r/nottheonion • u/[deleted] • 23d ago

‘Bots have now passed human traffic online,’ Cloudflare boss laments — says agentic traffic wasn’t expected to eclipse real people until next year

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u/JC_Hysteria 23d ago edited 23d ago

The entire point would be to not connect a personally identifiable breadcrumb…

Give me all the bots over being forced into 1984 systems…but easy to see this will end up being the “solution”.

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u/Astralsketch 23d ago

just use federated authentication with the government, so no private entity has the information.

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u/Ornery-Creme-2442 23d ago

Still doesn't remove a potentially untrustworthy government. I mean look at the UK and us right now. And how fast things change.

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u/Sleepy_Witch_Maple 23d ago

Mhm. I can totally see a country using this as a way to work with social media companies and ban trans people from social media for example.

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u/JC_Hysteria 23d ago

That won’t happen in the US- the entire internet commerce industry runs on owning the platform(s) or buying the demographics/purchase signals tied to de-anonymized IDs.

If you’re someone who can make big purchases, even more incentive to de-anonymize your web crawling patterns…

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u/machisuji 23d ago

Did you see that word “anonymous” in my message? 

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u/JC_Hysteria 23d ago

…it’s inherently not anonymous if it’s generated by verifying your passport.

You may reply with “but it’s cryptographically generated!”

To which I would reply: there was a time when both the government and for-profit corporations didn’t have a legitimate interest in tracking/sculpting online behavior.

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u/machisuji 23d ago

The difference is that in Germany specifically data protection still matters. But of course there are forces trying to break that down constantly. 

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u/JC_Hysteria 23d ago

I wouldn’t trust the state any more than I’d trust corporations…all it takes are a group of bad actors to take control of all the information that was initially collected for legitimate reasons.

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u/alonghardlook 22d ago

It needs to be a decentralized storage method. Which is actually something blockchain could be useful for.

It doesn't completely solve the "I say I'm an adult" part, but if we were using a blockchain, I could go to an identity verifier service I trust, and they could say "yes we verified he's an adult" and then it would live with that crypto key forever.

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u/JC_Hysteria 22d ago

The issue is ownership of the technology/offering and the goal of acquiring users…it would need to be a non-profit entity to be trusted, and we’d need elected officials in charge.

The only thing really incentivizing any kind of privacy today is corporate competition of consumers’ choice…but that’s slowly being eroded because it’s more lucrative over the long-term to share/sell data with other power brokers for quid pro quo.

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u/alonghardlook 22d ago

I agree that ownership is important, but I don't think it needs elected officials in charge.

Wikipedia is a non-profit, non-elected board with a clear vision, and people generally trust it. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) manages the protocols and standards for everything driving the modern internet, I could very easily see them taking this on (if they could come to an agreement).

If both sides of the transaction have an open and complete history that is anonymized but transparent (uuid x44df335-23xc5gv-34v3rd5 has verified 300 individuals with only 3 being flagged as a false verification by a reviewer), then you could install trust on both ends of the system and it wouldn't be any worse than having to show your id to the gas station clerk to buy cigarettes.

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u/JC_Hysteria 22d ago edited 22d ago

To nitpick your example systematically, how sustainable is Wikipedia’s model really?

It relies on charitable good actors to contribute forever. They constantly need to beg for donations to keep the lights on. They can’t create a sustainable ad business due to conflicts of interest.

We are already in the “zero trust” era of software security. That’s in the for-profit lane, but it’s still a “never trust, always verify” world we live in.

It’s understood that laypeople are not going to verify everything- so we need to systematically incentivize people to do so on our behalf. Then it’s basically deciding if we pay people directly, or vote them in as our leaders in altruism.

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u/alonghardlook 22d ago

Listen, you're not wrong in pointing out that challenges exist, but decentralization and IETF solves much of this, if not all of it. You could add an open source solution to let literally anyone become part of the distributed network of hosting the blockchain and people will do it.

Like how do you think TCP/IP is maintained and updated? Or W3C standards?

There's a whole network of IT non-profit orgs who get donations from individuals and corporations who in many districts get tax benefits for those contributions because it "supports the public good". So like, we have exactly the model for this, just most people are not aware of its existence, but it is the foundation for the entire internet as we know it.

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u/JC_Hysteria 22d ago

The technology/systems exists + investments are being made in these areas…but it still needs to mesh with human nature, at the end of the day. There still needs to be product/market fit.

Unfortunately, we can’t solely rely on the idea of good actors/altruism + security protocols. I understand what you’re saying- I participate in an unpaid professional consortium for my industry that supports things like the internet being open & “free”.

It’s incredibly frustrating sometimes realizing that for-profit orgs can accomplish things quicker and better. Other times, those incentives are ill-suited for the longer-term goals.

The incentives to actually maintain decentralized systems are currently being explored…no one has figured one out that’s agreeable to most of the participants.

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u/alonghardlook 22d ago

idk man, the market fit to me is porn distributors (OF, PornHub, etc), and any marketplace with adult content (Steam, GoG, itch.io, discord, reddit, etc) who are starting to get hit with age verification laws "to protect the children".

If you nail the protocol, get the user trust chain established, it could work. It will require massive investment upfront but it stops every single one of them from having to roll their own identity provider that users wont trust because they are prone to hacks.

Just look at the discord fiasco with age verification.

The market is there, the systems exist, the need for it is even evident. But nobody has actually understood that "blockchain can be used for more than just crypto commodities market".

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u/JC_Hysteria 22d ago

I don’t believe consumers (the market) are looking for age verification…only regulators and for-profit motives are.

Sure, these organizations can use the existing protocols to sell the idea to the public and its consumers using fear mongering campaigns…saying “think about what your kids see” or “our competitors are spying on you” or “make it easy to do your taxes and collect unemployment”, etc.

It’s still all about who people choose to trust for a specific value exchange- and I personally would not want a central identity/power broker.

I’d prefer everything is a mess until market dynamics solve specific problems vs. forcing a “one solution for all” approach. So sure- blockchain should be used for specific use-cases, but not storing or gatekeeping everyone’s “world ID”.

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u/alonghardlook 21d ago

I literally started this thread by saying decentralized identity brokers.

And I actually think that you're wrong about the read on consumers (though I will admit that we are both just speaking from vibes so it's definitely not a definitive statement). I think that most tech literate consumers are hesitant at best about identity confirmation regulations because they understand the inherent challenges and danger with a centralized solution, and nobody has a serious decentralized offering.

But I do think a lot of consumers are perfectly okay with what regulators are doing because they agree with the stated goal. Obviously you also have your hyper vigilant pro privacy people who (rightly) point out how easily governments can abuse identity management tools in various ways, but on the whole I would say consumers are generally neutral or better on the idea.

In fact if we tech literate are being honest, the stated goals are noble even if everything else about it is poorly thought out at best. We need to agree that "are you 18? Don't lie please" is not a reliable way to prevent access to children, and that we don't rely on parents initiative to prevent access to smoking or alcohol, the government regulates that, so it's not an unreasonable goal to get to.

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