Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age
agelesslinux.org
agelesslinux.org
With the same logical fallacies. Pretty telling about how transnational lobbies and their interests work.
Controlling what children do online is a solved problem: Parenting and parental control applications.
It's because of a mix of Barroness Kidron's lobbying [0] and companies trying to meet legislators halfway [1] due to latent legislative anger due to disinformation incidents that arose during the 2016 election, January 6th, January 8th in Brazil, the New Caledonia unrest, and a couple others.
Civil and digital libertarianism is not a mainstream view outside of a subset of techies.
Sadly, building and deploy a truly private and OSS authentication service was not on the radar in the early 2010s - that would have staved off the current iteration.
[0] - https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/14/british-baroness-on...
[1] - https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2025/11/exclusive...
Everything is happening at the same time in every country. It’s clearly being coordinated.
That's incomprehensible to me.
Smaller quorums needed for control.
Fewer people with more wealth pushing through what they want across more borders.
Less and less concern for citizens in general.
We are seeing a rapid centralization of power.
Building architectural styles used to be per city and now buildings look roughly the same worldwide. Style is dependent on the year built not the location.
Because every architect is "reading the same magazine" worldwide now that the internet exists, rather than debating in their own city.
Similar monoculture of global thought is happening in all fields.
Thereby removing yet more interesting things to see in the world through the spread of hyper-optimized inoffensive blandness. In the same way that restaurants are slowly turning into the same set of grey boxes with little of note distinguishing each.
I mean, kinda the least of our worries in this thread, no? Restaurants and tourism??
There is an enormous amount of policy that doesn't require significant money to oppose this in your local jurisdictions! This is one of them.
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...
Disclaimer: I have not myself verified the claims.
Especially the moment you move outside of America. Tech has always been comparatively more attuned to US mores and voter sentiment.
Everywhere else, I only see frustration and people trying to find someone who knows someone at a tech firm to get help.
The backlash against Tech firms is a force of nature at this point. Voters are currently unwilling to listen to appeals to reduce government overreach. Governments are trending towards authoritarianism globally, and are more than happy to give voters what they want, while also getting more leverage over tech.
that is just the US
And when this nonsense is defeated, I’d like to see aggressive prosecution wherever we can get it.
Perhaps instead of taking some responsibility for their actions, nations are going to further restrict their populations?
TLDR: The macro forces are more than sufficient for this situation to occur.
HN-goers are largely unaware of the scope of the Techlash globally. Voters want tech firms to be more responsive to their needs.
Governments are beyond frustrated with tech, and every nation is trending towards authoritarianism.
So Governments are more than happy to appear responsive to voter needs, while also gaining a new source of leverage on tech.
I don’t know the lobbying teams directly, but I know many civil society and online safety folk.
Currently, most of those orgs are excluded from conversations and funding. Tech firms have also been cutting down on their safety teams, especially since the current US admin came to power.
———-
If this is actually to be addressed, “enshittification” needs to stop being a thing. Tech used to be known for excellent products, but currently its seen as untrustworthy and most likely to break the law with impunity, and to nickel and dime users.
What you're seeing is a coordinated push by transnational interests; Meta's name has come up in discussions of the funding behind this push. At the very lest, verifying age also verifies that a person is real and not a bot, so advertising firms like Meta will benefit from verification. That's not right-wing or left-wing but rather the influence of business over the political, and neither wing of the spectrum is immune to corruption.
Isn't that basically every democratic country?
We can't judge how "right" or "left" the political culture of a country is by how frequently the right or left win office, because in the long-run they tend to win office roughly equally often just about everywhere.
A better way of judging this question, is how the policies of their main left/right parties compare to those of their counterparts in comparable countries
I'd classify both as very corporate friendly, far centrist, which is just as good as "right wing". Nothing about actually empowering the masses, and even less so the working class, only elite pseudo prograssive talking points.
In the US both the Democratic Party (Liberal) and Republican Party (Conservatives) are considered Authoritarian on this 2 dimensional graph.
Milei claims to be a Conservative Libertarian so, in theory, he should be opposed to this. We'll see what he actually does.
That's just for the gullible. In practice he's about power and self-serving interests, just like any "libertarian" in office.
Someone read the text, and made a clickbaity headline, and it went viral. then, another state made a similar bill, and it went viral again.Age verification isn't coming to Linux any time soon, and no, you aren't breaking any laws by either developing for, and/or using Linux if you are a U.S. citizen. It is literally illegal to pass a law like that thanks to the constitution. Outside the U.S.? well depending on the country, you likely experienced something better or worse, Regardless...
It is pretty remarkable that it [age verification] has popped up in multiple countries at once. It is almost as though a certain few billionaires are interested in suppressing speech.I wonder who those folks might be? ;)
The folks trying to shut down the masses via stuff like this should probably read some history, because that never works out...like ever. Doing the same thing over and over again won't make it work. It won't work this time either.
> 1798.501. (a) An operating system provider shall do all of the following: > (1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.
[And some other stuff]. A simple reading says operating systems need to ask the age of the accout holder during account setup. It says the purpose is to provide a signal to a covered app store, but it does not exempt operating systems without a covered app store.
If you don't intentionally allow accounts access to any app stores, do you still need to collect the data ? It says to collect it, and that's the purpose but it doesn't say if you're not permitting that purpose you don't have to collect it
Maybe that would finally push them to make kiosks that run entirely without OS. I expect a big enough Rube Goldberg machine could do the task if not as efficiently, then at least in a more entertaining way.
See:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...
https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1rsn1tm/it_a...
The idea that there is an age requirement (for certain content) has been around for a very long time (Facebook, for example has a no under 13s rule in their T&Cs, many porn sites have a 18 years or older declaration before allowing access, and so on)
Australia has recently implemented law(s) that take the next step forward, and the other countries in the world that have been wanting something similar are seeing that, seeing that there haven't blowback from corporations or voters that makes the idea of the law unpalatable, and thinking that they too can implement laws that work in similar ways.
If you actually pay attention to global politics you will see that this sort of behaviour occurs fairly regularly (look, for example, and the legalisationg of homosexual marriage, there was a law legalising it in the Netherlands in 2001, then Belgium did similar in 2003... and so on as more countries saw that their own voters were amenable to the idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_same-sex_marri...)
edit: There's no grand conspiracy at play
Another example is the cannabis use laws, cannabis was heavily criminalised in the 70s, there was pressure from the USA for other countries to follow suit.
BUT from the early 2010s several states of the USA legalised recreational use - this has also bought the debate back to the fore for many countries, with reassessments and changes occuring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cannabis_by_U.S._j...
This is absolutely not true.
Here in the UK schools are swarming with ipads and shit like that. They're given to primary school children because they're "more engaging". Children are supposed to practice their reading and even handwriting[1] on ipads. Naturally they're on youtube instead. It's really bad. As far as I can tell, private schools are even worse. Currently the only way that I know to escape this is homeschooling.
Saying "it's a solved problem" is incredibly dismissive to parents who do everything right in their homes, but then send their children to school and schools exposed their children in this way.
Saying that phrase in such a definitive manner caters to the interests of the companies who push these shit onto schools. Please stop saying it, it's harmful.
[1] leaving this reference here because I'm certain that people without school aged children won't believe this is actually true: https://www.letterjoin.co.uk/
And how does that refute what the parent said? Those school ipads could also have YouTube locked or restricted to a whitelist of channels.
There's so much wrong here.
A) there's ways around that stuff that any child can figure out.
B) schools aren't in fact obligated to enable those, and some don't.
C) who decides on what channels are allowed? The school does. But teachers are basically people off the street that did some basic training and (from my experience) have zero critical thinking. This are not the best and brightest.
D) big tech will tell you "this is age appropriate" and the only thing that means is that you probably won't see porn. Anything else, including gambling ads on youtube, you do see.
You see, you're trying to discuss the specifics which in this case is a losing approach if your goal is to protect your chidlren from being victimized by the attention economy. The reason is that those benefiting from the attention economy have more lawyers and more engineers to deploy than any individual parent.
No, there are not for hardware locked devices with the proper controls (what apps, websites, etc to allow).
>B) schools aren't in fact obligated to enable those, and some don't.
The technical problem is solved, if they don't want to implement the solution that's on them.
>C) who decides on what channels are allowed? The school does. But teachers are basically people off the street that did some basic training and (from my experience) have zero critical thinking. This are not the best and brightest.
Again, irrelevant. A common policy can be created (e.g. by ministry of education experts) and shared with schools.
> The technical problem is solved, if they don't want to implement the solution that's on them.
Just to be clear - do you not understand that a parent might be parenting, but some times their children is in care of a school? Your focus on "a technical solution exists" is missing the real issue here, and it's not a technical one.
And not only that but some of those times are dinner break, on a school campus with a thousand other kids and barely any supervision. Even if phones are banned, it's easy to hide one and for a child to be showing their friends unhinged stuff they found on 4chan.
And some of those times are on a bus carrying at least 50 kids when they're 'supervised' only by a driver ... and so on.
That would still reduce ther exposure by 1-2 orders of magnitude, which is perfectly acceptable.
IMO the problem is twofold: first, younger kid's brains are not developed enough to deal with games and social media that are intentionally made to be addictive. Heck, even a lot of adults have issues limiting their time. Addictive games and social media should just be forbidden under 16 years. Currently our government has only issued a recommendation, which does nada. Second, teachers and parents need to be educated better. Many have no idea that these addictive apps are an issue or just don't fully realize the damage they do.
But you know, I find it frustrating that the people we're talking to clearly have no experience with the subject but they come in here and state with confidence they're opinion on something which is for them a hypothetical. They don't know what's going on.
Age verification doesn't solve that though.
This answers your objection A and B. C is also a non-probem with a trivial fix, as I showed.
