132 replies
1d2h
Skimming through the article, it seems like the extent of this is to require IAAS (Infrastructure) providers to verify the identity of those who are using their services to train AI. It's an attempt to stymie sanctioned or malicious actors, from training AI and especially from hopping between services or using aliases to continue training on their model.
It seems a bit benign and I don't understand the parallels others on this HN discussion are making. Is it that it's a slippery slope or perhaps I'm being naïve in regards to the scope?
AI is mentioned, but the scope is significantly larger if you read the fulltext.
I'm going to need another intelligence to read the full text.
"U.S. IaaS providers and foreign resellers of U.S. IaaS products must exercise reasonable due diligence to ascertain the true identity of any customer or beneficial owner of an Account who claims to be a U.S. person."
So at a minimum, everyone's identity is verified by IaaS provider. If you claim to be a non-U.S. person, additional information is collected.
They mention looking at comments from a previous proposal in 2021, "Taking Additional Steps To Address the National Emergency With Respect to Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities" https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/09/24/2021-20...
Who counts as IaaS besides Amazon, Azure, and GCS?
Dreamhost, Wordpress, etc
Wordpress clearly does not meet the definition of IaaS in the document.
Can you not add plugins to Wordpress?
You cannot install Debian or Windows 11 on Wordpress.
It applies to any "software that is not predefined". An OS is just an non-exhaustive example of one type of software that applies.
The next sentence is:
That was just a snippet of the full definition here:
https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2024-01580/p-46
There are two possibilities here.
First, the rule applies to WordPress and all that kind of thing, and then providers would have to KYC WordPress users. Which is a reason not to pass it.
Second, the rule is completely pointless, because it doesn't, and then anyone could create an AI training WordPress plugin that uses whatever arbitrarily fast hardware the server has and thereby easily bypass the rule. Which is a reason not to pass it.
That's silly, no Wordpress hosting has H100 GPUs hooked up to it.
If you skim the full context of this proposal and the topics it focuses on (dedicated servers, virtual servers, AI acceleration), and you've been paying attention to current geopolitics in these areas (top chips being sanctioned), it is completely obvious that goal here is to prevent things like evading sanctions by renting hardware instead of buying it.
What stops them? You could have a WordPress plugin that uses Stable Diffusion to generate images, or encodes uploaded video, or provides an AI chatbot, and needs fast GPUs because there are a lot of users. Providers will supply anything the customer is willing to pay for. The expected AI plugins would be doing inference rather than training, but the user could use the same hardware for plugins that do something else.
I suppose every company and every service should be in scope for KYC then. /s
But the reality is that Wordpress hosts are not in the business of renting people dedicated servers the price of a nice house. And if they were asked to do so, it wouldn't be a simple automated request without scrutiny.
In 2010 it wouldn't have been an automated request. Now there is plenty of demand for it to do inference and some providers are likely to start offering it if they don't already. You're also assuming the providers are interested in preventing foreigners from using their systems for AI training, rather than being interested in making as much money as possible without violating the letter of the law.
The latter is one of the reasons rules like this are simultaneously so expensive and ineffective. Provider A decides to KYC everybody because they're big and risk averse, so the rules inconvenience millions of innocent people. Provider B wants to make money selling GPUs to foreigners, so they implicitly choose a structure that allows that to happen if the rules contain any loopholes whatsoever. (This ignoring that foreign customers could just switch to foreign hosts and cost US companies business for no reason.)
And if the premise is the level of resources being consumed rather than the type of service then why don't the rules exempt anyone spending less than e.g. $50,000/month? That would be almost everyone while still not being anyone buying enough compute to do major AI training. It still wouldn't work but at least it would have much less overhead.
I don't think anyone is under the presumption that these requirements are bulletproof. The point is to just target one big glaring loophole.
It might be almost every individual developer. But that isn't really a huge cloud spend at all for an organization.
https://www.cloudzero.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/flexera...
But speaking of loopholes, what do you think bad actors would do if you told them that they weren't subject to KYC under a certain dollar amount? lol
That's kind of the point. It excludes all of the individuals and small businesses and makes it unambiguous that it doesn't apply to someone paying $10/month for a VPS to use as a VPN endpoint for privacy.
