doing attestation, or Google who does at the low low price of selling your true name to Google. Both "solutions" suck, horribly.
ZK proofs of things like licences and age have to solve the attestation problem, and solve extra stuff as well. I'm not holding my breath.
Agreed. I am just very frustrated, because I feel it is an important topic. And I wish I saw adult discussions about it. And instead, people who claim to be "tech-savvy" keep whining about the fact that it will fundamentally leak their ID everywhere. Like they somehow understood the point for E2EE, and repeat it here confidently. If tech-savvy people can't be bothered to understand how this works, why should politicians?
I have the same frustration with the anti-5G crowd yelling that it will boil your blood. There are many valid reasons to criticise 5G and have a constructive debate, but they choose to be wrong anyway.
You underestimate your own abilities. Tech savvy doesn't mean they think much about crypto.
To get a feel for this I asked Gemini "If you were to survey a group of people who would be called "Tech Savvy", what percentage of them would be aware you could construct a zero knowledge proof for a person's age that revealed nothing beyond they were older than a given threshold?". The answer was 5%..10%. That rises to a surprising low 20%..30% for Software Engineers. It's only once you get to Software Engineers who write security systems that you get above 50%.
Gemini didn't give any references so those figures could be complete rubbish, but in my experience they seem on the high side. Many very experienced engineers I interact with clearly have not thought very deeply about how crypto systems interact with human trust. Granted understanding the implications of crypto is yet another step beyond understanding the maths, but I'm amazed at how many technology curious people haven't bothered to take that step.
The good pollies on the other hand probably have a very good intuitive feel for human trust systems and how to navigate them. They rely on engineers to tell them what is possible of course, and they won't care about the details. But what they will care about is whether the engineers can deliver the system they promised, and there I have to admit our track record is appalling. How many government IT initiatives have you seen deliver what was promised on time and on budget? So when you tell them you can build a ZK system that delivers in all these privacy promises, expect a very sceptical reception.
Absolutely, but those are nothing compared to the tradeoffs of putting attestation or identity verification (sometimes incorrectly described as "age" verification) on numerous sites and inflicting them on everyone.
And my whole point is that it's possible to do age verification in a privacy-preserving manner, and before complaining about the tradeoffs, you should get informed about what they are.
If you make it possible for governments to decide what content is "limited to adults", they can and will abuse that capability. "Porn" is the battle cry, to make it uncomfortable to argue against; often, other information the government wants to restrict becomes a target. The only way to prevent that is to deny the capability in the first place.
It feels like trying to debate about whether 5G is good or not, and the debate is stuck at people claiming that 5G boils your blood. There are valid reasons to oppose 5G, but if people choose to be so wrong that it sounds like bad faith, they surely won't convince me of anything.
That said, you've got blinders on. You're all over this comment section condescending to people about a particularly clever scheme without considering the various real world objections being raised. Not the least of which is that the vast majority of the tidalwave of legislation on the topic has zero to do with ZKPs.
That's not what I see. I mostly see people complaining about the fact that "if they verify my age, it fundamentally means that I have to give them my ID, and I don't want that". And whenever I mention that technically, there are ways to do age verification in a privacy-preserving manner, I get something like "you are so naive, nobody wants age verification, it's THEM (the all corrupt politicians who all have the exact same opinion) against US THE PEOPLE who need to fight for our freedom!
That is very frustrating to me, because
1. I believe that it is counter-productive to be technically wrong by saying "it is fundamentally not possible". Because if politicians genuinely listen to that, then ask a few cryptographers and get the answer "no actually it exists", then it seems only fair that those politicians will just dismiss the whole opposition by saying "oh right, they are just libertarians who don't want regulations and hide behind incorrect technical claims".
2. I believe that many, many people actually are in favour of age verification to protect their kids. And again, yelling at them saying "you understand nothing, this is not technically possible, and the politicians are all corrupt authoritarians anyway" is not constructive. Moreover, "normal" people don't give a shit about the privacy issues, so if they want age verification, they will just accept any technical solution. I would hope for technically savvy people to try to raise the privacy concerns and explain that if there MUST be age verification, AT LEAST it should be done in a privacy-preserving manner.