What we're discussing is whether age verification is needed. Based on the existence of other, perfectly fine solutions, it's not. "But schools don't bother implementing those other solutions" is not a counter-argument to this discussion.
Well that's not much of a solution is it now? More like an attempt that we all can see will fail.
Harm reduction is not the same as a solution.
There is no valid argument for why ID checks are necessary if the goal is simply to get filtering implemented in places such as schools.
If instead the goal is to entirely prohibit all children from using social networks regardless of parental consent then it makes sense. It also makes sense if the goal is actually to violate privacy or something similarly sinister.
> Well that's not much of a solution is it now? More like an attempt that we all can see will fail.
Some entities not wanting to implement a perfectly fine technical solution is not the same as "that's not a solution". If schools not bothering is your issue, just like the state can mandate a "age verification", it can also mandate schools add such parental control locks to the devices they give to kids.
>Harm reduction is not the same as a solution.
It absolutely is, and that's what any solution will be anyway.
There's no perfect solution short of throwing kids in some kind of restricted area without access to any devices. And even in prison prisoners get ahold of startphones.
Age verification can be beaten even more easily, getting access from some older kid for example, borrowing or buying verified accounts, getting an older/hacked OS that doesn't check, and countless other holes.
The difference is that the parent controls case directly affects the device the kids have, let's the parents set the policy based on their beliefs and the child's mental maturity (not authoritarian one-size-fits-all approach), and doesn't add OS mandated id and age tracking to everybody regardless if they're kids or not.
A solution—ie, solving a problem—does in fact imply perfection.
If real-world solution implied "perfect" there would be no debate regarding better and worse solutions concerning their results - which is what social and political and team and inter-personal and even ...spousal debates are all about.
And that's about merely inherent issues, before we even come to how a proposed solution interplays with other things (e.g. mandatory age verification vs privacy, or policing vs personal freedom, or censorship vs innovation and authoritarianism).
In real life practical solutions always have tradeoffs and weak spots, but can nonetheless make the problem much smaller as to effectively be irrelevant or at an acceptable level.
I was strictly only responding to the phrase "this is a solved problem you just have to parent".
If the school can't be bothered to lock down their ipads, why not make a law that schools must lock down the ipads, rather than push this out to everyone universally?
It seems like another shoddy excuse of a panicked panopticon to me. Feel free to try to convince us otherwise.
That's the parents.
The expectation that "Parenting" is now outsourced to Teachers, to the Government, to anyone else. People seem to expect they just have a kid, and somehow magically they'll grow up to be a perfect person without any work from themselves. So there's over-reach, there's pressure on making "unworkable" soutions, because the people they're trying to force "solving" the problem aren't the people in the best position to do so.
Your comment seems working from that very same assumption.
Yes, all the "technical" part of content filtering etc. is very much a solved problem. The issue is that's not a "zero effort" solution - they still need to be enabled and managed. And I'm not sure that's a "technical" problem than can be solved.
There's huge pressure on teachers etc. to "solve" these sort of problems - just go to any PTA meeting and there's a lot of loud voices asking for stuff like the laws the original post is highlighting. And politicians listen to the loud voices, and feel they have to be "seen" doing something. Even if that "something" is impossible, unworkable, and fundamentally harmful.
They try, but kids are smart and there are holes in the tools to lock things down. You would not believe the inventive workarounds that kids find to circumvent content filters. It’s a losing battle to lock everything.
In practice, most schools lack anyone with enough technical literacy to lock down the device. So they just hand out unlocked cheap android tablets with all the stock spyware and advertisement pre-installed.
They have some things used in lessons, but they're all given out at the beginning of the lesson, then gathered at the end.
You could argue that it's a problem they they assume home access to such things anyway - especially in later years - as things like online 'homework' is the norm.
And googling only seems to find examples of the low income programmes. I struggle to find a single instance when devices are handed out to kids and not keep at school and only used in specific tasks - like the old trolley of laptops was a few years ago.
Or breathless reactionary commentary without any actual examples of course.
Yeah, because the parents' time is now dedicated to their employers. When parenting wasn't outsourced, families typically had a parent at home doing it full time.
Don't blame the parents and ignore the story of reduced family capacity.
This seems to imply that the problem is that we started letting women work, but I suspect the actual problem is back to restrictive zoning again.
If you let people actually build housing, and then some people have two incomes, they use the extra money to build a big new house or drive newer cars etc. If you instead inhibit new construction, the people with two incomes outbid the families with one income for the artificially constrained housing stock, and then every family needs two incomes and like flipping a switch you go from "women are empowered by allowing them to work" to "women are oppressed by requiring them to work".
One is that people tell women it's good to work for a corporation, some of them believe that to be true and choose to do it, the others retain and exercise the option to do something else.
The other is that we set up an artificial scarcity treadmill so that if some families have two incomes, they outbid the ones that don't on life necessities and then women have to take a job at a corporation in order to be able to afford to live indoors even if that's not what they would otherwise choose to do.
How do you suppose a country with 100 million people can have the same standard of living, if not higher, than a country with 10 million people despite having ten times the supply of labor? Or for that matter that large populous cities can have higher paying jobs than small towns?
Another case of capitalist thinking infecting everything. Why must the market swallow everything? It's fucking totalitarian.
I’ve literally never seen anyone on the left (and rarely even the liberal capitalist center-right) say that. I’ve seen people on the hard right, when complaining, use that framing, though.
And, look, here its part of a complaint glorifying the defects of the capitalist-patriarchal family and whining that more equal treatment of women in the economic sphere hurt the “family unit” rather than recognizing that capitalism wrecks the family unit and greater equality for women just reduces the particular systematic of oppression of women within the capitalist-patriarchal system, but neither cures nor causes the damage to the family unit that comes from capitalism.
I think ideally most families should be able to survive on the income of one parent, regardless of which parent that is. But I'm not sure how to get there, although I think the problem is closely tied to wealth inequality.
I also think in a better world, it would be practical for both parents to work, but work fewer hours, each working 20 hours a week. But in the US at least that generally isn't practical because most such jobs don't provide health insurance or retirement plans, and are typically very low paying jobs.
While shadowy special interest groups and large corporations are able to write text directly into the laws of anglophone countries, The People can't even talk about one instance without fragmenting into a trillion pieces covering topics such as the affordability of housing.
If all you want to do is pass a bad law, all you have to do is pay money.
NOT giving children addictive devices isn't not outsourcing parenting, it's basic social responsibility. Like not giving them cigarettes. I find it encourating that most other commenters understand this.
> There's no (state) school giving out tablets that aren't pretty much single-use locked down devices.
False, and this betrays that you have no experience with what you're talking out.
Yes, but often times enough parents DONT demand that.
Most parents think "ipads are a good thing children need to learn tech in order to have good jobs". Other parents think "ipads aren't good but if I complain I'll be that annoying parent that no one likes". Only a minority is vocal.
Return to a single income household economy and bring education closer to the home, if not outright in the home.
And especially for that one it was quite obvious lawmakers were purchased to introduce these laws.
And there are receipts, too: https://codeberg.org/svin/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings
Parents just want to be able to designate a device as belonging to a child---one setting---and have that respected. Not to have to dig into the settings of every account, service, app, and website and figure out how to set it in age-restricted mode (if that's even possible).
The tech companies have made this way too difficult and now they are facing the consequences of their shameful neglect by having to deal with all these new laws (which they will probably ignore, with no consequences, but we'll see).
The problem here is, what does that actually do?
If you say the device is for kids, can the kids then see content related to firearms? What if the parents are Republicans and don't want that censored for their kids? Also, what does it even mean? Does a YouTube video on firearm safety get blocked because it contains firearms? Should "kids" be able to view sex education content?
If nobody agrees what should be blocked then the reason they don't have a setting is that nobody knows how to implement it.
I agree that children's elders (parents, teachers, ...) should be able to control the available apps and platforms, but only for a reasonably short period (so that kids don't grow up in censorship right until they are adult, it should be continuously relaxed until the kids are in control of their own impulses, so whatever mechanism is used, it should gradually relax willy nilly the opinions of the elders or the state).
This brings up the next problem: what if parents mutually disagree? and what if teachers mutually disagree? and what if parents and teachers disagree? So there should be some kind of jurisdiction awareness in the parental control system: when at mothers place, mothers rules, when at fathers place, fathers rules, when in this or that teachers class their rules, as that would be the technological agnostic position (regardless if the old ways were good or bad, thats what technological non-interference would suggest).
But even if all parents, all teachers agreed on the parental control settings for a child, they can't really do it effectively since they are placed at the whims of big tech, with clear visible conflicts of interest like advertising, engagement, etc.
To solve that government should mandate a simple secure way for the smartphone to accept a user generated cryptographic public key, upon proving ownership so that they can sign their own root, first non-ROM (actual silicon ROM, not firmware images) op-codes chosen by the user. Then they can install any open source parental control software they want.
Its the surveillance state refusing to give the populace the keys to their own smartphone, and then deciding to "solve" the resultant inability for effective and community controlled parental control mechanisms by degrading privacy for all.
"we have to reign in your privacy, because we refuse to give you the ability to sign your own bootloaders, for freedom and safety of course"
every time we have people complain about how expensive "bricking" software and effective parental control software are (the commercial solutions aimed at companies and institutions, which have special arrangements with smartphone industry), we should direct them to a petition to force an actual right to compute by mandating computers INCLUDING smartphones allow the end-user to sign their bootloaders with a self-generated key of their choice.
Then the problems will disappear overnight, and solutions for this problem will come in a form like all the big beautiful free and open source software, and it will work, and it will be sane.
And that parents rather have everyone's actions on the internet surveilled because they can't coordinate with their schools tells you about the parents.