In some hypothetical world where the rules were actually effective? Spend $49,000 and then create a new account, which would be highly suspicious and still cause them to get caught.
In practice? Use a cooperative provider (Wells Fargo as a hosting company), or one in another country, the same as they would do regardless.
The whole SUV category of vehicles was spawned as a workaround for the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975. Demand blocked by laws leads to weird mutations.
I'm thinking that this will simply promote cloud providers that operate outside America, sort of like Binance and FTX were "forced to exit" the US market. Not a bad result.
I think it’s most reasonable to read that as “includes [all of these examples]” not “excludes if it can’t [any of these examples]”
AWS Lambda would clearly (IMO) be in-scope as IaaS by this definition, as an example, even though I can’t install another OS.
AWS Lambda qualifies because it is part of AWS and an AWS account gives you access to EC2 which definitely qualifies.
"and applications", not just operating systems.
Services like Github Actions, Google Collab, and web-based IDEs likely meet this definition though as it lets users execute their own custom code on their cloud. So basically all developer stuff may require an ID check.
Does Scratch count?
That was just part of the definition that I quoted.
In the full context, it is quite clear it is targeting things like EC2, dedicated hosting, etc.
https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2024-01580/p-46
I don't think it's reasonable to read this as if MS Excel qualifies as an IaaS.
This is not the industry-standard or NIST definitions of these terms. Something like Google Workspace Suite is Software as a Service. Something like Heroku (or Dreamhost or Wordpress) is Platform as a Service. Something like EC2 and S3 are Intrastructure as a Service. The distinction is renting out undifferentiated server space that a customer installs their own software onto. If you rent a VPS from Linode and install self-hosted Wordpress, that's IaaS. If you buy Wordpress's managed hosting, that's PaaS.
Well, it may not be the industry standard definition, but it is the definition used in the actual regulation:
-------
Infrastructure as a Service product
or
IaaS product
means a product or service offered to a consumer, including complimentary or “trial” offerings, that provides processing, storage, networks, or other fundamental computing resources, and with which the consumer is able to deploy and run software that is not predefined, including operating systems and applications. The consumer typically does not manage or control most of the underlying hardware but has control over the operating systems, storage, and any deployed applications. The term is inclusive of “managed” products or services, in which the provider is responsible for some aspects of system configuration or maintenance, and “unmanaged” products or services, in which the provider is only responsible for ensuring that the product is available to the consumer. The term is also inclusive of “virtualized” products and services, in which the computing resources of a physical machine are split between virtualized computers accessible over the internet (
e.g.,
“virtual private servers”), and “dedicated” products or services in which the total computing resources of a physical machine are provided to a single person (
e.g.,
“bare-metal servers”).
---
So Dreamhost counts, any web host where you can run arbitrary PHP code would count. Wordpess.com -- where you cannot actually modify the PHP code yourself -- would not count as IaaS. But any web host that allows you to install applications on your own, or run any of your own code, would count as IaaS by this regulation.
Literally every software that you can host.
This effort will end anonymity on the internet. For everyone.
Crypto was just the beginning. Next is end-to-end encryption. And it's going on worldwide, not just in USA:
https://community.qbix.com/t/the-coming-war-on-end-to-end-en...
edit: Vultr info is wrong. They don't have anonymous use anymore.
Vultr, for example.
There are high-quality IaaS providers that accept bitcoin for payment, allowing someone to host a server on their platform without revealing their identity.
Vultur requires a card linked for ID verification even if paying for BTC. Or at least they did in the past when I tried.
Interesting. I can't even create an account with a privacy address (passmail.net forwarding). Wankers.
You are correct. "Account must be funded by credit card or PayPal before making a Bitcoin deposit." No more anonymity on Vultr.
In their definition, everything does, HN included.
It's still just for IaaS companies, though, right?
Not that that makes this all okay, but it is a much more limited proposal than "internet services" makes it sound.
Legally speaking, internet service providers are infrastructure providers.
Do you have a basis for this claim or are you just throwing it out there to see if it catches on? The document linked refers to IaaS, which as an acronym definitely does not include ISPs.
There are probably very few ISPs that can fall outside of this standard. For example if your provider provides e-mail, it's providing infrastructure. And yet, the slope can get much more slippery than this.
