kbal

You are suggesting that a system which does not yet exist will be perfectly safe and secure. None of the ones for which I have seen actual design documents are anything like as safe as you imagine.

consider Canada for your next overseas holiday, Welsh people.

If so, perhaps the rabbit-pejorative term "bunny" should also be avoided for the same reasons as the dreaded n-word.

Sorry ma'am we have a warrant to suck your blood.

officers also recovered around 80kg (176lb) of cannabis products worth up to £1.5million

At current exchange rates that's about 3.5 times the retail price for hash if you buy it from the government of Québec.

What do you mean, "no additional risk"? It's a pretty big additional risk, creating a huge central database of everyone's ID that will be frequently interacted with through a new interface that's available to every sketchy website in the world. Even if it isn't compromised it can collect data about how often your name gets looked up, and it isn't easy to make a system where there isn't the additional risk of more personal data being collected if the central authority colludes with Facebook. You'd really need to look carefully at the details to evaluate the risks of such a system, which they have not done at all in Australia.

Every time I've looked at the details of elaborate schemes resembling the one you imagine, I'm always left with a lot of doubts that they're secure or practical. Every time I've looked at the systems that have actually been implemented in reality, I have no doubt that they suck.

How would you get by without one? If I produce a proof right now that I'm at least 32 years old, how else do you know it's a proof for anyone in particular and I didn't get it from my older brother or some random website that sells them?

zero-knowledge proofs, which don't expose any information to any party other than "I'm at least x years old"

Not quite. The well-known zkp for age verification used in the obvious way reveals only: 1. "I'm at least x years old" and 2. "my name is y." The name can be some other unique assigned identifier, but the point is that whatever is used it needs to uniquely identify you.

There is no way to tell how old people are across the Internet without relying on unprecedented and shocking intrusions into our privacy.

Politician: What about these "mastodon" people who seem to think they're above the law? If they won't comply we'll have to shut them down.

Tech advisor: Sorry, there's no way. It's run by thousands of individual people from all over the world, most of whom would not want to have anything to do with our legal system, and most of whom by virtue of their hobby running social media servers are extremely well-connected and would raise an enormous stink about it if we tried anything. Better to just pretend it doesn't exist.

It's weird how so much of the reporting on this (e.g. CBC radio news in Canada this morning) focuses exclusively on what this means for teenagers, as if adults aren't also directly affected by the imposition of age checks. Sure the law suppresses the political speech of young people; that shouldn't be controversial, it's explicitly designed to take away some of their main telecommunications tools. The question for the court as it pertains to 15-year-olds is whether that's justified and allowed by Australian constitutional law, which I imagine the government can make a pretty good case that it is.

To me it's the larger question of how far the chilling effect of denying net anonymity to adults will go that seems like the more important one, seeing as it affects everyone in the country.

Anyway it seems like it is not actually a "social media ban" since it does not include e.g. Mastodon ­— although I've yet to find a good explanation as to how that works legally and whether it's likely to change. For now, maybe we can hope that it will drive a few more people towards the fediverse and thereby do some good, until fedi grows to the point where they feel the need to hobble it too. Assuming of course that the whole project doesn't just collapse in failure.

Recording and analyzing all the real-time video and audio feeds of their surroundings that everyone is required to provide while using the Internet, to ensure that no children are present when they use social media.