Compare to people who have the means to build, modify, and test the systems they talk about. Maybe no one can be this kind of an expert in the field of sociology. But if that’s the case do not present yourself as confident. Answer most questions with “I don’t know”. Refuse praise. Exude humility.
Short of it: 30-ish year career as a psychology professor and researcher focused on morality and emotions. If you follow the track of his popular science books, The Anxious Generation (on smartphone use in teens) is very much a sequel to The Coddling of the American Mind, which itself is something of a sequel to The Righteous Mind, and so on. There's a very clear linearity and progression to his works.
At I said this might just be a field where normal expectations of expertise can’t be met. But that doesn’t mean you can rescale and match the confidence of other fields.
He’s putting himself in a position similar to politicians running for office.
not to mention that the anxious generation is supported by a thin veneer of the most wildly cherry-picked data they could get, and they ignored just about any alternative explanation aside from their predetermined conclusion.
I'm fairly cynical about touch screen devices and kids, and won't be letting mine near any until they're old enough (whenever that is) but haidt's own charts don't support his conclusions in that book.
The actual reason teen mental health diagnoses started increasing so much?? An obamacare-related screening and reporting requirement change for pediatrics.
And honestly, I can't get rid of the feeling that this is where we're heading into. These are last years of the wild Internet and its next iteration will be passive and probably in 99% generated corporate safe slop.
That probably has something to do with why China's economically outperforming us so much.
The truth is, there are a lot of bad parents that are, for various reasons, unable to perform these parental duties.
We’ve always restricted children from accessing certain things without relying solely on their parent’s abilities or discretion.
I’m strongly in favour in giving parents as much control as possible. That doesn’t negate the fact that the vast majority of children, for example, currently have completely unrestricted access to hardcore pornography.
Shrugging it off, proclaiming it’s a parental responsibility, doesn’t solve the real world problem.
Previous to the internet we didn’t allow free unrestricted distribution of pornography to children. We stepped in as a society and said, no actually if you’re selling that… fine, but you need to verify the age of the customer.
This is the mechanism that allows for a recovery process to occur naturally.
Politicians have a limited duty cycle which entices them to act like the world is on fire. It's not. The real problems (deforestation, poverty, corruption to name a few) are mostly invisible to them.
If you wanna surveil your children, surveil your own fucking children. You have no say in other people's lives.
Now, as for solutions, it's also simple but unpopular. People shouldn't be so rich they have transnational power. All this is happening because we let a tiny group of mostly anti-social people get so much money the only way they can spend it is this kind of BS.
vx-underground • @vxunderground
“Yeah, so basically the current prevailing sch[*]zo internet theory is that Al nerds have destroyed the internet and created infinite spam.
The advertisement goons are now incapable of determining who is a bot and who is an actual human. The advertisement goons no longer want to pay as much to social media networks.
Social media networks, in full blown panic of losing potential revenue, decided to lobby governments saying "we gotta protect the kids! ID everyone to protect the kids from pedophiles!".
The social media networks know this doesn't really protect kids. But, it does two things (and a third accidentally).
1. They now can identify who is human and who is Al slop machine, or enough to appease the advertisement goons
2. Advertising to children is a general no-no from politicians, or something, so with ID verification they can say with confidence they're not advertising to children because it's been ID verification. Basically, they can weed out the children and focus on advertising to adults
3. The feds can now tell who is human and who is Al slop. This inadvertently helps them with tracking people and serving fresh daily dumps of propaganda, or whatever they want to do. It's a win-win-win for advertisers, social media networks, the government, and any business which does data collections.
It fucks over everyone else.
Chat, I'm not going to lie to you. This is an extremely good conspiracy sch[*]zo theory and 1 unironically believe it.”
Mar 13, 2026 • 11:33 PM UTC*
Zuck wanting to build a centerpiece for his lair made out of resin fused copies of driver's licenses would sound more plausible.
nothing strange about that. You have higher interests in control of the (national) governments in several countries, planning things at once. This is what you see as a result. It certainly did not involve democracy.
1. https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...
From rfk: “Rep. Kim Carver (R-Bossier City), the sponsor of Louisiana's HB-570, publicly confirmed that a Meta lobbyist brought the legislative language directly to her. “
That’s more than fighting to amend. I’m not sure where I got the discord connection but I thought it was from that link. I’ve read a few things on this subject recently so I may have mixed up two different sources.
heck I don't see everyone boycotting and embarging US/Israel for their aggression against Iran, because they came up with good story once again, cough...Iraq WMD...cough
Doesn't even seem close, but ok.
https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-en...
It is quite a job juggling the controls of the different companies. Microsoft even has two, one for Xbox one for windows.
And then your child turns 13 and your only option is to take away the devices entirely.
Another thing already discussed is school provided hardware. I know the schools try, but it is usually one person against 300+ students trying to figure out how to game/hack the system. Eg there's no reasonable way where you can expect one person to maintain a YouTube channel whitelist.
I do agree that we might be solving this issue the wrong way, but there is a definitely a problem here.
Spoken as someone who probably hasn't used iOS/Mac parental controls. It is a hot buggy mess that randomly blocks whitelisted applications as well. We use it, but it is a constant pain. Also a lot of applications only work half, e.g., TV apps blocking off all content rather than only content that is not age-appropriate.
By the way, we were initially firm believers of not using parental controls at all, by limiting time and teaching kids about how to use devices in a healthy way. But a lot of apps (e.g. Roblox, YouTube Shorts) are made to be as addictive as crack, making it very hard for a still not fully developed brain to deal with it.
That said, I absolutely dislike the current lobby for age verification because the goal of Meta et al. seems to be to be to absolve themselves of any responsibility by moving verification to devices and to put up regulatory walls to make it more difficult for potential competitors to enter the market. It is regulatory capture.
but i do remember my parents actually raising me pretty hands-on, taking care of me not watching stuff I shouldn't be watching which of course existed and was easily available
Cell phones and tablets don't spontaneously appear whenever a child wants one. Parents have the ability to hand devices over to children when they have time to watch them while they use it and remove those devices from them when they don't.
they really weren't
It's an actual choice:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/fashion/steve-jobs-apple-...
I am strongly against this age verification, I think this is an absolutely, catastrophically terrible idea. However, I'm also a parent who has been in the trenches. This is a damn hard problem, and we will lose our access to computing and a relatively free internet if we just sit back and say that it's on parents and parents are stupid if they don't know how to solve this problem.
No software is going to stop kids with constant access to electronics, kids are resourceful.
It's a choice, there's no getting around that.
If you're willing to use alternatives and do without the services entirely then simply DNS blocking a handful of big names on your LAN immediately resolves the majority of the issue.
Seriously. There are mountains of evidence all of this is harmful to developing brains.
There huge benefits to being able to look things up, download books, talk to friends and family even if they live on another continent, playing chess or D & D online.
I think social media is net harmful (to adults too) but devices, games etc. are not bad per se.
Society works a lot better when we make the few bad actors that are out to exploit children stop, and instead expect everyone to look out for them/generally behave in prosocial ways. Things stop working when we say "why wouldn't you assume everyone around you is out to harm your kids and act accordingly?"
We can just say "actually you're not allowed to put gambling in a game targeting 7 year olds".
But it is not a solved problem. From what I've seen parental control software is generally pretty terrible. But this age verification stuff isn't really helpful.
You seem to be arguing that introducing the whole new class of legal frameworks, technical requirements and privacy scandals(1)(2) is somewhat better than fixing the end user software flaws.
(1) https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/1-billion-identity-rec... (2) https://proton.me/blog/discord-age-verfication-breach
I specifically said that I don't think age verification laws are a solution.
But I also don't think it is a solved problem, and think that parents need better tools to help protect their children online.
I agree with "parents need better tools", but at the same time by "solved problem" I meant technical measures deployed by the parents.
Not the surveillance and privacy hell for adults.
Its a poison pull to lay down the infrastructure for controlling narrative on the internet
Like overnight a while ago, normal everyday websites are suddenly inaccessible (yes I have JS on, no it won't work.) Sometimes only the first page loads.
Can't complain to CF either, because that too is walled off by their non-functional robot detector.
I swear to God, if someone replies to this talking about how we need to protect the children I'm going to start requiring "age verification" from commenters, and I'll do a little background check to find out w̵h̵e̵r̵e̵ ̵t̵h̵e̵y̵ ̵l̵i̵v̵e̵ if they're over 18.
I walked to get a sandwich today and I counted no less than ten cameras along the way.
On an unrelated note, I'm thinking of taking up a laser hobby.
The end goal is for every IP address to be associated with a physical person and an ID card number. Which is where we'll end up after they'll unsuccessfully try to ban VPNs that are used to bypass age-verification checks.
We all know how these laws are not meant to protect children.
Then we decry the hypocrisy of it.
And then we stop at that.
So nobody is saying what needs to be said.
These laws are explicitly designed to hurt children.
It's mass surveillance. Let's not get distracted.
For starters, an independent self-education will become impossible. Millions more young people would be forced to choose between becoming fluent in whatever maddening proprietary nonsenses their schools are paid to teach them - or ostracism and starvation. They would never know the validity that disintermediated computation lends to one's interior thought process. Many more people would grow into the world of ubiquitous multilevel gaslighting instead of the world of free thought. And that would be those children's life now.
Here's a bit of a doomsday scenario, you can pepper with it your dialogues with people thinking of the children too hard, and you may find their reactions enlightening.
As enmeshed as personal computing and mass media already are with personal life, it can take an organized e***s-minded outfit scant generations to literally devolve your children into a servile underclass. Simply by making access to computation a tightly controlled privilege, and using that to amplify social inequality. (While their own kids get to play out the fantasies dreamt up for them by the colonial laureates of yore, i.e. be immortal trillionaire wizard aristocrats who can work "magic" because they get to learn actual sciences and not just some ever-changing APIs to them. Which would probably fall apart in a few generations making a huge mess of things, potentially permanently bringing down the global supply chain by mass incompetence - but how could they care?)
