I think FOSDEM had a talk a few years ago about that solution and their tang server. It is very similar in concept. They use McCallum-Relyea exchange, and we use PGP encryption, but the basics are the same in that you need information stored at the server and information stored in the unencrypted initramfs in order to be combined and turned into the encryption key. If my understanding of the McCallum-Relyea exchange is correct, they also combine the key creation and perfect forward security of the transaction into a single protocol, while we use TLS and client keys for the perfect forward security aspect and PGP for data at rest.
With tang you need to verify the hash of the tang server in order to prevent a MITM threat from extracting the server side part during the key creation process, while with Mandos you configure it manually with configuration files.
Tang uses REST and JSON. Mandos sends a single protocol number and then sends the data. Both operate primarily through local LAN, through Mandos client also support as an option to use global reachable ip addresses.
Outside of those design differences, there are some packaging aspects. Tang was designed for Redhat/Dracut, while Mandos was designed for Debian and initramfs-tools (Today Mandos also support Dracut, but it is not packaged for Redhat). Redhat packaging has been requested multiple times for Mandos, but neither of us two developer are Redhat users.
To add some historical context, I recall a Debconf BoF by the developers of initramfs-tools about if they were going to continue developing initramfs-tools or giving up and port everything to Dracut, and the silence was fairly deafening. People did not want to give up on initramfs-tools, but everyone recognized the massive duplication that those two project are. Similarly, the reason why Redhat had chosen initially to develop Dracut rather than just port initramfs-tools is also fairly big mystery, and is generally considered a Not Invented Here syndrome. Today there are however some distinct difference in design between the two systems.
clevis and tang do currently work seamlessly on Debian and Ubuntu using initramfs-tools. So while the initramfs-tools/dracut discussion is valid, it seems mostly orthogonal to this topic.
I was unaware that they no longer depended on Dracut and now support initramfs-tools, which also seem to be the earliest clevis version that got packaged in Debian. That makes the initramfs-tools/dracut distinction a historical aspect of the project.
Some of the speed bumps-like techniques here in Sweden will do more than just be a bump, it will severely damage the tires if you don't slow down. Curbs that require the driver to make very tight turns for example can be made from fairly sharp stone with an clear edge. A SUV/pickup truck can speed over it, but the trip to the repair shop will make it less fun.
They added some square-like flower pots in the middle of a lovely road next to where I live in order to force drivers to make a double S turn. Those are made from sharp rust-painted steel, and most of the corners are now painted with other peoples car paint. The only way to make it through is to drive at walking speed, which basically everyone do.
This is how we should view all information we get from a company. If the product say organic, claim to be pure ingredients, recycled material, made in "COUNTRY", or any other claim, it is only just that. It is simply a claim that you as the customer has no way to verify.
Excess death from Covid is a non-trivial topic. Sweden had a very different approach to covid response, and yet had a very average number of excess death. The post-covid investigation provider some clear insight of what was primary causes to excess deaths, and yet very little of those conclusions has became common knowledge.
The primary group that had excess death caused from covid was to people living in homes for elderly care, and the primary cause was a lack of initial process and gear by people who worked at those locations. They were not given enough time to keep up a higher standard of sanitation (often given less than 15 minutes between patients), and protective gear was lacking. They also heavily depended on mass transportation which was a primary location for the virus to spread. A better early response in that sector, including shutdown/restriction of mass transportation would had saved many elderly people from early death.
To note, this had nothing to do with masks, vaccines, or shutdown of schools, which is the main points usually brought up in popular discourse. Sweden would have had one of the lowest number of deaths, with the exact same use of masks/vaccines/shutdowns as it did, as long as the response in elderly care had been done better.
The customer is sometimes liable for a purchases. If a person go and buy a known stolen item, pay money to known criminal activity/terrorists, then they may end up being punished for it.
The relevant question is what knowledge the buyer had, which the Court of Appeal did consider. Dyson UK companies and personnel was aware of the crime being done by the supplier.
The general legal question is not if a customer can be held liable for purchases. They can. It is how much due diligence is expected before someone should be held liable.
I am a bit confused by that comment. Are parents social responsible to prevent companies from selling alcohol/guns/cigarettes to minors? If a company set up shop in a school and sold those things to minors during school breaks, who has the social responsibility to stop that?
when I was a kid in the early 90's, my state (and many others) banned cigarette vending machines since there was no way to prevent them being used by minors, unless they were inside a bar, where minors were already not allowed.
The problem is, doing the analogous action with the entire internet is a privacy nightmare. You didn't have to tell 7-11 every item you bought at every store in the past 2 years and opt-in to telling them what other stores you go to for the next 5.
There is no digital equivalent of "flash an ID card and be done with it" in the surveillance state era of the internet. Using a CC is the closest we have and even then you're giving data away.
The analogous action is to only require age-restricted sites (or parts of sites) to check ID, not the entire Internet. e.g. no one is calling for mathisfun.com to check ID. I'd expect most parts of the web are child-friendly and would not be affected. Just like how almost all locations in physical space don't need to check ID.
Additionally, the laws I've read mandate that no data be retained, so you have stronger legal protections than typical credit card use, or even giving your ID to a store clerk for age restricted purchases (many stores will scan it without asking, and in some states scanning is required).
This might have the benefit of reversing the trend where everything on the internet was rolled in to social media. If social media is age restricted, news, announcements, etc will have to break out to dedicated websites if they want to be accessible by all ages.
just ban kids from the internet already. if a parent allows the kid to have a full function smartphone and the kids get caught with it then throw the parents in jail and kids in an orphanage. people will catch on.
I don't see why that would be the case. It's reasonable to allow services that have a policy forbidding such content and make good faith efforts to moderate and remove it promptly. Seems analogous to e.g. a building being vandalized with lewd drawings. Or laws about user submitted child pornography.
I expect most forums or discussion groups in practice actually don't have child-inappropriate content, and already moderate such things because the members don't want it.
You do not need to control the entire internet. Put time limits on connected devices. Use parental controls. Talk to your kids about what they do online. Set clear boundaries. Reward good behaviour. Talk to other parents to align these limits to avoid social issues among the kids.
We may be agreeing, I'm saying there is no battle tested, privacy safe technical method of verifying age online, and this the controls need to be in the physical environment and setting social standards for social media and phone use.
I live in the UK. By default your ISP will block "mature" content and you have to contact them to opt out. iOS, Android, Playstation, Xbox, Switch all have parental controls that are enforced at an account level.
