Part of the issue with phones is that they are already controlled by the Google/Apple duopoly, and hence heavily optimized for constant distraction and addiction. These laws only cement that duopoly and provide fewer means to build more friendly platforms.
While I don't appreciate the implementation of "security" generally involving monopolization, I think it's important to note that you only need age verification for things that are irrelevant to children. In fact the entire point is to exclude children. So a non-Google/Apple device is still perfectly usable for them if (or even specifically because) it cannot pass age verification/attestation. Really the main concern should be use of attestation for banking/government stuff.
I've been hearing talk for years about a "web of trust" system, that could filter spam simply by having users vouch for eachother and filtering out anyone not vouched for. However, I haven't seen a function system based on this model yet.
Personally I'd love to add in something like the old slashdot comment model, where people would mark content as "helpful", "funny", "insightful", "controversial" etc, and based on how much you trust the people labeling it, you could have things filtered out, or brought forward.
There is the simpler version that is approximately "you can only get in if someone vouches for you. If a person you vouch for misbehaves you get punished as well". That's effectively a "tree of trust" with skin in the game. And it's incredibly successful, used in lots of communities, crime rings, job recommendations, etc.
Any attempt to generalize this by allowing multiple weak vouches instead of a single strong one, or allowing people to join before getting vouched for, or removing the stakes in vouching for someone, etc. always end up failing for fairly predictable reasons. No matter how much cool cryptography you add
Wouldn't that be easy to bypass by just adding one or two proxy accounts? Say person A invites me (a bad actor). I could invite a second throwaway account, with which I invite a third throwaway account. I do bad things on my third account. Could you reasonably punish person A for this? You'd first have to prove that the throwaway accounts all belong to me.
No one has to proof anything. If A invites B and B invites C who acts openly bad, you can remove all parties at once and maybe revoke on appeal. All up to the community. Otherwise it would be indeed simple to defeat. But before banning A, one can also just give a Warning. No restrictions here in principle, but I am also open for concrete implementations that work well.
The point is that either there has to be a limit for how much you get punished for the acts of your grandchildren, which leaves room for motivated abusers to work around your system, or people can expect to be banned for basically no fault of their own if they ever invite anyone, in which case your system is DOA.
The point is, it is a balance each community has to find on their own. In reality this means adjusting depending on incidents. But if A invites B who openly does bad things, it very much is the fault of A to drag this person into the community.
Some of the social media systems, including Bluesky, started as invite-only, but that was only ever really for rate-limiting and in particular there were no negative consequences for inviting someone who was subsequently banned.
"But I came crawling back to iOS because I'm weak and the orange iPhone was pretty and the Pixel 10 was boring and I caved to the blue bubble pressure. But the keyboard on this beautiful phone is worse than ever. "
I don't understand. What could Apple possibly have that is better than a working device?
"blue bubble" here is undersold. It means Apple has anti-competitively broken the experience of speaking with loved ones on purpose if you leave their ecosystem.
Tiktok will never have any competitors after this law comes into force. They will have the resources the implement the require changes, and the customer base will remain with them. Anyone starting a new service will have a tough time building something that jumps through all the hoops required by the EU, on top of the usual problems with network effects.
To me, it's just further evidence that trying to assert ownership over a specific sequence of 1s and 0s is an entirely futile and meaningless endeavor.
Regardless of your opinion on that (I largely agree with you), that is not the current law, and people went to prison for FAR less. Remember Aaron Swartz, for example.
Not all stablecoins are intended as investments. For many it's just a way to send money internationally without dealing with the SWIFT system, waiting periods, banks losing payments etc.
I still wonder about that. I don't have a contract with the advertiser to provide genuine data back about what ads I've clicked and what I haven't. The website operator does have such a contract and so cannot hire a bot farm to spam click the ads.
If it's something that's been held up in court already then of course I have to accept it, but I can't say the reason seems immediately intuitive.
>I don't have a contract with the advertiser to provide genuine data back about what ads I've clicked and what I haven't.
Charges of fraud doesn't require a contract to be in place. That's the whole point of criminal law, it's so that you don't need to add a "don't screw me over" clause to every interaction you make.
reply