The only thing governments should be doing is legislating that apps commonly used by small children be required to look for the RTA header and trigger parental controls if the device owner enabled them. That's it. Nothing more. Not perfect, nothing is or will be but it's more than we have now, does not leak PII and utilizes existing laws that already apply to parents.
Here are the definitions from the bill in a more reasonable order than they are presented there:
> "DEVICE" MEANS ANY GENERAL-PURPOSE COMPUTING DEVICE THAT CAN ACCESS A COVERED APPLICATION STORE OR DOWNLOAD AN APPLICATION.
> "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 DEVICES.
> "APPLICATION" MEANS A SOFTWARE APPLICATION THAT MAY BE RUN OR DIRECTED BY A USER ON A DEVICE.
> "DEVELOPER" MEANS A PERSON THAT WRITES, CREATES, MAINTAINS, OR CONTROLS AN APPLICATION.
The law applies to Operating System providers that runs on such a device:
> "OPERATING SYSTEM PROVIDER" MEANS A PERSON THAT DEVELOPS, LICENSES, OR CONTROLS THE OPERATING SYSTEM SOFTWARE ON A DEVICE.
Basically every Linux distro falls under this. Never mind the fact that OS providers don't really have control over where you run their code. If my device doesn't have a network card, does that mean my OS can skip this?
This also is not privacy preserving. It does require the device only report what age bracket a user belongs too, but on a long enough time frame, anyone currently under that age of 18 has their age accurately disclosed, often down to their birthday.
Worse, all applications MUST query this information every time it is run, regardless of whether or not age is at play. Every time you run grep, grep needs to know how old you are:
> A DEVELOPER SHALL REQUEST AN AGE SIGNAL WITH RESPECT TO A PARTICULAR USER FROM AN OPERATING SYSTEM PROVIDER OR A COVERED APPLICATION STORE WHEN THE DEVELOPER'S APPLICATION IS DOWNLOADED AND LAUNCHED.
Now, oddly, user is defined to be minors:
> "USER" MEANS A MINOR WHO IS THE PRIMARY USER OF A DEVICE.
But, the way the law is written, the implementation necessarily applies to everyone.
(6) "DEVELOPER" MEANS A PERSON THAT WRITES, CREATES, MAINTAINS, OR CONTROLS AN APPLICATION
The user is a "developer" so they can just send themselves an implicit age signal without modifying any software.
The real challenge will be ensuring this doesn't inadvertently entrench the gatekeeping power of major OS vendors or create a single point of failure for identity tracking. However, from a data-minimization standpoint, it feels like a more robust approach than the current fragmented landscape of requiring users to upload sensitive IDs to dozens of different websites.
Just say the quiet part out loud: this is absolutely going to happen, and this is why we need to fight our hardest to stop it.
Stop being distracted by and thinking about the technical points when the whole idea itself is bad, just like WEI and the other authoritarian ideas that originated with "trusted computing".
Seems like a great thing then. People get annoyed, businesses that comply lose customers and money etc.
All that friction means these policies become inherently less popular regardless of anything else. While this crap work effortlessly out of the box is just outright dystopian
From my admittedly poor understand of legal stuff, these are largely proactive measures happening at company and state level. Congress nor Supreme Court have issued any rulings around this yet.
Why would that matter? The constitution is just a worthless scrap of paper these days
"Our systems aren't foolproof because anyone can just boot Linux from USB. Hence we should enforce secure boot with proprietary keys and disable functionality for non attested PCs"
This is not far fetched. All Android vendors went down this path and now you can't even enable developer mode if you want your bank app to work to approve your bank loan.
IMHO requiring every to submit notarized paper forms to access Facebook/whtvr would be the best solution
>It was also possible to bypass the copyright monitors by installing a modified system kernel. Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers—you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that
General purpose computing is dead.
The real issue starts when OEMs, in order to comply with laws of this type, start releasing machines with locked-down boot firmware that cannot run any but an approved operating system.
There's just shy of 200 countries in the world. That's a lot of product managers already! But if provinces/regions/us states all decide they too can define how software has to work, we are up to thousands of little emperors all telling the world how we have to think, how we have to compute.
It's frelling disgusting.
This effort here has similar vibes to Chrome's Digital Credentials API. Which can be privacy preserving, but where site's can demand basically whatever they want. Either way, each site is returned material, that it then has to verify. So we are back to only approved identity working. And it seems unlikely credential issuers will willingly work with anything but 1st tier browsers/OSes. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/digital-credentials-api-sh...
It feels like a sure creeping doom that the internet is not going to be available in many places, except by commercial OSes that use DRM and attestation to deny users access to their own systems. This is against mankind, and imo, against every spiritual fiber that made man a great creature & arose us to what we are. To deny us a view of the world is to deny us from being toolmakers, is to mame our senses. This is an affront to our humankind. This making the machines infernal.
I trust the postal service here, more than Apple or Google. Just recently opened a bank account via their online service.
Imho that’s one of the best outcomes i.e. companies which will try to comply with all of the rules will go out of business or move to a less dystopian jurisdiction. Then there will be a lot economic pressure to build networking and payment systems which allow working around all this crap.
If on the order hand it’s actually streamlined and works without any friction nobody will lose their jobs/tax revenue and governments will come up with even more and even more dystopian shit.
Or anyone demanding cloud AI DRM for 3D printers and CNC machines.
Flock cameras and Ring Search Party too.
Certain potential capabilities are simply too dangerous to be given to any company, any government, or any person for any reason. Remember PRISM?
These are illiberal assaults on personal freedoms and privacy that must be vigorously and completely resisted just like when the Clipper chip was thoroughly trounced.
I mean, if android allows sideloading anyone would be easily able to get around these checks am I right?
Not really. You’d have Android attest to the check. If you are running a modified Android, it can’t attest. If you’re side loading, unless it messes with the attention logic, it should be fine. Like, Apple Pay could still work even if iOS permitted side loading.