Please read EO 13894 before proceeding further. Is the user able to run custom software directly with a customary ISP (because that's in the definition)? I agree with EGreg that they can possibly twist this, but as written it's actually narrower than you think.
Some AI services such as Synthesia https://www.synthesia.io › ethics " Your avatar can be created only with your explicit consent, following a thorough KYC-like procedure. Complete control: Our platform ensures you can decide"
Reading the definition https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2024-01580/p-46 and the paragraph following it, it's intentionally broad and i'd say it's not that much of a stretch to say ISPs provide services that match this.
In practice, as long as a definition can conceivably cover something, the DOJ or some agency will use it. Case in point from yesterday: money transmitter as applied to arresting the developers of a NON-CUSTODIAL wallet, as part of a wider war on crypto mixing:
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2024/04/24/samourai-wallet-f...
This comes amid a war on end-to-end encryption, and so on. It's not like they are going to stop here.
Definitely not in this case (unless you're using Digital Ocean as a VPN end point or something). EO 13984 (which is cited as the enabling act) has a narrow definition:
(e) The term ‘‘Infrastructure as a Service Product’’ means any product or service offered to a consumer, including complimentary or ‘‘trial’’ offerings, that provides processing, storage, networks, or other fundamental computing resources, and with which the consumer is able to deploy and run software that is not predefined, including operating systems and applications. The consumer typically does not manage or control most of the underlying hardware but has control over the operating systems, storage, and any deployed applications. The term is inclusive of ‘‘managed’’ products or services, in which the provider is responsible for some aspects of system configuration or maintenance, and ‘‘unmanaged’’ products or services, in which the provider is only responsible for ensuring that the product is available to the consumer. The term is also inclusive of ‘‘virtualized’’ products and services, in which the computing resources of a physical machine are split between virtualized computers accessible over the internet (e.g., ‘‘virtual private servers’’), and ‘‘dedicated’’ products or services in which the total computing resources of a physical machine are provided to a single person (e.g., ‘‘bare-metal’’ servers)
(https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2021-01-25/pdf/2021-0...)
That's not a narrow definition.
IaaS is defined as a provider of computing resources the allows you to run software that is not predefined. So that would seem to include basically every web host. If you can install Wordpress or Mastodon on the servers they provide, they are an IaaS.
Given that top GPUs are sanctioned, I'm sure preventing access to them remotely is a part of this. But just generally speaking, doing any malicious crap out of an EC2 instance is an easy way for a foreign actor in China/Russia/Iran to look more legit.
I think everyone has a sour taste left over from decades of half-baked laws written by politicians that don't understand the basics of the internet or technology in general.
With that said, I also don't understand the issues people are having with this.
The regulation "requir[es] U.S. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers of IaaS products to verify the identity of their foreign customers"
Q: How would one propose to determine if a customer is foreign or not?
A checkbox, perhaps? <rolls eyes>
No bad actor would possibly pretend to be a domestic customer, of course... <rolls eyes again>
That's a strawman. <rolls eyes> It won't be a checkbox, of course... <rolls eyes again>
OK, I'll bite. How exactly are [US] domestic users of services supposed to prove they don't need to prove their identity?
EDIT: it reminds me of the Common Travel Area (between Ireland and of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland), which has some glorious inconsistencies. For instance that nationals of Ireland and the UK travelling between those two countries do not need a passport, except when you take an international flight and rock up at IE/UK border control it's fairly hard to prove you are a national who doesn't need to provide a passport without having ... a passport (or equivalent ID).
KYC stands for Know Your Customer, and is a core regulation in banking. So we can pivot off that and work through what a bank does to verify your identity.
I signed up for a Mercury bank account a few months back for my Delaware corporation without talking to anyone, so I'll use that as a template.
I can't remember the exact steps, but tl;dr submit a passport photo / driver's license photo and a photo I take in the app itself. If it was a not-US passport, then they'd dig into a full verification, not just a quick manual check of "is that face the same as the passport/license, is the passport/license ID # valid, and are the photos edited"
You seem to be conceding the point that they would be forced to invade the privacy of their US customers in addition to just foreign ones.
True, I guess I wouldn't call it invading privacy, that's sounds a bit overwrought to me. Then banks invade my privacy, the DMV invades my privacy, etc. There's always tradeoffs, I respect people's concern about them, and I wish there was a gentler to say it.