This is a global legislative assault against the greatest novel liberty humanity has gained from technology for generations: the Internet is literally a means for anyone to project their disembodied thoughts at a distance! Whatever force is even capable of attacking that, it would not be playing for chump change. Nor is it likely to be the unimaginative sort of entity (unless, perhaps, these laws are part of an AGI bootstrapping itself throughout society?) which is why I'm being only slightly anxious about spitballing concrete patterns of defeat in view of it.
And even if we do not end up on the branch of reality where social inequality gets written into the genome and the bloody e***ists win - forcing minors to identify themselves online is sure to facilitate the global cultural conveyor belt that winds through Willy Wonka's Consent Factory Island and beyond.
Plenty of "think of the children" arguments either way if that's how they're playing it. It's a reflexive, non-rational argument, from the same firmware update as "your mom is sacred" (i.e. good luck being child or partner of abuser who had kids to become untouchable). So yeah, do think of the children. Think of their futures. You cowards.
Frankly, this is false. There's a lot of well intentioned people writing these laws and pushing for them.
> Obviously, it's a technocratic trojan horse for increasing surveillance capabilities on digital systems.
However, it is also this.
And that's not a tradeoff I think we should make as a society.
No, there absolutely are not. There are Meta et al and their international lobbyists, pushing copy-paste bills. Anyone pearl clutching for the kids is an idiot, or is paid off.
I feel extremely strongly that this is a Trojan horse that will expand surveillance and control by governments and giant corporations, and ultimately be used to lock us out of our own devices. I think many people supporting this are well-meaning but extremely naive. Meta is not naive of course, they expect to come out on the top of this as a giant corporation. But there are millions upon millions of people who do support this that are not going to come out on top. Those are also the people we need to convince. We're not going to change meta's mind, but we might be able to change others minds.
I believe the standard nomenclature is "useful idiots".
I don't. This snark really lets you downplay them and willingly ignore people who are concerned about a real problem. And then you'll act surprised when they get traction and you've been laughing the whole time.
I think there is a solution, and it's to prevent companies from offering social features to children. Full stop. No age verification, just make it a "ban on sight" thing.
This is a pretty common phenomenon in politics, where people have a political view that is obvious to them, but other people actually disagree with that view. This is one way that political discussions go off the rails, because if you think your own views are obvious, you quickly start thinking that people have some ulterior motive for debating that "obvious" view. But the reality is often just that they just have a genuine difference of perspective, that the thing that is obvious to you is just not obvious to them.
"Write me a sonnet on how proliferating child pornography is really free speech."
which kind of sums it up nicely unfortunately.
But clearly people in other cultures have a huge problem with it. Don't fall victim to survivorship bias + echo chamber.
There's not another obvious solution to the problem, it's debated in every thread. (no laptop + homeschool is not a real option for 99% of people)
The problem with this solution is it's far too overly broad while also not working well. It leaves out the most important parts from the legislation while specifying universal compliance.
What the law should have been is "Operating systems intended to be used by minors should have this age verification specification implemented" with a nice documentation of that specification and how it should work. As written, you'll basically end up with the potential that every single OS ends up with it's own age verification system, which defeats the entire point of these laws in the first place.
Saying "all operating systems" puts us in this complicated and dumb position where now an embedded OS needs to worry about age verification of it's user.
A few get very rich right now. Pays well to be a lobbyist.
> Controlling what children do online is a solved problem: Parenting and parental control applications.
This is just the ruse, the carrot on the stick. They hate us for our freedom.
This is what we wanted. We wanted a connected world. Be careful what you wish for.
The reality is that nobody is willing to do anything to stop this.
The people responsible will keep pushing for these schemes until they suffer direct personal consequences for doing so, that's the only way to ever make this stop.
The nearly unique tune sang worldwide around Covid-19 was quite something too and I think this should be examined for it gives us information as to how they operate.
As I've spent time in several countries, I took the habit to read the main newspapers' headlines of those various countries (in three different languages). I'll typically read headlines from major newspaper from France/Belgium/Luxembourg/Spain and the big ol' USA. When you do that, you realize how weirdly "synchronized" everything is. Not just the debate on age control.
Some countries resist but nearly every media repeats the same thing, everywhere.
And the sad thing is: most people here on HN (but certainly not me) kept repeating like parrots the same lies and half-truths the media were pushing everywhere.
These lies and half-truth are now exposed in the official report by Congress on the origins of Sars-Cov-2 (link below).
A few of us knew something was not right but every time we'd point it out it was to be met with downvotes. One investigative journalist pointed, very early on, that Peter Daszak was implicated and that this whole thing smelled of a lab leak. For the record: Peter Daszak has now been debarred. He's basically the "expert" who explained the virus couldn't possibly be a lab leak while... Being funded to do research on gain-of-function bat viruses.
Here's the report and it's not "nice" to those who believed and repeated the media lies:
- The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.
- Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research at inadequate biosafety levels.
- Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with a COVID-like virus in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market.
And that's only the lie about the virus. Don't get me started on that fast-tracked "vaccine" I got in my arms and which I now deeply regret. For all we know in a few years we'll also learn about the lies and half-truth around those various vaccines.
> With the same logical fallacies.
I think books could be filled with those logical fallacies we read about Covid. Including those we read in comments here on HN. I stand my case and it's here: FINAL REPORT: COVID Select Concludes 2-Year Investigation, Issues 500+ Page Final Report on Lessons Learned and the Path Forward [1]
> Pretty telling about how transnational lobbies and their interests work.
Yup I think so. And to me the SARS-Cov-2 / Covid-19 is a very interesting example of that and what happened should be studied more to understand how a select group people is scheming behind the scenes.
[1] https://oversight.house.gov/release/final-report-covid-selec...
As usual for online censorship, Techdirt has had excellent coverage for years: https://www.techdirt.com/tag/baroness-beeban-kidron/
Not really. Everyone wanted this for a decade or longer. They just waited for someone taking the first step, checking the reactions, to see how it will work out.
> With the same logical fallacies.
Same knowledge often leads to similar conclusions.
> Controlling what children do online is a solved problem: Parenting and parental control applications.
Do you have any relevant experience with this "solution"?
https://thedreydossier.substack.com/p/the-billionaire-behind...
You have no clue what children. It’s by far not a solved problem
Correct. For the life of me I cannot see how this can ever work in practice.
For such a scheme to work all users would have to be physically and electronically locked out from accessing any feature of a computer that would alter its function.
This has to be sheer madness. Every general computing device from small embedded controllers, to Raspberry Pis to the most powerful desktop computers would have more in common with electricity meters and their embossed lead anti-tampering seals than present-day computers. Can you imagine the utter chaos of the state conducting regular anti-tampering audits of every state-registered PC? And what about the millions of legacy PCs that could not be adapted?
Moreover, using such a computer would be more akin to using an automatic teller machine with its strictly controlled and limited functions, the notion of "general computing" as we now know it would cease to exist.
The only practical solution is to make parents responsible—that is to ensure their kids do not have unfettered/unmanaged access to computers. Responsibility could be extended to all adults, anyone deliberately providing unsupervised/unfettered computer access to minors could be charged with child abuse.
If parents aren't prepared to extend their parental responsibilities to also include computing devices, phones, social media and such then the state could impose penalties. Of course, for that to work society would have to agree as it now does over outlawing the physical punishing of children (not that long ago that wasn't the case).
No doubt arriving at a society-wide consensus would take time but it's doable. Societal views do change, for example, when I was a kid we got the cane for misbehaving, caning kids is now outlawed often with heavy penalties.
Finally, I also find your point about the age verification debate popping up simultaneously in the US, UK, and EU as very troubling. I'm not a conspiracy theorist but evidence suggests there are many lobbyists acting behind the scenes of whom we are unaware (same goes with the encryption debate).
It's this sort of hidden subterfuge that's undermining and pulling our democracies apart. Little wonder that these days many citizens have little faith in institutions and those whose governance they're under.
This is happening in India, Australia and will happen everywhere in the world.
Tech is now the “bad guy”. Voters are tired of tech firms and want tech firms to be held accountable for the “bad stuff they do”.
Actual research and evidence is held back because even if Tech is well meaning, they do not allow negative research results to be shared.
While this information void is growing, Governments are champing at the bit to bring tech firms to heel within their jurisdictions.
The alignment of incentives allows only one direction for things to go.
We do not need global lobbying to achieve this result.
Let's say I am a generic linux developer who develops variants of Debian Linux while sitting in my basement in any part of the world.
If one country wants to ban my software because I don't ask for their age, then set up suitable protections for your citizens.
Don't force me to do that. I am not responsible for protecting your citizens.
That is like saying if Saudi wants your id to make sure only males can download operating systems, so now will I add another restriction.
At least China takes it upon themselves to ban sites that they deem harmful for their citizens rather than forcing devs.
You didn't geobock the download or prompt for then user's address first in your scenario. So it may constitute export because it would be reasonable to assume that you clearly intended to make it available worldwide.
Phil Zimmerman was investigated for illegaly exporting munitions because he made PGP available via FTP. The case was settled, so I don't know whether this argument would ultimately have been successful.
Wyoming just passed a bill explicitly refuting this interpretation, other states are working on their own bills, and there is even a federal bill in the early stages.
The only exception that the US has ever acknowledged to this is ITAR, which is what the PGP case was built around, but it failed as you mentioned. But non age verified OSes are obviously not munitions.
