Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

  • 2 Posts
  • 124 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle
  • outlaws anonymous communication by requiring every citizen to verify their age before accessing a service

    This is likely to be the case in practice, but technologically, it does not have to be the case.

    If the age verifiers (which IMO should be the governments themselves[1], but could also be a private third-party, as long as it’s not the same as the social media company) only ever receive a blinded token representing the user, verify the user’s age, and then the user brings that token back to the social media site, unblind it, and present them the signed token, there is no way for the age verifier to track which sites a person visits, and no way for the sites to have any detail about who their users are (other than what they already have).


    1. obviously, it actually shouldn’t be anyone at all: parents should be put in charge of their own kids, and maybe given the tools with robust parental control software to handle it client-side. Government server-side age verification is just not a good option. But if we assume they’re going to do that, we should at least discuss the way it could be done in the least-bad way. ↩︎












  • that goes onto a separate device only for those purposes

    Or in a VM if you don’t have any spare devices available. VM escapes exist, but they’re a pretty rare and severe type of vulnerability that’s unlikely to be casually utilised by proctoring software.

    I’ve found out people have no problem logging into their Google or Microsoft account on public PCs. I brought the PDF on a CD

    With 2FA I probably wouldn’t have too much of a problem with doing this. Especially if I then change password afterwards.

    Another option would be to host it somewhere that you can remember the URL. If you don’t care for the privacy of the document itself, just using a URL shortener and Google Drive’s public sharing would work fine, or hosting at your own domain.

    Personally though, I’m glad that on the rare occasion I need to get something printed (I have my own black and white laser printer at home for 99% of my needs), my local company for that sort of thing lets you upload it from home and pick up.





  • I think it’s fine in any type of game…as long as they’re actually not developed in time to be included in the original release. The closest thing in games that I play is civs in RTS games. A civ in an RTS is basically a “character” in a fighting game. New characters in a MOBA would probably be the same. And turn-based strategy civs.

    These all require extra dev time to implement new mechanical features. Extra balance work to make sure they’re well-balanced (both on release, and later with future balance patches). Extra design work to make sure they look good and unique. It’s completely reasonable to charge for them. Just not if they’re there, ready to go, day one.