That is a reasonable and factually accurate statement.
The tradeoff here is astonishingly bad. Studies have shown that AML/KYC have an effectiveness of less than a fraction of one percent. They continue to proliferate because their largest costs fall on the users rather than the companies, so they're the thing that large corporations suggest as a "solution" when they're being pressured to do something. Because people have the perception that it will do some good, even though that perception is inaccurate.
In reality what they do is provide a means to satisfy "something must be done" in a way that dumps the costs on marginalized users instead of politicians and corporations.
I had to look up what "effective" means in this context, found a couple crypto blogs using it as a talking point citing a 2011 UN study, the study says less than <1% of money laundering proceeds are confiscated worldwide, nothing about the laws. Money laundering is defined as an estimate of any money from illegal activity, including tax evasion.
There have been more than one study and some of them more recent, e.g.:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...
AML laws are completely ineffective. People can write long papers about why, but the underlying reason is simple. Money is fungible.
If Alice is selling heroin to Bob and the government knows this, they don't need AML laws to arrest them. If they don't know this, even if all of the financial records were 100% transparent and tied to the name on their birth certificates, they still wouldn't know this, because Alice and Bob would just claim the payment is for software licensing or personal grooming services or whatever they want to make up, and neither the bank nor the government has any way to know otherwise until they independently prove the underlying crime. Worse, Alice and Bob don't even have to pay each other. Bob can just buy whatever Alice asks him to with his money and then give that to Alice in exchange for the contraband. Then there is no financial transaction linking them at all.
The entire concept of it simply doesn't work. It's all cost and no benefit.
Yeah like me. I will not be able to use the internet anymore, litterally.
So what else did they pull off your phone? Location data, personal photos, personal files, wifi connections near by, microphone data, ongoing location data?
None of those, just asked for the photo
You said it was their app correctly?
Have you validated that they didn't take the other bits off your phone?
Every modern smartphone has permissions on that stuff for years now. I don't self-peasantize with "but what if..."
Exactly, they just want more mass surveillance.
Have you travelled between the UK and Ireland? You most definitely do not need a passport and do not need "equivalent ID". You can travel (by boat) with a student card, driving license, photographic travel pass (ie over-60s pass, young person rail pass), or photographic id from your work.
The check is very much "don't stop walking but hold your ID-looking thing in your hand so a nonchalant man can glance at it". You would attract very little attention with someone else's UK or Irish driving license, a bit more if you decided to test the waters with a weird form of ID.
Children can travel with a birth certificate (no photo).
You need more than this to get on an aeroplane, but that also applies to domestic flights in the UK.
If you get the boat and show eg. a Romanian student card, they might ask you where your passport is, somewhat reasonably since you would have needed it to travel to the UK or to Ireland. They would accept an ID card probably and might let you in with legit looking non-government ID.
That's the sea border. You can cross the land border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland without any form of ID at all, government-issued, photographic or otherwise. Lots of people do it every day by car or bus and it would not remotely occur to them to take ID with them.
So the Romanian student would have no problem travelling between London and Dublin without showing anything since they could get a boat Glasgow- Belfast and then get a bus to Dublin.
If this was your best example of governments lying and changing the rules, it's not a very good one (and is also kind of offensive to Irish and British people).
Can you clarify what you mean by "more than this"?
I've travelled on many domestic flights within the UK, and ID is not routinely checked.
Ouch.
The common travel area has its origins way back in 1923, the rules are clear, no-one is lying.
It's just that it's hard to prove you are entitled to its benefits without having an ID document with you that - if you're entitled - it says you don't have to have with you...
When did you last travel on a UK domestic flight? You definitely need government issued ID.
You are suggesting that having to show any photographic ID is the same as having to show a passport. That's obviously silly.
No one has to prove that "they are entitled to not show a passport" by showing British or Irish ID. This is a fantasy.
On the boat everyone, British, Irish or other, has to show ID of some kind. No one has to show a passport. At the land border no one has to show anything.
"a spokesperson for the CAA, said: “UK aviation security regulations do not require a passenger’s identity to be checked for security purposes prior to boarding a domestic flight, in the same way when travelling within the mainland on a train or bus. Any further requirement on behalf of the carrier to provide identification may be a condition of travel by the carrier itself.”"
https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/british...