A child with an iPhone, Xbox, and a Windows Laptop won't be able to install discord unless the parent explicitly lets them, or opts out of all the parental controls those platforms have to offer.
The tech is here already, this is not about keeping children safe.
Parts of discord are not safe at all for 13 year olds and currently there isn't a mechanism as far as I am aware to restrict a 13 year old from accessing them.
The solution to that is obviously some sort of Parental features, where a parent can create accounts for their kids with restricted access and/or monitoring capabilities. The solution isn't to require an ID from everyone just to "protect the kids"...
No, it's about corporate and government control. Thankfully, the UK government is clueless about tech, which means these controls can be bypassed relatively easily by using your own DNS or a public DNS server like Quad9.
The corporations in this case are fighting against this. This is about your government and its desire to squash opinions they don't like. They are already going so far as to jail people for posting opinions they don't like. This has absolutely nothing to do with children, children are just the excuse.
[Any] task is much easier if you have the tools. Do/did you have a baby monitor? A technological tool, that allows you to "monitor" the baby while not being within an arms reach.
Do you have an A+++++ oven with three panes of glass? It's [relatively] safe to touch and instead of monitoring if a child is somewhere near the oven you have to monitor if the child does not actively open the oven. That's much easier.
I remember how my sister and I set up Google Family and fully locked down my niece her phone with app restrictions, screen time restrictions and a policy of accountability when we need to extend the screen time.
It worked really well up until she got a school managed chromebook for homework with no access controls.
Can't your router block by Mac address? Just limit the Chromebook to allowlisted sites. And also school-issued computers are known for Spyware and even worse. It should probably be segregated in a separate network or vlan.
over 10 years ago, I had an intern from Harvard CS tell me that privacy is irrelevant unless you're doing something that you want to hide. I was gobsmacked that someone would not cherish their privacy but since then I've realized many don't care at all and have the same attitude that "I don't have anything to hide."
Well that's your mistake right there. You hired someone from Harvard. Unless you are hiring that person to use their connections to market your product, there is no reason to hire someone from Harvard. They just bring bad ideology and STDs from Russian hookers to the table and nobody wants that.
PS This post is partly satire, I will leave it to you as to which part is serious.
Many of my school colleagues started smoking around 10-11 years old. All of us had tasted alchol by then, and some of them were definitely drinking the occasional beer. Older kids sometimes brought porn magazines in school and would show younger kids too (still talking about pre-highscool here). Now, this was childhood in Romania in the 1990s and early 2000s, soon after the fall of communsim, so maybe not so applicable everywhere else, but still - I doubt that there is any problem for a resourceful 8-10 year old even today to get some of these things.
The older kids are often the easy source for the younger kids. At 8 I had already seen a Playboy and knew kids who had seen harder stuff. I could have easily gotten a teenager to get me cigarettes (and drugs, but I didn’t know what those were really). I had also already tasted alcohol. Any of this I could have stolen from any number of places.
There’s also a difference between “saw my first” and “saw a playboy once.” I need you to understand I was a good kid whose parents cared until they divorced some years later. And yet I had multiple sources of access to this stuff without looking for it. Now, as an adult, I can see more ways I could have gotten it if I wanted it.
Again, if you occasionally caught a glimpse of a playboy, that’s not a significant problem.
If you were regularly smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, and reading porn magazines at 8 yeas, your parents fell down on the job. An 8 year old doesn’t have the wherewithal to hide that from parents who are paying attention.
> Now, as an adult, I can see more ways I could have gotten it if I wanted it.
Yeah a kid with the mind of an adult could access all kinds of illegal material.
Making it illegal to rob a bank doesn’t mean that’s it’s literally impossible. It’s about stopping enough people from trying that society functions.
The state of the world before the internet was that it was hard to keep a kid from ever glimpsing a titty, but it was relatively easy to keep a kid from having regular access to hard core porn-much, much easier than it is now. My take is that as a society we need to figure out some way to make this easy enough for parents to do that it becomes the default. Just like drugs, alcohol, and porno mags.
Another issue is that online porn and algorithmic brain rot is free (at least enough of it is). With IRL contraband, lack of money is a big limiting factor for kids. The IRL equivalent would be if the local liberal let 8 year olds checkout hard core porn DVDs.
Yeah. Anyway, porn, cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs were very accessible to me despite being a good kid with parents who cared in a world where those were all legally forbidden to me.
All this talk of “glimpses” is you trying to read too deep into a single example.
I’m not using my adult mind to figure out how I could have gotten this stuff as a kid. I’m using my adult mind to recognize that if I had been motivated as a kid, there are additional ways I. as a kid, would have been able to figure out how to get it.
I’m not throwing my hands up in the air and saying this is impossible or that we should just open up access. I’m saying requiring ID for access wasn’t effective before and it won’t be effective in a world with easier access. Yet the cost of that is quite high. Scan these threads for actual ideas, I’m not arguing for any particular one but there are plenty of them and some I think are good.
>Yeah. Anyway, porn, cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs were very accessible to me despite being a good kid with parents who cared in a world where those were all legally forbidden to me.
Were they accessible to you, or do you just think they were accessible to you? How many of these teenagers who would let you try a cigarette would have been willing to keep supplying you cigarettes regularly. How many would have been willing to keep buying you alcohol?
>All this talk of “glimpses” is you trying to read too deep into a single example.
No, it's glimpses, because it's about at the very least semi-regular access, not preventing every single child from having tiny amounts of alcohol. Look at my reply the other poster in this thread. There are dozens of studies that show conclusively that minimum age drinking laws reduce alcohol use among children, and reduce alcoholism later in life.
>I’m saying requiring ID for access wasn’t effective before
But yes it was effective. Read the studies. Minimum age drinking laws have been shown almost universally to be effective. Not at stopping every child from drinking but at harm reduction.
>I’m using my adult mind to recognize that if I had been motivated as a kid, there are additional ways I. as a kid, would have been able to figure out how to get it.
The level an effort an 8 year old would have to go through to get regular access to cigarettes and alcohol in the US, would require an enormous level of motivation which almost no 8 year old has, and it would be outright impossible to do without a semi-observant parent noticing.
That's the whole point of making it hard to do.
It takes much less effort for a kid to walk to the library and check out a hardcore porn DVD than it does for him to convince an 18 year old to buy one for him. Most kids just aren't going to go through the hassle of doing the latter, but they'd do the former in a heartbeat. All things being equal, greater motivation is required to overcome greater obstacles.
