If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I don't think that it's impossible for politicians, even nontechnical politicians, to make good tech policy. After all, the fact that no one in Congress is a microbiologist doesn't stop federal standards from delivering potable water (and it doesn't excuse the ghastly failures, such as Flint, MI):
For politicians to make good policy, they don't need to be technical experts: they need to have solid, independent, well-resourced expert agencies. Those would be the very agencies that Trump and Musk have DOGEd into oblivion, which is pretty ominous, since the work of expert agencies is how you avoid dying of food poisoning, water poisoning, air poisoning, collapsing buildings, faulty antilock brakes, train explosions and plane-crashes.
But when it comes to tech policy, politicians get it all so goddamned wrong. Partly that's because the cartel of tech companies lies to them like crazy, even under oath, leading to a kind of nihilistic refusal to believe any expert input. Mark Zuckerberg wants you to think that's it's inconceivable for you to have a social life without him eavesdropping on it, and any rule demanding this is a farce, like a demand to make water that's not wet:
Big Tech's highly resourced bullshit machine convinces some politicians that technical expertise is not to be trusted, and gives other, more cynical politicians cover for ignoring experts by saying, "Oh you people are always telling us that this or that is impossible."
For example, since the Clinton era, politicians all over the world demanded a kind of impossible encryption: encryption that works perfectly when it's doing something legitimate, like keeping hackers from pushing malware to your pacemaker or stealing your life's savings or listening in on you through your phone's microphone, but also they require that this encryption offer no protection to criminals, drug dealers, terrorists, child abusers, and other miscreants.
This really is like water that's not wet. We can make encryption that works. It's hard to get right, but when we do, it offers a wondrous level of protection from interception and eavesdropping, scrambling our data so thoroughly that you would have to consume multiple universes worth of time and space to build all the computers necessary to guess the descrambling key. We can also make encryption that doesn't work. People do this by accident all the time. Sometimes, the NSA does it on purpose (and doesn't mention that fact to the people who rely on it for their safety and integrity):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG
But what we absolutely, positively, totally cannot make is encryption that both works and does not work, depending on whose secrets it is protecting. That's impossible.
But when technologists tell policymakers this, they tell us that they have every confidence in our ingenuity, and also, they can't be certain we're not telling a Zuck-style fable about how the stuff we merely disprefer is actually impossible. They tell us to NERD HARDER!
NERD HARDER! is the answer every time a politician gets a technological idée-fixe about how to solve a social problem by creating a technology that can't exist. It's the answer that EU politicians who backed the catastrophic proposal to require copyright filters for all user-generated content came up with, when faced with objections that these filters would block billions of legitimate acts of speech:
When politicians seize on a technological impossibility as a technological necessity, they flail about and desperately latch onto scholarly work that they can brandish as evidence that their idea could be accomplished.
For example, back in 2019, Trump's Bureau of Land Management tried to impose a ton of absolutely bizarre, environmentally devastating requirements on Burning Man's land-use permit. One of these requirements was to effectively ban LED lights at night (!), on the basis that these were so bright at altitude that they could disrupt nocturnal birds.
In support of this measure, the BLM cited a PhD dissertation from a physicist who developed a method for estimating light pollution. That physicist turns out to be a burner, who filed comments in the docket describing how the BLM had misapplied his work, making crude mathematical errors that led them to grossly overstate the amount of light pollution at altitude (I've just spent an hour trying to find this comment and I came up craps – if you can find it, please let me know, as it was delicious).
That kind of Annie Hall/Marshall McLuhan/"You know nothing of my work" moment is always fantastic, and especially so when politicians are demanding that technologists NERD HARDER! to realize their cherished impossibilities.
That's just happened, and in relation to one of the scariest, most destructive NERD HARDER! tech policies ever to be assayed (a stiff competition). I'm talking about the UK Online Safety Act, which imposes a duty on websites to verify the age of people they communicate with before serving them anything that could be construed as child-inappropriate (a category that includes, e.g., much of Wikipedia):
The Starmer government has, incredibly, developed a passion for internet regulations that are even stupider than Tony Blair's and David Cameron's. Requiring people to identify themselves (generally, via their credit cards) in order to look at porn will create a giant database of every kink and fetish of every person in the UK, which will inevitably leak and provide criminals and foreign spies with a kompromat system they can sort by net worth of the people contained within.
