This has the useful property of being regulation-exempt because it's already literally everywhere. Unlike "F gases", which have much more serious greenhouse effects and are regulated in the UK (and elsewhere): https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/fluorinated-gas-f-...
You could install your own CO2-based heat pump in a way you wouldn't be allowed to do with a F-gas based one.
OTOH, CO2 uses much higher pressures and so I'm more willing to DIY a F-gas based one. CO2 if there is a leak can cut a limb off. F-gas is generally not that high. I wouldn't want a leak/mistake, but CO2 is less personally forgiving.
Yeah, I think people forget that before the internet there was the telcos. They had a "microtransaction" infrastructure, and they were determined to use it by gatekeeping everything. The power of the internet making almost everything almost free has been hugely net positive, although not without a few downsides.
Really this is the problem: the internet has enabled the global Hater community, who come together and find common cause in their hate, and that radiates outwards into everywhere else. Even if you're trying to define your place as "not that", it is influenced simply by trying to be negatively defined.
Not even specific to a type of Hate. Obviously it's the "big Hates" which are dangerous (and can get people killed), but even the "small Hates" such as "pop star gets cancelled for wearing the wrong outfit" or whatever nonsense is going on in kpop fandom are annoying.
We think of "frictionless" as good, but the friction was the only thing preventing services from consolidating to a single point. Of control and failure.
No, but my credit card has no battery, requires no cell service, is waterprrof and quite durable.
I see the advantages of the Chinese system but I really found myself missing my card.
- While payer-offline payments were possible most merchants didn't want to (and some seemed unable to) so payments in places with bad cell service were painful.
- It was a lot more steps to open the app and enter scanning mode or display your code than to just tap a card or phone.
- It was always unclear if you were scanning or being scanned, leading to friction for every payment (generally larger brands scan you and you scan for smaller merchants).
Honestly for in-person card payments are just nicer.
For online WeChat was better, but no different than Apple Pay or Google Pay except for course that it is standardized by the government.
Good example: cars come with a tracking identifier (license plate), tied to a responsible individual, who is subject to a test, and whose permission to use it can be revoked if they abuse it badly enough.
While there are more trolls and bots on Facebook than real users, but many of those real users have no issue using their real name and picture while excepting awful behaviour. I'm not sure that adding an identifier is really going to help that much.
It could be explained by the herd mentality. An angry man alone would probably not throw stones in the street with his face uncovered; But he would probably do so in a riot. Now, in social networks, is quite easy to simulate persons and have them starting a riot. Having a way to identify real persons could make this more difficult.
Oh, indeed. There's been a real public reversal in tolerance for open racism, over the past (see date) almost exactly 25 years.
This is now coming full circle in the UK; the Daily Mail (!) has a rightwing extortion mob outside their offices right now led by a "Danny Tommo". And we all know who Elon Musk is.
Yes, that's why we should deanonymizing the internet. Everyone should need a government-issued license to access websites. That's exactly what the modern society needs. (in case it's not super obvious, /s)
But why not? I want to make the distinction on public and private speech. In the physical world, no one should ever have their private speech scrutinized, that's why there are laws banning covert recording. But in public, speech is very much moderated. We don't allow hate speech and we don't allow harassment of others.
Social media is a public platform. We can't enforce moderation if we can't identify the abuser, they can always just make a new account. So deanonymize social media access, but for private communication? Let's leave that free from prying eyes.
To bring it back to cars, roads are public infrastructure, that's why you need a license. No one cares if you drive licenseless on your private track.
The internet would be a lot poorer, if all users had to be identified. I really appreciate it when people tell their personal stories and talk about how they have overcome crises. Anonymity empowers people to help others by sharing life lessons. Those same life lessons would be very harmful for the reputation of the internet user, if they had to be posted with the user's real name.
Not everyone has a life that is all sunshine. Not every use of anonymity is criminal or unethical.
I completely understand and actually agree with your stance. Consider this, the personal blog we love reading can remain anonymous, because it is private in the sense that it is ostensibly the writings of a single person, it is not a platform.