I’ve told you that access was not a problem at all. All your questioning is because you can’t grasp my lived reality. You think I’m mistaken, but actually I just don’t care to try to convince you because you’re already so sure.
Disinterest was what really “saved” me from these vices but lacking that, it was my parents. I also had access to perfectly legal things that were bad for me that I actually wanted and it was my parents who helped me there too; no mandatory ID required.
You don't know that you had access though based on what you said. You think you might have had access looking back.
>I could have easily gotten a teenager to get me cigarettes (and drugs, but I didn’t know what those were really). I had also already tasted alcohol. Any of this I could have stolen from any number of places.
You never tried it so you have no idea how well it would have worked. You really think those teenagers would have kept giving you cigarettes for free? You didn't even know what drugs were so I don't know how you could possible know there were teenagers you knew who would have just given them to you.
Again I'm sure you could have stolen a few cigarettes, or a few bottles of alcohol. But your parents would have smelled both on you or caught you quickly because 8 year olds are idiots. Then they would have cut your access to teenagers or locked up their liquor better. And because of age restriction laws, that's all it would take for them to keep you away from it.
It doesn't sound like you have kids and it's probably been a while since you were 8, but you are severely overestimating the ability of a 2nd grader to get away with anything.
>but lacking that, it was my parents
Of course it was your parents. Mandatory ID laws aren't going to stop terrible parents from letting their kid have a beer every night before bed time. They make it easier for well well meaning parents to do the right thing and keep their kids out of stuff they shouldn't have.
Again minimum age and ID laws have been proven to reduce access and reduce alcohol and cigarette use. Even if you were some kind of criminal genius 2nd grader capable of stealing a few bottles of wine a week, you would be an outlier. There's no room for debate that these laws have their intended effect.
There’s “no room for debate” in your argument because you’re basing it on false assumptions, trying to gaslight me, moving goalposts and you personally don’t care about the trade offs. It’s very easy to be right when everyone else is wrong. Congrats.
There are clearly trade offs with any law, but your argument was never that the benefits aren’t worth the price it was that minimum age laws don’t work.
There’s no gaslighting going on here. “As an adult Looking back to when I was an 8 year old, I belong that had I been motivated I could have acquired alcohol and cigarettes” is not a persuasive argument that most or even many 8 years olds have access to alcohol and cigarettes.
It’s not even a good argument that you had access because you don’t know that you did.
“I think that I could have got teenagers to get me cigarettes” is not good evidence that you had access to cigarettes. Maybe there were teenagers who would have given you enough cigarettes to feed a habit. Maybe the first 5 you asked would have told you to get lost and you would have given up.
We’ll never know because you didn’t try it. But again even if you had,
the evidence shows that minimum ages laws substantially reduce the number of cigar smoked by kids, and the rate of kids who smoke.
If you want to make the argument that the price of making people show ID isn’t worth that benefit then fine make that argument. But you can’t make the argument that minimum ages laws don’t have their intended effect.
There absolutely is gaslighting here. I think now that some time has passed you should probably go back and re-read this thread. I can't be clearer about the fact that I accessed these things young without trying and continued to have access if I had wanted it. My comment about looking back as an adult was about even more access that could have been available to me if I had gone looking.
So even if you don't believe I have the capacity to understand that a teenager I know (who was also a child) who was doing drugs, smoking, etc., would absolutely have gotten me what I wanted; it doesn't follow that I didn't have the access I actually had. "We'll never know" is false. I know, because I was there.
As far as minimum age laws not having their intended effect, again, it's easy when you're the one saying what all the arguments are...
you are writing this as if you were never a kid yourself... there is absolutely nothing I wasn't able to "get" as a kid - some stuff I had to jump through some hoops but end-result would always end up being the same. if I wanted to watch hardcore porn, there was a way, if I wanted to smoke a cigarette, there was a way. if I wanted to drink, there was a way. and make it "forbidden" made it ever more appealing for me to get it as a kid. I grew up in society where alcohol was not a big deal, I was buying alcohol for my parents when I was 6-years old, would get sent to the store to get stuff and among the stuff was always beer and sometimes wine if my parents were expecting some guests. most of my friends growing up never thought of alcohol as something cool, we had easy access to it so it was like a rights of passage or anything like that and it showed, just about no one was doing any drinking while we were teenagers. when I came to america junior year of high school I was stunned at home much effort my schoolmates were making to acquire alcohol - could not really understand what the big deal is until I realized that was because it was forbidden and acquiring beer etc for a friday evening chill made one a cool kid.
the only barrier I have ever had to doing stupid things was the wrath of my parents. the punishment(s) levied when I did stupid shit was always such that I would very seldom-to-never-again consider doing whatever stupid shit I did. it always starts and ends with parents. you can put in whatever "laws" you want (which will always get weaponized politically at some point either immediately or at a later time) but end of the day the buck starts and stops with parents...
1. There is no scientific evidence that the "forbidden fruit" theory is correct. Studies of minimum drinking ages show a near universal reduction in drunk driving deaths, alcoholism, and crime rates.
If you care to google it there are dozens of additional studies that all say the same thing.
2. You're writing this as if you don't understand what it's like growing up in a country where 8 year olds don't have easy access to alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs.
And you're writing this as if you don't understand what it's like growing up was a kid growing up in America specifically. My young children and the young children of everyone I now could not regularly drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes without their parents knowing about it. When I was 8 I couldn't have done either regularly without my parents knowing about it.
Again this isn't about stopping every single kid in the world from ever trying alcohol. This is about making it harder for them get and easier for parents to enforce.
>end of the day the buck starts and stops with parents...
That's a completely unrealistic view of the world and it's just flat out wrong on the face of it because every study we have on the subject shows that minimum drink age laws reduce harm--they work. If it were solely up to the parent they wouldn't work.
The easier you make it for parents to do the right thing, the more of them will do it.
- they will honestly tell you that they'd be very happy to see you dead when you impose restrictions upon them (people who are older will of course possibly get into legal trouble for such a statement)
- they will tell they they wish you'd never have given birth to them (or aborted them)
- they will tell you that since they never wanted to be born, they owe you nothing
I raised kids. Never had to deal with anything like what is described. Sounds like someone read some questionable books on parenting, unfortunately followed the bad advice in those books and this is the result.
And this entire thing is about bad parenting. Its always easier to just give the kid a tablet and go back to whatever you were doing. Its always better to actually interact with the kid. That trade-off of time is important because if you mess up when they are young, you spend a lot more time handling issues later on. That time you gained by giving them a tablet will get payed back someday, usually with interest. That's what is happening here.
As a father of 3, one thing the wife and I had to learn over the course of the first two is that the modern world holds parents to impossible standards and a "fuck off" attitude is required for much of it.
We've had pediatricians shame us for feeding our kids what they're willing to eat and not magically forcing "a more varied diet" down their throats at every meal, despite them being perfectly healthy by every objective metric. There are laws making it technically illegal for us to leave our kids unsupervised at home for any period of time in any condition, even a few minutes if one of us is running slightly late from work/appointments.
Your not-quite-2-year-old is too tall for a rear-facing car-seat? You're a bad parent, possibly a criminal and putting them at risk by flipping the seat to face forward, a responsible parent spends hundreds of dollars they don't have on several different seats to maybe find one that fits better or have their kid ride uncomfortably and arguably unsafely with their legs hyper-extended up the seatback.
Miss a flu shot because you were busy? Careful you don't come off as an antivaxxer.
And all of this and more on top of changing diapers, doctors' appointments, daycare, preschool, school, family activities and full time jobs?
Yeah, when my kids are old enough to engage with social media I will teach them how to use it responsibly, warn them about the dangers, make myself available to them if they have any problems, enforce putting the phones down at dinner and and keep a loose eye on their usage. Fortunately/unfortunately for them they have a technically sophisticated father who knows how to log web activity on the family router without their knowledge. So if anything goes sideways I'll have some hard information to look at. Most families don't have that level of technical skill.
I was almost certainly never going to be a parent for other unrelated reasons, but you have just given me a whole other list of confirmations for that decision that I hadn't thought of before.
There's a law going through in some state that want's to do this, but also put the onus on the OS developers to detect age aligned behavior. How do you do this with Linux? It would kill the open computer and kill ownership over computing.
Why would it be a problem to do this sort of thing with linux? Linux allows for oauth, proxied networking, what have you -- unless they're using some super-secret-unpublished-protocol, linux will be fine
I'm against these age-verification laws, but to say it's impossible to comply with open-source software isn't really true.
The point is that you won't be able to just install a Linux distro of your choice in this world - your computer will only run approved OSs that have gone through some kind of certification process to make sure they enforce age-verification content. If, say, the Debian foundation doesn't want to add these mandatory controls because they feel it goes against the spirit of Debian (not to mention the huge issues with the GPL), then your new computer just won't be able to run Debian anymore. And something like Kali would be right out, of course, since anonymity is not compatible with age verification.
Or, Conversely, these systems won't be able to verify age and will just be shut out of adult content. Which is fine, just keep a windows machine around for porn and do your actual work on a real computer
But it isn't fine. How long before that's no longer an option?
A few years ago it was "Apple won't let me side load apps, which is fine, I'll run android" now that's coming back and getting locked down even more.
How long before normal computers will all have signed bootloaders with only the OEM's OS of choice allowed to boot, 4 chains deep of verifying signatures on hardware security chips?
I think the argument is more around it being illegal so as to not be forced into playing "the bad guy". It's hard to prevent a level of entitlement and resentment if those less well parented have full access. If nobody is allowed then there's no parental friction at all.
Its unfortunate that the application of this rule is being performed at the software level via ad-hoc age verification as opposed to the device level (e.g. smartphones themselves). However that might require the rigimirole of the state forcibly confiscating smartphones from minors or worrying nepalise outcomes.
I'm saying hold parent's accountable for their children's online behavior and for their protection online, not companies (who want to profit off the kids, perverse incentive) or governments (who can barely be trusted to do this even if this was the only goal). For example if your kid starts making revenge CP of their classmates, and the parent could have reasonably mitigated or known about it, I think the parent absolutely should be held responsible.
Don't punish the rest of the web for crappy parenting and crappy incentives by companies/govts.
If we want parents to be accountable, then these platforms need to provide better tools to enable parents to do so. It is impossible to monitor the entirety of your child's behavior online through any of these platforms today. They are their own person, they make their own choices, and those choices are heavily influenced by a world the parents have increasingly less influence over, especially as they grow older.
On the flip side, I do think we should also hold companies more accountable for this. We collectively prevented companies from advertising tobacco to minors through regulation with a pretty massive success rate. These companies know how harmful social media can be on youth, and there is little to no effective regulation around how children learn about these platforms and get enticed into them.
This all needs to be modulated by the knowledge that some children benefit immensely from being able to hide parts of their lives from their parents, parts that their parents would disagree with greatly.
The clearest example is LGBTQ kids who want to talk to other LGBTQ kids, or enjoy LGBTQ content, without fundamentalist or just homophobic/transphobic parents finding out. Children of fundamentalist or cult members who want an escape from the cult are another common category.
> I'm saying hold parent's accountable for their children's online behavior and for their protection online
You're saying the status quo and I think its fair to state you wouldn't intentionally design the status quo. Unless we have some wizard wheeze where we can easily arrest and detain or otherwise effectively punish parents without further reducing the quality of life for their children.
The bar isn't that high at all. It's just what norms you decide to set. You could make this argument for any particular parenting decision, from washing hands before food to saying no to the next desired purchase. It doesn't make sense to special-case this. At some point you're setting rules, and it's not that difficult. Just don't buy the device.
Parents can't easily prevent their kids from going to those kinds of stores once they're at the age where the parent doesn't need to keep an eye on them all the time and they can travel about on their own.
The difference though is that parents are generally the ones to give their kids their phones and devices. These devices could send headers to websites saying "I'm a kid" -- but this system doesn't exist, and parents apparently don't use existing parental controls properly or at all.
> These devices could send headers to websites saying "I'm a kid" -- but this system doesn't exist
And there would be ways to work around it. If people find that privacy-preserving age verification is not good enough because "some kids will work around it", then nothing is good enough, period. Some will always work around anything.
if a parent gives a kid a full on smartphone, charge the parent with child abuse just like feeding the kid alcohol, cigarettes or having sex with them. people will catch on.
So what’s the alternative? Pretend we don’t live in a digitally connected society and set our kids up for failure when they get one years after their peers?
Let's assume for the sake of argument that social media is extremely harmful to children. Which means the answer to your question is "yes, obviously". If people were running around giving their kids fentanyl, you wouldn't say "but my kid's friends all use fentanyl and he'll be an outcast if he can't". You would say "any friends that he loses over this are well worth avoiding the damage". Why would it be different just because it's social media?
The problem isn't with phones. We should have robust parental controls and the responsibility of parenting should be left to, wait for it... the parents.