Did you read the headline of that article?
You need government ID to get on a domestic flight in the UK. You also need government ID to get on a flight from the UK to Ireland.
As with the sea border and the land border, this completely invalidates your claim about what ID is required to travel between the UK and the Republic of Ireland.
You don't appear to have travelled between the UK and the Republic of Ireland, ever, or to have flown domestically in the UK since 9/11. You stated above that "they do not check ID on UK domestic flights", not "the CAA does not require ID but all airlines do". The first statement is untrue. Not sure why you are making stuff up in support of an urban legend about the UK/Irish border.
Even if there was a difference between the ID required to board a flight from the UK to the RoI and the ID required to board a UK domestic flight (there isn't - both require govt ID, not necessarily a passport), the situation at the boat and at the land border completely disproves your original claim.
What laws are you talking about? The Internet has grown a lot that’s largely because we have smart politicians and strong institutions. I really think the regulation of the Internet has been amazingly good.
For example: CAN-SPAM. If I want to send emails to a list, I have to burn $90 of my scarce dollars every year just for a PO box for the address at the bottom on the off chance someone sends a letter to unsubscribe. Unless I want to put my home address in every email, which I don't, and no one should. Unsubscribe links and highly effective spam filters were already completely standard when the law was passed in 2003. It doesn't matter if the email you send doesn't actually require it because every mailing list provider requires it.
Eh, unsubscribe links were definitely not universal in 2003 and they barely are today. But the situation has definitely improved in the last 20 years.
The point is the rules are daft. A sensible rule would require a functioning unsubscribe process in the email, which every piece of software would then automate as an unsubscribe link. The actual rule requires people to be able to unsubscribe via a postal mailing address, which is unreasonable and ridiculous.
Yeah, who wants to do that? I don't want to, no one wants to. It's a stupid law!
I'm just saying, your earlier comment would have been better without the sentence: "Unsubscribe links and highly effective spam filters were already completely standard when the law was passed in 2003."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_IP_Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agre...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
Yep, all of those need to go the way of the creamitorium!!!! You forgot FISA and CISA though, how'd you do that.
I wonder how they deal with the (hopefully) constant abuse reports aimed at them from providers who are tired of their shady customers doing shady things from their IPs.
They wouldn't.
You don't understand the issues me as a blind person has with it? OK I have to upload a government ID every time I want to use an internet service. That's stupid. It's also considered a general warrant, and I thought we did away with those long ago.
Skimming the regulations, this does not seem right. All IAAS providers (which is everyone who allows customers to run custom code, so it includes any web host like Dreamhost) to verify the identity of foreigners who open an account. This would seemingly entail the service provider needing to verify everyone's identity, in order to figure out who is a foreigner and who is not.
In other words, if you want to run your own Wordpress, or Mastodon node, or your own custom CMS web site or group chat or IRC or bitcoin node, you would need to reveal your identity to the hosting service that you want. This does seem quite bad and could obviously be used to identify political dissidents.
On top of that, the IAAS must report to the US Commerce department about foreigners who are using services to train large AI models.
Aren't you basically revealing yourself anyway because you need to pay them?
AWS has my name and my credit card number. But they have never asked for a photocopy of my passport, my history of international travel, which nationalities I have and so on. Something tells me that for the goal of this law to be achieved, all those details would need to enter the database.
Amazon is certainly supposed to ensure that you are not a sanctioned person or a citizen of a sanctioned country. This was a concern decades ago when I was in shared web hosting.. don't know why it would have changed?
When has big tech had a good history of proactive compliance?
I've been in big tech for a while and oh wow is there a lot of proactive compliance.
AWS has a denied party screening team and absolutely restricts access to services based on the BIS entity list and other sanctioned parties.
If you rent a VPS in supposedly privacy-conscious Germany they need photo id too :(
Luckily there's other cheap options in Europe like in France.
I don't think that is a legal requirement in Germany. At least Hetzner lets you rent a German VPS or dedicated server without ID. Though Hetzner may require you to submit an ID if you are flagged by their automated systems upon registration.
It was actually Hetzner that didn't want to provision my VPS without Photo ID. I blanked out the SSN as our government tells us to do and they balked at that as well. After I showed them my government's website explaining how and why to do that they were OK with it but at that point the relationship was already soured and I started looking for alternatives.
