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Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th August 2025 (awful.systems)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[–] 2 points 1 year ago* (5 children)

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.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    an unintended side effect of this is people who can't or don't want to verify their age going to less reputable sources. so even though it can be done in a "privacy-respecting fashion" (see, for example, soatok's post on this^[https://soatok.blog/2025/07/31/age-verification-doesnt-need-to-be-a-privacy-footgun/] ), it's still a bad idea.

    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^[e.g. "steam porn games" → "this person's existence is inherently sexual" → "ban lgbtq content"]

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Would you mind explaining how to do that easily in a way that only reveals age without being a privacy nightmare? Which means that it mustn't be giving sites an excellent tracking identifier nor requires them to process documents themselves.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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”.

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