Reminder of the HN guidelines for commenting, as the majority of comments just talks about the design of the page at the moment:
In Comments
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
- files Suspicious Activity Reports directly with FinCEN
- files Suspicious Transaction Reports with FINTRAC
- tags STRs with intelligence program codenames (Project SHADOW, Project LEGION…)
- maintains biometric face databases with 3-year retention
- runs 269 distinct verification checks against every user
- compares your selfie to political figures with facial similarity scoring
- flags you as a “suspicious entity” based on your face alone
- classifies selfie spoof risk with hardcoded rejection thresholds
- screens against 14 categories of adverse media from terrorism to espionage
- lets operators upload custom FinCEN screening lists and run them against everyone
- continuously re-screens on configurable intervals
- tracks you across 13 types of lists from browser fingerprints to geolocations
- screens crypto wallets against sanctioned addresses via Chainalysis
- runs experimental unnamed ML models on your biometric data
- encrypts data with shared symmetric keys while admitting they “depend on obfuscation”
- runs two parallel PEP screening systems with known incompatibilities
and the company that runs all of this is the same one that takes your passport photo when you sign up for ChatGPT. same codebase. same platform. different deployment. same facial recognition. same screening algorithms. same data model.
author here. currently in touch with persona's CEO as mentioned on twitter, part 2 and 3 coming soon.
i understand the criticism on the design of the site but it has no place here on hackernews. the content is what matters. i designed my website to be an experience rather than sanitized white on black minimalist slop, whether you like it or not is completely fair, then just use reading mode in your browser.
thank you!! this website was made loooong ago before gpt3 was even a thing lol (saying this because people thought it was vibecoded lol), the design of it brings me joy and i wouldn't change it for anything
I love your site design, but please consider that people may not take your content seriously because it is so expressive. It is cool looking but hard to concentrate on the actual content. This is distracting from the point you are making and makes it harder to circulate this to non-tech peoples.
An experience yes but one that is noisy to the information you’re trying to expose.
Deflecting criticism of the noisiness because you want to focus on the content is just creating another distraction to discuss instead of the content. The cat, the music, the lowercase text, low contrast color scheme all create a layer of “is this serious?”
i agree but this is why journalists and the media pick up on this - i'm doing the technical writeup, other reputable sources do the normie stuff
also while yes i agree that it could raise questions about "is this serious?" to be honest i believe my track record in the field is enough to outweigh the design of my site. i designed this website when i was a teenager, many years ago, to express my vibe and soul, and i would much rather it stay that way even if it makes it seem less serious
Perhaps you would consider compiling into a less expressive format when you complete it. I’d love to dig into it but the context switching distractions as well as the difficulty curve of the material and style are high. So it is bookmarked but deprioritized.
Okay so not dissing on the website itself (btw reader mode isn't always available depending on context...) this reads like a total mess. I guess it's too messy to be AI generated so that's good, but it doesn't feel professional at all, is this a fanfic ?
In Comments
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.