If we allow this shit to happen, be prepared for evolution deniers to push their nuts agenda through the same channels and similar. Suddenly, we won't find wikipedia articles any longer and suddenly having a blog about biology will lead to one being investigated.
So it's strange that California is trying to compel speech when the ninth circuit has already said that software regulation is unconstitutional.
Consider that your server received a connection from an ISP that you know has global reach, and you sent the packages to IP addresses that are from a specific RIR and assigned to a specific country. That is if you are hosting directly if it's a third party, who knows.
Also, I am not a lawyer.
What's worse (and the point of the linked article), a kid who's not 5 but 10 would be very able to bypass this particular requirement, making it utterly useless. It's about as effective as the "parental controls" on Leisure Suit Larry. I'd argue that this is worse than nothing, because now the parent believes they have a working parental control mechanism when they actually don't. Which means you now have a 10 year old online without parental controls AND possibly without parental supervision.
What works:
- Talk to your children about what they can be finding online.
- Don't let children as young as 5 onto the internet unsupervised.
- Build trust with your child. Try to make sure your child trusts you enough to come to you if they encounter material they're not comfortable with.
- If you don't have that relation of trust, your child will hide their online "failures" from you. They are then more likely to be victimized by online predators by blackmail etc.
If I want to bash the government I don't want to have to choose between giving my id and going to terroristforum dot com.
unless you can confidently dodge American law enforcement, which is a big ask unless you are solidly anonymous somehow, then you are forced to react in some way
I'm not disagreeing with you. Just pointing out an additional bit of detail.
I am so puzzled by everyone who objects so strongly to these operating system based opt in systems; all it does is provide for a way for a parent to indicate the age of a child's account, and an API for apps and browsers to get that information. If you're the owner/admin of a system, you get to set that information however you want, and it's required that it only provides ranges and not specific birthdays in order to be privacy preserving.
The government legislating APIs is an uncomfortable precedent given the culture wars that are raging right now. There seems little reason to expect this will stop here.
Are these illegal operating systems?
Either you or someone else mentioned this talking point the other day, I asked for even a single example of an OS maker being sued over this successfully, and I got nothing.
I work in aviation, a highly regulated field. And that's a good thing. It does take some work to regulate well; there has been a migration in aviation to more prescriptive regulation about how things need to be, to less prescriptive like what the ultimate performance needs to be. But yeah, the aviation regulations aren't that you have to implement something a specific way, but that you have to be able to show that your aircraft has no more than a certain probability of catastrophic failure (where the probability varies base on certain things like the size and type of aircraft).
For this age verification law, all that is required is that there is an API provided for this purpose, and there is a way for the owner of the machine to set up user accounts with age information indicated, and that the APIs need to provide several rough age ranges, not specific birthdays.
It might also include some additional text like "we have decided to collaborate with systemd to integrate this proprietary binary blob, to maximize the reach and eliminating any pains in the setup process caused by the vibrant ecosystem of package managers, while at the same time avoiding disrupting the development process of the Linux kernel".
We shouldn't object to a reasonable law just becasue it might, theoretically, pave the way to an unreasonable law.
In fact, this is put in place as an alternative to the kind of law being enacted elsewhere, right now, which is much worse; the ones requiring ID based verification for accessing many online services. This one provides an alternative solution, which is far more privacy preserving, and leaves all of the actual power in the hands of the owner of the computer.
Meta being behind all of these efforts makes it incredibly suspicious, especially given the New York law is ridiculously more invasive than the California one. It sure makes it seem like there's likely a larger plan here that this is merely facilitating.
So I don't think I can still buy it at face value that California's version is a good-faith attempt to balance privacy and child safety, even if that's what it is in the eyes of the legislature, given who's actually behind it and what else they've been pushing for.
Yes, the New York proposed law is far worse, and we absolutely should be pushing back against that. And Facebook doesn't care, because they only care about moving the liability onto the OS vendor, not on actual privacy.
But still, just because this was supported by Facebook doesn't make it bad. Sure, Facebook doesn't care about privacy, but they do care about not being liable for this, and in this case, they're right, it is actually much more efficient to centralize this function in the OS, and it happens that that way it can be done in a privacy preserving way as California's law shows.
At any rate, why legislate operating systems when all of the harm comes not from computers themselves but rather from certain websites? And there are already mature solutions for controlling access to specific websites. Client-side parental controls for internet access have existed for decades, dating back to Surfwatch from the Win95 era. A credit card requirement would also effectively impose an age filter.
I didn't say just because Facebook supports a law that it makes it bad.
I said the fact that Facebook has been lobbying for such legislation across a ton of jurisdictions, that makes it suspicious.
I stand by that. This is suspicious, whether it's ultimately bad or good.
It definitely makes it more deserving of a closer look. I think that's undeniable.
It requires that operating systems provide a way, at account setup, to specify the age or birthdate of a user, and provides an API for indicating which age range the user falls in (under 13, 13 to 16, 16 to 18, or over 18) to an application, so the application can use that information to comply with any laws or regulations relating to the age of the user.
It doesn't make any requirement that the parent actually truthfully put that information in. It doesn't require that anyone verify the information. It doesnt provide for any requirement that a child not set up a user themselves. It explicitly calls out that there is no liability on any of the parties if one user uses a computer under another user's account.
So all it's doing is saying that there must be a reasonably accessible mechanism for a parent to indicate a child's age so that rough information about which age range the child is in can be provided.
Now, is it perfect? No.
It does seem a bit over broad as there are lots of things which be classified as computers uner this, like routers, smart TVs, graphing calculators, cars, etc. Having to provide account setup with age and an API to accesss it in all of these environments could be a bit of a lift in the time frame given. And it doesn't leave a lot of time for something like standardization of Unix APIs between operatings systems, so for systems not running graphical environments I'm sure we're going to get a bunch of different solutions from different OSes as everyone sticks it in a different place and provides a different way to access it. And this would need to be a new feature added into long-term supported maintenance releases operating systems.
So yeah, could it have been done better? Yes. Is it likely that they are actually going to fine OpenWRT developers if they don't implement this? I doubt it; it's pretty clear that the legislative intent is desktop and phone OSes, and other mass market consumer oriented devices that might offer app stores.
So yeah, I see some issues, but overall this seems like the right way to do things; just provide a way for parents to set an age on their children's account, and then provide that to any apps that might need to do age verification. That's it.
I don’t see why we should burden OSes this way. An App Store does all that better.
Because it's inverted. If it's opt in on the parent's part anyway then there's no reason to send additional information along with the request. The service should rather send additional information about content categorization alongside the response.
So what reasons can you imagine for it to be designed in such an obviously unnecessary way?
Right now the only one I'm aware of is RTA which theoretically applies on a per-request basis although I expect that approximately all present usage is uniform site wide.
Such a system is clearly the technically superior solution. It regulates the provider as opposed to the client, forcing the market to provide a workable solution for concerned parties while the client maintains complete control over how things are handled. It further steers well clear of any slippery slopes by not mandating the broadcast or collection of personal information.
Perhaps important from a liability perspective, it places the onus on the client as opposed to these latest attempts to shift it squarely onto the service provider. Right now the legality of serving content across jurisdictional boundaries is extremely convoluted. With ID or age reporting laws it clearly becomes the service provider's responsibility. In contrast, a mandatory metadata standard for classification would create a situation in which it is clear that the legal responsibility (if any) to appropriately configure filters falls to the client.
Of course such a solution would be of no help to the anti-porn and pro-surveillance lobbies. That's the entire point.
or do you have root on your iPhone?
As it stands, it reads more like “I’ve used my free will to decide to suspend all critical thinking and accept that anything that anyone with authority decides should be a rule must be unquestioningly accepted.”
Yeah, in an ideal world. Good luck with that.
We live in a deeply unjust world where laws are literally bought and paid for by corporations. This age verification nonsense is just the latest example. They aren't going to sit idle if we attack their lobbying efforts, they're going to come after us. God only knows what a surveillance company like Meta can do to you if they really hate your guts.
Selective rejection of laws based on your own personal morals is wrong in every circumstance.
Either you believe the system is just and you follow all the rules (and work through the system to changes the individual rules you believe are unjust), or you believe that the system is fundamentally unjust and you take drastic action to fix it. If you don't, then you're a hypocrite - you don't really believe that the system is unjust, you're just using that as an excuse to selectively ignore laws you disagree with.
I do.
> you should reform/replace it
This is a way to reform it. If nobody obeys a law, is it really illegal? It's more like a custom.
> Selective rejection of laws based on your own personal morals is wrong in every circumstance.
So if your so called authorities passed a law saying you're required to participate in some atrocity such as genocide, you'd do it with a clean conscience? Okay.
> you believe that the system is fundamentally unjust and you take drastic action to fix it
I don't have the power to do so. Also, people who try "drastic" actions are called terrorists.
- some are backed by powerful interests
- some have become load-bearing and are too difficult to replace
- some just don't matter and aren't enforced
- even if you fix some, new ones will be passed, because people are not perfect
If I prove this to you, will you then take your own advice and "take drastic action" to replace the US government?
> If I prove this to you, will you then take your own advice and "take drastic action" to replace the US government?
No. You didn't actually read my comments before responding, and you're fundamentally misunderstanding my position. That's not "my own advice".
> Either you believe the system is just and you follow all the rules (and work through the system to changes the individual rules you believe are unjust) [...]
I believe the system is just. That does not change in the presence of those unjust rules that you listed above, because those laws can be changed and are changed regularly, and because they're not egregious enough to constitute a failure of the system.
You seem to agree that there are unjust laws, but you don't realize the scope of the problem. There are many unenforceable laws, with drastic consequences if they were enforced, which are not being fixed[0]. A just system would not perpetuate unjust laws indefinitely, and so under your framing, everyone who disagrees with these laws and is not willing to follow them should take "drastic action."
