Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | XorNot's commentslogin

So they can die from dehydration while we spend 3 days trying to figure out who ordered the weird coffin sized box no ones coming to claim?

Are they? The goal isn't to draw a hard boundary it's to create layered defenses which increase the difficulty and reduce opportunity.

If instead of open access you need to tailgate on a limited set of employees, that increases difficulty considerably and makes the opportunity much less common.

Real security analysis works this way: you don't assume you can build a wall which is never breached.


Theres footage online of a basic security door stopping an armed robber from escaping despite him trying to shoot the lock.

Bullets aren't universal door openers, and shooting your way through one lock doesn't magically unlock the next one.


And the bullets and time spent getting through the door are bullets and time that aren’t used harming the people behind that door.

Except a decent part of security is literally just deterrence.

Will my front door stop someone robbing my house if they want to? No: I have sidelight windows you could just smash them and come through.

But the one time a house I was in got robbed, it was because we left the front door open and went out.

Which is odd if you think about it right? Statistically an open front door rather implies someone is home, not away so it's a terrible targeting priority - but our house was targeted and not say, our neighbors who also wouldn't have been home that day.

People are quick to claim security theater, talk about threat models, but equally ignore them anyway.


The "I don't have to run faster than the bear; just faster than you".

Age verification in Australia had like 70% popularity.

That is an astounding consensus in a system which regularly decides elections by 51%.

You're not getting mandated from up high: it is democratically enormously popular to do this.


Australia has two major parties that agree on absolutely everything, and a virtually non-existent civil society. No true free debate can take place in such circumstances. The Australian government loves falsely claiming a popular imprimatur for policies that have never been properly debated or put before the people.

The only reason we have any rights left is because the Australian government is - thankfully - comically incompetent.

"Australia is a lucky country" is a quote every Australian knows. Few know the full quote: "Australia is a lucky country, run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise." - Donald Horne.

I encourage all my teenage countrymen to use as many social media apps as they desire. Mullvad is a decent VPN and you can pay for it anonymously. Freedom of speech and freedom of association are your human rights. No government gets to take them away from you.


That's a fallacy. You don't have any evidence to support the claim that this system of age verification is popular and more importantly, whether it would remain popular if people had a full understanding of how it worked and how it can be abused.

It might be popular to have age verification conceptually and only as long as it's only used "as advertised", which is not the same thing.

This is one of the biggest issues of democracy. As long as your propaganda machine is strong enough (and anti-privacy propaganda is one of the strongest) you can pass just about anything and pretend that society put on the shackles of surveillance and coercive control voluntarily.

People just submitted it. I don't know why. They "trust me". Dumb fucks.


No you're switching intent around here: age verification for social media is very popular.

Whether any given implementation is popular is a different question.

But people aren't attacking implementations: they're attacking the concept as though people don't want it.

But in surveys they do: by a huge margin, politically.

It's like how a generic candidate tends to reliably poll higher then a specific person.

"Why does this keep coming up" has the trivial answer of "because people overwhelmingly keep asking for it".

You can complain about the people being decieved if you want, but they still vote regardless.


This is a fairly weak argument though: the layperson also cannot verify the software updates we push to their phone/computer or any number of other critical devices in the chain.

All of this is reputation management: if technical experts broadly agree the system does what it says, then all of us have to accept that in aggregate that's probably good enough and significantly better then many other areas.


Except it wouldn't need to be every request. Just the first one.

All these services have accounts, and the only time you need to do an age check is when the account is created.


It's the overconfidence of 90s kids who knew how to program the VCR and use the modem.

YouTube and Google are very confident this feature exists but drilling down to my model the answer is no it does not.

I think I'm getting the screwdriver out this weekend.


The site was created for the express purpose of enabling bypass of sovereign policy decisions: so yeah, it's going to be blocked.

It's a canary, for the governments who claim they have free speech. If they then block this site, then they're giving away the game. Government have the right to censor whatever they want (until they're overthrown), but they can only lie that they have free speech.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: