Thanks for sharing that link! Interesting post and interesting blog in general!

Yes, any version of age control which would realistically get passed will be bad. This:

additionally, in my opinion no one who wants to enact such a thing is doing it in good faith. it is a pretense towards an ulterior goal[2]

is absolutely true. The fact that those privacy preserving approaches exist but aren’t used is all the proof I personally need of this.

I’d have imagined something along these lines:

• USER visits porn site
• PORN site encrypts random nonce + “is this user 18?” with GOV pubkey
• PORN forwards that to USER
• USER forwards that to GOV, together with something authenticating themselves (need to have GOV account)
• GOV knows user is requesting, but not what for
• GOV checks: is user 18?, concats answer with random nonce from PORN, hashes that with known algo, signs the entire thing with its private signing key
• GOV returns that to USER
• USER forwards that to PORN
• PORN is able to verify that whoever made the request to visit PORN is verified as older than 18 by singing key holder / GOV, by checking certificate chain, and gets freshness guarantee from random nonce
• but PORN does not know anything about the user (besides whether they are an adult or not)

There’s probably glaring issues with this, this is just from the top of my head to solve the problem of “GOV should know nothing”.

Yes, of course, it’s everywhere. What’s left but becoming a hermit…?

But you know what makes me extra mad about the age restrictions? I don’t think they are a bad idea per se. Keeping teens from watching porn or kids from spending most of their waking hours on brainrot on social media is, in and on itself, a good idea. What does make me mad is that this could easily be done in a privacy-respecting fashion (towards site providers and governments simultaneously). The fact that it isn’t - that you’ll need to share your real, passport-backed identity with a bunch of sites - tells you everything you need to know about these endeavors, I think.

ChatControl is back on the table here in Europe AGAIN (you’ve probably heard), with mandatory age checking sprinkled on to as a treat.

I honestly feel physically ill at this point. Like a constant, unignorable digital angst eating away at my sanity. I don’t want any part in this shit anymore.

… are entirely possible, even if rarely the right choice.

Hm, yes, that sounds annoying indeed. Maybe I just have not encountered such an app/site yet, but louckily, the bitwarden integration has been working flawlessly for me.

Bitwarden / Vaultwarden are OSS and work fantastic across all my devices. IMO it’s more convenient than passwords now, ESPECIALLY if you’d have to enter a 2fa code as well.

Haha, perfect 😄

Would you mind opening a PR to fix that typo? Would be useful for others as well!

Or a CLI with clap.

Curious what you are talking about. Multi-threaded sharing of memory for example is also easy with rust, it just doesn’t let you wrote and read at the same time, and so on.

Yeah. Once you get used to the (verbose, but by no means unergonomic!) syntax, you’ll probably never be happy with another language again. Job-wise, I am currently mostly using Go, and while also a nice language, I miss the confidence and security I took for granted with rust.

Not to mention just how goddamn expressive rust can be. Let bindings like if ok/err, else return? Assign from a match on Some(Ok(x))? Filter, map, and friends on any iterator? Oh my GOD the error handling with the question mark iterator? 100% confidence that if it compiles, no error, possible null value, or case is unhandled.

And all this WHILE giving you the amazing security benefits!

Ah, damn, caught me proselytizing again.

• if your skill is so great that you would never cause the kinds of bugs the rust compiler is designed to prevent, then it will never keep you from compiling, and therefore your complaint is unnecessary and you can happily use rust
• if you do encounter these error messages, then you are apparently not skilled enough to not use rust, and should use rust

In summary: use rust.

Nice, that’s great to hear!

Viel Spaß! War im Mai 3 Wochen dort, absolut begeistert, jetzt wird fleißig Japanisch gelernt 😄

Ah, too bad! But thanks, that’s good to know.

Not gonna lie, I’m a tiny bit jealous of you 😄 It’s gotten to a point where having to use Android is a constant, low-intensity source of stress just because of how closed and privacy-unfriendly it has become.

Thanks, that is a very kind offer!

The secific app is xdrip+. But it’s probably not possible to test it out, because starting/working is not the issue, the issue is making sure that it has a 100%% stable background connection with my blood glucose sensor, recovers from failures, restarts in the background on closure,… Eventually, I’ll get my hands on a linux handheld and try for myself :)

That being said - how’s your experience with Sailfish been so far?

Ah, true. I honestly think we need to get to a point where smartphones intended for use with linux are profitable / widespread.

But that’s a catch 22 with UX and HW both being required for companies to invest in the other.

Again for Germany, it’s handled by a single provider, and they absolutely do utilize CoCo tech. (Source: I work at one of the involved companies, sorry, not going to be more specific)

In the case of Germany: confidential computing tech ensures all data is encrypted in storage and in memory, shielded even against data center employees / hosting providers. I imagine that’s become the standard for most countries.