Don't worry, plenty of people are willing to talk about vaccine safety, even if they have no idea what they're talking about and don't understand rates or per-capita figures (lots of crossover there!)
Most problems that aren't reduced to poverty can be reduced to people who can't read graphs and only understand linear functions. Alternative wording "it's normies that are the problem"
I think the obvious answer is they aren't held to account by regulators. If a few execs were sent to prison for defrauding their users (and investors for taking on so much risk) things would change overnight.
I think this rule is quite unfortunate. Wouldn't we all be better off if sites that hijacked back buttons were just banned or at least had their posts hidden until they're fixed?
Sure, they're somewhat common issues, but so are ads for malware served by Google. Surely we should call those out?
It would be crossing a line for us to ban or penalize sites in response to complaints about the back button.
In this particular instance, it works fine for me on Chrome. When I test it in Safari, I can see the same behaviour that people are complaining about, but I also find that if you double-click the back button, it takes you back to HN.
I point that out because it seems clear to me that the site author has not set out to implement a “dark pattern” to trick visitors into staying on their site against their will; they've just tried to implement some in-page navigation, and perhaps only tested it in Chrome.
That's outside the boundary of reasonable grounds for us to penalize a page or site. It puts us in the position of having to investigate a page's behaviour in different browsers and to adjudicate on the severity of the dysfunctional browser behaviour and the author's intent (i.e., their inner thoughts). We clearly can't be getting into that; it takes up too much time and we will never be able to consistently reach fair decisions.
I can understand the frustration, but as well as asking HN users not to fixate on offtopic distractions like this, we also ask people to "assume good faith", and I see no reason not to follow that guideline in this case.
A quick email to the author would have more likely led to a favourable outcome than this meta-subthread.
Honestly, I feel like browsers should handle this.
Sites are always going to do malicious shit. The browser should know that when I hit the back button I want to go to the place I clicked that brought me here. SPAs have severely perverted this simple idea, but I’m sure browser devs can figure it out.
It was really just a bad design decision that was exploited. It should be deprecated and removed. Allow it on intranets or some legacy website specific setting, but it should be blocked on the public internet.
I don't know, but I suspect the battery drain would be substantial. I wonder if there is a different explanation: maybe one of your friends searched for information on the topic while you were on the same hotspot/in the same location and that (along with existing relationship graphs?) allowed them to target you? That's how I'd do it, I think.
I don’t know how old you are but the GOP has 180’d on trade, international relations, unions, Social Security, and Medicare among many other issues over the past 30 years.
> You may trust them with your money, but does not equate to trusting them with any other personal information.
How do you expect that they will give you your money when you walk in to a branch and ask for a withdrawal? Or that they'll replace a lost card? Surely you'd expect them to verify your identity.
Well, how do you expect a website to know that you are 18+?
The technical solution offered earlier was to have a trusted third-party only be willing to answer the "is this person 18+?" question. Of course, the same works for banks. The trusted third-party can answer "does this person own this account?" without needing to reveal to the bank any other information about you.
Now, that still leaves open the question of who you can trust. If you can trust a business run by people then that allows you to trust a bank, sure, but it also allows you to trust a tech company, so why not just give the tech company your ID and skip all that technical complexity? Understandably the broader idea presented earlier was that you cannot trust businesses operated by people, but then that includes banks, so...
For the sake of discussion, if we accept that technical solution and the need for a trusted third-party that is a business run by people, surely it should at least be a business that does nothing but offer profile trust to minimize the blast radius? For what reason would we want that business to have their hand in other activities like chat or banking?
> Now, that still leaves open the question of who you can trust. If you can trust a business run by people then that allows you to trust a bank, sure, but it also allows you to trust a tech company
Banks are subject to much stricter regulation than any tech company is or ever will be (IMO, I could end up surprised).
I trust my bank to know who I am and keep track of my money. I trust big tech to lose or misinterpret my data, to close my account for no reason, etc, and to face zero consequences for those failures -- not even fines.
> Banks are subject to much stricter regulation than any tech company is
That's true, but remember what we're talking about: Using banks (or another trusted third-party) to assert your age instead of having big tech collecting your personal information themselves. There is context here. Writing comments in a vacuum makes no sense.
In that context it is understood that only incentive for big tech to follow the proposed is regulation, but if you are going to push regulation on them then you can regulate them just as much as banks.
Your broader point that, in the real world, there isn't much political will to push any of that regulation is also no doubt true, but, again, writing comments in a vacuum makes no sense. The hypothetical of big tech adopting a third-party attestation system was already understood to be just that: hypothetical.
They could verify your identity if you've given it to them.
But it would also be completely reasonable to authenticate the customer exclusively using mechanisms other than government ID. You can already make a withdrawal using your bank card and PIN. If you lose your card you could sign into their website using your password and request a new one etc.
Consider what happens if you lose your government ID. Your bank has much better ways to authenticate you at that point than the government does. Government ID has a major bootstrap problem, whereas patronizing a service doesn't because a new account with no money in it belongs to whoever is signing up for it regardless of who they are, and you can at that point give them a bank card and have them provide a password and email address etc. that allows you to identify them in subsequent transactions without ever needing their name.
This is the new Republican mainstream, the same mainstream that brings us AI generated videos of the Obamas as apes. They have no shame and are likely irredeemable (certainly their behavior is inexcusable).
And ultimately these statements aren't for the normal citizens. They're for the truly strange, the racists, and the trolls.
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