To bring it back to analog, newspapers are platforms, where journalists are identified members of the public and can be held accountable for their words.
If you would like more personal stories, by all means, search for the personal blog online and share them with your friends privately. But if you share it on a public platform like HN, you are making an editorial decision that this is worth sharing to the masses and thus should be scrutinized.
If the blog is publicly published, so the author should be unmasked.
Identification schemes would be fine if there were never abused, but every single instance of them has been abused in the past. There is zero reason to believe it will it be different on the internet.
Are you familiar with how the DMCA gets abused? Do you really believe that bad actors will not find similar ways to abuse an identification system?
I generally agree with this, but a problem I can't solve is: at what point does a "large group chat" become a "public channel"? If, hypothetically, someone is organizing a thousand people in balaclavas to turn up outside a business they want to intimidate, over Telegram or Signal, is that "private" or "public"?
(also everyone in this thread saying deanonymisation does not on its own solve the problem is correct)
I draw the line on discoverability. Reddit? Public. Hacker news? Public. 4chan? Public. Facebook and Instagram are also public with a slight caveat, private accounts will be considered private, otherwise public. Even ye old public forums are considered public.
Discord and group chats will be considered private. Basically anything that requires an invitation / permission to view their content is considered private. To your example, I'm not sure if J6 members were organising publicly themselves. If the FBI wanted to, they could easily infiltrate these groups as an anonymous member themselves, so I don't see a contradiction there.
Legislatively, it means that platforms will be held responsible for their public content, which I think is fair. If there are too much content to moderate, it's up to them to find solutions. I hear rumours of a promising automating tool called LLMs.
What about what you watch on PornHub? Should that be tied directly to your government ID?
I know that's an easy one to cherry pick but just consider all you use the internet for and how an adversarial governmenft could use some of that info.
Personally I'd love to see all social media corps required to verify ID but leave the rest of the internet alone.
PornHub is a great example! It is a public platform and thus posters have to be deanonymized. For one, this would provide traceability to people who revenge post intimate content. It would not block anonymous viewers. While that means minors can still access porn, there will be a level of accountability to the creators of porn. Porn mags were a thing before the internet anyways, and the magazine itself was tied to real identifiable people.
And that's how you get Minecraft letsplays on PornHub.
Interesting question though, because IRL, before the internet, there was also ID verification to access that kind of content. And that was actually worse, because the person checking your ID lived in your city and could see you buying groceries.
I suppose what you would want there is a verification mechanism that proves that you're an adult, but gives absolutely no info on which adult you are.
This - to my understanding - is possible with the technology we have. But whether that will actually be what happens remains to be seen.
I definitely participate in a deanonymized internet social media platforms, especially for local issues, employment or niche hobbies. I also want anonymous internet, but having the choice between the two, for certain things may be great.
I hate to say it, but I do not see how else a nation state could act.
The goal of a state is stability. The free, open, anonymous global internet otoh is a force of change.
The west really liked that, back when it was useful to its geopolitical goals, but now, not only does it have outlived its usefulness, but also, it's suddenly being pointed at the west itself.
At least I do not see how it could be any other way. You cannot simultaneously have high-trust and low-filtering in a space.
I think a lot of confusion stems from the fact that this was actually always kinda the case. It was just not enforced by law, but by the fact that computers were weird, expensive and complex.
As the technology matured, these core assumptions started holding true less, until, eventually, we've ended up where we are now.
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This doesn't necessarily mean that we will have no more anonymous networks though. But they will be less global and less accessible.
Thanks to open weights LLMs, we will have more capabilities within them than we did in the 90s and earlier, but, we will lack the leverage of tidal proportions that social media held.
This, to me, sounds like the compromise to be found with the powers that keep the states we live in running.
An absolute classic of "we've done no requirements analysis at all, but our exec went drinking with the wrong people and that now defines the solution, regardless of the problem".
You could install your own CO2-based heat pump in a way you wouldn't be allowed to do with a F-gas based one.
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