This hasn't deterred Starmer, who insists that if we just NERD HARDER!, we can use things like "zero-knowledge proofs" to create "privacy-preserving" age verification system, whereby a service can assure itself that it is communicating with an adult without ever being able to determine who it is communicating with.
In support of this idea, Starmer and co like to cite some genuinely exciting and cool cryptographic work on privacy-preserving credential schemes. Now, one of the principal authors of the key papers on these credential schemes, Steve Bellovin, has published a paper that is pithily summed up via its title, "Privacy-Preserving Age Verification—and Its Limitations":
The tldr of this paper is that Starmer's idea will not work and cannot work. The research he relies on to defend the technological feasibility of his cherished plan does not support his conclusion.
Bellovin starts off by looking at the different approaches various players have mooted for verifying their users' age. For example, Google says it can deploy a "behavioral" system that relies on Google surveillance dossiers to make guesses about your age. Google refuses to explain how this would work, but Bellovin sums up several of the well-understood behavioral age estimation techniques and explains why they won't work. It's one thing to screw up age estimation when deciding which ad to show you; it's another thing altogether to do this when deciding whether you can access the internet.
Others say they can estimate your age by using AI to analyze a picture of your face. This is a stupid idea for many reasons, not least of which is that biometric age estimation is notoriously unreliable when it comes to distinguishing, say, 16 or 17 year olds from 18 year olds. Nevertheless, there are sitting US Congressmen who not only think this would work – they labor under the misapprehension that this is already going on:
So that just leaves the privacy-preserving credential schemes, especially the Camenisch-Lysyanskaya protocol. This involves an Identity Provider (IDP) that establishes a user's identity and characteristics using careful document checks and other procedures. The IDP then hands the user a "primary credential" that can attest to everything the IDP knows about the user, and any number of "subcredentials" that only attest to specific facts about that user (such as their age).
These are used in zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) – a way for two parties to validate that one of them asserts a fact without learning what that fact is in the process (this is super cool stuff). Users can send their subcredentials to a third party, who can use a ZKP to validate them without learning anything else about the user – so you could prove your age (or even just prove that you are over 18 without disclosing your age at all) without disclosing your identity.
There's some good news for implementing CL on the web: rather than developing a transcendentally expensive and complex new system for these credential exchanges and checks, CL can piggyback on the existing Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) that powers your browser's ability to have secure sessions. When you visit a website with https:// in front of the address (instead of just http://).
However, doing so poses several difficulties, which Bellovin enumerates under a usefully frank section header: "INSURMOUNTABLE OBSTACLES."
The most insurmountable of these obstacles is getting set up with an IDP in the first place – that is, proving who you are to some agency, but only one such agency (so you can't create two primary credentials and share one of them with someone underage). Bellovin cites Supreme Court cases about voter ID laws and the burdens they impose on people who are poor, old, young, disabled, rural, etc.
Fundamentally, it can be insurmountably hard for a lot of people to get, say, a driver's license, or any other singular piece of ID that they can provide to an IDP in order to get set up on the system.
The usual answer for this is for IDPs to allow multiple kinds of ID. This does ease the burden on users, but at the expense of creating fatal weaknesses in the system: if you can set up an identity with multiple kinds of ID, you can visit different IDPs and set up an ID with each (just as many Americans today have drivers licenses from more than one state).
The next obstacle is "user challenges," like the problem of households with shared computers, or computers in libraries, hotels, community centers and other public places. The only effective way to do this is to create (expensive) online credential stores, which are likely to be out of reach of the poor and disadvantaged people who disproportionately rely on public or shared computers.
