This applies to ADHD as well: We might seem to be procrastinating, but i at least get a whole lot of stuff done during that “procrastination” period, such as reading unrelated wikipedia articles. I wouldn’t learn stuff if i didn’t do it because i’m procrastinating on something else.

damn, i gotta steal that meme. it applies waaay too often.

because you don’t actually consider them; you just assume they are

i’d define it as size of an svg file that represents the flag, since more complex flag -> more fundamental elements (rectangles, circles) needed -> bigger file size -> more entropy.

Maxwell equations?

if you’re that online, you should consider going offline more, tbh, meeting people irl is great :P

i’m not a fan of it at all, it was a country of rapists the way they invaded their neighboring countries.

same for alcohol

instant diarrhea, haha, but yeah, it carries the point across quite well. some people can’t work wherever they want, at whatever job they want, because they have health conditions limiting their range.

very interesting!

caught between upvoting because you’re right and downvoting because it’s mean.

this feels a bit like open source software, just that the software involved is genetic code, which codes for a protein.

The problem is that it leaves a paper trail.

Grace also knows what number n got verified, and the identity of the user n. Later, the website can ask the age-verifying service who user n actually was. It requires that the age-verifying service cooperates with the website, though, but this could be mandated by law, which would create a single point of (privacy) failure.

PS: i love your writing style. It’s so simple and clear :)

Cryptography is a really complicated subject. You managed to express it very easily understandable.

Yeah a small false-positive rate will have to be accepted. This is the same like you can’t fully prevent minors from getting access to alcohol. Consider that their older sibling can buy it for them (at an increased price, ofc).

What matters is to keep the rate of false positives reasonably small, i’d say.

See my comment in this thread involving drawing a piece of paper from a box in real life. Since nobody knows which piece of paper you draw from a box, if many people do this at the same time, it’s impossible to establish an one-to-one mapping between age-verifying tokens and people’s identities.

I doubt this doesn’t actually leave a paper trail.

At some point, you send that nonce to an age-verifier service. So they can keep track of it, and if the 18+ website you visited at some point later wants to know your identity, they can ask the age-verifier service who asked for that nonce to be signed.

This involves that two organizations are corrupt, however: both the 18+ website and the age-verifying service. Law could mandate that they both cooperate, however, thus creating a single point of (privacy) failure.

I still believe it is doable, however. Check my other comment involving a piece of paper that is drawn from a box. My method relies on the fact that the age-verifying service doesn’t actually know which code they gave you, just that they gave you one. For digital services, seevices can always keep track of their input/output, which is not always possible in real life.

It is doable, i think. Consider:

You go to your local library. They verify you’re above the age limit (like they do at supermarkets when you try to buy alcohol: either look you in the face and recognize you’re clearly old enough, or have to show them some kind of id, details vary.)

You pick a code (put your hand in a box and draw a piece of paper at random). Nobody knows what code you picked except you. If lots of people do this at the same time, it’s impossible to accurately map codes to people’s identity.

You scan the code (like QR code) with your social media app that you use, and it associates the code with your account. Now everybody knows you have a valid code associated to your account, but nobody knows your identity.

(The code could work something like a cryptographic signature, where you can show that you have a valid code without actually revealing the code, so others can’t simply copy it. That’s a technical detail that you need to leave to the programmers to accurately understand.)

hello? human computer rights department?

Don’t cut the umbilical cord too short, btw. It will “turn inside” during growing up, and if you cut it too short at birth, then it leaves a hole in your belly later in life.

you’ve clearly never had a hot cousin