Re: [Taler] [address@hidden: 'Oh, that's an idea...': U.S. parents respond to China screen time ban]

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > As Jacob says, attributes always create ethical problems in
  > anonymous authentication.

I could not follow Jacob's argument -- it was written in a sketchy way.
Unfortunately, that means I can't follow your point either.

                               The W3C’s DID and VC schemes expressly
  > wants end users to prove things like education, employment status,
  > residency, age, etc.  It’s immediately clear this’ll be abused,
  > say by employers wanting job applicants only from currently
  > employed people.

That might be illegal in many countries.  Besides which,
to distinguish characteristic C with a special taler token
depends on a bank to issue them which can tell whether you
have characteristic C.

  > We should always encourage websites to not require any
  > authentication for this reason, but..

I agree, but I'm telling you about government programs which
require these criteria, and enforce them digitally in a way
that also tracks what the person purchases.

Certainly we can disapprove of payment systems that cntrol who can buy
what, but we can't stop governments from imposing them.

  > Anonymous authentications via ring VRFs permits the developer to
  > specify exact control over this “context”, so like every users
  > gets a different identity in each chat room and on each day or
  > whatever.  Although a downside is its a bit easier to add
  > attributes besides ring membership.

I don't have the background to understand this, sorry.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)