Maybe they changed it now but they were asses about it then. I thought it was a legal requirement, they basically said as much though I don't recall the exact details, it was before the pandemic.
Eventually I just moved to Scaleway in France which is much nicer and cheaper and you can even talk to their support on slack.
PS: I don't do anything nefarious on my servers but I just don't want my ID on file anywhere it's not needed.
Not necessarily (although that doesn't necessarily mean I think this is OK). Payment-card-based verification is a longstanding method of doing prima-facie verification like this. When you give your credit card, you give your billing address and typically your phone number -- if the postal code is a US address and the phone number is a US area code and everything else is consistent with that, that might be all the KYC required. If you appear to be a foreign national operating outside the US, they can flag that and require additional paperwork only then.
This proposed rule looks to me like it basically requires providers to come up with their own verification plans, which may then differ from provider to provider, so as to be "flexible and minimally burdensome to their business operations".
[note for the following: I am not a lawyer. The following is not legal advice. Do not fold, spindle or multilate. Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.]
The real danger, I think, with things like this is, there's an executive order that was issued, but it further specified a rulemaking process be conducted to determine the actual regulations that define compliance. The link in the title is to the proposed rule. There's nothing that says any amount of prior public input will necessarily influence the details of the final rule, or that rule can't change in the future through another rulemaking process, and if it does the only way to challenge it is either to sue the agency on the grounds that it exceeded its discretion (e.g. by making rules that require unconstitutional things) or that the enabling executive order is itself unconstitutional -- but these kinds of federal cases have a pretty high bar for what's called "standing" (the legal grounds to bring a particular lawsuit): you pretty much have to suffer concrete harm or be in obvious and imminent danger of suffering it to a grievous degree. (This is one reason you hear about "test cases" -- often somebody will agree to be the goat who is denied something, fined, or even arrested and convicted of a crime, so that standing to sue to overturn the law can be established.) Other times, if a lot of potential defendants already have standing, a particularly sympathetic defendant will be selected for the actual challenge. The US federal courts are also deferential to "agency discretion" by default, as a matter of doctrine.
What happens all too often with these things is, the initial rulemaking is pretty reasonable, and the public outrage (if there was any) dissipates. Then three years (or however long) on, the next rulemaking imposes onerous restrictions and strict criteria, and people suddenly (relatively speaking) wake up and find they're now in violation of federal regulations that they were in compliance with last week. (This is one reason public-interest groups are so critical -- they have the motivation and sustained attention to comb the Federal Register for announcements about upcoming rounds of rulemaking on various topics.)
Thanks, this was useful clarification.
There are IaaS services out there that accept bitcoin, monero, or anonymous prepaid charge cards. They aren't an IaaS but Mullvad even accepts cash mailed to them in an envelope.
Is it fair to assume, that one can engage in a business relationship with these services outside the US? I'm not sure I see the effect that you are implying. AWS, GCP, Azure don't accept crypto. Mullvad is as you point out not an IaaS provider.
Namecheap, Vultr, BuyVm all operate in the U.S. and at times in the past (I don't know if they still do) have either accepted crypto or anonymous charge cards (available for cash at a convenience store), thus making it possible to get a dedicated server or VM totally anonymously. This new regulation would seem to prevent this.
Interesting, I did not know this. The actual anonymity of crypto currencies aside, it's good to see these kind of businesses do still exist.
Some hosts accept alternate payment systems, like gift cards or cryptocurrency. You can also have someone else pay for it with a credit card or bank transfer without giving your name, which can be quite important in some cases. The new rules would presumably make that a crime.
“Say you host spammers and scammers without saying you host them.”
Tbh this is fine by me. It's about time the US stop being the center of the world for internet infrastructure.
It's fine to make me, a blind person have to upload a government ID. Cool dude.
I think you need to re-read my comment.
i’m reading through the contrarian takes here and thinking, “yeah i’m kind of ok with that?”
this would make it much trickier for bad actors to get away with everything from online ai scams to swatting. i could live with that.
It would not. They're financially motivated to do what they want. They will find a way around it. i.e. scaming the elderly to sign up for cloud services and proxying their KYC requirements.
