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My previous/alt account is [email protected] which will be abandoned soon.

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

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  • Je suis un Parisian? I don’t speak French so this is the closest thing I can try. Besides, if you look at the whole speech it doesn’t even require much nuance:

    Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was civis Romanus sum [“I am a Roman citizen”]. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is “Ich bin ein Berliner!”… All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words “Ich bin ein Berliner!”

    It’s the difference between:

    “I am a Londoner” and “I am from London”










  • 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.



  • Wieselworte wurden allerdings nicht verwendet, ich bin nicht mal zur Einsicht gegangen.

    Es war eher:

    “Oh die Punkte wurden veröffentlicht. Hm, 52/120, das reicht eher nicht.”

    Zwei verdammte Wochen später:

    “Oh, die Notentabelle wurde (endlich!) veröffentlicht. 52 Punkte -> 4,0 ??? Waren wohl einige schlecht.”




  • 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.



  • At the time, Johnson said that the UK lost money under Erasmus as twice as many EU nationals came to the UK to study as British students went elsewhere in Europe.

    True, it’s obviously bad to have your universities educate more students and possibly keep them as future researchers. Terrible, really.

    The biggest benficiary of Erasmus would obviously be a country whose students all left to study abroad. I can’t see how this would pose a problem whatsoever.


  • Photos?

    I’m fairly certain the app will use the NFC feature of your ID to verify age and only age. Everything else would be a gross violation of privacy, it does not need to store anything else.

    Besides, photos only prove possession of an ID card, not ownership. Imagine if an ATM allowed withdrawing funds from a card without having to enter anything. Using the NFC feature requires entering a PIN only the owner should know.