Tagged: services

Identity Verification is as Bad as It Can Be

  • Posted in cyber

This is an addendum to OS-Level Age Attestation is the Good One, where I talk about the potential of legal standards for age attestation as an alternative to age verification. Not already convinced of the dangers of age verification? The extent of the evil waiting behind identification systems and deanonymization is unspeakably vast, and fortunately it’s getting extensive coverage. Here’s a quick look to get you up to speed.

Direct digital censorship

A lot of the energy behind age verification comes from authoritarians eager to censor political dissent, promote propaganda and retaliate against critics. This is a power grab, with bills designed to seize power over specific content the government objects to:

Governments are, of course, trying to claim control over “public discourse”. Like all seizing of arbitrary power, the risks associated with this are volatile and unbounded, because they depend on who holds power at any given moment in a political system where power is expected to rotate.

Discord

As a case study, let’s take a look at one of the latest major services to attempt age verification: Discord. At time of writing, Discord is in the process of trying to switch to a “Teen Default” system, where every user is assumed to be a minor unless they can prove their age to Discord. Discord is a communications platform used widely by adults, and during COVID Discord very intentionally expanded their market domain beyond gaming to focus on being a global platform, so the assumption that all spaces are for kids is clearly incorrect.1 But Discord is sometimes used by children, and since it’s a communications platform people can use it to communicate horrible things. Boomers have learned they can be insane about this, so Discord is under significant pressure to balance its goal of being a universal communications platform with child safety.

OS-Level Age Attestation is the Good One

  • Posted in cyber

There’s a coordinated effort to use the “child safety” euphemism to cripple the internet with identity verification mandates. That’s bad. But buried in the mix there’s a genuinely good idea with enough political capital that it might stick around and do some good.

Every time I’ve tried to write an article on the topic of child internet safety my energy has fizzled into depression, because as one researches the topic it becomes obvious that everyone with any relevant power is refusing to solve the problem on purpose. It’s demoralizing and it’s been mostly useless for me to do any thought work in this area.

But California’s age attestation bill might be an exception to this. Because it’s age attestation, not age verification, it looks like a significant political step in the right direction, and with the right focus it could do a lot of good. A lot of people have (fairly!) assumed attestation was age verification or at least lays the groundwork, but I think this isn’t the case. There is always the danger of future bad legislation, but OS attestation doesn’t pave the way for it, it provides a strong defense against it. We need a good idea to win the child safety war, not because we’re in dire need of more online child safety, but because addressing the real concerns correctly blocks a whole slew of impossibly dangerous policies.

My ideal age filtering tool is a system of client attestation with trust rooted in the adult administrator, provided by an OS-level API provided as preemptive verification, enforced by compliant browsers and application stores. And we’re shockingly close to that.

There is room for improvement

People on the privacy side of the age verification war — my side — will argue that parents already have everything they need for comprehensive web filtering if they want to use it. I think this isn’t quite true; there’s one notable architectural gap that a technical solution could meaningfully fill.

There are many existing content filtering tools geared toward child safety but their weakness is that they’re reactive. Traffic filters can identify and block traffic from known websites and on-device content filters can try to detect and block specific content. But this requires the user reacting and defending against every possible source and behavior. It’s the same cat-and-mouse game as adblockers. And like adblockers, the more closed down the system is — like iOS or gaming consoles — the harder it is for developers to make exactly the right product.

The internet sometimes assumes minors are supervised — since they have parental consent to have the device in the first place — but this often isn’t the case. It’s very common for minors to have their own phones or tablets with unsupervised access. When they’re online or downloading apps, they’re not sitting with a parent, they’re unsupervised, roaming children. Parents are dropping their kids off in the city.

This isn’t inherently bad; it seems like parents and children both want children to be able to exist independently without granular supervision, and so there’s a desire to make that situation safer. That shouldn’t come at the cost of any adult liberty or even the liberty of children with parental consent; it just means we want an ecosystem that allows for unsupervised children to exist within it.

Right now the burden is on parents to be active defenders protecting their children from a vast ecosystem of companies investing research and capital into optimizing how efficiently they can exploit money and data out of everyone in the world. It would be a meaningful improvement if there were a safe way to prevent some of this exploitation by putting reasonable requirements on providers, so long as this can be done in a way that doesn’t cause more problems.

Political pressure for “child safety” is exploitable

But the lack of a perfect parental control system isn’t the main problem here. The real danger is the push for online identity verification using child safety as a justification.

Smart and privacy conscious people demand “No age verification” (quite reasonably!), but that doesn’t offer the quick fix people are looking for. More importantly, it doesn’t relieve the political pressure and so doesn’t take away the excuses of tyrants.

Normally “do nothing” would be the safest option here, but the danger of uninformed and reactionary voters means there is a great deal to gain by satisfying the concerns safely instead of letting the solution be evil. A technical standard for parents to somehow identify their children as children is the relief valve for dangerous political pressure. This doesn’t appease the fascists and censors. This doesn’t cede them any ground and it’d be wrong to try to; there’s no satisfying that hunger and it’s a dangerous mistake to feed it. What it does is actually improve the material conditions for the people they’re trying to trick.

