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Comment by jgord | Hacker News Reader

Did Meta spend around 60Mn lobbying for age verification to be forcibly added to every OS install ?

If not, who has been paying to lobby for these age verification laws ?

That seems a question that we should have an answer to.

Forcing an age check upon linux install seems anti-competitive, and a violation of freedom of speech allowed by the Constitution.

Also impractical and ineffective, unless they plan on some sort of bio-metric confirmation of age.

Will they outlaw computation itself, or constrain a personal quota so that only corporations can access approved LLMs and certainly not run a local AGI ?

As with the insane "encryption is a weapon and cant be exported" policy of the 80s, this will surely force innovation to migrate outside the US.

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> Did Meta spend around 60Mn lobbying for age verification to be forcibly added to every OS install ?

Of course they would want this -- as long as the OS reports that the user is over 18 via such a system, then Meta is legally off the hook for any COPPA violations.

> As with the insane "encryption is a weapon and cant be exported" policy of the 80s, this will surely force innovation to migrate outside the US.

Not advocating for this policy but if a critical argument against it is that policymakers can expect an analogous amount of computer innovation migrating out of the US as it saw in the 80s, then I think policymakers won't care remotely. Quite literally I think the lower bound for the proportion of global computer innovation happening in the US is 70%.

> age verification to be forcibly added to every OS install ?

This should be easy. Just in one of dialogs ask user to create a file 'me_age.txt' with age inside. No changes to OS at all. This will be the 'interface'. Any program can read the file. As far as I understand that's all California law requires (or will require).

Not sure about other versions. Strict verification would require binding to property software/services. Which is equivalent of reporting every user on every install.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised. They are absolutely negative player. But I'm kinda confused how this could even pass and what is the functional reason for this? Because "think about the children" it absolutely isn't. You can of course chain child to the radiator and let him out but that's obviously not an protection.

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