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Posts
121
Comments
782
Joined
3 yr. ago

Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

  • The fact that they haven’t gone for this approach that delivers age verification without disclosing ID, when it’s a common and well known pattern in IT services, very strongly suggests that age verification was never the goal.

    I don't agree. It certainly makes it possible that it isn't the goal. But I genuinely believe that, at least here in Australia (where our recent age-gating law is not about porn, but about social media platforms, with an age limit of 16), the reason behind the laws being designed as they are is (1) optics: despite what those of us here say, keeping young children off of harmful social media algorithms is very politically popular and they wanted to pass a bill that banned it as quickly as they could. No time for serious discussion about methods. And (2) a complete lack of knowledge. Because they wanted the optics, they passed the bill extremely quickly and without a serious amount of consultation. And I don't trust that even if they had done consultation, they would have known who is more reliable to listen to, the actual experts and privacy advocates, or the big AI companies with big money promising facial recognition will somehow solve this. Because politicians are, by and large, really fucking stupid at technology.

    What is it they say? Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity?

  • “Kids shouldn’t be driving cars, it isn’t safe!” Yes, but somehow we have made it 100 years without requiring proof of age/license to start the car.

    This is sort of my take. There's a lot of fun to be had in discussing possible technical solutions to the problem. And technical solutions do exist. But they all have some sort of noteworthy downside, including relying on the government to build and maintain this signing server.

    But the best solution, IMO, is much more low-tech. Parental controls. Mandate that all browsers and operating systems support a parental control API where apps and websites can request to know if a user is of age. Mandate that adult sites call this API. And put the onus on parents to actually set up parental controls on their children's devices, with an appropriately strong password that the children cannot break into.

  • This can be improved even further to lock a single age verification to a single account. Instead of issuing you a generic signed cert, they use blinded signatures to sign a cert that you generate and encrypt, containing the domain name and your username. The govt never sees the site or your username, because it's encrypted, and the site never sees the document you provided the govt with to prove your age. But you have a cert that can only be used by you to verify your account is of age.

    There's an alternative solution that would enable a person's browser or device to verify their age based on a govt-signed cert with repeated hashes. This would have the benefit of the government not even knowing how many verifications you had done, because they only provide one cert per person (with longer renewals. The downside of this is that it requires some form of unique multiple-use identifier. In the sample question that's fine because it's a passport. IRL it could be something like an email address, or even just your own unique UUID.

  • On doit apprendre le français (ou l’allemand) pour rechercher le web sans indices Américains? Défi accepté!

    🤨

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  • How do they fair in their native western US?

  • Discussions are, arguably, their own type of OC. Like this thread as one example. That's the kind of thing I, and I suspect @fujiwood@lemmy.world, would love to see more of.

  • Not sure, but I think it's the Lemmy API, not the client, that determines this. So you could probably log out and view the post? Or set your profile to speak every language.

  • Hey @obey@lemmy.wtf, if you see this...your comments are all set to be in Lithuanian, which means anybody who's logged in and doesn't have their account set to say they speak Lithuanian won't see your comments at all. (I only saw it because this post says "3 comments", but I could only see 2, which made me curious to go investigate.)

  • I don't really understand what this is trying to say, particularly the 9 pm cravings. But we've been reading Dracula together recently in !vampires@lemmy.zip, and the text for 9 pm is on her kneck, so I'm assuming it has something to do with a craving for blood.

  • support for Israel abetted a humanitarian catastrophe

    Say the word, damn it. Genocide. Biden abetted genocide.

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  • but I can acknowledge that some countries may have interesting ideas

    Hmm, well definitely not French then.

  • the eyeballs are good source off freshwater

    That is definitely a very fun fact. But the joke in my comment was that I can't hunt or forage for any sort of food. I was referencing the guideline that a person can survive 3 days without water or 3 weeks without food.

  • Is there a source of fresh water? Three weeks : three days.

  • He may or may not be. He's on the left...

  • Oh yeah that definitely looks more trigger-y.

  • Wait, you use the d-pad with your right hand on an Xbox‽ I'm gonna be honest, I can't even imagine wanting to do that, and it feels like it would be bad game design if a game necessitates it.

    But if you did want to do it, I'd say your best option in a symmetric design would be to use your right thumb on the left stick. It's a little awkward, but it's only for a split second, which IMO is better than sacrificing the comfort of the design as it's used 99% of the time.

  • Ok that bottom image is interesting. It certainly looks a little more trigger-like. I dunno what console that is, but I think it's noteworthy that the PS2 controller has convex buttons for both R1 and R2. And even the PS5 seems to have only gone so far as making the button relatively flat:

    With a steep convex bump out at the top, and a very gentle concave curve (much too gentle IMO to still be described as "similar to a gun trigger") across the rest. Personally, I don't particularly like the idea of naming the buttons in a way that is dependent on minute details of design like whether it is convex or concave. It's unintuitive and particularly if you throw third-party controllers into the mix, could lead to the names being even more misleading and unintuitive.

  • The order makes sense to me. R1 is the top button. R2 is the bottom one. We usually read top to bottom so that checks out.

    R3 is the weird stepchild option. It goes last precisely because of how weird it is and how rarely-used it is. Or at least was, back when I was last playing games on a console, during the PS2 era.

  • Someone else pointed out that when you say "trigger", you mean like the trigger of a gun, as opposed to in the sense I was thinking, which is in terms of event scripting, where a "trigger" is the event that causes another event to begin. I was thinking of it like that because, well...none of the buttons look even remotely like a gun trigger to me.