Comment by tliltocatl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tliltocatl | Hacker News Reader

IANAL, but the whole thing feels quite problematic. Should we interpret the prohibition as a licensing condition "a resident using our IP is violating the contract" or as an informative note "we are not compliant and we are not ever going to be compliant so a resident using the IP is violating local laws"? I'd expect the intent to be the latter, but would it hold in front of a judge? If the notice is a licensing condition, the whole thing is problematic as hell:

- Does such prohibition has any legal force at all? Does it do anything to prevent responsibility according to the bill? Wouldn't just saying "CA/CO have zero jurisdiction over us, get screwed" be a saner choice (of course it would be better if the project wouldn't host on M$'s servers).

- The main project license is GPLv3. GPLv3 clearly has no provisions to introduce arbitrary prohibitions into the license without losing compatibility. But they still keep GPLv3 LICENSE.txt, which is problematic in itself - if LICENSE.txt says one thing and LEGAL-NOTICE.txt another, the conclusion might be that no license applies so no one may use the software at all!

- If they are reusing any GPL software that they don't hold copyright on, they might be or might not be in violation (would need a real lawyer to say if that's the case or not).

And on the actual matter of things, it's really sad to see California to be on the front line of this crap (this screams ageism). And, dear "adults", screw your parental authority so much. Whatever skills I've gained before the university I've done against an explicit parental prohibition. This is what I live off now. Screw you all.

> And on the actual matter of things, it's really sad to see California to be on the front line of this crap (this screams ageism). And, dear "adults", screw your parental authority so much. Whatever skills I've gained before the university I've done against an explicit parental prohibition. This is what I live off now. Screw you all.

It's yet another surface that totalitarian parental control has crept into, and it's a serious problem. Young people kept strictly within the iron grip of their guardians generally aren't the ones who become happy actualized all-star adults.

Obviously there should be some limits on what teenagers and children can access, it shouldn't be entirely free reign, but robbing them of space to bend the rules severely limits their potential for growth and incurs a strong risk of extinguishing their spark.

> Obviously there should be some limits on what teenagers and children can access

Is it? The only people who should be deciding those limits are parents. If they fail to set and enforce those limits then any negative outcomes for the child are due to their own negligence, and can be adjudicated as child abuse per those laws.

I agree fully. Limits should be on the shoulders of parents, not the government or any other institution.

Exactly. OS makers should build fine-grained parental controls into their OSes, and parents, and only parents, get to decide how much (if any at all) of that to enable for their children.

(And OS makers need to get better at this; from what I understand, it's not difficult for savvy kids to bypass parental controls on iOS and Android.)

If this were the late 80s I would wholeheartedly agree with you. But it isn't. Every device under the sun seems to have a web browser and wifi built into it at this point. Even most TVs are "smart" these days. If you told me that your refrigerator had a web browser and an app store I would assume you were entirely serious.

The internet is full of amazing things but it is simultaneously a largely unfiltered cesspool.

Imagine you live in the suburbs, but at some point the house to your left got demolished and replaced with a casino that doesn't ID anyone. The house to your right got demolished and replaced with a liquor store that doesn't ID anyone. And the house across the street got demolished and replaced with the headquarters of a local group of political extremists.

Sure, there also happens to be an award winning library a couple houses down. But that's largely irrelevant when it comes to the question of how you're supposed to raise children in this environment.

You shouldn't apply that kind of thinking to global things. Because what you end up doing is nuking library on earth - there might be a casino somewhere near there. I see your concerns, but, ultimately, parent's carving for a comfortable illusion of control is less important than child's rights. And yes, I'll repeat it again, it's not child's best interest to have their surroundings controlled and censored.

And for reference, when I was talking about my personal experience, I wasn't talking about 80's. More like mid- to late- 00's Russia. The internet was already quite a cesspool at the time, the local IRL even more so. Just I wasn't interested. Once a teen is interested in getting into the edgy stuff there is no amount of regulation can stop them.

> there might be a casino somewhere near there.

That's approximately my whole point. We have zoning laws. We have age verification laws. We have lots of ordinances about what is and isn't appropriate in public and around children and similar. You can't open a strip club across the street from a public school and I think that's a very good thing.

The vast global unfiltered internet is increasingly pervading our lives. I think it is entirely reasonable to enact minimal regulation that stems the tide with respect to a narrowly defined goal.

> Once a teen is interested in getting into the edgy stuff there is no amount of regulation can stop them.

That's really the thing too. I did grow up in the 80s and 90s, and I managed to find porn and all other sorts of things that my parents didn't want me to have or do. And I wasn't even a bad, difficult-to-parent kid. I was just a pre-teen and teen who wanted to do stuff my parents didn't approve of, just like pretty much every other kid on the planet.

In the end, I turned out fine! Not perfect (I have my issues, like most of us), but I'm happy and successful. I have no doubt that the same would be true if I'd grown up in the 00s like you did.

I don’t agree. It’s still ultimately up to the parent to keep an eye on what their kids are up to, talk to them and prepare them to handle ugly things (which they will encounter at some point whether you prepare them for it or not, no matter how hard you try to keep them in a bubble), and if they feel necessary impose restrictions on a household basis.

Even if I did agree, the implementations being rolled out present far more danger to adults than requiring an ID to enter a physical establishment ever could. Internet ID systems are rife for political abuse for example, and requiring age attestation at the OS level endangers general purpose computing, adds yet more hoops for free open source OS projects to jump through, and risks making FOSS OSes illegal to use for those who need an escape hatch from their commercial counterparts the most.

I agree with you about the proposed implementations. I don't think ID checks are justifiable and I definitely don't think attestation is acceptable as a public policy under any circumstance.

I agree with you that it's up to the parent to keep an eye on their children. But I also think that society has a duty to facilitate that. To that end, I think some minimal regulation regarding self reported content ratings for websites would probably be a good thing.

> But I also think that society has a duty to facilitate that.

I don't think anyone disagrees with that. The disagreement is around how intrusive the government should be in facilitating that. And some people (myself included) believe that these sorts of age checks and attestation are too intrusive, even if the stated goal is a good one.

Did you perhaps miss the part in the comment you're replying to where I said that I disagree with both attestation and ID checks? I went on to suggest a concrete method of facilitation whereby websites are legally mandated to self report content ratings.

Notice that the context here is a comment farther up the chain decrying the enablement of totalitarian parental control.

You be a parent and set limits on your children's behavior. You enforce it through the usual means. You don't rely on a nanny-state government to do it for you. That's abandoning your responsibility as a parent.

And let's not seriously try to say internet availability is the same as free-for-all liquor stores and casinos on as your physical neighbors. It's just not. It's still easier to restrict what a kid does online than it is to restrict their physical movements.

(And frankly, it's not that hard to restrict a kid's physical movements.)

> GPLv3 clearly has no provisions to introduce arbitrary prohibitions into the license without losing compatibility.

It's not even just that. The license expressly forbids adding other conditions and restrictions, and says that people who receive software, licensed under the GPL, with added conditions ore restrictions, can just remove those restrictions.

If the author really wants to add a restriction like this, they have to switch to a different license.

Maybe they don't really want to add this restriction. Maybe they want a fig leaf, so when California asks them why they don't comply with the law, they can point to this and state it's not legal to use in California.

This is a valid point, and I was aware of it, though the wording was not clear enough. So I clarified in a recent commit. I also added Brazil and New.

https://github.com/c3d/db48x/blob/dev/LEGAL-NOTICE.md

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