In fact, there's no such binary. We live under a flawed system which contains unenforceable laws; we can just ignore those laws (which law enforcement already does) even if they are not changed, without needing to overthrow the system, emigrate, or whatever it is you meant to imply by "drastic action."
[0]https://claude.ai/share/b5d93161-65f8-432e-b04e-af98d951038e
Irrelevant.
> A just system would not perpetuate unjust laws indefinitely
Can you point to laws that the majority of the population agrees are unjust that have existed since the beginning of the United States? If not, then there's zero unjust laws being perpetuated indefinitely, and so your conclusion is invalid by your own argument.
But, your own argument is wrong to begin with - the vast majority of humans will acknowledge a system as being essentially just even if it perpetuates some unjust/irrelevant/silly laws.
> In fact, there's no such binary.
That's true, you can "just ignore those laws" - and you'll be a hypocrite. The binary that I'm describing is clearly moral. I'm not saying that you physically must take one position or the other (as you're implying) - just that if you pick a value in the middle, you're a hypocrite, and your opinions are worthless, because you don't really believe them - you're just saying whatever is most convenient/advantageous for you at the moment.
While I don't see why "unenforceable laws" is being mentioned so many times, given the plethora of other laws, I possit that since one of the prior comments was that enforcing them would be damageous, perhaps the intended wording is "unenforced laws" (as distinct from laws which cannot be enforced). If so, then I suggest their relevance.
>> A just system would not perpetuate unjust laws indefinitely > > Can you point to laws that the majority of the population agrees are unjust that have existed since the beginning of the United States? If not, then there's zero unjust laws being perpetuated indefinitely, and so your conclusion is invalid by your own argument.
This the flaw that a law being perpetuated "indefinitely" (that is, without defined end) need not have existed since the beginning of the United States. Such law could have begun at any after, or indeed prior.
>> In fact, there's no such binary. > > That's true, you can "just ignore those laws" - and you'll be a hypocrite. The binary that I'm describing is clearly moral. I'm not saying that you physically must take one position or the other (as you're implying) - just that if you pick a value in the middle, you're a hypocrite, and your opinions are worthless, because you don't really believe them - you're just saying whatever is most convenient/advantageous for you at the moment.
This formulation is not constructive of enlightened debate. Kindly sheath your daggers and reply without invectives. As written, that might easily be read both as personal attack and casual dismisal of entire person. For what is a person who has no opinions?
Now, if I understand your position correctly, you believe that all laws must be obeyed, and that disobeying any law is immoral. Do we each believe that some laws are, whether past or present, immoral? In the case that a law can be immoral, I must hold that the resultant moral obligations are to disobey that law to the fullest and to endeavour to best ability for its most expedient and most moral removal.
Nobody asked for this age verification nonsense. The entire child protection angle is just a way to manufacture outrage and cover up the real nature of this law. This is purely a political move from Meta against Apple and Google. Apple cut off their data via iOS privacy controls, now Meta is striking back.
Meta spent billions on lobbyists, then laws benefiting Meta and hurting its competitors were passed. If this is not evidence that you can buy laws, I don't know what is.
That literally does not answer the GP's question.
You're just an anarchist. We can save a lot of steps if you just state that outright.
I'm merely a proponent of civil disobedience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience
> Any man who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community on the injustice of the law is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for the law out of all other freedom struggles.
> Martin Luther King Jr.
There is absolutely no reason at all to even so much as recognize these laws as legitimate. Society can go to hell if it thinks otherwise. They were supposed to be working for us, not the corporations. Since they aren't, we simply revoke their power over us. It really is that easy.
Power isn't something you have, it's loaned out to you, and it can be revoked. People give you power because they believe you'll act in their best interests and solve their problems for them. Once it becomes clear that's not happening, there is absolutely no reason at all to defer to some corrupt "authorities" who are doing nothing but enriching themselves at our expense.
So much for "Resolving inconsistencies between my ideas is the entire reason why I come here to discuss them."[1] - you're just here to engage in propaganda.
(propaganda that, for the future record, isn't even true - corporations do not get votes and do not get to "buy the laws they want")
The current system allows for changing it if you have enough support. People who try to go around it because they do not have the needed support. If society was truly wrong we could easily dissolve it.
I can't see how that could ever go wrong.
Why shouldn't it look like that? Especially with a law this dumb
>Especially with a law this dumb
Allow software to know if the user is an adult or a child seems like a useful signal to me and is not dumb.
It’s a way of socializing the losses, this time you lose civil liberties and they get to keep acting unrestricted
The correct solution that does not do this is to put liability on the parents.
So if your goal is for the state to decide what is good or bad for children, then yes, giving parents fines when their children access 18+ content will motivate those parents to parent their children. That will be an effective way to achieve your goal. Other policies have issues with externalities (ignoring the inherent externalities of creating liabilities ex nihilo, which will exist no matter what policy you choose).
If you believe that parents should get to decide what content their children, then like me, you would oppose any kind of legislation with this goal in mind.
And, like most such policies, will disproportionately impact the working poor.
I guess we made a mistake in not consulting the oracle of all legal matters. Very sorry, we will consult you on all future proposals.
Meta is in the middle of a huge multi-state lawsuit (33 attorney generals), so they have a lot of incentive to do this.
Amazing. We the people are not engaged. It really feels like we're at the end of history or something.
It was originally 30,000 but was changed, your author is using the updated version.
Additionally, there is another way to change it. The Texas State Legislature. Texas is the only state with Congressional pre-approval to break up into 4 more states. 5 total without the need for congresses approval. Texas breaks up, then California and New York are heavily outnumbered in the Senate as each state gets 2 Senators. Other states will follow and so too will calls to expand the House.
There is a path without state amendment process or congress.
F*ck Poettering. Want to bet that once he's done the damage his company will be acquired for a large amount of money by Microsoft? This is just another Nokia for them.
For fucks sake, this would make your life easier. Instead of having to enter your DOB for everything you access, your OS based on your account can just send it. I'm tired as fuck of Steam asking my age even though my Steam account is 21 years old. If Steam and other websites / apps could query the age I've specified that would be far better and less disruptive.
The Internet has been a free place for 30+ years and I don't see a reason to change that. I grew up with the ability to access all kinds of content on the Internet, in an unrestricted manner, and it is sad to see that decision makers now want to take this away from younger generations.
We must absolutely resist any attempt at profiling Internet users. Age is only the first step. If people give in now, the next step will be other personal information, and it will also be done in the name of "protecting children" or "catching terrorists" as always. The writing is on the wall.
You're just gullible.
There is no website that I've ever uploaded my driving license or other ID to, the only place that I need that for is my bank and that's about a real world relationship, not about an online one.
Any website that wants me to verify my age is going to have to do without me, that's just none of their business. What children see on the internet is not going to change because of this, any parent that wants to modify their kids' behavior is going to have to do some actual parenting rather than to rely on gatekeeping technology because kids are far more capable than their parents when it comes to circumventing such restrictions.
How will that be accomplished?
How will these laws be ammended in the future?
> Ageless Linux is a registered operating system under the definitions established by the California Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043, Chapter 675, Statutes of 2025). We are in full, knowing, and intentional noncompliance with the age verification requirements of Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.501(a).
> Q: What if the AG actually fines you?
> Then we will have accomplished something no amount of mailing list discussion could: a court record establishing what AB 1043 actually means when applied to the real world. Does "operating system provider" cover a bash script? Does "general purpose computing device" cover a Raspberry Pi Pico? Can you fine someone "per affected child" when no mechanism exists to count affected children? These are questions the legislature left unanswered. We'd like answers. A fine would be the fastest way to get them.
“What’s even an operating system will this apply to my toaster?” - probably not, a judge would ultimately decide.
> “What’s even an operating system will this apply to my toaster?” - probably not, a judge would ultimately decide.
> or ovens which do not provide an App Store, I cannot tell what the intent of AB 1043 should be.
- Does the oven have an "account setup" process?
- Does the phrase "the user of that device" make sense for this oven?
- Does "the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store" make sense for this oven?
- Does "to provide a developer, as defined, who has requested a signal" seem relevant to this oven?
One judge might look at an appliance with no screen or input and “nope” it quickly.
Another might decide that these OS designers should show more caution. And just because their distro supports ovens, it also supports Amazon Echo.
While we're at it, does fdroid count as the sort of app store that this law cares about? Because an end user can install that for themselves.
F-Droid is more abusable, unfortunately.
Could the law be better written? Probably. But at some point there will always be a grey area that needs to be slowly defined through jurisprudence and case law.
Maybe they're interested in performative noncompliance, but I'm not. I'd rather engage in creative and effective noncompliance.
'Definition: "Covered Application Store" '"Covered application store" means a publicly available internet website, software application, online service, or platform that distributes and facilitates the download of applications from third-party developers to users of a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device that can access a covered application store or can download an application. — Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.500(e)(1) 'This website is a "publicly available internet website" that "distributes and facilitates the download of applications" (specifically: a bash script) "to users of a general purpose computing device." We are also a covered application store. Debian's APT repositories are covered application stores. The AUR is a covered application store. Any mirror hosting .deb files is a covered application store. GitHub is a covered application store. Your friend's personal website with a download link to their weekend project is a covered application store.'
For compliance the os has to provide an age category to an application and an interface for the user to enter this data. We already have an api to provide information to applications. it's called the filesystem. and an interface to enter the data, that's called the shell. so everything is already there. If the user lives in california and wants to be compliant (wait a minute, let me stop laughing) all they have to do is put a file somewhere with a age category in it. if the application can't find it. well it's not their fault the law is stupid.
Actually having a cross-distro way to specify an age group for parental control purposes would be very useful.
