Hacker News Reader

What about at the device level?

“You must be this tall to ride this ride”

“ you must be 18 to own an iPhone 18+ “

I apologize for the drive-by question, and I appreciate your takes!

This would run into the same deal as VINs in the real world being tied to licenses, or serial numbers to guns. But the car equivalent of VMs/open hardware/custom firmware (imagine a $7 pi zero flashed with lineageOS “overage phone”) then becomes equivalent to a gun without a serial number, and suddenly open source/hardware people are felons and there is insane amount of control on hardware and software like it’s 1982.

This assumes that the government would be able to verify independently a phone serial number so that people’s IDs aren’t leaked. If not, then you’re back to the same thing as before since “drivers licenses” are stored by sites and shared around with advertisers

Reply on news.ycombinator.com