Or people who aren't parents are yet again sharing strong opinions that are not based in reality. Plenty of parental controls are deployed, how long they last against a determined child is the real question. Here's a concrete example for you. Spotify has a web browser built in so that you can watch music videos, kids have figured out a way to use that to watch any video on YouTube--a 12 year old told me this. If you search on this subject you'll quickly learn this is well known and is generally being ignored by Spotify. Why not allow parents to disable the in-app web browser / video function?
It's not as easy as you may believe to prevent that type of access.
Well the parents entrust their kids to the school, so they would be the ones responsible for what goes on on their premises. In turn, school computers are famously locked down to the point of being absolutely useless.
Companies are legally prohibited from marketing and selling certain products like tobacco and alcohol because they historically tried to.
Parents are legally and socially expected to keep their kids away from tobacco and alcohol. You're breaking legal and social convention if you allow your kids to access dangerous drugs.
Capitalist social media is exactly as dangerous as alcohol and tobacco. Somebody should be held responsible for that, and the legal and social framework we already have for dealing with people who want to get kids addicted to shit works fairly well.
Banning access to social media for kids under 18 similar to how tobacco and alcohol is banned to underage people would be the more direct line.
This argument is quite close to what gov'ts are "trying" to do here! And I tihnk you'll find very few people ammenable to the idea that we should allow cigarettes to be sold to underaged people (even if in practice they still get access).
The argument on the "don't do the social media ban" side is quite an uphill battle if you dig into this metaphor too much
"Capitalist social media is exactly as dangerous as alcohol and tobacco. Somebody should be held responsible for that, and the legal and social framework we already have for dealing with people who want to get kids addicted to shit works fairly well."
They work hand in hand with governments around the world, that's why they get the tax breaks. In return they hand over details about your opinions, social networks and whereabouts, not to mention facial recognition data via Facebook. They aren't remotely capitalist in any real sense since they have a bad business model.
> Capitalist social media is exactly as dangerous as alcohol and tobacco.
Most actual studies done on this topic find very little evidence this is true.
It's a run-of-the-mill moral panic. People breathlessly repeating memes about whatever "kids these days" are up to and how horrible it is, as adults have done for thousands of years.
I expect some emotional attacks in response for questioning the big panic of the day, but before you do so please explore:
People looked at how the cost of wind and solar went down and made a assumption that green hydrogen would follow. The reasoning was that the cost of green hydrogen was energy, and thus at some point green hydrogen would be too cheap to meter.
The whole energy plan of central/northen Europe, especially Germany, was built for the last several decades on the idea that they would combine wind, solar and cheap natural gas and then replace the natural gas part with green hydrogen. In Sweden there were even several municipalities that spear headed this by switching mass transportation and heating towards hydrogen, initially with hydrogen produced through natural gas, as a way to get ahead on this plan.
The more sensible project were the green steel project. As experts in green hydrogen said consistently said through those decades, is that green steel would be the real test to make green hydrogen economical. The economics of burning it for energy or transportation would come several decades later, if ever. The green steel project however has not ended up as planned and gotten severely delayed and has seen a cost increase by an estimated 10x. municipalities are now giving up the hydrogen infrastructure and giving it an early retirement, as maintenance costs was significantly underestimated. There is very little talk now about replacing natural gas with green hydrogen, and the new plan is instead to replace the natural gas with bio fuels, hinted at carbon capture, at some unspecified time.
In general, "green hydrogen" makes the most sense if used as a chemical feedstock that replace natural gas in industrial processes - not to replace fossil fuels or be burned for heat.
On paper, hydrogen has good energy density, but taking advantage of that in truth is notoriously hard. And for things that demand energy dense fuels, there are many less finicky alternatives.
I had to Google what is green hydrogen. It is hydrogen produced by electrolysis.
If you've already got the electricity for electrolysis, would it not be more efficient and mechanically simpler to store it in a battery and power an electric motor?
The value proposition of hydrogen is energy density. Batteries have low energy per unit of volume and awful energy density by unit of mass. You will never, ever, fly across the Pacific on a battery powered aircraft. Transoceanic shipping is also not feasible with batteries (current and proposed battery powered shopping lanes are short hops of a couple hundred kilometers or less).
Is suspect large trucks may eventually move to hydrogen, but smaller passenger vehicles will stay on batteries. The nature of hydrogen containment favors larger capacity, on account of better volume to surface area ratios.
Many jurisdictions require that commercial drivers take a 30 minute break every 4 hours. Those that don't should. Those stops make battery trucking feasible.
And if you want to stop for 5 minutes instead of 30 you can use battery swapping solutions like the one Janus uses.
Batteries are feasible for long distance trucking today.
Green Hydrogen trucking uses 3X as much electricity as using it directly. Trucking's biggest expense is fuel, so that will be the killer factor ensuring battery will beat hydrogen for long distance trucking.
Using mandated breaks for recharging heavy trucks isn't actually helpful in much of the world. Maybe it is in parts of Western Europe.
The problem is that those mandated breaks are mandated and happen (with a small amount of wiggle room) wherever the truck happens to be at that moment. Rolling out enough charging infrastructure to make that work is an even more immense challenge than the already massive challenge of adding sufficient charging infrastructure to places like existing truck stops.
Imagine the cost of installing 1MW chargers on, say, half the wide spots on every highway.
Imagine the cost of installing massive diesel depots at half the wide spots on every highway. And yet, there they are. And we already have car chargers every few dozen miles on the highways. A larger number of smaller chargers adding up to likely a larger wattage than what the trucks need.
> Imagine the cost of installing 1MW chargers on, say, half the wide spots on every highway.
Do those spots have lighting? If so, a significant portion of the work has already been done. Even if the electrical wiring must be supplemented or replaced, just having already the subinfrastructure to snake high voltage wiring up there is the major hurdle.
>Is suspect large trucks may eventually move to hydrogen [...]
They won't, why would they? The number of hydrogen gas stations is going down and the price is going up. Batteries are good enough already - the Mercedes eActros 600 with its 600 kWh battery has a range of 500 km.
Around where I live, we have electric car ferries.
To avoid having to upgrade the grid massively, we use large battery banks shoreside which are being charged at a sustainable (to the grid) rate, then the ferry charges rapidly by depleting the battery bank, leaving the grid alone.
Electrifying all transport in the nation would increase electricity load by 20%.
But even if 100% of all vehicles sold today was electric, it would still take ~20 years before almost 100% of vehicles on the road were electric. And it's not, so we're probably looking at > 30 years to increase electricity load by 20%.