A proactive system that puts some of the burden for protecting children on those companies is a real relief to this, and it would be a meaningful improvement if something could address this without causing bigger problems.

Taxonomy

There are three basic categories of age filtering: nothing, client attestation, and client verification. These provide services varying levels of confidence in their knowledge of users. (It’s tempting to simplify confidence to labels like “strong” or “weak” but it’s important to think about what’s actually being secured, and from who.) Different people call these different things, but here’s my taxonomy with the labels I’ll use.

Anthropic and The Authoritarian Ethic

This has been a wild weekend for the fields of tech policy and AI safety. As a writer I am not normally a news guy, but this moment has felt like kind of a perfect microcosm of both the AI industry and the Trump administration’s flavor of petulant authoritarianism.

The AI company Anthropic — known for their engineering-focused chatbot Claude — was founded by former OpenAI employees who left to form their own company because they weren’t satisfied with OpenAI’s safety standards. Anthropic’s prioritizing of ethics and care have not been a handicap for them; they’ve led to Claude, the best LLM product on the market today. In July 2025 Anthropic was awarded a two-year $200 million contract with the Department of Defense to support AI for use in classified government environments, mirroring similar contracts the government made with other companies. Despite the internal competition with ChatGPT and Llama, Claude was the highest-quality product and the only one approved for use in classified military systems.

But Anthropic’s culture of (relative) corporate responsibility set it up to be the target of a frenzy the Trump people had already worked themselves into: the specter of “woke AI.” The presidential order “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government (July 2025)” was an ideological rant typical of Trump’s presidential orders filled with false and foolish assertions to justify banning LLMs involved in federal workflows from “incorporating concepts” like “DEI”, “intersectionality”, and “transgenderism”.

A Hack is Not Enough

  • Posted in cyber

Recently we’ve seen sweeping attempts to censor the internet. The UK’s “Online Safety Act” imposes sweeping restrictions on speech and expression. It’s disguised a child safety measure, but its true purpose is (avowedly!) intentional control over “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”. And similar trends threaten the US, especially as lawmakers race to more aggressively categorize more speech as broadly harmful.

A common response to these restrictions has been to dismiss them as unenforceable: that’s not how the internet works, governments are foolish for thinking they can do this, and you can just use a VPN to get around crude attempts at content blocking.

But this “just use a workaround” dismissal is a dangerous, reductive mistake. Even if you can easily defeat an attempt to impose a restriction right now, you can’t take that for granted.

Dismissing technical restrictions as unenforceable

There is a tendency, especially among technically competent people, to use the ability to work around a requirement as an excuse to avoid dealing with it. When there is a political push to enforce a particular pattern of behavior — discourage or ban something, or make something socially unacceptable — there is an instinct for clever people with workarounds to respond with “you can just use my workaround”.

I see this a lot, in a lot of different forms:

  • “Geographic restrictions don’t matter, just use a VPN.”
  • “Media preservation by the industry doesn’t matter, just use pirated copies.”
  • “The application removing this feature doesn’t matter, just use this tool to do it for you.”
  • “Don’t pay for this feature, you can just do it yourself for free.1”
  • “It’s “inevitable” that people will use their technology as they please regardless of the EULA.”
  • “Issues with digital ownership? Doesn’t affect me, I just pirate.”

Fake Twitter accounts

  • Posted in cyber

Remember when Elon Musk was trying to weasel out of overpaying for Twitter? During this very specific May 2022-Jul 2022 period, there was a very artificial discourse manufactured over the problem of “fake accounts” on Twitter.

The reason it was being brought up was very stupid, but the topic stuck with me, because it’s deeply interesting in a way that the conversation at the time never really addressed.

So this is a ramble on it. I think this is all really worth thinking about, just don’t get your hopes up that it’s building to a carefully-constructed conclusion. ;)

Argument is stupid

First, to be clear, what was actually being argued at the time was exceedingly stupid. I’m not giving that any credit.

After committing to significantly overpay to purchase Twitter with no requirements that they do due diligence (yes, really!) Elon Musk tried to call off the deal.

This was a pretty transparent attempt to get out of the purchase agreement after manipulating the price, and it was correctly and widely reported as such.

Scott Nover, “Inside Elon Musk’s legal strategy for ditching his Twitter deal”

Elon Musk has buyer’s remorse. On April 25, the billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion, but since then the stock market has tanked. Twitter agreed to sell to Musk at $54.20 per share, a 38% premium at the time; today it’s trading around $40.

That’s probably the real reason Musk is spending so much time talking about bots.

I don’t want to get too bogged down in the details of why Elon was using this tactic, but fortunately other people wrote pages and pages about it, so I don’t have to.

Reddit: Your API *IS* Your Product

  • Posted in cyber

Reddit is going the same route as Twitter by making “API access” prohibitively expensive. This is something they very famously, very vocally said they would not do, but they’re doing it anyway. This is very bad for Reddit, but what’s worse is it’s becoming clear that companies think that this is a remotely reasonable thing to do, when it’s very critically not.