Next are the "economic issues": this stuff is expensive to set up and maintain, and someone's gotta pay for it. We could ask websites that offer kid-inappropriate content to pay for it, but that sets up an irreconcilable conflict of interest. These websites are going to want to minimize their costs, and everything they can do to reduce costs will make the system unacceptably worse. For example, they could choose only to set up accounts with IDPs that are local to the company that operates the server, meaning that anyone who lives somewhere else and wants to access that website is going to have to somehow get certified copies of e.g. their birth certificate and driver's license to IDPs on the other side of the planet. The alternative to having website foot the bill for this is asking users to pay for it – meaning that, once again, we exclude poor people from the internet.
Finally, there's "governance": who runs this thing? In practice, the security and privacy guarantees of the CL protocol require two different kinds of wholly independent institutions: identity providers (who verify your documents), and certificate authorities (who issue cryptographic certificates based on those documents). If these two functions take place under one roof, the privacy guarantees of the system immediately evaporate.
An IDP's most important role is verifying documents and associating them with a specific person. But not all IDPs will be created equal, and people who wish to cheat the system will gravitate to the worst IDPs. However, lots of people who have no nefarious intent will also use these IDPs, merely because they are close by, or popular, or were selected at random. A decision to strike off an IDP and rescind its verifications will force lots of people – potentially millions of people – to start over with the whole business of identifying themselves, during which time they will be unable to access much of the web. There's no practical way for the average person to judge whether an IDP they choose is likely to be found wanting in the future.
So we can regulate IDPs, but who will do the regulation? Age verification laws affect people outside of a government's national territory – anyone seeking to access content on a webserver falls under age verification's remit. Remember, IDPs handle all kinds of sensitive data: do you want Russia, say, to have a say in deciding who can be an IDP and what disclosure rules you will have to follow?
To regulate IDPs (and certificate authorities), these entities will have to keep logs, which further compromises the privacy guarantees of the CL protocol.
Looming all of this is a problem with the CL protocol as being built on regulated entities, which is that CL is envisioned as a way to do all kinds of business, from opening a bank account to proving your vaccination status or your right to work or receive welfare. Authoritarian governments who order primary credential revocations of their political opponents could thoroughly and terrifyingly "unperson" them at the stroke of a pen.
The paper's conclusions provide a highly readable summary of these issues, which constitute a stinging rebuke to anyone contemplating age-verification schemes. These go well beyond the UK, and are in the works in Canada, Australia, the EU, Texas and Louisiana.
Age verification is an impossibility, and an impossibly terrible idea with impossibly vast consequences for privacy and the open web, as my EFF colleague Jason Kelley explained on the Malwarebytes podcast:
Politicians – even nontechnical ones – can make good tech policy, provided they take expert feedback seriously (and distinguish it from self-interested industry lobbying).
When it comes to tech policy, wanting it badly is not enough. The fact that it would be really cool if we could get technology to do something has no bearing on whether we can actually get technology to do that thing. NERD HARDER! isn't a policy, it's a wish.
Wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one will be full first:
The happenings around the world have been quite......steady is it because of the elections approaching or are we about to witness a greater chaos...very soon?
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Lets take a look back... at the things we witnessed last week.
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@arshadpappu was caught dealing drugs with unknown foreigners.
He's yet to release any official statement against this very serious allegation.
@arshadpappu is on very thin ice at this point.
One wrong move and there goes his dreams of becoming the 'king of lyari'
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@lyari-ka-janbaz was arrested...haww how shocking? By @lyarikadjinn who might i add has been M.I.A since February.
So...was @lyari-ka-janbaz really arrested..? or are they hiding something much darker that we don't know about?
And to note, they have only been supporting @arshadpappu 's party....i wouldn't be surprised if they were a part of this scandal too.
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Oh but is it really just the PKI leader dealing with drugs now?
It has come to my attention that @majoriqbalahmedisi held a party or to be specific... A Rave. Yesterday.
This party included drugs alcohol and other intoxicating substances.
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Does hosting such a big party and providing drugs to the youth make @majoriqbalahmedisi a suitable candidate @lyarielections ?
Does this former ISI agent have no clue what a negative impact this "fun" rave has left on this political status?
