The big issue isn’t even age verification. The end goal is verified user identification. They want every transaction on the internet to be associated with the exact identity of the user. No more anonymity.

In the short term the way it will be implemented is this — age verification will not be a binary, it will also want to push your DoB, name, location etc and they say “the choice is with the user” but the default will be to send everything. Very soon there will be services that require DoB or name or something else to gate new or existing functionality. That is the slippery slope it will be built as and that is how they win the game

I truly share your concerns, especially as someone belonging to a minority.

At the same time, we have to be real: Online anonymity has significant, real-world drawbacks. I don't think it's reasonable to keep dreaming of the 90s or 00s when the internet was a comparatively innocent place. As society is more and more digitized, the stakes become much, much higher. An information leak 30 years ago was bad, but it had a fairly limited impact radius. Today it can lose you your house, your savings, your relationships, and even your life ("swatting" comes to mind).

This extremely ill-advised legislation across various jurisdictions cannot just be brushed off as a global turn towards fascism. It is that, but there are also real, legitimate concerns that need to be addressed, and the tech world has not leveraged its expertise to come up with any solutions so far. Sticking our head in the sand crying "git gud" while millions get scammed out of their life savings... It's not great.

(Children getting into trouble is honestly the least of my concerns here. Don't let your child go online unsupervised. The internet is not for them. You wouldn't let them roam free in a red light district or an underground illegal weapon's market either, even though they are unlikely to come to any harm.)

> Online anonymity has significant, real-world drawbacks.

Do please be specific about those. Provide concrete examples and justify for the class why those involved couldn't have voluntarily done away with anonymity for that particular interaction.

Hypothetically someone can browse a tor site in one tab, post on 4chan in a second one, all while accessing online banking in a third. The bank can use hardware backed 2FA to verify you. Where's the issue here?

When financial institutions in the USA are not even adding basic things like... approve transaction on phone, keeping most things pull based based on knowing a few magic numbers vs. push based and other really basic things, this really doesn't hold water. Things being anon doesn't even register in the day to day of what is bad with the internet, vast majority of it is from very non-anonymous sources, influencers, apps or institutions.

In many other countries, these are enforced by central bank, bank association or legislations.

In USA, small business, small bank and credit unit are often used as excuse to push back these kind of rules.

> As society is more and more digitized

How about this is actually the real problem? Online banking is not worth an omniscient global surveillance state, let alone the immense amount of leverage gained by this digitization.

Theres no putting that genie back and most people wouldn't want to.

> An information leak 30 years ago was bad, but it had a fairly limited impact radius. Today it can lose you your house, your savings, your relationships, and even your life ("swatting" comes to mind).

So you are afraid of minor information leaks getting you killed, but you’re also trying to tell us that online anonymity is a bad thing?

Come on. This argument isn’t even coherent from paragraph to paragraph.

> I don't think it's reasonable to keep dreaming of the 90s or 00s when the internet was a comparatively innocent place

This is such a strange argument as the internet was most definitely NOT an innocent place, even relatively speaking, in that period.

I think there is a lot of nostalgic history rewriting in these claims. Much like political movements that claim that the past was a better time, it’s easy to only remember the good parts of how things were in the past.

> Online anonymity has significant, real-world drawbacks.

Online anonymity has significant, real-world benefits which every doxxed person ever will list for you.

And drawbacks, too. Imagine if you could only dox someone else by doxxing yourself at the same time.

Perhaps the first step is to actually listen to the frustrated people. Maybe at least some of their problems are real.

I've definitely listened to the frustrated people, as well as even sharing many of their frustrations. And their (our) problems are definitely real. I still stand by what I said.

To show you that I'm maybe not just blowing smoke out of my ass on this topic, here is me personally dealing with a scammer-adjacent problem: https://qht.co/item?id=47125550

You got suckered by the marketing. Google's "zero knowledge" approach requires devices locked down with remote attestation, which prohibits end users from running their own code (when interacting with websites that prevent it, which as time goes on under this plan will be everywhere). The only actual difference here is that this is Google's desired approach to destroying anonymity and personal computing.

Why is that required? The whole point of zero knowledge proofs is that it can run on untrusted devices.

Because true “zero knowledge” proofs are actually useless for age gating purposes.

Conceptually, if a proof was truly zero knowledge and there were no restrictions on generating it, there would also be nothing stopping someone from launching a website where you clicked a button and were given a free token generated from their ID. If it was truly a zero knowledge proof it would be impossible to revoke the ID that generated it, so there is no disincentive to freely share IDs.

So every real world “zero knowledge” proof eventually restricts something. Some require you to request your tokens from a government entity. Others try to do hardware attention chains so theoretically you can’t generate them outside of the approved means.

But the hacker fantasy of truly zero knowledge proofs is impossible because 1 hour after launch there would be a dozen “Show HN” posts with vibe coded websites that dispense zero knowledge tokens.

You’d have to ask Google

This was fully expected. They just fully exploited their economies of scale and entered the low end market. They are going to grab a lot of market there from windows

Is there a use case for this today? Feels more like nvidia is priming the software hoping system designers will find ways to use it.

Why do we want to make the stock market mimic the crypto market? What need is the 24/7 trading solving? Just for hft companies to make more money? Seems like a genuine reason to diversify to Europe and Asian markets

As a practical matter as a "normal person" who just wants to rebalance/do a deposit/withdraw every so often, the market only being open 6:30 AM-1 PM on the west coast is very annoying.

6:30 AM to say 10 PM would solve a lot of those issues though without needing to go 24/7 (unless you work night shift...)

> What need is the 24/7 trading solving?

There's a reason the Black-Scholes model assumes market prices are continuous. The discontinuity of the market makes hedging options a lot more complex and expensive.

24/7 trading doesn't completely fix that, but it does help.

This is yet not the grok acquisition, so there is another update coming with that claiming more improvements?

Are these countries being very conservative or do their oil supply get impacted by a couple weeks of war? If so that is a very concerning situation

Something I heard from an analyst online (can't find source unfortunately) said that China has a 90 day supply for gas, whereas it's 10 days for Taiwan. Not sure this applies to all fuel types, but it may give an indication of the buffer that some of these major Asian countries are working with.

I read somewhere that Australia has 10-14 days of gasoline supply - I have no idea how many countries run this tight and exposed, but it seems to be surprisingly widespread - it's wild how the global economy runs on just-in-time shipping of energy imports.

And its worth pointing out that China recently stocked up their strategic oil reserves to a significant degree. They would be the very tipping top high end of reserves.

The closest gas station in my area is out of stock already. I'm in Philippines, totally miles away from the war.

Wow! Thanks for the info. This is much more dire than I had imagined. Hope it stops quickly and normalcy resumes

This was always going to be the case. Apple has perfected the art of finding slots for different use cases and consumer buckets just as well as they have perfected the hardware and software. This is a no brained for most home use and particularly education. Only issue for home use is photos and able to process an entire photo database at once and doing ML operations on them. Of course apple’s photos is the one black mark in their software stack, or may be something I don’t like.

Don’t forget that this auto generated code will have subtle bugs and feels complete at the outset

FHE is great, if we can get this to work at scale and if this can be baked into the GPU complex, we don’t need the confidential compute pipeline. Of course we will still need to manage the user keys, so the current confidential pipeline will just be replaced with something else, but hopefully managing large amounts of data will become simpler. Not sure where the tech is but it could be a game changer for security. It still doesn’t eliminate the bad corporation issue though. We still rely on code they run on the servers inside the FHE.

Huh,I thought this was a social experiment but I guess when it got traction they pivoted to make it into an enterprise story somehow? Meta just is desperate for anything with AI right now.