Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

  • 7 Posts
  • 286 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • The article says “Mississippi and elsewhere”, so I assumed all sorts of bans were fair game for discussion.

    As for your second point, I genuinely don’t really care all that much. Take my solution and require platform vendors provide a parental controls API and require websites and apps call it. From there, whether you legally required parents to set up parental controls, you strongly suggest they do it, or you just leave it there as an option doesn’t matter as much. Maybe different places can have different laws.

    The important thing is that parents should at least be given the tools necessary to be able to do this.





  • 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.




  • There’s a ~/.docker/config.json. In that there’re some auths, with keys https://index.docker.io/v1/, https://index.docker.io/v1/access-token, and https://index.docker.io/v1/refresh-token, and then there’s "currentContext": "rootless".

    There’s ~/.docker/contexts/meta/[a long hex string]/meta.json, with {"Name":"rootless","Metadata":{"Description":"Rootless mode"},"Endpoints":{"docker":{"Host":"unix:///run/user/1000/docker.sock","SkipTLSVerify":false}}}.

    The only file in /etc/docker is key.json.



  • $ dig registry-1.docker.io
    
    ; <<>> DiG 9.18.33-1~deb12u2-Debian <<>> registry-1.docker.io
    ;; global options: +cmd
    ;; Got answer:
    ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 50801
    ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 8, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
    
    ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
    ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232
    ;; QUESTION SECTION:
    ;registry-1.docker.io.          IN      A
    
    ;; ANSWER SECTION:
    registry-1.docker.io.   33      IN      A       54.210.249.78
    registry-1.docker.io.   33      IN      A       44.218.153.24
    registry-1.docker.io.   33      IN      A       107.20.112.188
    registry-1.docker.io.   33      IN      A       34.234.222.10
    registry-1.docker.io.   33      IN      A       34.195.83.243
    registry-1.docker.io.   33      IN      A       52.21.128.203
    registry-1.docker.io.   33      IN      A       52.0.248.137
    registry-1.docker.io.   33      IN      A       52.207.69.161
    
    ;; Query time: 47 msec
    ;; SERVER: 192.168.20.1#53(192.168.20.1) (UDP)
    ;; WHEN: Tue Aug 12 22:27:45 AEST 2025
    ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 177
    $ cat /etc/resolv.conf
    # Generated by NetworkManager
    search Home
    nameserver 192.168.20.1
    

    edit: oh, and in my router’s configuration:

    • Primary DNS Server:9.9.9.9
    • Secondary DNS Server:1.1.1.1

  • I’m happy to keep it public if only for the off chance that if we find a solution it might some day help someone else with the same issue. The thread’ll fall down in the rankings naturally over time anyway so I wouldn’t worry about polluting anything for people not actively seeking it out.

    I’m not 100% sure how to find the OS version, but uname -a outputs [...]6.12.25+rpt-rpi-v8[...]. /etc/os-release contains “Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm)”. It should be whatever was latest as of a month or two ago when I installed the OS fresh.