That annual increase is far less than the increase caused by data centers. It's about the same as the annual increase in load caused by increased use of air conditioning.
Life expectancy. A hydrogen tank can be refilled forever. A battery is normally limited to a few thousand cycles. A truck, or airplane, is expected to be fueled/recharged daily for decades. A car is designed to survive the length of a standard lease. Those running fleets of trucks/aircraft will always care more than car owners about long-term ownership costs.
Yeah, Li-ion batteries already have comparable life cycles to hydrogen tanks 1-2k fills/recharges, _but_ batteries are improving rapidly and tanks are already a mature technology.
This isn't necessarily true. Most cylinders storing compressed gasses need to be hydrostatically tested in regular intervals to ensure continued safety and will need replacement when they fail. Other kinds of composite cylinders have fixed ages where they should be replaced.
Inspection is expected. In the transport industry, all sorts of parts need regular inspection. Batteries are different. Performance loss over time leading to replacement decisions is unussual. Virtually no other part degrades in performance the moment you use it. Lots of parts have time limits, especially in aerospace, but few degrade. Those running fleets see this as unussual and unpredictable which, at scale, means extra expense. A tank that needs inspection every decade is a known problem. A battery that looses 1% to 5% capacity every year, depending on weather/use factors, is harder math.
I'm not in the transport industry, I just want to go to the grocery store.
> Performance loss over time leading to replacement decisions is unussual. Virtually no other part degrades in performance the moment you use it.
Tires? Brake pads? Lubricants? Belts? Springs? Bearings? Bushings? Seals? There's tons of parts on my cars that have expected wear intervals that will need replacing after x number of miles with performance that changes with the wear of the part, there's a whole service manual of when to replace certain parts.
Nope. All those parts work at basically 100% until failure or replacement. Some even improve with a bit of use (tires, brake pads, seals). They wear, they dont degrade. Batteries drop in performance from day one.
So tires with 2/32nds will have better grip in the rain than warmed up fresh ones? They just get better until they pop? That must be the reason why race cars only use heavily worn tires instead of fresh ones when they race. Engine lubricant is better at 5,000mi than 1mi?
You only bother buying heavily used motor oil and tires right? After all they perform so much better.
And springs and shocks are perfect examples of things that start to lose their effectiveness on a curve instead of necessarily just all at once. You can tell the dampening effects get worse and worse, the car might start sagging more, etc. They have a whole range of performance before they need to be replaced.
Even the motor itself will often slowly have reduced compression due to slowly looser fitting parts before actual failure, fuel injectors will slowly get more gummed up over time, valves might get gunked up having reduced airflow, spark plugs are slowly vaporizing themselves and can have worse spark characteristics throughout their life, etc. Its not like everything just continues working 100% until they snap. Everything that's moving or reacting is slowly wearing itself out.
Mold release needs to be rubbed off. And the bead needs a few weeks to harden. That's why the tire people tell you to go easy on new tires. As for other stuff, work on cars for few decades and you will learn which parts are more reliable once proven than when brand new, which need time before being pushed to limits.
> As for other stuff, work on cars for few decades
That's the experience I'm drawing from when I point out that "virtually no other part degrades in performance the moment you use it" isn't based in reality. Everything is constantly wearing out. Anything rubbing on another thing, any fluid being pushed through a hole, anything that might be reacting with another thing, its all slowly getting more and more out of spec. And when it gets more and more out of spec, its performance gets worse. You might not immediately notice it, that performance might not be in the go go kind of performance, but it isn't working as well as it used to.
Are you really going to tell me a car with a couple hundred thousand miles on it running all original parts (assuming they didn't literally break apart yet) is likely to be anywhere near the same performance as when the car had 200 miles on it? Its not. Its almost like there's a reason why mileage is considered when people price cars. The suspension isn't going to keep the wheels as well planted, the cylinders likely don't have the same compression, those fuel injectors are likely tired and aren't spraying optimally, that coolant pump is worn down and barely able to pump coolant anymore, your timings are likely not optimal anymore due to slack in the timing chain or belt, your spark plugs aren't making as full or reliable of spark, etc.
If your response is "well you would have replaced those by now"...well, why would you have to do that? Because they...had their performance reduce over the life of the part?
And even then, a part of that break-in period of those parts is the part's performance actively changing over the life of the part with pieces of the part literally degrading, just pretty quickly and positively for performance as opposed to negatively. That positive slope of performance change is a pretty early hump though, otherwise as I mentioned you'd be taking me up for ensuring all your tires are near-bald (but not quite, they haven't actually failed yet!) all the time and you'd be dumpster diving for the good stuff out behind your auto parts store.
Perhaps, but the larger question is whether the price of hydrogen itself can be sufficiently reduced. $36/kg is not justifiable for distance trucking or planes. If the price of hydrogen dropped sufficiently, then there's more demand to build hydrogen infrastructure, which increases demand for hydrogen in smaller vehicles, etc. in a positive feedback loop.
That theory didn't play out, mostly because the price of electrics kept dropping year after year, undercutting any appeal in early investment in hydrogen.
I worked in one of the top 5 logistics companies in the world and I can recall them investing in electric trucks and charging infrastructure. Idea was to have strategically placed overhead lines that could recharge trucks without need for them to stop. Can't recall any mentions of hydrogen.
I have seen at least one stretch of highway in Germany that has overhead power lines for trucks. I think it's a very interesting concept: the big downside of batteries is slow charging (compared to diesel) and limited range. Charging while driving on highways would largely solve these downsides.
I think that is the way it is headed. But you never know. Sometimes when comparing it helps me to reduce these things down to lower levels.
What is a battery? A chemical cell to store hydrogen and oxygen(true, it does not "have" to be hydrogen and oxygen but it usually is) to later get energy out of. For example lead-acid(stores the oxygen in the lead-sulfate plates and the hydrogen the the sulfuric acid liquid) or nickle-metal(charges into separate oxygen and hydrogen compounds, discharges into water) the lithium cell replaces hydrogen with lithium. Consider a pure hydrogen, oxygen fuel-cell, it could be run in reverse(charged) to get the hydrogen and oxygen and run forward(discharged) to get electricity out of it. So it is a sort of battery, a gas battery. Gas batteries are generally a bad idea, mainly because they have to be so big. Much time and effort is spent finding liquids that can undergo the oxidation/reduction reactions at a reasonable temperature. But now consider that there is quite a bit of oxygen in the air, if we did not have to store the oxygen our battery could be much more efficient, This is the theory behind free-air batteries. But what if our battery did not have to run at a reasonable temperature. We could then use a heat engine to get the energy out. And thus the Mirai. They are shipping half of the charged fluid to run in a high temperature reaction with the other half(atmospheric oxygen) to drive a heat engine that provides motive power.
