Hacker News Reader

Comment by nodrog3000 | Hacker News Reader

Forcing all OS to do this is a bit of overreach though no?

If you want to keep your kids safe get an OS that supports it?

Why is it the state’s responsibility?

It's the State's responsibility once something affects enough people. That's why a law like this makes sense but should exempt OSes under some number of users. It's not great that we have such a harsh divide between "do whatever you want so long as not too many people are bothered" and "alright now the people have spoken and it's a State/national law," but it's the system we have and better than the people only getting a say with their wallets.

I think it only affects devices that are sold. So free software, you install yourself won’t meet that theshold.

Well it may end up with some porn-hungry kids compiling their own Unix core build on their own, not a bad even if unintended direction

This conversation makes me wonder if age verification at the system level could be considered an externality for its cost to society as a whole, and the solution be to collect tax from any commercial sale of a desktop OS that doesn't implement a defined open standard. If there is any money raised it could be used for eg. education pieces on harm and harm reduction

Maybe it doesn't work in this case, but I think you both make great points. Just feel like there must be a way of bridging this gap

The state requires things sold to meet a bare minimum of safety. Cars sold require seat belts, movies/games sold require ratings. Devices sold have a meaningful parental controls flow.

Seat belts aren't forced on you - if you want to not use them and face the risk of fines, you can do so. Media ratings systems are informational, you can choose to let your kids watch R rated movies or above. Are they going to let parents have a choice when it comes to parental controls? What about non-parents?

That's my gripe with the age verification systems I've seen, there is no room for parental choice and no consideration for people that are adults and don't have kids using their computer.

If something is illegal for kids to access it is illegal and therefore parental choice is being overriden by the state just like every single other thing that is illegal for kids to do such as smoke cigarettes, do drugs, drive etc.

OS-level is so much better than app-level. App-level means redoing the work for each app and increasing the odds of issues.

I don't think it is overreach since its fairly simple to implement and non obtrusive. We have had multiple decades of failure from tech companies already to prove that they won't act on their own.

If you are putting individual parents up against Meta, Google, etc, the big tech companies easily win. As we have seen already.

> I don't think it is overreach since its fairly simple to implement and non obtrusive

Those two things have absolutely nothing to do with one another. Something being easy to implement is completely unrelated to whether forcing its implementation is overreach.

Which is why s/he mentioned both of them. *This* law is simple to implement *and* it's unobtrusive. It's actually a really good way to solve the problem without creating privacy concerns.

How do you verify someone’s age reliably without identifying them? Unless there’s some standard around zero-knowledge proofs they’re implementing that I’m not aware of, they’re probably going to end up identifying everyone as part of this system, since kids will try and bypass it and parents will demand it be made more robust. Kids will still bypass it no matter what we do.

You don't. The law we're discussing doesn't verify someone's age. Please stop calling it an age verification law, because that's completely disingenuous FUD.

Its the responsibility of legislators to reflect the legislative will of the people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com