[ExI] The internet bot problem

[Stuart LaForge]

On 2024-11-30 07:54, Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat wrote:
> Corporations, which are not people, can already get tax ID numbers.
> 
> Also, which "the" government would one have to have a relationship
> with?  Would, say, the Indian or Brazilian government fully trust the
> US government to authenticate their citizens, and to provide
> personhood credentials only to its actual human beings?  (Leaving
> aside the Russia/China/et al mess.)

Perhaps Identity Confirmation as a person could become like Credit 
History, a salable service to those that need it, that is run by 
companies similar to the credit reporting companies.


> And without what amounts to identification, how could personhood
> credentials not be trivially forged?  A non-shared password, or
> something like that, links to and thus identifies an individual.  If
> there's nothing linking the credential to a specific person, a
> computer (with or without AI) can simply copy the credentials and use
> them.

I have noticed a push by government and commercial websites towards 
biometric 2FA tied to the users' phone thumbprint unlock.

A more automated way of running identity-verification-as-a-service would 
be to run blockchain-type algorithms keyed to all available user 
biometrics, i.e. DNA SNPs or sequences, fingerprints, dental records, 
retinal patterns etc, on a network of identity servers that are 
regularly updated to keep up with user development, aging, and other 
changes to the users' physical identifiers. It could use a variety of 
possible consensus mechanisms so that any given biometric supplied by 
somebody claiming to be you would be matched against the blockchain and 
if you matched, it could issue the user a public and private key pair or 
an NFT that could be used to verify identity until the user's biometric 
profile was refreshed or updated, at which a new key pair or NFT could 
be issued to the user.

Stuart LaForge







> 
> On Sat, Nov 30, 2024 at 10:29 AM BillK via extropy-chat
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
>> Can humans purge the bots without sacrificing our privacy?
>> "Personhood" credentials could cleanse the internet of bots — but
>> are
>> the costs worth it?
>> By Ross Pomeroy     November 30, 2024
>> 
>> 
> <https://www.freethink.com/the-digital-frontier/personhood-credentials>
>> Quotes:
>> According to the 2024 Imperva Bad Bot Report, the proportion of
>> internet traffic generated by bots hit almost 50% this year, growing
>> 2% from the year prior. It’s hard to get a handle on the share of
>> essentially fake websites, social media accounts, comments, reviews,
>> and emails being churned out by bots, but it is surely vast.
>> 
>> Personhood credentials to the rescue?
>> “To get a personhood credential, you are going to have to show up
>> in
>> person or have a relationship with the government, like a tax ID
>> number,” Tobin South, a graduate student in MIT’s Media Lab and
>> one of
>> the report’s authors, told MIT News.
>> While a PHC proves your humanity, it would not be identification —
>> users would maintain anonymity.
>> But there are genuine risks and challenges.
>> -------------------
>> 
>> Indeed, proving you are human will become increasingly difficult.
>> Even video calls and chats can now be done by bots.
>> 
>> BillK
>> 
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