As opposed to having the customer run the full chemical plant to charge and store the charged fluids to run in a fuel cell to turn a electric motor for motive power. Honestly they are both insane in their own way. But shipping high energy fluids tend to have better energy density. Perhaps the greatest problem in this case is that it is in gaseous form(not very dense) so has no real advantage. Unfortunately one of the best ways to retain hydrogen in a liquid form is carbon.
> If you've already got the electricity for electrolysis, would it not be more efficient and mechanically simpler to store it in a battery and power an electric motor?
Yes, if you actually have the batteries.
Between around 2014-2024, the common talking point was "we're not making enough batteries", and the way the discussions went it felt like the internal models of people saying this had the same future projections of batteries as the IEA has infamously produced for what they think future PV will be: https://maartensteinbuch.com/2017/06/12/photovoltaic-growth-...
I've not noticed people making this claim recently. Presumably the scale of battery production has become sufficient to change the mood music on this meme.
To be fair, there are still plenty of people on HN talking about lack of battery capacity as a reason to delay solar/wind rollout; I suspect it'll take a bit more time for the new reality to sink in fully.
The fossil industry was always suspiciously keen on green hydrogen - partly because the path to green hydrogen would likely have involved a long detour through grey and blue hydrogen, and partly because it gave them an excuse to lobby against phasing out natural gas for domestic heating/cooking ("we need to retain that infrastructure to enable the hydrogen economy!").
You can see the same thing happening in their support for Carbon Capture and Storage - "we're going to need the oil producers to enable carbon sequestration, so we might as well keep drilling new wells to keep their skills fresh!"...
Before the introduction of 800V charging architectures, long charge-time for EVs was a big con. Hydrogen Cell vehicles were supposed to be EVs with drastically faster fill-up times. The tradeoff was more complex delivery infrastructure.
The faster fill-up time of hydrogen was mostly a lie. It could fuel a single vehicle at that speed, but then the filling station would need a significant time to build up enough pressure for the next one.
Turns out having to fill vehicles at 350 to 700 bar (5,000 to 10,000 psi) is a massive pain - especially when you can't keep it cryogenically cooled as a liquid in your storage tanks.
I don't know why you prefixed with "Yet" when I clearly spelt out the trade-offs and contrasts in distribution between H2 and electricity.
The Mirai goes from empty to full in 5 minutes or less - which compares very well with fossil-fuel burners. Now that every OEM has abandoned battery-swapping, how fast can EV batteries be safely charged with the said 3 phases? How long were the charging time when the Mirai was debuted? That was the trade-off Toyota was hoping to fall on the good side of, nevermind the Japanese government bet on hydrogen and whatever incentives are available for Toyota.
>with "Yet" when I clearly spelt out the trade-offs
It was with regard that 800V was the driving factor, it'd be possible to have 'fast' charging earlier with existing infrastructure, even home.
>be safely charged with the said 3 phases?
The limiting factor for charging would be charging current in lots of cases. Getting 60% of 75kWh battery, it's 45kWh to charge in 20mins, the output should be ~150kW (90% efficiency) or 325A (on 400v), 4x 12-15mm wires.
Note about 'home' charging - three phase 32A is widely available domestically or around 6-8h to fully charge
Green hydrogen is a way to ship solar power elsewhere that doesn't have it, similar to a battery, but with the advantage of being able to be piped/pumped/liquified etc.
For that purpose and for long-term storage of energy and for aircraft/spacecraft, synthetic hydrocarbons are much better.
Making synthetic hydrocarbons was already done at large scale during WWII, but it was later abandoned due to the availability of very cheap extracted oil.
So when oil was not available, the economy could still be based on synthetic hydrocarbons even with the inefficient methods of that time (it is true however that at that time they captured CO2 from burning coal or wood, not directly from the air, where it is diluted).
Today one could develop much more efficient methods for synthesizing hydrocarbons from CO2 and water, but the level of investment for such technologies has been negligible in comparison with the money wasted for research in non-viable technologies, like using hydrogen instead of hydrocarbons, or with the money spent in things like AI datacenters.
A BTU of hydrogen requires more energy to compress to a given pressure than a BTU of natural gas, but hydrogen also has lower viscosity, so less recompression is needed. The point you raise does not rule out hydrogen pipelines.
If it does, then it also rules out long distance transmission of electrical power, as that is even more expensive. And the hydrogen advantage is even greater when one considers one can piggyback storage onto this system, as is done in natural gas pipelines. The electrical system would need additional batteries which are much more expensive per unit of storage capacity.
The PDF you shared actually agrees with my point if you care you to read it. It models the cost for a specific HVDC implementation, but the HVDC line selected is more expensive when transporting just 3% of the energy of the pipeline.
The same capex and opex can support 100x more Wh-km via HVDC, making HVDC at least an order of magnitude cheaper then the H2 pipeline.
What's interesting to me is that this is completely uncontroversial and incontrovertible, so I wonder where your insistence otherwise is?
I'm sorry but you appear to be completely deranged. The paper says nothing of the sort. Let me give the abstract:
"This paper compares the relative cost of long-distance, large-scale energy transmission by electricity, gaseous, and liquid carriers (e-fuels). The results indicate that the cost of electrical transmission per delivered MWh can be up to eight times higher than for hydrogen pipelines, about eleven times higher than for natural gas pipelines, and twenty to fifty times higher than for liquid fuels pipelines. These differences generally hold for shorter distances as well. The higher cost of electrical transmission is primarily because of lower carrying capacity (MW per line) of electrical transmission lines compared to the energy carrying capacity of the pipelines for gaseous and liquid fuels. The differences in the cost of transmission are important but often unrecognized and should be considered as a significant cost component in the analysis of various renewable energy production, distribution, and utilization scenarios."
I'm to read this as supporting your assertion that electrical transmission is several times cheaper??
> If you've already got the electricity for electrolysis, would it not be more efficient and mechanically simpler to store it in a battery and power an electric motor?
I highly doubt that hydrogen heating was ever considered. It's usually pushed by the gas lobby (since most hydrogen comes from gas), and Sweden doesn't have a strong gas lobby.
