• 3 Posts
  • 95 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • The way that London has done a congestion tax, by law, all the funds raised from it go towards improving public transit. It has been an enormous success there! The transit is much better, the city is less polluted, and if you do choose to drive in the city, you have less traffic to deal with.

    I’m sure you can find a niche of people who are worse off in this situation, but Londoners overall are very supportive of it given the fact it has been in place for 22 years now without a gov’t repealing it.


    1. Many taxpayer funded services still have additional fees for the users (postal service, toll roads, etc)
    2. This is a common argument against congestion pricing, but it ignores the fact that the lowest income people cannot afford a car/gas. Implementing congestion pricing and shifting resources towards public transit would be a huge win for the poorest in our society

  • This is a very hard problem to solve, and people have tried.

    Let’s say you do as you said: hash the data (screenshot, date, etc) and upload it to a trusted server. Nothing can stop me from generating fake data, hashing that and uploading it instead.

    Ok, so maybe you decide to add a cryptographic signature to prove that it was the web browser that made this hash, not an unauthorized one. That might work for a while, but the private key needs to be shipped with the browser software, so a sophisticated person could extract that key and then generate fake data. Especially is the browser is open source (like most are).

    Alright, what about if we add a special chip on the device that is hard to tamper with and keep the private key on there and do all the signing on that chip. Those do exist somewhat already, but hackers have found ways to break them.

    Ok then you move everything to the cloud. Have the entire web browser running on a cloud machine by a trusted authority. Maybe then you can do what you’re discussing, but you’ve also entered a privacy nightmare where everything you’re doing can be monitored in real time.

    What would be a better situation (and where I think we’re going eventually with Gen-AI) would be to put the responsibility on the website publisher to provide cryptographic proof of their content. For example, the NYTimes could create a digital signature of a photo and publish it on a blockchain or other trusted tamper-proof ledger as they publish the photo. Then anyone can verify that the photo is from the NYTimes and the date it was created.