by perching_aix | 2026-03-07 14:14:24+00:00
> What an incredibly short-sighted, dystopian view.

You do recognize that the person I kept replying to was not asking these questions in earnest, right? They were all carefully directed questions, specifically designed to confirm their world view. I played into it, because I think they're pitiful and hilarious. Serves them right. Their latest question about government criticisms completes the caricature perfectly. All they're missing is referencing or quoting Orwell.

> I live in a country that has mandatory SIM registration, and it's stopping exactly zero organized criminals – these can just pay a tiny bit more and buy burner phones and use out-of-country SIM cards – while it's making life more complicated and expensive for the average citizen.

Pretty much the same here to my understanding. There's no credible evidence I'm aware of that'd suggest the criminal use of phone networks decreased significantly thanks to these. It might have improved on the exhaustion rate of the numbering pool, but I don't think we were particularly close to exhausting it anyways. Most benefit I can think of is a chance at traceability, but how well realized vs abused that is, no idea. Just like with IP leasing described in the article above, enlisting the help SIM mules has a long standing tradition, after all.

Any addressing system that relies on non-cryptographic identifiers will be prone to all kinds of mass misuse. There's no amount of lawmaking, honest or not, that could be implemented to counteract these. It's just like email.

> Thanks for being honest about this, though.

Except I really wasn't, and I find it both remarkably funny but also extremely concerning how on board you guys are with it. Propaganda and culture sure are powerful.

The current ways of identity verification are broken, and are prone to enable surveillance: this is something I fully recognize. What I refuse to recognize however is that the concept of identity verification would be wrong wholesale. There was another thread on here a few days ago that I did comment on, but the bottom line is, in my understanding there's no mathematical reason that things would have to be this way. Its shortcomings, including its enablement of mass surveillance, are an implementation issue, not something fundamental to the idea per se.

Being able to trust that a stranger you're talking to is

- an actual specific person

- is actually a stranger

are bottom of the barrel human expectations that communications technology have completely shattered. Technologically guaranteeing these, to the extent the analog hole problem allows for it, does not require dystopian practices. I'm confident that the lack of these guarantees is the root of many societal problems we see at large today. For better or for worse, a lot of people live a lot of their lives on the internet these days, but the internet is no hospitable place for them, among else for these exact reasons.

Accountability is a good thing. I refuse to let it be monkey paw-d by people who mean unwell into being recognized as a tool for evil, and I think you should too. Trust being abused by a centralized system does not mean trust is wrong. It means there are abusers at the wheel. The solution is not mistrust, or even systems that require less trust necessarily, although both can be useful. The solution is reworking the system to get more trustworthy people into the leading positions, and to make it so that those who have demonstrated to be not deserving are thrown out more readily. It is most unfortunate that this listing is ordered exactly by difficulty, from easiest to hardest. Trust is easily broken, and human systems are impossibly hard to get right. I don't think this justifies giving up though.