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Proton CEO warns global age verification push will mean "the death of anonymity online"
(www.techradar.com)
That's why they're fuckin doing it.
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2026
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I hate short replies that don't add much (so added more than agreed!) but I've always enjoyed being anonymous in forums, I'm quite a shy person.
Never was a jerk intentionally or anything just said my bit. But everyone possibly knowing who I was I'd probably say nothing ever. Fuck it I was private before I can be private later. But I'm old and recall before Internet when I had no (or little) interaction.
Like we all haven't seen data breeches over the years....oh it's the government that holds the master authentication? Fuck that shit is all. Nothing, from a person who does programming these days, like that is remotely better.
Some countries may be better but we're all democratic right? Takes a single election till shit stops working as a safeguard, then new ones in make a different law. The whole system was not built for current tech.
CEO of Honeypot declares water is wet
I am old enough to remember when the internet was run by hobbyists and enthusiasts, companies were happy to pay "to be online" it wasn't riddled with ads and profits wasn't the default reason to create content.
Thems were heady days
You're kidding yourself if you think companies being online was ever about anything other than potential profit. At first it was just a way to reach a wider pool of customers. Like the yellow pages before. Then, once every company had an online presence, they started looking for new ways to monetize the connectivity.
For once Yen and I see eye to eye.
given it's just because it will hurt his business, but i'm still happy for some W
What is being pushed for implementation is better described as identity verification, not age verification.
I would have little issue with a solution that purely gated services on age in a secure and privacy respecting manner. This OS level garbage is not that, its creating an oligarchy run identity gate to control access to personal computing.
Thank you. Now I just wish somebody at the government level would understand this and the implications of what this entails. Like maybe mention that all their weird online fetishes could be tracked back to them. It’s like this one company doing the “verification “ would be rolling in kompromat.
it’s all by design. they don’t want the general public to put it together that these are identify tracking surveillance system, just a carefree age verification to keep kids away from the baddies 🙄
Exactly. We need to adopt something like a post quantum secure, independently audited version of the EU age checking app. Way better than OS level crap.
Agreed. The model is a good start, the security of it's implementation woefully inadequate... And I agree this MUST use post quantum cryptography.
Dox-gating (yes I just made that up lol) operating systems will result in people not updating security patches.
I like that word. I may use it later.
This is an easy fix. We just make our own internet. With the usual, blackjack and hookers.
But does it have blackjack and hookers?
I'll stop interacting online outside of a professional context. So this obviously sucks from an online perspective. It's will dampen online organization. But hopefully it increases community level interactions IRL. It'll probably be good for day-to-day mental health.
That’s the plan. It’s about control.
I’m glad someone else sees it. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills every day lately. People don’t give a single shit, will minimize the danger and do anything they can to give up their rights, time and time again.
A few of us see it, sadly too few to matter.
People in the privacy communities have known this for a while.
But because it's slightly technical at minimum, and nuanced, and about something not immediately tied directly to people's financial interest, the average person will never ever know, understand, or care about this.
Whats wrong with you?! Why aren't you thinking of the children??!
already been accused/harassed on here of being pro-pedo for not being pro age-verification.
it's always the yahoo idiot opinions that gain political traction, and rarely the common sense ones.
The good times are gone, fascism is back.
The US has always been an electoral oligarchy. It paints itself as a democratic republic to claim that it has consent of the people it governs, but the governed are given no real choices. Would you like to take a right hook or a left hook? Sorry, not getting hit wasn't an option.
We need to start demanding our cities and states use a ranked sortition approach. Put a lottery option on a ranked voting ballot and make politicians beat the lottery if they want to claim they're a legitimate ruling class.
But it's in a new wrapper. Now it says "Good for humanity" on the label, still the same shit tho...
…and extend the ability of governments and especially corporations to control what you see and hear. From ads to what “facts” they want you to see.
Lawmakers who are pushing age verification: "Win - win"
if they want to censor and monitor the internet, its time to start building on a new one that's private and encrypted by default: https://reticulum.network/
I agree with the notion, but I'm mildly concerned with the fragmentation of solutions. We already have I2P, Yggdrasil Network, Gemini Network, the cjdns ecosystem, just to name a few. You can just run nodes on all of them at once, but that restricts accessibility to those who have the raw compute (and bandwidth) necessary, which isn't exactly conducive to what I'd consider a truly "open" internet, especially in the third world.
I think fragmentation is great. Shows there's varied interest in the space and allows them to evolve. Let the best one stand the test of time!
A quick overview of the difference in the tech stacks:
| Network | Can run without IP? | Can run without ISP? | Primary Physical Medium |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reticulum | Yes (Identity-based) | Yes | Radio (LoRa/HF), Serial, Wi-Fi Mesh, Ethernet |
| Yggdrasil | No (Uses crypto IP) | Yes | Wi-Fi Mesh, Ethernet |
| cjdns | No (Uses crypto IP) | Yes | Wi-Fi Mesh, Ethernet |
| I2P | No (Overlay) | Mostly No | Existing Internet (TCP/UDP) |
| Gemini | No (Application) | No | Existing Internet (TCP) |
Isn't reticulum supposed to be really bad as traffic increases?
I LOVE reticulum, the idea anyway. I2P is a great idea too. I run an I2P node just to contribute.
I started up reticulum on my Linux box, added sideband to my Android, setup an rnode. it was marginal. Text chat worked 90% of the time, I got a single image to come through, then never again. Something about it was either broken, or something I was doing was incompatible, but there weren't enough logs for me to figure it out.
I'm down with the while second internet over encryption, but none of them are straight forward enough I could get anyone outside of my extreme tech circle to consider it.
This is interesting, I think people should be aware of and check out i2p as well. I actually don't use it (because there's not that much of a community yet 😭) but I run a i2p router to support the network, that bitch does ~15TB a month in bandwidth. I think the main use of the network is torrenting currently.
But with governments and tech companies getting so oppressive hopefully i2p and other similar systems can flourish into the new free net.
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