Most of the current energy production in Sweden was built starting 50 years ago, which can be seen in the graph. Since the early 1990s the combination of hydro power and nuclear has had an almost static production rate, and hydro power in particular has been maxed out. Oil was and is still used as the reserve energy, through new plants currently being built are based on natural gas rather than oil. The political statement is that the goal is that bio fuels should be used, but that the mix will be based on the market and the economical viability of different compatible fuels.
That was extremely stupid of them then. Hydrogen has been very good at one thing: subsidy extraction. But I don't think it was or ever will be a viable fuel for planetary transportation.
> , and thus at some point green hydrogen would be too cheap to meter.
Even if you assume that is true. It will always be more expensive then straight electricity.
> The more sensible project were the green steel project.
Not sure I agree. I think Boston Metal solution is better long term carbon free steel solution.
> natural gas with bio fuels
There was a huge 'bio' fuels hype around like 15-20 years ago if I remember correctly. Huge amount of controversy and false claims with politicians support.
Funny how this now comes back again and nothing was learned.
The idea was to transition from coal to natural gas while using solar and wind to reduce fuel consumption, thereby significantly reducing CO2 emissions. Any claims of hydrogen being burned were either lies to the public to get the gas plants built despite the non-green optics or lies to investors as part of a fraud scheme.
Hydrogen burning could have a place in an all-renewable grid: it could be much more economical for very long duration storage than using batteries. The last 5-10% of the grid becomes much cheaper to do with renewables if something like hydrogen (or other e-fuels) is available.
A competitor that might be even better is very long duration high temperature thermal storage, if capex minimization is the priority.
> it could be much more economical for very long duration storage than using batteries
Yes, but that's not the only option you have. With the absolutely awful efficiency of burning hydrogen you'd need to be building a massive amount of additional wind and solar - which in turn means you'll also have additional capacity available during cloudy wind-calm days, which means you'll need to burn substantially less hydrogen to generate power.
This leads to the irony that building the power-generation infrastructure for generating enough hydrogen means you won't even need to bother with the hydrogen part: you're basically just building enough solar that their overcast supply is enough to meet the average demand. As a bonus, you've now got a massive oversupply during sunny winter days and even more during summer days, so most of the year electricity will essentially be free.
Efficiency is not very important for very long duration storage. What's important is minimizing cost, which is dominated by capex, not by the cost of the energy used to charge the storage system. Paying more to charge it can make sense if that greatly reduces capex.
Good context. It's a shame none of these people did high school chemistry.
I do remember there being some news about the steel manf.
I wonder if further advancements in rocketry are adding H2 tech that could help us manage the difficulties of dealing with the stuff. It still only makes sense in very specific circumstances. Like when you need energy in tank form.
We had a situation in Sweden when a person found that if you remove a part of the url (/.../something -> /.../) for a online medical help line service, they got back a open directory listing which included files with medical data of other patients. This finding was then sent to a journalist that contacted the company and made a news article of it. The company accused the tipster and journalist for unlawful hacking and the police opened a case.
But was it? Is it pen testing to remove part of an URL? People debated this question a bit in articles, but then the case was dropped. The line between pen testing and just normal usage of the internet is not a clear line, but it seems that we all agree that there is a line somewhere and that common sense should guide us in some sense.
I would hazard a guess that the facial recognition will limit the search scope to people associated (to some degree) with your friends account and some threshold of metrics gathered from the image. I doubt it is using a broad search.
With billions of accounts, the false positive rate of facial recognition when matching against every account would likely make the result difficult to use. Even limiting to a single country like UK the number could be extremely large.
Let say there is a 0.5% false positive rate and some amount of false negatives. With 40 million users, that would be 200 000 false positives.
The only explanation for this comment is you never used reverse image search by Google or yandex before it was nerfed or you'd know this is super plausible to find direct hits without many false positives.
There is enough local fraudulent waste management companies that shipping things to Africa to have it "recycled" is just a waste of money and time. Sweden recently had one of the largest fraud cases involving a waste management company, which also became the largest environmental case in Swedish history.
The scheme is fairly simple. The criminals rent some land, dump the stuff there, and then have the company go bust, thus leaving the problem to the land owner. Rinse and repeat, and run it in parallel. It takes years before anyone call on the bluff that the stuff will surely get recycled "someday", and the main reason the Swedish police caught wind in the earlier mentioned case was that the waste started to self-ignite.
The only benefit to ship it to Africa is the hope that it won't be found out and create bad press, but that doesn't work if everyone know it is fake.
Oil companies have been doing this for over a century in US. Sell abandoned well to a small llc, llc files bankruptcy, big OilCo off the hook! Everyone happy!
>The scheme is fairly simple. The criminals rent some land, dump the stuff there, and then have the company go bust, thus leaving the problem to the land owner.
This is what these countries get for having weak laws that allow people to do illegal dumping and then hide behind a corporate veil to avoid accountability.
Trouble is if democracy worked properly then corporate entities wouldn't be able to lobby and influence governments to weaken laws out of self-interest.
I think FOSDEM had a talk a few years ago about that solution and their tang server. It is very similar in concept. They use McCallum-Relyea exchange, and we use PGP encryption, but the basics are the same in that you need information stored at the server and information stored in the unencrypted initramfs in order to be combined and turned into the encryption key. If my understanding of the McCallum-Relyea exchange is correct, they also combine the key creation and perfect forward security of the transaction into a single protocol, while we use TLS and client keys for the perfect forward security aspect and PGP for data at rest.
With tang you need to verify the hash of the tang server in order to prevent a MITM threat from extracting the server side part during the key creation process, while with Mandos you configure it manually with configuration files.
Tang uses REST and JSON. Mandos sends a single protocol number and then sends the data. Both operate primarily through local LAN, through Mandos client also support as an option to use global reachable ip addresses.
Outside of those design differences, there are some packaging aspects. Tang was designed for Redhat/Dracut, while Mandos was designed for Debian and initramfs-tools (Today Mandos also support Dracut, but it is not packaged for Redhat). Redhat packaging has been requested multiple times for Mandos, but neither of us two developer are Redhat users.
To add some historical context, I recall a Debconf BoF by the developers of initramfs-tools about if they were going to continue developing initramfs-tools or giving up and port everything to Dracut, and the silence was fairly deafening. People did not want to give up on initramfs-tools, but everyone recognized the massive duplication that those two project are. Similarly, the reason why Redhat had chosen initially to develop Dracut rather than just port initramfs-tools is also fairly big mystery, and is generally considered a Not Invented Here syndrome. Today there are however some distinct difference in design between the two systems.
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