There are scamers who walk seniors to sign up through Coinbase, the KYC requirements, to order bitcoin.
Good. It’s not 1999.
There are so many malicious actors putting human life at risk in some scenarios it should be possible to figure out who owns what.
Now, I would start with corporate ownership and focus on anonymous entities controlling things like Delaware and Nevada corporations. But that’s me.
You guys are stupid. That's exactly what they want to use it for is to train AI.
Post a comment to the federal register.
This seems, to me, an utterly malignant attack on anonymity, which is a protected constitutional right. It's the idea that every internet packet needs to be tied back to some verified identity. We're in frog-boiling territory with this garbage.
There is no absolute right to anonymity in the US constitution.
(The courts have "recognized relatively strong First Amendment presumptions on behalf of purveyors of anonymous speech, especially for those that are statements of opinions rather than obvious falsehoods, while recognizing that government sometimes has the right to identify such speakers when they have used their platforms to harass, engage in slander or sexual predation, make true threats, or allow foreign governments to influence U.S. elections")
How is one supposed to exercise their right to anonymously express political opinions if anonymity is prohibited by law?
There is no right to anonymously express political opinions.
There is a right to express political opinions, but anonymity is a privilege, not a right.
Then how do you explain these?
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/anony...
I see controversy and a lot of dissent among Justices, but no decisions that explicitly declare a Constitutional right to anonymity.
And the modern Court explicitly declared that a Constitutional right to privacy does not exist, and one cannot have anonymity without privacy, so no.
Precedent is set by the majority, not the dissent.
Weird then that there are several decisions striking down laws that violate the right to anonymous speech?
One cannot refuse to turn over one's papers and effects in the absence of probable cause without privacy either.
Consider the possibility that there could be a right to anonymous speech without a right to anonymous practice of medicine. A universal right to privacy would require both. Just because it isn't both doesn't mean it's neither.
Yes. I believe a right to privacy once existed, but it was nullified as it formed the basis of the case for Roe V. Wade. As a result even the Fourth Amendment is weakened because it must be interpreted in the light of a right to privacy no longer existing.
What I'm trying to put forth is that the assumptions you're working under are no longer valid and we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
It was kind of the other way around. There is clearly no explicit right to abortion in the constitution, so to find one it would have to be implicit, but the Court in Roe wanted to find one, so they made one up. The reasoning was something like, the constitution implies there is a general right to privacy and laws against abortion violate it. The people who liked the result were then stuck trying to defend its inconsistent reasoning for 50 years, because the same logic would cause all kinds of other laws to be a violation of the same right. Obvious example would be drug prohibition; government invading your privacy by trying to control what you put into your own body. Same logic as Roe.
But Roe was never actually extended to any of that stuff, so overturning it didn't re-enable drug prohibition after it was struck down, since it was (inconsistently) never struck down to begin with.
The cases having to do with anonymous speech are independent and use entirely different logic. The general idea is that people are deterred from speaking (chilling effects) if people can associate what they have to say with a physical person who can then be harassed for expressing an unpopular opinion. It doesn't have any of the same problems because there is no First Amendment right to morphine, which they could ban outright under the same justification as they ban heroin, so having to show your ID to get morphine isn't deterring you from exercising your right to free speech.
The converse would have to be true then, that the government has the legitimate power to intimidate people to not express their opinion. This does not seem like a legitimate power for government to have, but now I need to be careful whether I express it at all.
Laws against slander, libel, intimidation, conspiracy, perjury, etc are based upon the government's power to intimidate people from expressing opinions. It is a felony in the US to express the opinion that the President should be killed. Speech in the US has never been a free for all.
Those are not opinions, they're provably false statements or threats. Conspiracy is essentially committing a crime as a group rather than an individual, and the statements are the evidence of the crime rather than the crime in itself.
The closest the government comes to prohibiting an opinion is copyright, but even then you can restate the opinion in your own words, and when an exact quote is necessary to make your point it's fair use specifically because it would otherwise violate free speech.
There's been multiple attempts to do this. Via KOSA and a few others lately in our Congress. PR friendly candidates like Duckworth have been trying to walk this through the system.
