Hi!

My previous/alt account is yetAnotherUser@feddit.de which will be abandoned soon.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2024

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  • Public domain is a thing in the EU but not releasing anything into public domain.

    In Germany, I cannot renounce my copyright to anything. I can give you an indefinite, unrestricted license to do whatever but I still own the copyright. It will only ever become public domain 70 years after my death, not a day sooner or later.







  • Sadly that’s not it, I was using offline maps.

    I’m not entirely sure what’s the exact issue, but it only really occurs when trying to change LoD quickly. E.g. clicking on an inter-city bus route and zooming out to see it in its entirety or zooming back in. From 10 km to 500 m can take 3-4 seconds which is enough to feel sluggish if you’re doing it often.

    Probably not the most popular use case but it can get frustrating after a while nonetheless





  • Yeah, that’s again a little different. You have to fully trust WhatsApp that they are doing what they promise. You can’t really verify this yourself.

    Besides, if the app is open source, backdoors are generally more difficult to implement. Especially for something like E2EE, where people look very closely at what the application does with keys. Same with age verification in my opinion. You’d need to pull off a lot of gymnastics to put in a backdoor, see the xz utils one which was only achieved through several obfuscated stages in a codebase rarely ever looked at by another human.


  • Can you explain a little what you mean with:

    So they simply scrape post decryption from the user’s device.

    As far as I know, no social media company’s posts are E2EE. After all: It’s not possible to have both public posts and E2EE. “Direct messages” to other users can be E2EE but you’d have to trust the company with the encryption keys.

    The only condition that requires Zero-Knowledge Protocols to function is that your device is not hijacked by hackers (and there are no deliberate backdoors and such). This can be achieved by having the app be open source with regular security audits. The social media company can do nothing to identify you, nor could the government (unless again, they collude and share secrets).

    But yeah, social media can already identify most users because of surveillance capitalism. The goal however is to ensure identification is not in any way made easier via age verification.


  • You cannot turn a ZKP into being secretely not ZKP without significant effort though.

    Take the following example protocol:

    1. Social media app sends you a token to verify.
    2. You append a private secrete string to the token and hash it with a known, collision resistant hash function.
    3. You send the hash to the government’s server and request an “18+” signature. The signature should correspond to a public key.
    4. You send the signature back to the social media app, including the secret you used.
    5. The social media calculates the hash of its token + your secret and then checks whether the governmen’t signature is valid with that value.

    The government will not know which social media site was used, the social media site will not discover anything about your identity beyond a binary “is above 18 years old” statement. This is because you control all communication.

    To discover anything else, they would BOTH have to collude in some significant way. They can only do so in step 5, by having the social media app send the value you gave it to the government. Maybe there exists a protocol that you control that works against this threat as well, I’m not sure.

    But if they collude in step 5 - what prevents the social media company from sending all information it has about you to the government already all the time, even without age verification? Like IP addresses, phone number, access time etc. If the government further controls all the ISP servers and log which traffic from where goes where, it could certainly identify you already.