In general, we accept that the Government already knows who you are, how old you are, and where you live. That’s already a given. The purpose of a zero-knowledge age verification scheme is to allow a third party (not the Government) to be confident that a person is an adult, without being given any additional information or being able to deduce any additional information from what they’re given. So essentially, they get only 1 bit of information: whether the user is an adult (true/false). In practice, a perfect system is not possible, since the fact that you receive a response also means you get the answer to related questions, like whether the user possesses a Government-issued ID (obviously “true” if they can successfully complete the verification).

So, here’s how such a scheme might work. There are many possible implementations.

In the United States, we have (optional) digital ID cards. These are added to one’s digital wallet in a similar manner to payment cards and can be used for things like buying alcohol, getting through airport security, and driving. This digital infrastructure can be re-used.

1. An organisation which wants to perform digital identity verification generates a cryptographic key pair and registers the public key with a Government server ahead of time. The public key is published to a Government-run public keyserver.
2. A website who wants to verify a user’s age sends a verification request to a Government server, digitally signed with their private key. The server responds with a request ID, which is a random, but unique, string of characters.
3. The website provides this string to the user. The user copies the string.
4. The user opens their digital wallet, selects their ID card, and then opens the age verification feature. The user pastes the request ID into their digital wallet, which fetches information about the request from the Government server. Because the request which the request ID is associated with was signed using the organisation’s private key, the Government can tell the user who initiated the request.
5. The user is asked to confirm/deny the age verification request. If the user confirms the request, then a biometric will be required to access their private key (these are stored in the device’s keystore), sign the approval response, and then sent that response to the Government server. The Government server checks that the signature is valid and tied to the key associated with that ID before marking the verification request as completed.
6. After confirming, the user returns to the website and clicks a button which says “I’ve completed the verification.” The website then queries the request ID with the Government server (again, signing the request with their private key). The Government server responds with “completed” if the user has accepted the request, or “not completed” if the user has either not yet accepted the request or denied it.

It’s not a guarantee, but generally, digital ID systems live on the phone of one person only and require a screen lock to use. You’re right though, that there is nothing preventing someone else from borrowing another’s identity.

It is possible to construct a zero-knowledge proof using cryptography and adapting existing digital ID infrastructure. A user can prove that they have knowledge of a private key tied to an adult’s identification card without having to reveal the key, or the associated public key.

But that being said, whether something is possible and whether it is a good idea are two different questions.

It’s possible to construct an age-verification system that allows a user to verify they are over the age of 18 without divulging any other information whatsoever.

But that would defeat the point of “age” verification for these goons.

They should make a “Firefox Core” which contains only the browser with basic features, and then make another version which contains all the “fun” stuff.

The collection of texts today known as the Bible were not written at once. There’s actually a lot of interesting history about how it came to be, but the short of it is that there were a multitude of maybe-canon Christian texts floating around during the early period of Christianity. These texts were written decades or even centuries apart, and often falsely attributed to authors who did not write them. There was also the Septuagint, a Greek text which was a translation of various Jewish scriptures, many of which now form the Old Testament.

The early Christian church decided which of these were deemed to be canon and which were non-canon. The canon texts were compiled together to form what is now the Bible. Everything else that was deemed not canon is called the Apocrypha. Many of these texts were also deemed heretical or blasphemous to read, publish, or teach by the various ecumenical councils.

Each Christian denomination has a slightly different version of the Bible depending on which decisions and ecumenical councils they accept.

The most interesting difference would be the Bible of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (also known as the Mormon Church), which has an additional text called the Book of Mormon. That was written in the 19th century by a guy named Joseph Smith, an American religious leader who founded Mormonism. According to Mormon theology, it contains the revalations he received from God about various other unknown saints who lived in America and other holy happenings which took place, making the US a second holy land of sorts. His group travelled to the western United States to find their own promised land and establish a Mormon theocracy (they were successful; it’s now the US state of Utah).

There’s no historical evidence that any of these texts were intended to be read as anything other than religious scripture, but keep in mind that in Biblical times, people seemed to have had a really difficult time differentiating texts written by people having fever dreams versus actual genuine accounts of observed events or legitimate attempts to write scripture. If you want a fun time, you can read some of the Apocrypha, which are often similar in style to the canonical gospels but are slightly… weirder. The line between religion and insanity was not so easily found back then. Regardless of their authors’ original intent, the Apocrypha certainly can be read for entertainment in the 21st century.

I think there is a line to be drawn between what is theoretically better and what is meaningfully useful.

It is realistically not useful information for an attacker to know what country you are from by observing your UTC offset. It’s simply much easier to guess this information by observing your other behaviours. For example, the text and time of your post is already leading me to guess UTC+5:30 as the time zone in question. But again, knowing what country you’re from is not really useful information most of the time, as even if my guess is correct, that narrows it down to a whopping one-eighth of the human population.

A hundred “rifts” have opened up in the MAGA movement, but this does not seem to have had any noticeable effect in policy-making decisions.

It’s shocking similar to how the Chinese government used the excuse of “national security” to arrest the publisher of the largest anti-Beijing tabloid in Hong Kong and jail opposition politicians for “sedition”.

America really has a litigation culture, not because people are particularly fond of lawsuits, but because problems which are generally solved by legislative enactments or actions by regulatory bodies in other countries, aren’t in the US, and thus the only way to find out who is right is to go to court.

That would be a dream come true. AI agents are not legal entities with the right to own or inherit property. Therefore, all of his stuff has no legal owner. By the principle of escheat, it now belongs to the State.

Sadly, I doubt Elon’s lawyers are quite this dumb.

I remember when Musk was the cool electric car guy and not the chief accomplice to the dismantling of Western democracy.

I don’t think the majority of people ever viewed Polymarket as anything but gambling.

Yeah, don’t mess with the wife of a guy who’s friends with the chief of police.

It means “the leader” in Italian. It was used by Mussolini, leader of the Italian National Fascist Party in the same way “der Führer” was used to refer to Hitler.

At the same time, it’s hard not to understand where he’s coming from as well. Throughout the campaign he and his family would be subjected to the full force of the MAGA hate machine. This can have deadly consequences for candidates perceived to not be loyal enough to Il Duce.

I’m guessing what you’re suggesting is that Google’s proposal is the same as requiring all packages be signed and accompanied by an Extended Validation or Oragnisation Validation X.509 certificate.

While that would technically work, the problem with using the existing PKI is that it’s still very expensive to get EV/OV certificates. And the most common of these certs (those for TLS purposes) will soon only last 47 days which is, to put it mildly, would be a pain in the ass to use for package-signing.

While AI obviously is not perfect and is flawed in many ways, having AI sift through the torrent of comments and then flag problematic submissions for human review is likely going to be extremely effective with minimal false positives. Though I do say this as a person whose Reddit account is currently banned for 3 days for “inciting violence” because of a knife-based joke.

Bankers fulfill a pretty important role, which is that they turn excess money that would otherwise be economically unproductive into economically productive loans. The world would be a lot worse without bankers.

All the negative behaviour associated with banking comes not from the bankers, the people who work at the branches writing loans and collecting deposits, but rather from finance bros at the top making the management decisions.

When a financial institution is ethically run, you tend to not think about it because it just quietly does its job in the background without making noise or causing trouble. You always hear about big banks in the news doing something shady but when have you heard about a credit union or building society ripping off their customers to the tune of hundreds of millions?