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Apple already shipped attestation on the web, and we barely noticed

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596 points pimterry | 1 comments | 25 Jul 23 14:10 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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lifeisstillgood ◴[25 Jul 23 14:29 UTC] No.36862777[source]▶
I kind of get both sides here. If we take the "see the best of others intentions" then a web that is populated by identified humans (and their authorised proxies!) is likely to be the "cleanest", most ideal web space we can see (a web full of sock puppets and link farms is not ideal).

The clearest end point for this is some government issued digital ID that just asserts who you are, acts as a login etc.

You can see this as a stepping stone to there. if you squint.

Is it the idealism of the 70s coke to life? No. Is it some sane compromise - I think so.

What if we cannot trust our government ? Sorry it is pretty sure that no internet is going to solve that. That's on the real world.

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tolmasky ◴[25 Jul 23 14:47 UTC] No.36863074[source]▶
> a web that is populated by identified humans (and their authorised proxies!) is likely to be the "cleanest", most ideal web space we can see (a web full of sock puppets and link farms is not ideal).

Depends on your definition of "ideal", and whether you even want to strive for such an "ideal". To me this sounds more like a "sterile" web. If we temporarily assume that humans won't do what they're experts at (finding ways around that system too), and take at face value that this will lead to this "cleanest" web space, we are still assuming that that's what consumers want. I would argue that the very existence, and success, of the web in the face of approximations to this "ideal" space in the native-app-world disproves this theory. We have the App Store, we have lock-down control and identifiability for apps, and yet the web still manages dominate commerce in the face of this. Consumers still end up going to the web, and arguably increasingly so with things like Figma. So where are the cries for this "sanitized" web? The demand certainly doesn't appear to be on the consumer end, that's for sure.

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lifeisstillgood ◴[25 Jul 23 15:58 UTC] No.36864293[source]▶
"clean" / "sanitized" is not the terms I really want. I think a web (living under a democratic legal system) that uses sane forms of digital identity verification will help reduce the ridiculous levels of online fraud we are seeing. (yes citation needed)

To me that's (again under legal / democratic protections) using some centralised public private key (probably) and a curated env and this is (sort of being very generous) a first step towards that world.

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1. mrguyorama ◴[25 Jul 23 20:42 UTC] No.36869130[source]▶
I do fraud prevention as my job. The "ridiculous levels of online fraud" isn't happening. There's been a mild uptick in fraud which you would expect from an event that impoverishes millions (covid), but all those people on your favorite website that are so crazy they must be bots spreading misinformation? Nope, those are almost entirely real people. Millions of people are just that awful, hateful, spiteful, dumb, whatever.