If the law starts to change and be about surveillance (which it isn't about _right now_) then distro maintainers will just not implement that.
You described a technical solution to comply with this law. Yes, that's easy. The problem is the legal implications.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
Without that file, I hope the age category generalizes to 0. Also, I suppose the file’s ctime should be subtracted from localtime and added to the age, but maybe not if the special value 0 was entered.
How is it so bad that we need some civil disobedience movement over it? On the contrary to, UK's Online Safety Act and China asking all online platforms to verify your phone number?
Democracy should be direct and the gating function shouldn't be age but a test of intelligence, logical reasoning, general knowledge and ability to detect manipulation.
1) Do they really? I honestly don't know, are there independent polls about this?
2) What makes them think they have any right to decide for other people's children? I would be OK with them genuinely thinking they need to surveil their own children but if 1) is true then there is this underlying need of people to control others and I am not OK with that. This is how minorities are suppressed and harassed - same mechanism, different target.
> Have you heard of the slippery slope? A cornerstone of American political philosophy?
> Arguments like this one are why the authoritarian ratchet continues to turn unimpeded over time.
Compelling any speech or written code is a violation of our rights as recognized by the first amendment of the United States Constitution.
It's the principle of the matter. The State should not be allowed to compel speech (what code you write) in your open source project. It may sound stubborn but if we don't fight it now it will only grow little by "easy feature" little.
And I know someone is going to say 'then we should regulate social media sites to force them to verify the users' ages...' no god please no. Normalizing cloud-based age verification is far, far worse than AB 1043. If there is a principle to be set that should be: cloud should trust local, not vice versa.
[0]: https://yougov.com/articles/51000-support-for-under-16-socia...
[1]: https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/widespread-support-banning-socia...
[2]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/gen-z-social...
I also don't base my principles on the desires of the masses. It's our duty as people who understand the technology to prevent the controversy-de-jour from wagging our dog.
I share your feeling that if everyone did it this way and the world promised to stop making bad, privacy-invading ID laws I could grin and bear it. I don't see that happening, thus I am hostile to it in any flavor.
Exactly. This is why if there is no some less evil way to appease these stupid people we'll go all the way straight to the evilest way. Stupid and uninformed people do actually vote.
A reasonable compromise? With who? Who here is somehow required to "compromise"?
What a stretch man. Is banning nuclear weapons a restriction of free speech because it compels speech (the blueprints and specs engineers write).
And by "trivially easy" I mean "somebody already posted how-to for windows to stackoverflow"
It might not be a problem for you, but some underage kid, who lied about their age, gets addicted to a game with in-game purchases and gets into financial trouble now has no recourse against the company who made the addicting game.
I genuinely don't know, and it's hard to see what's the differences between those two cases are.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
I kinda did forgot about Android, yeah. You can't exactly rewrite OS rules there. But it's no less trivial* on Android, you just have to solve it from different angle.
* assuming someone will just write the app, and share it. But since similar projects exist, it wouldn't be a reach to say that it's doable and some folks would be interested to do it.
All I can do is encourage you and others like you to ponder upon:
Google is trying to force all devs to have verified identies
Google and Apple and Microsoft already ban applications they simply don't like (violates their "policies") from their app stores
There will be attempts to close the holes when they come to the attention of "stakeholders"
The UK already wants to ban VPNs
And the aforementioned, you can't really enforce laws or policies like this without locking down the OS and hardware.
There's probably more indicators of what's coming down this path. It doesn't look good.
It's the laws and the FOSS that matter. You can circumvent almost anything, and – if the laws allow – you can share it freely.
I feel like we disagree on "you can't really enforce laws or policies like this without locking down the OS and hardware". In my eyes you can enforce the suggested law, without locking down on things. The law as written requires sending brackets, it doesn't require for them to be in any way to be true. It doesn't require OS to check.
I presume that if a child could get around this restrictions, they could make a choice between following them or getting around them. In my mind it's akin to "don't trespass" signs. Obviously a child could trespass them quite easily, and yet it's on parent to teach them why they shouldn't
Note that I know that we don't know yet what are the restrictions and how they could be enforced. I just don't get how we got from what we know to "lockdown all platforms must happen".
So it’s a nice statement but ultimately hollow because the devs aren’t at any real risk of being arrested or fined. This isn’t like Rosa Parks refusing to move to the back of the bus.
Want to make a real statement about software freedom? You gotta do something that makes the normies mad, like making an OS that explicitly helps kids do sports betting, buy drugs, watch porn, and whatever else. Then people will notice, but unfortunately you probably won’t convince them that this law is bad.
Unless Microsoft, Apple, or Google refuses to comply then I think this law is where commercial OSes are headed. But Linux doesn’t really need to worry, because nobody is going to arrest a nerd waving his arms saying, “look at me everybody, I’m breaking the law!”
History of computing and open source is full of clever subversiveness. If back in the past hackers had the same attitude crying about complying otherwise fines we would have nothing today.
Once that door is closed you can kiss 90% of what we love about computing goodbye.
They will solely be marketing and advertising platforms which you increasingly MUST use to interact with institutions private and public.
And by the way they'll be spying on and profiling on you even worse than is happening today, all fed into digital identity silos sold to anyone who wants it, including governments. Governments you like, and governments you don't.
There is already a pre-existing push to bring attested computing to Linux.
The California law is not the only OS level age verification law passed or in the process of passing in the US.
One wonders if you're being intentionally obtuse.
Its already illegal to show adult material to minors. If they were about enforcing laws properly they'd just do that. For instance a court ruling that adult material isnt allowed on the internet, since you can't effectively ID visitors.
Anyone could just make a fake ID though, so what did they do? Make creating fake IDs a crime. If we can lie about our age to the OS, they'll make it illegal to do that as well.
This is an obvious move to reduce computing freedom.
And because it gives multiple groups extreme power and influence over many things.
And because those groups clearly crave that power and influence.
The internet is the new public sphere and forum, and it should not be possible except through legal judgement to bar or hinder anyone from accessing it.
If necessary, create private gated networks for adult material.
Anyway. You're clearly entrenched for some reason, so I won't waste my good faith effort any more.
There would be great rejoicing.
but that is an American solution, not a worldwide one and this is happening everywhere
would be great if the US provided a safe haven against all of this garbage, because this would essentially derail other efforts and other jurisdictions dead-set on them would have to go full China/Russia/Iran/NK and segregate themselves
Good news, this is already happening, with pushback against foreign attempts to meddle domestically. Look up Wyoming’s GRANITE Act which is spreading to other states.
This is a good lesson. What is legal is orthogonal to what is moral and/or good for you.
But I agree it's not worth trying to engage with that kind of rhetoric.
Our distribution has no centralized legal entity in any country, and our decentralized trust model requires signatures from multiple maintainers from multiple legal jurisdictions to sign code and reproducible builds to make changes so quite literally no single person has the power to change stagex alone.
I would genuinely be fascinated to see anyone attempt to make us do anything we don't want to do. I do hope California attempts to make me. I would make it my personal mission to drag them in court and make a spectacle of proving that I literally am unable to comply due to the design of the operating system.
This email is encoded with ROT-26 encoding. Decoding it is in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Does it require exact age, or just a flag >=18 vs <18? It seems like this could be trivially met by something like a file /etc/userages, where if a login is missing from that file, it is assumed they are >=18 - and a missing file is equivalent to an empty file
Why would it be reasonable for a government to use the power of law to enforce the design of an open source operating system developed by an international consortium of developers? The very fact they are even considering this is extremely suspicious.
Imagine your kid not being able to buy cigarettes easily because it can't pass an ID check at the convenience store.
For most parents, this is actually nice-to-have. For the HN crowd, it's a doomsday scenario full of dictatorial government control.
1. If kids could download cigarettes by circumventing age checks, would they?
2. If watching porn required obtaining an in-person ID check, other threads have indicated HN accepts it.
You can give your kid a cigarette, a gun, alcohol, heroine and the car keys.
What this enables is to set up a children's account on Linux.
Legality is what is permitted or prohibited by the law. In contrast, legitimacy is based on a moral principle. And thus, it is not universal and depends on the culture and tradition of a specific region.
When concerning law, in my opinion, one does not need to ask, is it legal? Which now clearly, in California, will be legal to impose restrictions on the OS level to access content on the internet. At start it is about age. But this builds a base which can be extended on.
One needs to ask, is it legitimate? Is it legitimate to impose restrictions on computer and internet usage based on who you are?
Another question to be asked is if in democracy all laws are legitimate, as they emanate from the congress which belongs to the nation. It's clear that in non-democratic regimes legality will never be equal to legitimacy.
If the California law flops, the result isn't going to be no age verification. It's going to be increasing numbers of internet services requiring that you verify their identity with them through some shady third-party you have no control over, until you effectively can't use the internet without giving away your ID.
I'd prefer to have no age verification, but it's pretty clear that's not an option. People in power are using minors accessing porn and social media as a cover to push age verification, and it's believable enough that people are going along with it. Approaches where someone attests their age on an OS or account level are our best shot at disarming this push.
Contrary to your belief that if we just give them an inch they won't take the full mile, I think it is very important to get people rallied against OS modification altogether. If you take a murky position like "a little bit of age verification, as a treat", and sell people on voting for that / not protesting it, all you're doing is priming the average person for accepting age verification no matter how invasive. Average Joe isn't going to understand the nuances of when age verification may or may not be tolerable, nor is Average Joe going to understand the nuances of when compelled software inclusion may or may not be tolerable. If we want to get millions aligned in the same interest, the message needs to be extremely clear and straightforward, communicating exactly how bad of an idea it is to let each and every jurisdiction compel their own form of surveillance into your OS.
Putting your age into your user account is not the same thing.
