I had an idea about amost-privacy-preserving system by involving government ID and blind signatures:
1. The service passes a random string to the user.
2. The user authenticates to their government and asks the government to sign it.
3. The government applies a blind signature which basically says "this user/citizen hasn't registered an account in the last 60 minutes".
4. The government records the timestamp.
5. The user passes the signature back to the service.
Upsides:
* Bypassing this would be orders of magnitude more expensive than phone numbers.
* Almost private
Downsides:
* Won't happen. Remote HW attestation is likely to win :(
* The service knows your citizenship * The gov knows when and how often you register.
* Any gov can always bypass the limits for themselves.
I think it may be also possible to extend it so that the government attests that you have only one account on the service but without being able to find which account is yours.
Some time ago there was a website that showed you a random YouTube video. Like truly random. The biggest discovery to me was that a typical video has 0-1 views, nearly always <10. I bet most people don't realize this is how YouTube actually looks like. And I guess it's also a good small reminder to all people trying to become famous on social media.
I believe the website tried to find videos with least bias possible by doing some clever searches using YouTube API (so not just videos titled IMGXXXX). Maybe it was trying to do partial matches on video ID.
> The biggest discovery to me was that a typical video has 0-1 views, nearly always <10. I bet most people don't realize this is how YouTube actually looks like.
This is also interesting when thinking about how to optimize a video platform. You can see how the vast majority of videos could be evicted to cold / slow storage.
That's probably rare but I had a no name TV which just let me just enable adb over network with full root access. IIRC I had to install an app that can launch arbitrary activities so I could access the buildin Android settings menu instead of the crippled TV settings UI.
For a case when file sharing is intended between individuals or small groups there's an easy solution:
Anyone who got the link should be able to delete the file.
This should deter one from using the file sharing tool as free hosting for possibly bad content. One can also build a bot that deletes every file found on public internet.
Imagine some computer work with a class of high school kids, where a teacher has to send them a file... there will be maybe three full downloads max, before someone presses the "delete" button.
Sending files anonymously and sending files easily seems like mutually exclusive problems. If it's easy and anonymous, it's too easy to abuse. The teacher should just be using file storage that is tied to an account: it's not as though they're trying to stay hidden from their students
For a lot of use cases, simply sending the address of the deleter to whoever sent the file would suffice. Next time, just don't send it to them, or apply real-world consequences.
Sure, it wouldn't work for a large public setting... but it'd work for many other settings.
That's a good point. Moreover, someone built[1] an SSH server that prints your name when you connect (because GitHub publishes SSH public keys of every user):
[1]: https://github.com/melontini/bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shame
[2]: https://xdaforums.com/t/future-of-unlocking-bootloaders-in-a...