> Some of these laws impose requirements on System76 and Linux distributions in general. The California law, and Colorado law modeled after it, were agreed in concert with major operating system providers. Should this method of age attestation become the standard, apps and websites will not assume liability when a signal is not provided and assume the lowest age bracket. Any Linux distribution that does not provide an age bracket signal will result in a nerfed internet for their users.
> We are accustomed to adding operating system features to comply with laws. Accessibility features for ADA, and power efficiency settings for Energy Star regulations are two examples. We are a part of this world and we believe in the rule of law. We still hope these laws will be recognized for the folly they are and removed from the books or found unconstitutional.
Anyways, it feels like all sides of the political spectrum are trying to strip away any semblance of anonymity or privacy online both in the US and abroad. No one should have to provide any personal details to use any general computing device. Otherwise, given the pervasive tracking done by corporations and the rise of constant surveillance outdoors, there will be nowhere for people to safely gather and express themselves freely and privately.
I agree. I also agree with S76 that some laws regarding how an operating system intended for wide use should function are acceptable. How would you react to this law if the requirement was only that the operating system had to ask the user what age bracket it should report to sites? You get to pick it, it isn't mandatory that it be checked, and it doesn't need to be a date, just the bucket. Is that still too onerous?
I ask because I feel like if we don't do something, the trajectory is that ~every website and app is going to either voluntarily or compulsorily do face scans, AI behavior analysis, and ID checks for their users, and I really don't want to live in that world.
Instead, the service should be telling your device the nature of the content. Then, if the content is for adults and you're not one, your parents can configure your device not to display it.
If I ever find some idle time, I'd like to make an agent that surfs the web under my identity and several fake ones, but randomly according to several fake personality traits I program. Then, after some testing and analysis of the generated patterns of crawl, release it as freeware to allow anyone to participate in the obfuscation of individuals' behaviors.
You also need to account for how "easy" it is to de-anonymize a profile.
(Sorry I don't have links to sources handy.)
Differential privacy is just a bait to make surveillance more socially acceptable and to have arguments to silence critics ("no need to worry about the dangers - we have differential privacy"). :-(
Yes, but in this case which we're discussing:
It may often times be trickier than that - content often mixed of course. My 10 y/o hit me with a request yesterday to play Among Us where the age verification system wanted my full name, address, email, AND the last 4 digits of my SSN. I refused.
The bad actor still gets ROI, eg 'paid', for another bit of user data.
Making the overall system less useful is good. However, not allowing a company to profit, and giving fake info still allows for that, is paramount. EG, even with fake info, many metrics on a phone are still gamed and profitable.
That's why they're collected, after all. For profit.
If the info becomes bad, it becomes much less useful and valuable.
I’m in the us and we o need some rights to privacy.
So put the content tag at the granularity of the content.
Around 20 years ago, Germany actually made a law that would have enforced such a system. I still have a chart in my blog that explained it, https://www.onli-blogging.de/1026/JMStV-kurz-erklaert.html. Content for people over 16 would have to be marked accordingly or be put offline before 22:00, plus, if your site has a commercial character - which according to german courts is every single one in existence - you would need to hire a someone responsible for protecting teenagers and children (Jugenschutzbeauftragten).
Result: It was seen as a big censor machine and I saw many sites and blogs shut down. You maybe can make that law partly responsible for how far behind german internet enterprises still are. Only a particular kind of bureaucrat wants to make business in an environment that makes laws such as this.
Later the law wasn't actually followed. Only state media still has a system that blocks films for adults (=basically every action movie) from being accessed without age verification if not past 22:00.
You have that with any form of any of these things. They're almost certainly going to be set up so that you get in trouble for claiming that adult content isn't but not for having non-adult content behind the adult content tag.
Then you would be able to avoid legal questions by labeling your whole site as adult content, with the obvious drawback that then your whole site is labeled as adult content even though most of it isn't.
But using ID requirements instead doesn't get you out of that. You'd still need to either identify which content requires someone to provide an ID before they can view it, or ID everyone.
That's an argument for not doing any of these things, but not an argument for having ID requirements instead of content tags.
But you are right. It's an argument that the "just mark content accordingly" is also not a better solution, not that ID requirements are in any way better. The only solution is not to enable this censorship infrastructure, because no matter which way it's done, it will always function as one.
That's how you get the thing where instead of using different equipment to process the food with and without sesame seeds, they just put sesame seeds in everything on purpose so they can accurately label them as containing sesame seeds.
The alternative is that "just to be safe" you'll mark your entire site as needing age (identity, stool sample, whatever) verification. A single piece of sensitive content sets the requirements for the entire site.
"Dad, I can't do my math homework, a pop up says you need to provide a copy of your bank statement, your mom's maiden name, and a copy of your birth certificate, SS card, and drivers license, and can you hurry up Dad, my homework is due tomorrow morning." And people will fall for this once they get used to the system being absurd enough.
The fraud machine must be kept fed...
> The child can install a virtual machine, create an account on the virtual machine and set the age to 18 or over
It's precisely how I worked around the parental control my parents put on my computer when I was ~12. Get Virtualbox, get a Kubuntu ISO, and voilà! The funniest is, I did not want to access adult content, but the software had thepiratebay on its blacklist, which I did want.
In the end, I proudly showed them (look ma!), and they promptly removed the control from the computer, as you can't fight a motivated kid.