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Another one of my source has caught @thesexierbetaofrehmanbaloch and @shiranisahabkaexplosivepota lurking outside @aalamdudhsoda 's shop...
Many speculate that both kids might be planning a raid.
But truth be told.... something good..is in the works ;)
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I also happen to know about a coalition that might be forming soon...
But i won't comment further until both parties announce this themselves.
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Thats all for today my dears, im sorry to disappoint you with this.....not so interesting news but i guess everyone has decided to keep their composure till the elections :/
This is reporter Fuljhadi on patakanews. Dhanyawad ✍️
Intro
If you know me online or offline, you’ll also know that I have an obsession with productivity and knowledge management stuff. This includes note taking apps, task management apps, different methods and everything related to that. This is partly because of my ADHD and needing a support system for myself but also because how I work in general.
This is why when the new generation of note…
SittySharaa - Pada tanggal 7 Desember 1942 seorang Ratu Wilhelmina mengantarkan pidato kenegaraan berbahasa Inggris, dikala itu Ratu Wilhelmina mengungsi ke Inggris sebab negeri Belanda dikala itu diduduki oleh tentara Nazi. Dalam pidatonya Ratu Wilhelmina mengantarkan pujian dalam pidatonya kepada rakyat tanah jajahan Hindia
( apalagi dikala itu Ratu Wilhelmina menyebutnya Indonesia) atas kedudukannya dalam mempertahankan diri dari serbuan Jepang. Dia pula melontarkan janji manis berbentuk wujud pemerintahan baru untuk negeri- negeri jajahan sehabis Perang Dunia II berakhir. 3 tahun setelah itu PD II betul- betul berakhir serta suasana politik global telah sangat berganti.
Dikala berakhir Perang Dunia II timbul kekhawatiran kalau negeri- negeri jajahan Belanda menuntut apalagi betul- betul mendeklarasikan kemerdekaan mereka. Bukan cuma si Ratu yang takut tentang negara- negara jajahannya. Kegelisahan ini pula timbul lho noona/oppa di benak orang- orang Belanda yang makin meningkat sebab melihat kenyataan kalau dekolonisasi besar- besaran tengah terjalin di mana- mana. Hindia Belanda, tanah jajahan kesayangan, pula lagi dilamun arus dekolonisasi itu serta memerdekakan diri jadi Republik Indonesia.
Timbul dikala itu pemikiran dari elit politik Belanda kalau Belanda hendak kehabisan anak emasnya ialah Hindia. Apalagi banyak Paradoks yang timbul memandang ikatan antara Belanda serta Hindia dari tahun 1942- 1949 ataupun bisa jadi sejauh penjajahan Belanda di Indonesia timbul suatu ironi yang tanpa di sadari kelompok ini karena sudah membentuk semacam“ etik” kolonialisme: senantiasa menempatkan Belanda bagaikan Tuan Eropa yang pemurah serta memiliki misi bawa kalangan pribumi kepada alam yang lebih beradab—suatu mission civilisatrice.
" Indisch verloren, ramspoed geboren"( Hindia lenyap, kesengsaraan tiba). Suatu berita mengejutkan yang diungkapkan pers Belanda di tahun 1940an. Perasaan ini berasal dari zaman masa Perang Dunia I yang disebar luaskan oleh tersangka Onze Vloot( Armada Kita), kelompok pencinta maritim dari Belanda dari para pelaut sipil serta anggota angkatan laut. Mereka kelompok nasionalis yang berhaluan konservatif. Kala pidato saat berkumpulnya mereka yang membahas pembuatan milisi Hindia yang terkenal dengan sebutan Indie Weerbaar( Pertahanan Hindia) mulai mengemuka pada dikala Perang Dunia I meletus, kelompok itu salah satu pendukung utamanya. Mereka waspadai dengan mungkin terburuk Perang Dunia I yang dapat menimbulkan Hindia lepas. Salah satu penyokong Onze Vloot merupakan W. V. Rhemrev, perwira KNIL yang pula pendukung utama aksi Indie Weerbaar.