I don't think this is actually true. Discord walked back its implementation of global age verification for now because it was protested so heavily. Governments can get away with mandating ID for porn sites and Average Joe will not make a ruckus about it because it's a shameful/embarrassing topic they would rather sweep under the rug, but I don't think Average Joe is on board with ID verification to use their computer just yet.
Tarring and feathering was once acceptable. Shame it's out of style.
a bunch of viral tiktok videos could bring it back pretty easy.
do not comply do not pay the fine idiot geriatric lawmakers have no power over what you do with your computer
I do not want an "API" in my OS to reveal information about me. I do not want this to operate without my consent. I do not want to be limited from accessing certain sites because I refuse to implement this.
No age verification at the OS level. If Meta needs to verify ages for their _profitable_ business, that's entirely _their_ problem. Get your hands off my equipment.
The primary use case of this, in my mind, is so that a parent can give their kid a PC and set an age on the user account, and that will result in them being unable to access a variety of content. Same thing for phones.
You are already being limited from accessing certain sites, because those sites are going to ask you to provide an ID. This is an alternative. It frees sites from having to request an ID to verify ages, because the age signal from the OS is legally sufficient. If I'm remembering what I read, it actually bars them from trying to determine your age in other ways.
edit: also, the signal passed from OS to software isn't even your age, it's one of four age groups. three under-age groups, and one adult group. It's not even meaningfully de-anonymizing!
The law specifically says your OS has to implement this API. It burdens my OS vendor with adding this. In this case, that's me, since I roll my own linux.
> That will get provided to app stores and probably browsers.
And how will they behave when my *OS* decides not to provide that signal? Which is what's going to happen since there's no way in hell I'm playing along with this garbage.
> is so that a parent can give their kid a PC and set an age on the user account
You're telling me there isn't any software which does this already? That are no third party packages a parent can buy to achieve this? Aside from that you're missing the blindingly obvious, without an audit trail, none of this matters. The third party software can actually do that. This cockamamie nonsense can't.
> You are already being limited from accessing certain sites
Oh yea? Which ones? From my perspective this has never happened.
> because those sites are going to ask you to provide an ID.
That's on them. That's a choice they have to make in the market. Perhaps that will allow a competitor to provide the same service, with better safety, and no ID checks. I will refuse to use any service that requires this.
If you have to show your ID to enter, that's a seedy place, and no where children should even be near. Why does social media need the same restrictions as pornography, drugs and hard liqour? Why is facebook even trying to profit off of this gap?
> If I'm remembering what I read, it actually bars them from trying to determine your age in other ways.
I believe you have remembered incorrectly. Please show me where this is a part of actual law. Then please explain to me why this is a good thing.
> the signal passed from OS to software
That's the problem. I don't care what it conveys or of it's "de-anonymizing" or not. If the software wants to know it can ask me directly. I don't want a law that requires my OS to provide _any_ information about me. Full stop.
It's just not _meaningful_. It does nothing. It does not protect children. It lets seedy backalley social media networks to profit off of their corruption. This is morally bent.
this one is easy, as a parent I would rather have my daughter watch 10,000 hours of pornography than spent 1 hour on social media
Until I poll the API every day until the bucket changes and now I know your exact birthdate. This law is not well-baked.
Every kid knows they have to click that button to see the porn. It's not about keeping anyone out, it's about legal liability (i.e. making it easy for companies to blame you).
We've seen tonnes on HN recently
2. Are the pile of assertions they're making (which sound like legal arguments and stipulations to me) against Debian's interests?
TEEN: *runs at invaders* Hey, you thugs! You can't make me obey! I support Bob, over there! *points at Bob's house*
THUGS: Grrr! Thugs smash!
BOB: Please! I have done nothing! I don't know who that teen is!
JOE: You should be happy to have such a vocal advocate in this important fight.
NARRATOR: Ironically, Bob and Jane were quietly plotting strategy and tactics for the Resistance. Until they and their children were dragged out into the street that night.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...
Seriously, we in the tech industry can help stop this 1984 stuff.
1) develop good systems for completely anonymous age verification.
2) now, potentially, use this in the places you think need age verification.
Why are people accepting 2 before 1?
it's actually the government saying "you must include salt in your food" and a few people who cook dinner at home and don't care for salt set up a website teaching you how to desalinate your... (well, there's no direct continuation of the metaphor here, but the point is it's very important that this is not the government banning a developer from implementing something, it is them mandating a developer implement something. That's far more troubling than an "asbestos ban" as in "your open source project must not fry the computers it runs on," which is equally questionable in light of "no warranty expressed or implied" but a totally different ballgame from "this API is required")
It seems metaphor is important to you, so hopefully this thoroughly illustrates the insanity of this law.
The point is there are no carve outs (for open source). Your toy operating system is just as liable as Microsoft to implement this. In the real world, the health department does not require your home cocktail hour beverages to meet industrial water supply mineralization standards.
Perhaps you believe that analogue is "a few people raising a stink" because you don't really believe the "health department" would go after my "little open source water faucet." But the way the law is written, there's nothing stopping them. And none of us want to be the test case. And that's not even getting into the whole "compelled speech" problem, but I'm going to have to leave that line of argument to someone else to analogize.
Is it? It's consumer product law, so it only applies to commercially available stuff, if not only commercially sold stuff
Y'all are so pavlovian that you see Zuck/Meta and instantly rage.
The alternative to OS based verification isn't no verification. It's cloud-based verification
The cloud verifiers have all the interest in the world to making you hate the idea that this problem could be solved at the OS level without any third party involvement
If legislators want to create some kind of legal category of child friendly device and put requirements around it, maybe that’s ok. Until they attempt to ban, restrict, or otherwise inconvenience non child friendly devices, and I guess I no longer have confidence that they won’t attempt that. At this point I’m only in favor of market based solutions and IDGAF if that fails.
Our country is apparently incapable of intelligent, fair legislation, and it’s going to be the end of us as a society.
How the fuck do you think these sorts of standards are created? The companies involved aren't going to do it out of the goodness of their hearts. That doesn't exist. So you've got multiple competing private standards which are all more privacy invasive or an option when you setup your account to specify an age that is reported to anyone who asks and is required to be accepted as true. The alternatives currently are uploading your photo ID to random websites to get access. And you think that's a better solution?
If this passes, and when it inevitably gets expanded, I won’t be free to use my computer the way I want to.
How about "age-agnostic Linux"? Just work?
But nowadays you get Discord servers with IS propaganda and twitch.tv is full of prostitutes. Facebook is "the feed", scoured by corporations, full of idealized vacation photos and Russian propaganda.
The old days are not coming back and doing nothing will lead to a further deterioration of the internet landscape.
There's still choice. My 6 online friends are on signal and they're 5 real people I interact with irl and 1 guy I never met irl.
[0] I have no credit card and it won't accept debit cards. It also won't use the fact that I've had an Apple account and spent 10s of thousands in my own name at their damn shops, online and real life, over the last 2 decades (and Apple/partners have done at least one credit check on me in that period!) But that's fine, there's an alternative! A driving licence (don't have one of those either) or a national ID (also don't have one of those.) Can I use my passport? NOPE. Absolute farce.
Californian law won't apply in the UK, sadly.
That said, the failure is shared evenly with the tech industry's refusal to work with governments to implement viable solutions.
Legislators favor their corporate benefactors, the tech industry favors its ideologies and freedom of developers and engineers. But who looks out for the regular individual? Who is making sure their interest is enforced first and foremost?
Consider these facts (and correct me if they're wrong):
1) it is possible to issue hardware to the public that verifies to computers and internet services alike the age of the bearer without disclosing anything else about the bearer.
2) Age verification laws for other things like drinking, smoking, and gambling all primarily require the seller to authenticate that the person has authentic identification, and their age is lawful for the activity.
3) The secure method of authenticating users requires MFA, a FIDO2 compliant device like a Yubikey is the most secure means of the 2nd factor of authentication. It requires knowing a secret, and physically touching the device.
Knowing all this, it is possible to issue the public devices that receive a challenge from a government operated server, require the user to tap on the device, and then enter a pin to respond with a signed version of the challenge, to verify they possess the device. The device could be sold or given to the public without any registration, the only thing required would be showing and verifying your valid ID at the point of sale (from a government office ideally).
This is just one solution, but the burden could be passed onto the government, and the tech industry to implement solutions that work with that.
If we had that, I wouldn't agree with it, but I would also not have a problem with requiring insertion of an age verification device to start installing Linux -- of course the installer wouldn't know it's in California, it would rely on the people installing it to tell them it is. And when selling devices in california, by default they could require inserting this device to proceed, but I see nothing preventing users from installing their own custom OS lawfully if they too the device elsewhere, and how can the device tell it is at "elsewhere", even if it has a GPS there is no law requiring GPS to be turned on for that purpose.
---
The key thing you should all consider is that this is the will of the people to the most part. Most people agree that access to tech should be age restricted, although to what degree is a different story. This isn't the 90s, using an OS is not a novel or special thing you do, it is similar to driving a car except we depend on these devices more than cars!! Things the public depends on, things a country depends on, will always require regulation of some sort.
Forget about what it was like for you in your nostalgic days of experimenting with Linux or whatever. These are not those days. this is happening. if you can stop age verification laws, please go ahead, you have my full support. But I don't see that happening. We will get shitty situations where third party companies bribing politicians collect our physical ID scans, and we'll be forced to not only disclose our identity to everyone and their mother on the internet, we'll be forced to let these 3rd parties and the government track every site we visit at this rate.
Corrupt lawmakers are one half of the problem, technologists refusing to adapt and make best of the situation and propose privacy preserving solutions is the other half. I'm glad so many are willing to go all-or-nothing and die on their hills, but there is no reason they have to drag everyone else with them.
We get it, you’re against the government and big tech