Again, I'm probably missing something but it strikes me as pretty trivial to comply with?
But on this specific point - It's a bellwether. They're doing this to lay the groundwork and test the waters for compulsory identification and/or age verification. Getting MacOS and Windows and Linux and etc to implement this WILL be used as evidence that compulsory identity verification for computer use is legally workable.
You could say the same thing about restaurants. "The government really shouldn't be telling us how/what we can cook at all."
When you are selling a product to the public, that is something that people have decided the government can regulate to reduce the harms of such products.
And there's not really a clear+observable difference between the two on the internet. The biggest difference between the NYT and my cousin's blog is scale, which is pretty hard to know up front - HN itself frequently DDOSes tiny websites.
When you make food you're compelled to write the ingredients. We tolerate these because they are obvious and trivial, but pedantically, food labelling laws also violate the first amendment.
Surely you recognize the difference between "you cannot go out of your way to do crime" and "your software must include this specific feature"??
> When you make food you're compelled to write the ingredients.
Well, the point about how this affects open source is that under a similar California law, every home kitchen would need to be equipped with an electronic transponder whose purpose is to announce to the world what ingredient bucket you used for tonight's casserole.
Anyway, the whole point of the metaphor, because I feel like I will have to explain it, is that we don't put these onerous "required labeling" rules in place for private individuals going about their own lives. So just like you don't have to tell anyone who asks what you put in your dinner last night, private individuals should not have to tell anyone who asks (websites, apps) what age demographic they fall into.
Note: this is one of many arguments I endorse against this type of law. This shouldn't be interpreted as "so that's all you're worried about?" just because we dissected it in detail here.
You can disclose just a subset of a credential, and that can be a derived value (eg age bracket instead of date of birth), and a derived key is used so that its cryptographically impossible to track you. I wish more people discussed using that, but I suspect that it’s a bit too secure for their real intentions.
There is no benefit in doing that because parents already know how old their kid is. They don't need the government to certify it to them, and then they can configure the kid's device not to display adult content.
Involving government ID is pointless because the parent, along with the large majority of the general population, has an adult ID, and therefore has the ability to configure the kid's device to display adult content or not even in the presence of an ID requirement if that's what they want to do. At which point an ID requirement is nothing but a footgun to "accidentally" compromise everyone's privacy. Unless that was the point.
If it's windows, they can just live boot into the OS and get access to pretty much all the files anyway, if the parent didn't encrypt things.
My point is, if the implementation is trivial to bypass, why do we need this legislation? Just let the parents use the existing tools we have and parent.
This also has the extremely useful benefit of making you aware that something is being censored, because then it has a censorship box in place of the content. Whenever censorship is happening it should be flagrantly conspicuous rather than invisible.
A) under 13 years of age, or B) at least 13 years of age and under 16 years of age, or C) at least 16 years of age and under 18 years of age or D) at least 18 years of age.
that's it. The OS can decide how it wants to implement that, but personally I'd literally just do get_age_bracket_enum(now() - get_user_birthday());
The bill is here: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
The uproar seems to be extremely overblown.
I mean, "compelled speech"? Really? That's people's argument? This is about as bad as the government compelling you to write a copyright notice.
The well should be poisoned. The whole idea is poison.
Regulation of products for sale is in line with the commerce clause. (I also think federal regulations on this should comply with the 10th amendment and not apply to local-only products. Wickard v. Filburn was a poor decision.)
The boundary between what is speech and commerce can be fuzzy, but if something is free and provides no profit to its maker then it’s obviously not commerce.