None of these detectors can work. It’s just snake oil for technophobes.

Understand what “positive predictive value” means to see that. Though, in this case, I doubt that even the true rates can be known or that they remain constant over time.

I had a look into the Temu and Aliexpress subreddits: Funeral mood.

DHL suspends high value US deliveries over tariffs

I can think of a number, besides the one in the OP.

You could worry about freedom of information also for adults. Such systems interfere, by design, with receiving and imparting information. It also creates a system that can be easily abused for political censorship. Me, I worry a lot about the direction Europe is taking.

You could also worry about privacy in other definitions. Europeans, or Germans anyway, usually equate privacy with data protection, which is not actually correct. One American definition of privacy is as “the right to be let alone”. You’re certainly not being let alone with such a system. You might feel that it forces you and your family to abide by moral values that you may not share.

Then there’s the economic aspect. The people in a country with such laws will have to do extra work and use extra resources to implement and enforce this.

There is a maximum number of unsuspiciously requestable tokens and people can sell their unrequested ones. There will be a black market and no ability to investigate unless privacy is lifted.

Such a thing would work as with credit cards. An unusual pattern of use would flag the card as potentially compromised and cause it to be blocked, not the volume of requests in itself. It wouldn’t be quite so easy to avoid detection.

Making porn, alcohol, or other such things available to minors is a criminal offense. Being flagged multiple times would probably be enough for a conviction if one couldn’t provide an explanation.

An age verification service would need to determine your age. It’s not strictly necessary for them to keep your identity on file, but I think the likelihood is that it would be required precisely to prevent such abuse.

I don’t fully get the part about selling adult products directly.

Such a service would be illegal in itself. It would have to exist on the darknet beside offers for mail-order drugs, stolen passwords, and so on. Might as well offer mail-order alcohol or adult media downloads with no questions asked.

Since foreign services do not need to comply, porn will still be available. So a firewall is needed. But then, why not give children an age appropriate vpn for their devices and accounts and leave the internet to itself?

Good question. Part of the answer is that law-makers in Europe have no idea what they are doing. Why there is no one capable of giving them technical advice is something I simply don’t know. Some tech regulations are so absurd that you’d never believe me they are real.

How do you prevent people from selling access to children by calling the age verification service for them?

The high volume of requests would be detected pretty quickly. The verification service would not know what sites you visit, but it would know that you are making requests.

To succeed, that would need a fairly large number of stolen or fake identities. There’s really no point when you can just sell adult products, including pirated media, directly.

• You connect to an age-gated site.

• Your browser receives an age verification request that does not contain information about the site.

It would contain the time, a random number, and the query: Is user over 18/16/14/whatever?

• Your browser sends the request to a government-licensed service.

You identify yourself to that service in some way. The service could also be a program on your own device that uses a chip on your ID-card. If the service confirms the age, it digitally signs the request.

• Your browser returns the signed request to the age-gated site.

The site checks if the signature is valid and done. There’s never any connection between the age verification service and the site. If the request is more than a few seconds old, then it will be rejected to prevent sharing.

Of course, this assumes that sites will cooperate and implement such schemes at their own expense. Obviously(?) that will only be done by the larger sites, so it will be quite pointless. I don’t know why that is not a consideration. Understanding that doesn’t actually require any deep technical knowledge. But that’s typical for EU tech regulation.

Having to proof adultness cannot be done without creating a link between the identify of the adult and the account at the service.

It can be done.

Do you really have no other complaints?

The point of an age verification system is to make sure that certain classes of people cannot access certain categories of information.

Is there really no problem there?

a prefrontal cortex, the administrative center of the brain and generally host to human consciousness.

That’s an interesting take. The prefrontal cortex in humans is proportionately larger than in other mammals. Is it implied that animals are not conscious on account of this difference?

If so, what about people who never develop an identifiable prefrontal cortex? I guess, we could assume that a sufficient cortex is still there, though not identifiable. But what about people who suffer extensive damage to that part of the brain. Can one lose consciousness without, as it were, losing consciousness (ie becoming comatose in some way)?

a dedicated module for consciousness would bridge the gap

What functions would such a module need to perform? What tests would verify that the module works correctly and actually provides consciousness to the system?

In fairness, the word “conscious” has a range of meanings. For some, it is synonymous with certain religious ideas. They would be alarmed by the “heresy”. For others, it is synonymous to claiming that some entity is entitled to the same fundamental rights as a human being. Those would be quite alarmed by the social implications. Few people use the term in a strictly empiricist sense.

Good question. Over the years, I’ve read a number of arguments about consciousness, or more precisely against machine consciousness. One thing that’s striking is that the authors never apply the same logic to themselves or humans in general. It’s like they completely lack self-awareness. If I took the whole “p-zombie” idea seriously, I’d look for such p-zombies. And these philosophers would be my first candidates.

secret sauce

What would such a secret sauce look like? Like, what is it in humans, for example?

Yes, that’s the point. You’d think they could have, at least, looked into a dictionary at some point in the last 2 years. But nope, everyone else is wrong. A round of applause for the paragons of human intelligence.

Not sure what’s alarming about that. It’s a bit early to worry about an AI Dred Scott, no?

On a possibly related note:

https://github.com/rauchg/doom-captcha

(via https://canitrundoom.org/ )

No. Not imagery and not intimate as defined.

For the lulz!

This is some Orwellian shit right there. This kind of shit is part of the very big problem.

The hook is a scenario where someone gets doxed.

Years later, Lina was shocked to find her name and image circulating in far-right forums online.

There are some murky suggestion that connect this with “migration” or “profiling” but it’s unclear how that would make sense.

Lina tried to exercise her rights. She filed a data deletion request, but the company refused to comply. Turning to her country’s Data Protection Authority (DPA) for help, she expected a clear path to justice. Instead, she found herself trapped in a bureaucratic maze.

Indeed. A small forum outside the EU, as such far-right forums typically are, cannot be made to comply with EU law.

Technologically, scrubbing personal information from the internet is no different from scrubbing information about the Tiananmen Massacre. It can’t be done perfectly, and doing it imperfectly is totalitarian.

But what about EU primary law and the EHRC? Wouldn’t be the first time constitutional law is deemed incompatible with EU or international law.

Tricky. Protecting “morals” and the “moral development” of children is one thing that justifies a lot of limitations of rights.

Using that to suppress LGBTQ is not a distortion but has always been a point, maybe the main point, of obscenity laws. A few decades ago, such laws would have been A-OK. Maybe today, a court would rule that this goes too far.