Semacam yang noona/oppa tahu Negara Belanda saat itu mengkolonialisasi Indonesia, Indonesia ataupun Hindia Belanda dikala itu jadi pusat pemasukkan kas serta produk dalam negeri bruto terbanyak untuk Belanda dikala itu. Apalagi ketakutan ini terus menjadi jadi nyata kala negara Hindia ini mulai begerilya buat memproklamirkan kemerdekaan sehabis pasca dunia kedua.
Tetapi legenda menyebutkan tentang Indisch verloren, ramspoed geboren teruji jadi legenda belaka serta ketakutan belaka di tahun 1949 kala Hindia ataupun Indonesia betul- betul merdeka. Apalagi tanpa Hindia, pemulihan ekonomi Belanda nyatanya berlangsung sangat pendek, terlebih dengan dorongan dana dari Amerika Serikat lewat skema Marshall Plan.
Marshall Plan merupakan paket kebijakan ekonomi AS yang berikan pinjaman lunak kepada negara- negara Eropa barat guna pemulihan ekonomi pascaperang. Dorongan ini diberikan secara bertahap sepanjang 3 tahun( 1948- 1951). Belanda tercantum 5 besar negeri yang menemukan jatah sangat banyak dari 16 negeri penerima. Total dorongan yang diterima sebanyak 1. 128 juta dolar AS( rata- rata 376 juta dolar AS per tahun), sesuatu jumlah fantastis mengingat Produk Dalam negeri Bruto Belanda pada 1938“ cuma” dekat 280 juta dolar AS. Dengan dorongan sebesar itu, Belanda sukses kembali jadi salah satu kekuatan ekonomi Eropa pada akhir 1950- an. Pencapaian itu didapat tanpa memeras lagi bumi Hindia.
Tetapi bila kita menelisik ke balik kala Indonesia menemukan kemerdekaan di tahun 1945, tidak dan merta membuat Belanda mengakui kemerdekaan Indonesia. Belanda baru mengakui kemerdekaan Indonesia pada tahun 1949 tepatnya bertepatan pada 29 Desember 1949 yang bersamaan pada penyerahan kedaulatan Indonesia atas Belanda di Istana Dekameter. Apalagi dari perjanjian Linggar Jati, Renville, serta Roem Royem, Belanda tidak seluruhnya mengakui kedaulatan Indonesia serta tahun 1949 dapat dibilang Belanda tidak menyerahkan seluruhnya hak kedaulatan Indonesia jadi Negeri Kesatuan Republik Indonesia. Dikala itu Indonesia masih berjuang dalam konstitusi serta wujud negeri serikat.
Apalagi sehabis pasca 1949, sepanjang nyaris 60 tahun Belanda mengakui kalau kemerdekaan Indonesia merupakan bertepatan pada 29 Desember 1949 sampai tahun 2005 pas 60 Tahun Indonesia merdeka dikala itu saat sebuah Pengakuan ini baru keluarkan pada tanggal 16 Agustus 2005, satu hari saat sebelum peringatan 60 tahun proklamasi kemerdekaan Indonesia, oleh Menlu Belanda Bernard Rudolf Bot dalam pidato resminya di Gedung Deplu. Pada kesempatan yang langka itu, Pemerintah Indonesia akhirnya diwakili oleh Menlu Hassan Wirajuda. Keesokan harinya, Rudolf melakukan perjalanan dengan mengikuti Upacara Kenegaraan Peringatan Hari Ulang Tahun ke- 60 Kemerdekaan RI di Istana Negeri, Jakarta. Langkah Bot ini mendobrak tabu serta ialah yang awal kali dalam sejarah.