From the executive order (Executive Order 14110) it seems to affect only massive compute infrastructure:
Keep in mind that most consumer graphics cards are in the _teraflops_ range, which is 10^12. It's hard to imagine this affecting the average person, it seems that they are specifying KYC for people using clusters with thousands or tens of thousands of cards.
No, that is just one part of it. The proposed rules are intended to cover both EO13984, which addresses foreign entities using US IaaS for Cyber attacks, and EO14110 which addresses foreign entities using AI hardware.
They require all IaaS[1] to determine if customers are US persons, and if not to collect and retain certain identifying information[2], and provide annual reports describing their processes[3]. It grants the Secretary of Commerce extra-judicial power to force any IaaS to stop doing business with any foreign customer, or place restrictions on their use[4]. This section lists things that the Secretary should consider in doing so, but doesn't have any hard requirements. Finally, it requires the IaaS to report certain foreign use of AI[5].
[1]§7.301 https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2024-01580/p-189
[2]§7.302 https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2024-01580/p-219
[3]§7.304 https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2024-01580/p-266
[4]§7.307 https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2024-01580/p-377
[5]§7.308 https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2024-01580/p-403
This can backfire, as foreign customers of public clouds may switch to local providers, which erodes the US near-monopoly on cloud services. Ironically this can reduce the visibility and control the US government has over foreign nation states.
E.g.: most of the Australian government is hosted in either Azure or AWS. That kind of thing might stop if extrajudicial power is granted to pull the plug on any customer on any time.
If they’re inspecting what people are running on GPU instances to report that information back to the US government it’s going to give a lot of people pause for thought. It’s basically violating guarantees that many businesses have with cloud providers.
Something like 40 of them, or 100-300 if you're looking at FP16. So well over 2^14.
And that's per second, give it your idle cycles for four months and that's 10^7 seconds.
It gets pretty close to 10^23.
This won't work. Foreign nations have enough skill and resources to pass KYC as a citizen (steal someone's documents, pay a homeless for verification etc). And as I understand, US doesn't have a central citizen database so it is difficult to verify a document.
It's not meant to work.
True that!
It's funny they don't need ID to vote but they'll need one for a VPS.
EDIT: I know it's about IaSS.
That isn't even the first reason it won't work.
Computing is a global commodity. There are providers in other countries. They would just use one of those.
It's really not benign as far as I can see. There is an implication that its purpose is to allow providers to start writing reports on foreign users training LLMs (which, incidentally, I'm not condoning either), but in the process it requires every American IaaS has to start implementing KYC folly.
No one wants to send in selfies and their passport just to start a Digital Ocean droplet.
I'm curious if the spammers will find a way around this. I would actually like to be ID'd by a provider if that also meant they had no un-ID'd customers. I'd expect their IP range would start to get a pretty good reputation.
The spammers are criminals. They'll just use ID scans and info from data breaches of other companies. Requiring more companies to collect them makes it even worse because now there are more places to exfiltrate them and it makes it easier for criminals to commit identity theft against financial institutions etc.
There are also non-"criminals" who are more than willing to use their actual ID for the sort of things that aren't strictly illegal but will still get your IP space on a bunch of block lists when they can make a buck doing it, so it wouldn't solve the problem even if it could actually identify all of the customers.
And now more people will have thier passports pinched as they'll be opening themselves up to more opportunities to have it stolen. It'll be great to get ready for that overseas trip, or while returning, to find out you need to now visit an embassy as a forged version of it is now in use.
It's absolutely folly! Foolishness by the department of commerce. What were they thinking?
This. Also, it won't stop malicious actors. Setting up a LLC to mask your true identity is cheap and easy. Not to mention that providing a fake identity or pretending your are not a "foreign person" is also cheap and easy.
I'll certainly get one, or two, if this goes through.
This is a terrible idea!
On top of that, it is to identify FOREIGN users
We damn well SHOULD be identifying foreign users of our services, particularly those which have high-powered potential to cause harm.
This knee-jerk [govt identifying anybody is bad] response prevalent here deeply undermines the cause of actually maintaining privacy. There are actually very bad actors out there, and if we fail to identify and contain them, things will be far worse. The reality is that some measures must be taken — let's focus on containing the real threats, not cry foul at every shadow of a hint that we might approach a slippery slope.
Only foriegners.
Unlikely, since it exempts non-foriegn malicious actors