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- Hacker News
- Looking at that page, it cites the rating string "RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA" with no indication what those numbers mean or why the RTA is repeated. Googling that string, it just seems to be some random fixed token. Why have we got this nonsense?
Also, why is this restricted to only marking up adult sites? There should be an equivalent for marking sites that are specifically designed for children (e.g. educational material) and specifically tested as designed for adults but safe for children (e.g. news).
Without the safe opt-in, this scheme can never work, as the majority of the sites will be considered safe for children when they are not, and nobody will be able to trust it. Better to have an opt-in safe marker, and some enforcement against websites that mark their content as child-safe when it's not.
An example of why you need to force people to opt-in is e.g. HTTPS, which was available for years but only really taken up by banking websites etc. It was only adopted by everybody when it was enforced by the browser. Until website owners are forced to take an action to explicitly mark their content as safe or adult, it simply won't happen at scale.
by ralferoo - We lost this war when we got bamboozled into putting the V-Chip into televisions.
The obvious tradeoff was that we should have been able to have all forms of offensive and pornographic choices on the public airwaves, because we've given those who are concerned the tools to explicitly block it. (not that "unplugging the set when the parents weren't around" wasn't a viable tool already).
We never got that.
I do wonder how much of it is directly that the "won't someone think of the children" demographic is politically loud and courtable in and of itself, and how much of it has been fostered by firms that see it as a conduit for more nefarious aims (i. e. commercial social providers who want desperately for a legal CYA so they don't have to do the dance of COPPA compliance and have an incentive in the verified demographic details age attestation provides)
by hakfoo - I fully expect anonymity to disappear, but also certain causes will still be supported by massive amounts of bot accounts.by Buttons840
- In the world where people with authority lie casually and bots are cheaper and smarter than people, anonymity does not grant freedom or empower democracy anymore. West is hopelessly outgunned to modern polit&propaganda technologies of russia and China, still citing 1984 like this is 20th century.by Svoka
- > Pass laws requiring companies that use third party age or ID verification to take full legal culpability for that data. If any of the data is leaked they must pay each party $1 million dollars regardless of how or why the data was leaked. 300 identities leaked or sold? That will be 300 million dollars not counting criminal penalties. Should this lead to bankruptcy then it is working as intended as they are clearly not qualified to be guardians of this data much less the guardians of your children.by mentalgear
- Discord used a 3rd party and they were supposed to delete IDs they were sent, but they didn't do that and it got leaked
- Oh no not my LLC that keeps zero dollars on the books.
- Too much? I suppose the solution would be to not collect the data in the first place and instead use RTA headers and client checks for said header assuming legislators come to their senses and start caring about kids.by Bender
- There has got to be a way to assert that a user is human, and over some age, without having to identify which specific human that is.by edoceo
- by ricochet11
- I suspect something like this is on the way, in the long term. Every site has some Cloudflare captcha or the like to guard against the AI scraper bots. Eventually, we may need some kind of token which is only issued to real humans.by big85
- Confirmation someone is human is harder. Over some age could be accomplished with time should most of the devices and browsers children have access to were to check for RTA/adult headers and activate parental controls. It would not be solved over night thus not perfect but perfect is the enemy of good.
At the moment what we have is no good in my opinion. What we have at the moment will put the identification information of both children and adults at risk. Children can not even consent to sharing this data thus the only people that could protect them are their parents.
by Bender - This is an impossible task. If a certain business wants to make human id required, let them. It should not be enforced by government.
You have full control over your router and kid's devices so start there. Not anyone else's responsibility.
by nodrog3000 - There were proposals to do this, using encrypted containers of data that would let users authorize apps to use just the data they needed, but the idea got tied to Web3, which got some intense public blowback between the Crypto and NFT hype cycles.
https://www.w3.org/2023/Talks/0727-wearedevelopers-tbl/solid...