It’s the same problem we see with Twitter and other late-capitalist hell websites: Reddit’s product is the service it provides, which is its API. The ability for users to interact with the service isn’t an auxiliary premium extra, it’s the whole caboodle!

I’ll talk about first principles first, and then get into what’s been going on with Reddit and Apollo. The Apollo drama is very useful in that it directly converts the corporate bullshit that sounds technical enough to make sense into something very easy to understand: a corporation hurting them, today, for money.

The API is the product

Reddit and all these other companies who are making user-level API access prohibitively expensive have forgotten that the API is the product. - The API is the interface that lets you perform operations on the site. The operations a user can do are the product, they’re not auxiliary to it!

“Application programming interface” is a very formal, internal-sounding term for a system that is none of those things. The word “programming” in the middle comes from an age where using a personal computer at all was considered “programming” it.

What an API really is a high-level interface to the web application that is Reddit. Every action a user can take — viewing posts, posting, voting, commenting — goes from the app (which interfaces with the user) to the API (which interfaces with the Reddit server), gets processed by the server using whatever-they-use-it-doesn’t-matter, and the response is sent back to the user.

The API isn’t a god mode and it doesn’t provide any super-powers. It doesn’t let you do anything you can’t do as a user, as clearly evidenced by the fact that all the actions you do on the Reddit website go through the API too.

The Reddit website, the official Reddit app, and the Apollo app all interface with the user in different ways and on different platforms, but go through the same API to interact with what we understand as “Reddit”. The fact that the API is the machine interface without the human interface should also concisely explain why “API access” is all Apollo needs to build its own app.

Right now, you can view the announcement thread at https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits/, and you can view the “API” data for the same thread at https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits.json. It’s not very fun to look at, but it’s easy to tell what you’re looking at: the fundamental representation of the page without all the trappings of the interface.

Public APIs are good for both the user and the company. They’re a vastly more efficient way for people to interact with the service than by automating interaction (or “scraping”). Having an API cuts out an entire layer of expense that, without an API, Reddit would pay for.

The Reddit service is the application, and you interface with it through WHATEVER. Whatever browser you want, whatever browser extensions you want, whatever model phone you want, whatever app you want. This is fundamentally necessary for operability and accessibility.

The API is the service. The mechanical ability to post and view and organize is what makes Reddit valuable, not its frontend. Their app actually takes the core service offering and makes it less attractive to users, which is why they were willing to pay money for an alternative!

Netflix's Big Double-Dip

Netflix is finally turning the screws on multi-user accounts. That “finally” is exasperation in my voice, not relief. Netflix is demanding you pay them an extra surcharge to share your account with remote people, and even then caps you at paying for a maximum of two. It’s been threatening to do something like this for a long, long time:

Since 2011, when the recording industry started pushing through legal frameworks to criminalize multi-user account use by miscategorizing “entertainment subscription services” as equivalent to public services like mail, water, and electricity for the purposes of criminal prosecution,

Since similar nonsense in 2016 exploiting the monumentally terrible Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,

Since 2019, when Netflix announced (to its shareholders) that it was looking for ways to limit password sharing,

Since 2021, when Netflix started tracking individual users by location and device within a paying account,

Since 2022, when it started banning group use in Portugal, Spain, and New Zealand, to disastrous consequence. Also, Canada, but temporarily. And, of course, then threatened to “crack down” on “password sharing” in “Early 2023”,

Since January, when it threatened to roll out “paid password sharing” in the “coming months”,

Since February, when it released a disastrous policy banning password sharing, then lied about the policy being an error and made a big show of retracting it due to the massive backlash, but then went ahead and did it in Canada anyway,

And finally now since just now, as it’s finally, really, for-realsies banning password sharing this quarter.

Netflix threatening this for so long was a mistake on its part, because that’s given me a long, long time for these thoughts to slowly brew in the back of my head. And there’s a lot wrong here.

the teat one this is a real graphic Netflix made!

Netflix’s pricing model

So, first, what are multi-user accounts in the first place, and how does “password sharing” relate to that?

Lies, Damned Lies, and Subscriptions

  • Posted in cyber

Everybody hates paying subscription fees. At this point most of us have figured out that recurring fees are miserable. Worse, they usually seem unfair and exploitative. We’re right about that much, but it’s worth sitting down and thinking through the details, because understanding the exceptions teaches us what the problem really is. And it isn’t just “paying people money means less money for me”; the problem is fundamental to what “payment” even is, and vitally important to understand.

Human Agency: Why Property is Good

or, “Gio is not a marxist, or if he is he’s a very bad one”

First: individual autonomy — our agency, our independence, and our right to make our own choices about our own lives — is threatened by the current digital ecosystem. Our tools are powered by software, controlled by software, and inseparable from their software, and so the companies that control that software have a degree of control over us proportional to how much of our lives relies on software. That’s an ever-increasing share.