> What lead it to being "banned in dozens of countries all over the world, including the United Kingdom and China"?
Almost everyone who banned it did so because of acute toxicity - it requires careful handling to use safely.
Unfortunately, it was commonly used to commit suicide in many countries. In other countries, it was deaths from accidental ingestion, lung damage from unsafe handling, etc.
I don't know of any country that banned it because of a purported link to Parkinson's.
Even the golf course trade association only claims 10% grey water use.
Also, you're going to be shocked, data centers can cool with grey water as well. The now-cancelled Project Blue data center near Tucson was going to build and operate a wastewater pipeline and treatment plant and give it to the city, but the shouting NIMBYs prevailed anyway. The developer now intends to use air-to-air cooling, which costs more energy.
Intentionally modifying a license plate in order to prevent it from being read read by a very specific privately held company's cameras that then sells that info to whomever will pay.
No. It's mostly that the proposed age verification schemes have fundamental problems that disqualify them from being considered "good" and none of the "better" implementations fix those problems at all.
I'm just waiting for governments to start requiring OS makers to verify identity on consumer phone/laptop/console devices before you can use them.
After all, they can legitimately claim it solves much of the issues with other verification schemes - no need to trust third party sites or apps, lower risk of phishing, easier to implement internationally and with foreign nationals, etc.
Of course, the downside (for individuals) is it would take just one legal tweak or pressure from the government to destroy anonymity for good.
- If I can do a zero knowledge proof once per day against someone who is under age, I can eventually determine their birthday.
- If I can do a zero knowledge proof with an arbitrary age, I can eventually determine anyone's birthday.
- If the only time people need to verify their age is to visit some site that they'd rather not anyone know they visit and that requires showing identity - even if it's 100% secure, a good share of people will balk simply because they do not believe it is secure or creating a chilling effect on speech.
- If the site that verifies identity is only required for porn, then it has a list of every single person who views porn. If the site that verifies identity is contacted every time age has to be re-registered, then it knows how often people view porn.
- If the site that verifies identity is a simple website and the population has been trained that uploading identity documents is totally normal, then you open yourself up to phishing attacks.
- If the site that verifies identity is not secure or keeps records, then anyone can have the list (via subpoena or hacking).
- If the protocol ever exchanges any unique identifier from the site that verifies your identity and the site that verifies identity keeps records, then one may piece together, via subpoena (or government espionage, hacking) every site you visit.
Frankly, the fact that everyone promoting these systems hasn't admitted there are any potential security risks should be like an air raid siren going off in people's heads.
And at the end of all of this, none of it will prevent access to a child. Between VPNs, sharing accounts, getting older siblings/friends to do age verification for them, sites in jurisdictions that simply don't care, the darkweb, copying the token/cert/whatever from someone else, proxying age verification requests to an older sibling/rando, etc. there are way, way too many ways around it.
So one must ask, why does taking all this risk for so little reward make any sense?
UNCLOS provides that “all states have universal jurisdiction on the high seas to seize pirate ships and aircraft, or a ship or aircraft taken by piracy and under the control of pirates, and arrest the persons and seize the property on board” [1].
> if we're using that as a justification, are we admitting the US has turned pirate then?
No, because the seizure was not “committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship or a private aircraft” [2]. Under UNCLOS states can’t be pirates.
(Again, this is academic. China has been blowing off UNCLOS judgements in the South China Sea for years.)
Because paraquat was approved for use over much of the world at one point, including countries people claim require substances be "proven safe."
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