Perihal ini memanglah normal di negara Koloni yang masih menganut Paternalisme Kolonial. Paternalisme Kolonial ini ialah suatu pemikiran antara ikatan penjajah- terjajah yang dibayangkan semacam ayah serta anak. Penjajah selamanya menyangka rakyat negara jajahannya selayak" anak" yang mesti selalu dibimbing oleh" si ayah".
noona/oppa apalagi ilustrasi yang dapat menggambarkan kedekatan bapak- anak di atas dapat dilihat dalam ikatan antara raja- raja Jawa serta Gubernur Jenderal Hindia Belanda. Tiap raja Jawa diharuskan pemerintah kolonial buat memanggil serta memperlakukan Gubernur Jenderal di Batavia bagaikan orang tua dengan panggilan“ eyang”. Perilaku paternalistik berbagai ini berkelindan dengan mitos" Indisch verloren, ramspoed geboren" sehingga membentuk mentalitas kolektif dalam sebagian besar warga Belanda. Mentalitas ini menjelma jadi kekhawatiran kelewatan terhadap seluruh perihal yang berbau“ Indonesia merdeka”. Dengan mentalitas ini, Belanda terus menjadi posesif terhadap Hindia serta senantiasa mempertahankan tanah jajahan itu dengan metode apapun. Dampaknya parah untuk kedua belah pihak: peperangan jadi tidak terelakkan.
Inti dari naskah oleh Ratu Wilhelmina dari Negara Belanda ini merupakan menginkan kalau Hindia ataupun Indonesia ini bila satu hari lepas dari tangan Belanda, Belanda masih dapat mengendalikan Indonesia dengan mau membuat negeri pesemakmuran semacam yang dicoba Inggris atas daerah koloni mereka. Dengan membentuk negeri pesemakmuran serta membuat Hindia berupa negeri Federasi yang bisa mengendalikan pemerintahan sendiri tetapi masih dibawah kendali kerajaan Belanda. Apalagi Pidato ini jadi patokan untuk Jenderal Van Mook kala berunding serta berdiskusi dengan perwakilan Indonesia dari tahun 1945- 1947.
Apalagi warga serta tokoh- tokoh Indonesia menyangka pemikiran dari Jenderal Van Mook usang serta kuno. Sebab gagasan tersebut berasal dari paruh kedua abad ke- 20 yang dipopulerkan kelompok- kelompok progresif di Belanda. Suatu gagasan yang menekankan berartinya kebebasan membentuk pemerintahan sendiri untuk rakyat Hindia, tetapi masih dalam jalinan kesatuan antara Kerajaan Belanda serta Hindia.
Dari paradoks serta pemikiran menimpa Indisch verloren, ramspoed geboren inilah yang merangsang pemerintahan apalagi Ratu Wilhelmina susah melepas negeri jajahan mereka yang sudah lama menciptakan pundi- pundi duit untuk Kas negeri Belanda dikala masa Kolonial. Apalagi ketakutan ini terbantahkan pasca perang dunia kala Amerika menyodorkan Marshall Plan untuk negara- negara yang sirna pasca perang dunia kedua.
Baiklah noona/oppa itu hanya alibi gimana belanda susah banget ngelepasin Indonesia apalagi sejarah panjang pengakuan kedaulatan Indonesia dari Belanda baru diakui kalau Indonesia merdeka 17 Agustus 1945 di tahun 2005 pas 60 tahun Indonesia Merdeka sebab sejauh itu Belanda mengakui kemerdekaan Indonesia tahun 1949.
Para Kovács Imre hívta fel a figyelmünket ma erre(sz) a hiánypótló műre!
Szájer József: Ne bántsd a magyart!
" Ebben a kötetben Szájer József 2014. január és 2018. decembere között született gondolatait osztja meg az olvasóval a bevándorlásról, a Fidesz-ről, Magyarországról, az Alaptörvényről és Európáról.
*
Európa válságban van.
Elveszítette az iránytűjét, és arra készül, hogy feladja azokat a hagyományait, amelyek évszázadokon át biztosították fennmaradását és sikereit.
Európának politikai, gazdasági, demográfiai és lelki megújulásra van szüksége.
Magyarország kész arra, hogy fontos, iránymutató szerepet játsszon az Európai Unió cselekvőképességének helyreállításában, versenyképességének megerősítésében.
A régi, lejárt receptek nem működnek többé, azok éppenhogy akadályozzák az innovatív, új utakat kereső megoldásokat, tartósítják a pangást.
Új Utakra, Új Válaszokra, Merész Döntésekre Van Szükség! "
