This would only work for anyone foolish enough to attempt to access content and services with their phone. You don't own your phone. It might has well be a company-owned device.
"But everyone uses their phone all the time!" Yes, and everyone will be worse off for making the obviously worse choice.
> I am willing to be educated; does the average schoolkid carry such a device?
Yes.
On at least Android phones, and I'm pretty sure also on iOS, location access is a user-controlled permission that's not necessarily granted to any given app. There always leaks, but are you going to require commercial software to play cat-and-mouse games to get around system security settings?
And some, possibly most, "social media" can also be used without apps.
"To enforce it, platforms must age-check their users. In practice that means anyone opening a new account will likely have to prove they're over 16 by uploading an ID or passing a facial age scan."
> likely
It could, of course, use a double-anonymous system like the French one.
Probably not, but I'd rather that they didn't state their guess as fact in the title.
I am so tired of everyone assuming the worst possible implementation of age verification.
Whatever happened to steel manning? It's supposed to be in the fabric of HN. Curious enquiry.
Is it nice children are exposed to dreadful things? No. Could we, with tech, come up with a way to improve things? Probably! Let's discuss and think about how!
If a site creates some opaque token representing the request, and the token is signed by the ID service with no other information disclosure that "The user that presented this is of the appropriate age" that would seem like a reasonable compromise.
Token could be signed out-of-band to obscure the interaction between the parties.
I have absolutely zero knowledge about the area, but doesn't Polymarket just set up bets between users?
If you're a regular bookmaker, who is on the hook for any losses, then yes you would ban successful users. But in this case you just skim off a fee for each "trade" so there's no incentive to ban anyone.
And how does one verify that the public key received belongs to the intended party, rather than a mitm?
If the answer is blind trust in a third party that runs the messaging service then I suspect that you can guess what the people asking those questions are really asking.
Diffe-Hellman-Merkel key exchange is vulnerable to attacker-in-the-middle attacks.
Eave could just do key negotiation with Alice and separately do key negotiation with Bob. You have to use a slightly more complicated cryptographic protocol to avoid this issue.
How would the keys get stored in the user's private browsing window? Do they lose all chat history when they log in on a private browsing window and then close it?
I don't know the technical details of that for sure, but I think the answer is that keys and chat history are stored on-device only; for example you lose your WhatsApp history if you don't restore a backup when moving to a new phone.
If a messaging app is showing you message history in a private browsing window then perhaps the encryption key for that history is derived from your password or something like that; that can be done locally so that all the server ever sees is encrypted data.
What if you log into the app and then log out of the app and then log into the app again? Should you be able to see your messages?
E2EE is a fail-secure design. In case of any doubt it deletes your private messages. When applied to this case I don't think the downside of constantly losing all your messages outweighs the upside of Facebook pretending they don't have a copy of all of them.
Are you asking for technical details about E2EE in messaging apps, or simply making the point that you don't like it? If you don't like it, then fine, you do you, however I would point out that we all accept some inconvenience in our lives as a trade off for improved security; the lock on my front door is inconvenient but I'd rather have it than not.
As to whether or not Meta have been lying about it, then that would be on-brand for them, but then what are they turning off if so? Or maybe the whole thing is theatre, and I should better disconnect from the internet altogether? I don't see the value in speculating about that.
Not being able to receive messages except on one device isn't a minor inconvenience.
To fix this, you either need to authorize each device (and web browser) from another device that's logged in, or the central authority holds your keys.
I run WhatsApp concurrently on two phones and receive all messages on both devices. But generally speaking this is where we disagree - requiring all devices to be authorised by me is feature not a bug as far as I'm concerned.
> And how does one verify that the public key received belongs to the intended party, rather than a mitm?
Fingerprints. Again, this is like Crypto 101. Not saying that as a personal attack of any kind, I just remain incredulous that what used to be entry level knowledge in “our thing” has evidently become so obscure.
You shouldn't be talking down like this, you're wrong about it. Alice and Bob need to exchange keys beforehand in some trusted out-of-band way. There's no protocol that solves this if Eve can be in the middle. I'm not sure what you mean by fingerprints, but if you describe a protocol, I can describe the mitm attack.
Bob and Alice are setting up their e2e channel, and because they have some extra level of concern about snooping, they telephone each other and read off some form of hash of the public key to each other.
A more complex variant would be something like PGP implemented, where Bob and Alice could both sign each others keys after this exchange, ensuring that someone who hadn’t met Bob but did trust Alice could inherit trust in Bob’s Alice-signed key.
You’ve stated unequivocally that I’m wrong, so now, please show your homework.
This is a very frustrating exchange. You guys are saying the same thing. For key exchange to be secure against an attacker who can MITM the channel you're securing, either the public keys or at least their respective fingerprints need to be exchanged out of band, over some channel the same attacker cannot also MITM. For a sophisticated enough targeted attack, a telephone isn't that.
The way military radios handle this is hardware key loaders that have seeds pre-synced in factory, in person. Every day in the field, a unit comms person takes the key loader and loads new keys onto everyone's radios. The key loaders themselves are reseeded and resynced during maintenance periods between campaigns or exercises. They're physically accounted for on every movement and twice a day when not moving, and if they ever can't be found, all messages from any device they loaded keys onto is considered compromised.
Anyone trying to overthrow a government or run a criminal empire or whatever is going to have to take measures at least this drastic. Or quit LARPing and accept that nation state attackers can probably slide into your Instagram DMs, which are probably being sent to people you don't know, and if they're hot and actually answering you, 90% chance they're a honeypot anyway.
Web of trust or centralized trust are the main answers here.
Compromise of the secret key is a whole other issue - revocation.
MITM of a key can be solved pretty well via web of trust techniques.
Apologies if the dialog is frustrating to read! As a “recovering cypherpunk”, I find these sorts of discussions animating, as long as they’re polite and technically focused! Much love!
Switzerland isn't in the EU, though.
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