The “critique” is a non-issue pushed mainly by uppity Europeans

fwiw I’ve seen it most often from Latin Americans.

The first woman (Christina Koch), non-white person (Victor Glover), and non-American (Jeremy Hansen) in deep space. And Reid Wiseman.

Fantastic. Great Move. Well done Angus.

Actually something just occurred to me. Because my system, unlike the one from the Stack Exchange link or the one described elsewhere in the thread using an ID card, relies on a per-site untraceable request to the government, the government would be able to detect if one user is making a suspicious number of requests. It’s reasonable for one person to make tens of requests, maybe even low hundreds over the course of a lifetime. It’s not reasonable to be making hundreds or more in a day. They wouldn’t know which sites are being accessed with it, or even what accounts on those sites. But they could set rate limits to prevent one person creating too many accounts for others, and potentially threaten legal action against them for doing so.

That threat of legal action is part of the same thing that prevents children from being able to go up to a random adult, handing them a $50 note, and asking for $20 worth of alcohol in exchange. You’re not going to be able to prevent it on a smaller scale, but you can definitely prevent a small handful of people being able to age verify on behalf of thousands of children.

An additional protection could be added depending on how the age verification works. If she verification is “upload a scan of your photo ID”, then yeah, mass verification becomes possible. But if each verification requires you to hold up your photo ID next to your face, speak a specific phrase aloud (with automated lip reading attempting a rough lip flap match), nod your head, write a specific phrase on a piece of paper, and more, all in randomised orders, it becomes a much bigger burden for someone to provide for others.

I’m certainly not advocating this. The level of burden for legitimate users would be too high to consider it reasonable. But it would be possible. Something like this has been used in the past for things like EV code signing certificates, where a larger burden is relatively more reasonable.

It would also reveal to the government that the user was accessing 18+ content

Yes, I did mention that. Although ironically, Australia’s social media minimum age law, and other similar laws being considered around the world, would actually increase privacy in this respect. The government could have separate keys for each age of legal significance (16 and 18, in Australia) and sign with the appropriate one (either the highest the user meets, or all the user meets—the latter would give the site less information about the user’s and).

I don’t believe it is technically possible to get around the example you shared there. Even in the real world, it’s not dissimilar to a child asking an adult to buy alcohol for them.

Here’s one good answer: https://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/96283

It has the downside of requiring a physical device like a passport or some specific trusted long-running locally-kept identity store held by the user. But it’s otherwise very good.

Another option does not require anything extra be kept by the user, but does slightly compromise privacy. The Government will not be able to track each time the user tries to access age-gated content, or even know what sources of age-gated content are being accessed, but they will know how many different sites the user has requested access to. It works like this:

1. The user creates or logs in to an account on the age-gated site.
2. The site creates a token T that can uniquely identify that user.
3. That token is then blinded B(T). Nobody who receives B(T) can learn anything about the user.
4. The user takes the token to the government age verification service (AVS).
5. The user presents the AVS with B(T) and whatever evidence is needed to verify age.
6. The AVS checks if the person should be verified. If not, we can end the flow here. If so, move on.
7. The AVS signs the blinded token using a trusted AVS certificate, S(B(T)) and returns it to the user.
8. The user returns the token to the site.
9. The site unblinds the token and obtains S(T). This allows them to see that it is the same token T representing the user, and to know that it was signed by the AVS, indicating that the user is of age.
10. The site marks in their database that the user has been age verified. On future visits to that site, the user can just log in as normal, no need to re-verify.

All of the moving around of the token can be automated by the browser/app, if it’s designed to be able to do that. Unfortunately a typical OAuth-style redirect system probably would not work (someone with more knowledge please correct me), because it would expose to the AVS what site the token is being generated for. So the behaviour would need to be created bespoke. Or a user could have a file downloaded and be asked to share it manually.

There’s also a potential exposure of information due to timing. If site X has a user begin the age verification flow at 8:01, and the AVS receives a request at 8:02, and the site receives a return response with a signed token at 8:05, then the government can, with a subpoena (or the consent of site X) work out that the user who started it at 8:01 and return at 8:05 is probably the same person who started verifying themselves at 8:02. Or at least narrow it down considerably. Making the redirect process manual would give the user the option to delay that, if they wanted even more privacy.

The site would probably want to store the unblinded, signed token, as long-term proof that they have indeed verified the user’s age with the AVS. A subsequent subpoena would not give the Government any information they could not have obtained from a subpoena in an un-age-verified system, assuming the token does not include a timestamp.

Worth noting that Lemmy receives at least some institutional funding for its development. And I believe some of that funding is contingent on hitting active user goals or similar metrics.

What’s xz?

I’ll admit I don’t know all the differences between locally run, open source models that are used for accessibility and the horrible plagiarism machines we all despise the most

Fwiw 99.9% of the time someone talks about ak “open source” generative AI model, what they really mean is “open weight”.

An open-source model has public training code and training dataset, allowing full reproduction

— a random Reddit post I found when looking for a good definition to share

Some people (including the author of that definition) don’t like the need for open source models to have an open source dataset. It’s also not clear to me whether that definition is even supposed to mean the dataset is actually public domain, or just clearly defined (e.g. “we trained on all top 100 best-selling books from the period 2000–2020”). The former would obviously be very meaningfully different from closed models in terms of accusations of ethical problems in the training process.

Open-weight models basically just mean you can download it and make some slight tweaks and run it at home. It means the big AI companies aren’t benefiting financially from your use and can’t train on what you feed them for their next model, and because these are typically designed to be run locally rather than in a data centre the environmental impacts are lessened. But in terms of the training process it’s no better than closed models.

This edit inspired by Zagorath

Fuck yeah!

Btw the other way you can do it (which will only be noticeable to users with screen readers) is to put the alt text between the square brackets.

![alt text](image url)

Downvote posts that consist mostly or entirely of an image of text but don’t also include a transcription in either the alt text or the body.

Oh wow, thanks for that info. I knew LW was uncomfortably liberal but that top comment is very concerning if true.

The removal, if I’m understanding the story correctly, seems justifiable enough on its own (untagged nsfl), but it does seem part of a pattern of borderline decisions all going one particular way…

(If it was removed for being “political”, as some others said, that’s inexcusable.)

School blown up?

This is the first I’ve seen, and it looks like a black square Photoshopped to cover up the kerb near a door? What’s this about a school being blown up?

I’ll be honest, I thought it was someone humorously censoring one of those fairy doors, pretending it’s a government cover-up of the supernatural.

Perhaps, but I’m describing something slightly different. Your description is basically “one platform supporting two protocols that basically do the same thing”. I’m talking more about “one app that has two separate-but-related bits of functionality, each using the more appropriate protocol for that job”.

Exactly. Conservatism is not really very strongly correlated with age, controlled for other factors. But it is correlated with various things that are themselves correlated with age. Like wealth. And family status.

Sounds like you need to upgrade your toaster, noob.

I mean, there’s nothing technically stopping one app supporting both protocols natively, especially since Lemmy already includes a field for people’s profiles to link their Matrix ID. Though to my knowledge none do it yet.

Like someone else said, there are warnings for the UK. Certainly not a healthy country in 2026, but for the UK to be given a safety warning when the country with literal brownshirts roaming the streets does not is just absurd.

Does Piefed have a NSFW tag like Lemmy does?

Other than that, what “nsfw features” would a platform like Piefed need that it wouldn’t need for SFW content? Serious question, I don’t know. (In fact, my instance blocks lemmynsfw.)

So when are countries like the UK (and my own Australia) going to update official government travel advice to warn against travel to America?