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.

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.

Damn it, I was trying to go for the “When” + simple present to check whether my statement worked.

I thought:

“When 1 equals 2, blablabla” is always true, therefore [my statement above] works as well.

But I should’ve thought “When 1 equaled 2, …” which doesn’t sound true anymore.

That is to say: Fuck grammatical tenses!

Reason #2801 why vacuous truths are awesome.

“When I first met you, you promised to give me all your money” is a true statement because I have never actually met you.

Just be careful not to test this in court.

Makes sense though.

The complex Riemann-Zeta function (Zeta(x) = sum from 1 to infinity of 1/n^x) only converges for Re(x) > 1, else it is infinite. We can use analytic continuation - which I understand as extending the function such that it remains holomorphic (basically continuous but in the complex numbers and for some reason well-defined) and find the value of Zeta(-1) that way.

The value of Zeta(-1) when viewed this way is -1/12.

It’s not really saying the sum of all natural numbers is equal to -1/12. It’s really just a mathematical trick, just like: lim (x -> 0) x/x = 1 but this doesn’t mean 0/0 = 1.

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True. I should’ve added: “Without significant foreign support”.

Like no shit, if neighboring countries provides weapons, training and even manpower then it’s hardly considered an uprising, is it? More like a proxy war.

That covers Vietnam, Cambodia and Syria. The latter was literally just a gigantic proxy war. Like look at this shit, this is not a popular uprising:

Don’t know enough about Iraq, but in Afghanistan the military did jack shit against the Taliban and in Myanmar the military was the one rebelling.

Every single uprising hinged on:

• Who is supported by the country’s own military?
• Who is supported by foreign nation’s militaries and to which extent?

None of them depended on the popular opinion of civilians.

East Germany 1953, Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, China 1989.

It does not cause any long-lasting unrest. Crushing protests with tanks is extremely effective and has always worked if the military was called upon and willing.

Full control of everything? It would take at most around 1000 soldiers on the ground to siege a modern a city - shut down water, electricity and close the highways - and you’ll regain control. People don’t like to live without food and water.

Plus no country cares what you do to your own population beyond strongly worded letters and maybe some targeted sanctions against like 3 entities.

Does it work this well? I’ve never used it.

I was sneakily calling the artist out on taking the easy path and just “turning” the skin into cloth. Not that I could do it better, it’s just one of those artistic shortcuts that are extremely obvious if you look for them.

I consider Wikipedia more reliable than vast portions of primary sources. I have seen the awful quality of many papers - “publish or perish” is a thing in science.

And yes, obviously the label “narcissist” is an insult. Just like calling someone “stupid”. When using it as an insult however, it is clearly meant to say this person displays high amounts of narcissism and behaves like a self-centered asshole.

This is different to insults such as “autistic” because that is not a personality style but rather a clinical diagnosis. It would be akin to using the term “disabled” as an insult.

Narcissism is a negative trait if you have too much. That is why it’s an insult. If I say someone is “smelly” I am also insulting their body odor. Doesn’t mean people who struggle with body hygiene for whatever reason should also feel insulted by that.

They don’t need to kill the entire workforce. People generally don’t want to die, so you only need to kill a small fraction to terrorize the rest into submitting.

This has worked for pretty much every single uprising since WW2. Just send in the tanks. Only when the military refused were uprisings successful.

The military today is able to kill nearly the entire population within days. That’s pretty much it.

As long as the military is not on your side, you will lose badly. And as long as the soldiers don’t suffer, they will support the status quo because they have something to lose.

How does the left (from our perspective) woman’s top work by the way?

Like, it somehow sticks to her skin instead of “flowing down” the missing chunk in her abdomen?

The term narcissist doesn’t just refer to someone with that personality disorder.

If you are a self-centered asshole, you are a narcissist regardless of an NPD diagnosis.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism

Narcissism is a self-centered personality style

Same with calling someone stupid. It doesn’t mean they have a learning disability.

That’s not a fair example, I know what linear algebra is but can’t tell what’s going on.

Change of basis would be my guess, but that’s pretty basic.

You could’ve provided something far worse, like a manual construction of the Jordan normal form of a large matrix.

If you’re riding on a bumpy path in the woods, helmets make a lot of sense.

But most roads do not have tree roots or rocks around.

That’s not a thing in like every single country. Might as well add a “Name of the Chinese primary school you graduated from” field, at least that would have more users.

Right?? I genuinely don’t understand this meme, I have never wanted to stack my coins and hold them. Do these people not have wallets?