When I was about three years old, I walked down the hallway from my room toward the living room. I remember that even in that moment it felt like I had blacked out halfway through and my brain started working a couple of steps from the living room door. Everything before that is blank, yet I have tons of memories from the weeks and months after that event.
That was probably the best angle to start an in-depth investigation into his dealings with Epstein. Evidence that comes to light during that investigation can still be used for additional charges.
Yeah, certainly because of the Chinese and not because their government actively discourages tourism…
It happens all the time. Another famous example is the Azure Window on the island of Gozo, Malta. You might know it from the Dothraki Wedding in the first season of Game of Thrones. It collapsed in March 2017.
Well, even without everything that happened to him, he would have died from old age by now. Might have had a chance to see the rise of home computers and the early internet though.
Until Discord starts classifying anything and everything as adult content, TikTok style. Can’t curse, can’t talk about any form of violence. Good luck talking about most video games when you can’t say “gun”, “kill” or “die”.
If it hasn’t happened yet, it’s probably just a matter of time until someone creates an NSFW loops instancce.
You would need to include the birth date in the certificate. But of course that would have its own privacy implications.
And that’s what I’m trying to say: your “just do X” falls short. It is incredibly hard, maybe impossible, to build a reliable age verification system where neither the websites nor the government can violate your privacy. Even the tiniest mistake can mean that the whole thing comes crashing down. And no, “just trust your government” is not a solution. Even if I trust my current government, the next election could put raging Nazis in power who use every available database to identify and terrorize people they don’t like.
If someone designs a system that satisfies all these requirements and is reviewed by multiple independent security researchers, I’m all for implementing it. But from what I know about government IT projects, it currently looks like every country will implement its own system, each with obvious problems that can be exploited by the average computer science student.
About the part of sending the certificate, how do you say they should check the age? By smoke signs?
The whole point about certificates is that they are signed with an asymmetric cryptographic key so you can verify them on your own. You have a list of root certificates from trusted certificate authorities and when a user sends you a certificate that claims to be issued by the Spanish government, you check the signature with the Spanish root certificate. No need to contact the Spanish government’s server about that specific certificate.
This is exactly how any certificate validation process works today. Otherwise, your web browser would have to talk to a bunch of certificate authorities every time you open an HTTPS connection to a website.
And as a follow up to my previous point, now that I’m at my PC and don’t have to type on my phone:
Even if we made certificates in a way that can’t be shared, for example by locking the private key inside a physical device (like a digital passport), we have solved nothing.
Your certificate would immediately become your digital fingerprint that will be stored with your account (to find duplicates) and can be tracked across websites as soon as a database gets leaked or the sites’ owners sell your data to advertisers (when would that ever happen?). While that fingerprint alone doesn’t say anything about you except your age, it makes it trivial to aggregate your activity across the whole internet. Ever bought something on a site that requires age verification? Congratulations, your certificate is now tied to an address. Shared a selfie somewhere? Your certificate has a face. Even without personal data directly in the certificate, it would be a privacy nightmare and exactly what the EU GDPR tried (and failed) to prevent.
The next step would be to find a mechanism that creates single use certificates every time you need one. But you can’t do that locally, because the certificates still need to be signed (and revocable) by a trusted authority. So maybe you need to send a certificate signing request to a government server every time you sign up for something. That could work for some use cases but requires expensive infrastructure that is never allowed to fail even for a few minutes or it would cause chaos.
… and now I’ve noticed your exact wording, implying that sites would forward the users’ certificates to the authority to be verified. That’s a big no-no. A site may never ever acknowledge to an authority that it has seen a specific certificate. The authority necessarily knows who the owner of that certificate is and even if they don’t tell the website, the authority itself can keep track of every citizen. “On date X, PornHub asked us to verify the age for certificate ABCDEF which we know belongs to John Doe from Somesmalltown” is not something I would want to be stored on a government server.
And this is all still assuming that the infrastructure for this would be implemented according to modern standards without security-critical shortcuts. If you have any hope that will ever happen, I recommend you click through https://media.ccc.de/ and watch some talks about government IT fails. Many are available in English.
Certificates that can’t be tied to a specific person can and will be shared, making them essentially worthless.
We‘ve had that in Germany about 20 years ago. Some websites asked you to verify your age by entering a part of the encoded data on the back of your ID card. It took maybe a few days until lists with valid IDs were all over the internet.
Sure, certificates are marginally more reliable because they can be revoked but at that point, websites need to update their revocation lists close to real time which isn’t practical and still can’t catch every shared cert.
Reliably verifying your identity without revealing too many personal details is an extremely hard problem that has troubled computer scientists for decades.
I have exactly one reason why I own an Xbox One S: Gamestop went out of business in Germany at the exact moment I made plans to buy a cheap 4k BluRay player for my bedroom TV and they sold me one (used) for 60€.
I have two. Both not the worst in terms of total delay but memorable for being horribly annoying.
I think it’s more of a general sentiment against Merz. He pushes for longer work days, fewer public holidays, later retirement, “incentives” for people to still work part-time during retirement, fewer protections for workers overall and worse social security. The guy is massively unpopular so nobody trusts that these statements come from any sensible reasoning.
Nobody cares what Friedrich “we need to treat workers like slaves” Merz thinks.
I think OP is not a native speaker. The (implicit) question is probably “Do you agree?”
And now you understand what we Germans feel when Americans ask what our ancestors did during the 1930s and 40s.
I finished high school in spring which was a true blessing. I had always been a good student (4th best in my year) but got bullied for being a nerd.
Over the summer, I worked as a programmer for a small game studio, making a Nintendo DS game that got cancelled by the publisher on the day we sent in the last release candidate because they finally noticed that their idea was crap and they should have accepted the changes we had proposed. Didn’t matter, I had already been paid and got a lot of experience out of it.
In October, I started university which was a great chance to make new friends. By now I’ve lost contact with most of them but some are still around and I appreciate them a lot. I was lucky enough to already live close to the university so I could stay at my parents’ house.
Through all of this, I was in the middle of my first serious relationship. My partner moved from across the country to a town just an hour away from me. Being able to see each other more often was amazing but at the same time it made things more complicated. We were constantly struggling with aligning our schedules, couldn’t agree at whose place we should meet and got annoyed when one wanted to meet friends on a day the other would be free. We broke up in 2009 but we’re still good friends.
It was pretty much the peak of a community that I’m still part of today. Apart from long online discussions, we met twice a year for community events with about 60-80 guests who decided that it’s our turn to define what being a grown-up means. These events still exist (the last one was just a few weeks ago) but they’ve gotten smaller and some of that chaotic creativity has been lost forever.
Overall, 2008 may have been the start of one of the best sections of my life. I’ve never had more active friendships at the same time, before or after. I had many of the perks of being an adult without most of the drawbacks. I earned a bit of money and could keep most of it because university is cheap in my country and I didn’t have to pay rent. If I had the chance (and could take a few people that I met later with me), I would probably go back.
He stopped them so early you haven’t even heard of them! /s
Pretty much that, yes. I remember stopping for a moment and wondering what had just happened. I was of course aware that I had existed before. Who and where I was. At the same time it felt like all that was vague and distant, like suddenly waking up from a dream.
Realistically, it was probably just an unusually intense doorway effect but the fact that I can still remember it so vividly, even decades later, shows how significant it must have felt to 3-year-old me.