Now we’re onto AI, so we have suboptimal age verification, with implementations in law written by politicians
- Taylor Lorenz has been sounding the alarm. Peter Thiel and all his pets have been pushing the same narrative https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0RRxR4LvK4&t=661sby zapataband1
- I've never really liked Taylor Lorenz's writing, but after following her work in 2025/2026, I have to admit that she is our girl on this one.by miiiiiike
- 20 years before that, there was “The Digital Imprimatur”: <https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/>by teddyh
- ahhh fourmilab. I still run John's earth screensaver.by nezuzen
- Simple solution, Use your router to block whatever you need to, control your kids devices, the internet stays free and open.
What are we talking about?
There are no laws that will turn out well.
by nodrog3000 - You want the internet to be engineered so you will be able to MITM traffic?by inigyou
- You know what we are talking about. It was written in the book.
- The entire point is to gain control over internet traffic. Your suggestion doesn't work because it requires people to implement it themselves and since you can't control all people, you can't control how they're going to implement it.
The title "for the children" is tongue-in-cheek. It's not serious.
by singingtoday - <meta name="RATING" content="RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA" />
I wonder why the rating code is so complex. Pornhub.com has this code enabled, but it also uses a simpler <meta name="rating" content="adult">. 4chan also uses the latter.
by big85 - probably for uniqueness. This code is set by a very specific standard while adult could mean almost anything.by inigyou
- I think it should be fairly simple client code to look for either of them.by Bender
- Maybe because it leads people to cease providing non-rated contents, contrary to the intent of regulations.
This btw actually happen: "Sesame Scheme: Unintended Consequences of Allergen Food Labeling"( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074487 )
by numpad0 - I can't find any information on https://rtalabel.org/ to explain why that specific string, but I appreciate that the string being unique made it easy to find the official website, compared to something generic like "adult".by omoikane
- To add to the list: KYC/AML-like regulations and practices (not necessarily financial) that shift the responsibility down the chain, outside the accountability zone, and result in preventive overly broad risk avoidance, self-censorship, and manipulation of your Overton window. See for example DMCA vs YouTube practices vs what actual channels choose to do to dodge both. Or algospeak. Or the PayPal situation which is mentioned in the article.
But it's all talk. Political pressure is like gas pressure. Gas expands to fill the available volume. What do you actually do to push back, besides talking about it on the web? This defines the available volume, if you don't do anything it's infinite.
- Create a government from scratch.
Version control the laws.
Compare the laws with all other countries.
Hoard data.
Write code to replace government employees and to make laws easy to implement. (If done well consider selling a product or service)
Make everything modular so that the establishment can steal it.
Get people involved. Doesn't matter if you need to write a sim and convince them it is a game.
Pretend the whole exercise is writing code so that you can imagine you are perfect for the job.
I learn that people from all political angles like the idea of voluntary taxes (but no one believes it can work)
If the whole thing can run on donations and volunteers with a few "state" owned companies a hot swap becomes inevitable.
by econ - What is the final defense? I suppose we create underground relay networks of radio networks within cities that allow for computers to connect directly to eachother, and from there we seed all our pirated content and discuss whatever the hell we'd like.
Maybe we'd have to contend with low bandwidth when we connect outside our own city network, using larger wavelength radio to bounce off the ionosphere across the planet.
As for the FCC, I don't really care. I will set up nodes on top of abandoned buildings. I will set up nodes in front of the local FCC field office. I will set up nodes in the middle of the forest. I will set up nodes on buoys out at sea. They may capture me or worse, so be it. I will not be around forever anyhow.
I pray there are still actual hackers out there on hacker news who might consider this idea and help further the technical side. This is a little out of my wheelhouse. I just can't accept this inevitable incoming future where all our communications will be IDed and censored. That is the end game for them. We can't allow for that to happen. This might be the biggest battle yet, bigger than all the other wars where power used us like pawns against the pawns of some other power, because for once in the history of civilization, we'd be fighting for our own right and not some elite group's right. I hope I am not alone in this line of thinking.
by asdff