But yeah, let's keep yelling that it is fundamentally impossible, such that nobody even hears about the privacy-preserving solutions, until we have to either give our ID to random websites or stop using the Internet. Because what seems clear to me is that we are going towards age verification anyway, and there is zero constructive discussion about how to do that right.
This is one of the reasons you're getting a lot of arguments here. Every bit of energy spent saying "actually, check out this use of cryptography that lets you do this in a privacy-preserving way" is energy not spend saying "no, not under any circumstances" and fighting against it.
Because what I read is "ok, this person is either not competent to talk about it, or arguing in bad faith, so I won't listen to them".
And to be very honest, I can't remember a good argument against "privacy-preserving age verification". It's mostly "hmm I don't like it, that should be the responsibility of the parents anyway".
The EFF has a valid point which is "such technology will leave people out who won't be able to access important services". I don't have a definitive stance on it, but that would be worth debating. I can't remember another argument from the EFF. Pretty sure they don't say "it's technically impossible to do".
Actually Soatok [1] starts by acknowledging it's possible, before going straight to their opinion: "we should not do it". Again, I think it's a debate worth having.
But I won't debate with people who either don't have a clue or downright lie about it, saying "it's not possible, period".
[1]: https://soatok.blog/2025/07/31/age-verification-doesnt-need-...
> And to be very honest, I can't remember a good argument against "privacy-preserving age verification".
I gave you one in the other thread:
If you make it possible for governments to decide what content is "limited to adults", they can and will abuse that capability. "Porn" is the battle cry, to make it uncomfortable to argue against; often, other information the government wants to restrict becomes a target. The only way to prevent that is to deny the capability in the first place.
Here's another: Many people have successfully been productive members of many online communities (e.g. FOSS projects) while still under 18, and future generations should have the same opportunities we did.
That's where we disagree, I guess. I feel like the more palatable version, in this case, is debatable. An important part of democracy is to recognise that others may have different opinions, and to be willing to engage in good faith. If the norm is to systematically lie, all you get is polarisation. And it is ironic to argue in favour of lying for your cause, but then to complain when the other side lies as well for theirs.
> I gave you one in the other thread
And I think it is debatable.
But more generally, if your opinion is that you should lie and yell to defend your ideas, that your government does not represent the people at all to the point where they would prevent teenagers from contributing to FOSS (is that a thing somewhere?), then I wonder if you actually live in a functioning democracy. I mean no offence here.
I mean, your argument is pretty much "We should remove all laws, because laws come from the government, and the government will abuse that capability. They will make schools illegal, and future generations should have the same opportunities we did".
My point, again, is that in a functioning democracy, we should strive to debate in good faith.
> I am arguing for not always helping your opponent make their bad idea better
I am not sure what you mean by that. So when people generally lie by saying "I am a technical person, believe me I know, it is technically impossible", I should... what? Say "yeah that is right, believe him"? Or just say nothing, because letting them lie is the way to "not help the opponent"?
Also you assume that age verification is a fundamentally bad idea. A lot of the arguments against any regulation is "it is a step towards authoritarianism". And I disagree with that: removing all regulations is a bad idea, we need some amount of that. The right amount of the right regulations is a balancing act.
I strongly feel like I have a fundamentally different approach from many of the comments I read, and people don't like that: I don't fight for my opinion to win. I fight for society to take an informed decision. If there is a vote where the average voter is correctly informed and the vote goes against my preference, then it is a functioning democracy. I may be frustrated of course, but it means that I am in the minority, and it makes sense to follow the preference of the majority.
People should not win because they make more noise, or because they have a better strategy, or because they lie. The goal is to represent the majority of the people, and for that, the people need to be informed. When both sides systematically lie, then the people cannot believe anybody anymore. And the result of that is polarisation, as we see it.
> I am not sure what you mean by that.
By "opponent" here I mean a politician who is arguing for an age+identity verification system. Telling them "actually you can do that without checking identity" is making their argument better. (There was a time I thought that it might help because then you can see who goes mask off and actually clearly wants identity verification for its own sake, but in general politicians never get pinned down and forced to answer hard questions about their positions like that anymore.) "That's a bad idea, age and identity verification are both bad" is better.
But most comments explicitly criticise the EU, saying it is authoritarian and has an agenda. What then? Did they all keep the mask for too long and ended up with an actually privacy-preserving technical solution on their website "by mistake"?