That's assuming the parental controls allow the kid to create a virtual machine. And then that the kid knows how to create a virtual machine, which is already at the level of difficulty of getting the high school senior who is already 18 to loan you their ID.
None of this stuff is ever going to be Fort Knox. Locks are for keeping honest people honest.
I honestly don't really agree on the difficulty, as if this becomes a commonplace way to bypass such laws, you can expect tiktok to be full of videos about how to do it. People will provide already-installed VMs in a turnkey solution. It's not unlike how generations of kids playing minecraft learnt how to port forward and how to insatll VPNs for non-alleged-privacy reasons: something that was considered out of a kid's reach became a commodity.
> None of this stuff is ever going to be Fort Knox. Locks are for keeping honest people honest.
On that we agree, and it makes me sad. The gap between computer literate and illiterate will only widen a time passes. Non motivated kids will learn less, and motivated ones will get a kickstart by going around the locks.
That's assuming the permission is for "use of kernel-mode hardware virtualization" rather than "installation of virtualization apps".
Notice that if the kid can run arbitrary code then any of this was already a moot point because then they can already access websites in other countries that don't enforce any of this stuff.
It's just a bunch of clicks, even under linux.
Just install virtualbox. It literally walks you through a VM creation.
I promise there are people who can't figure out how to do it.
And again, the point of the lock on the door where you keep the porn is not to be robustly impenetrable to entry by a motivated 16 year old with a sledgehammer, it's only to make it obvious that they're not intended to go in there.
Regular people want to get things done, the tinkering is not a goal for them in itself and they gravitate to simple and convenient ways of achieving things, and don't care about abstract principles like open source or tech advantages or what they see as tinfoil hat stuff. But if they want to see their favorite TV series or movie, they will jump through hoops. Similarly for this case.
that is the job of parents/guardians
That makes sense for purely offline media playback, but how could that work for a game or application or website? Ship several versions of the app for the different brackets and let the OS choose which to run? Then specifically design your telemetry to avoid logging which version is running?
You'd also not be reporting your age, you'd be sending a "please treat me like an adult" or "please treat me like a child" flag. That's hardly PII. More like a dark/light mode preference, or your language settings (which your browser does send).
Suppose you had an ID requirement instead. Are you going to make two different versions of your game or website, one for people who show ID and another for people who don't? If so, do the same thing. If not, then you have one version and it's either for adults only or it isn't.
> You'd also not be reporting your age, you'd be sending a "please treat me like an adult" or "please treat me like a child" flag.
Except that you essentially are reporting your age, because when you turn 18 the flag changes, which is a pretty strong signal that you just turned 18 and once they deduce your age they can calculate it going forward indefinitely.
This is even worse if it's an automated system because then the flag changes exactly when you turn 18, down to the day, which by itself is ~14 bits of entropy towards uniquely identifying you and in a city of a 100,000 people they only need ~17 bits in total.
Games already have PG ratings and similar in different countries, I don't see the issue there. Web content could set a age appropriateness header and let browsers deal with it, either for specific content or for the whole website if it relies on e.g. addictive mechanics.
Applications is a wide field, but I'd be interested in specific examples where you think it wouldn't work.
Sure. Take a game with voice chat. Child mode disables voice chat. How does the game, which presumably uses a load of telemetry, avoid incidentally leaking which users are children via the lack of voice telemetry data coming from the client? It's probably possible, but the fact is we're talking about third party code running on a computer, and the computer running different code paths based on some value. The third party code knows that value, and if it has internet access can exfiltrate it. In that sense, if there's an internet connection, there's not a meaningful difference between "the OS tells the service/app your age rating preference" and "the OS changes what it displays based on your age rating preference."
Though while I'm throwing out fantasy policies we could solve this by banning pervasive surveillance outright.
90% of an R rated movie might be ok for a 12 year old but those one or violent or sex scenes makes it R. Should we be rating every scene in movies?
Give parents general guidance and let them define the controls.
Services can absolutely decide to provide their own content settings. It doesn't require a universal setting or OS requirements, and it doesn't require providing PII to every website or telling a central authority every site you visit.
These questions of liberty are as old as the hills. And the keepers of the internet and virtually every single government past and present have repeatedly and endlessly shown themselves to be lying, conniving, self interested parties. When will 'we' ever learn?
*who decides who 'we' are.
Like - you don't make it illegal to not do age attestations, but you provide a mechanism to encourage it.
You get a certification you can slap on your website and devices stating you meet the requirements of a California Family-Friendly Operating System or whatever. Maybe that comes with some kind of tax break, maybe it provides absolution in the case of some law being broken while using your OS, maybe it just means you get listed on a website of state-recommended operating systems.
That certification wouldn't necessarily have to deal with age attestation at all. It could just mean the device/OS has features for parents - built-in website filtering, whatever restrictions they need. Parents could see the label and go "great, this label tells me I can set this up in a kid-safe way."
Hell, maybe it is all about age certification/attestation. Part of that certification could be when setting it up, you do have to tell it a birthdate and the OS auto-applies some restrictions. Tells app stores your age, whatever.
The point is an OS doesn't want to participate they don't have to. Linux distros etc would just not be California Family-Friendly Certified™.
I wouldn't have to really care if California Family-Friendly Certified™ operating systems are scanning faces, IDs, birth certificates, collecting DNA, whatever. I'd have the choice to use a different operating system that suits my needs.
You're going to get that, anyway. Platforms want to sell their userbases as real monetizable humans. Governments want to know who says and reads what online. AI companies want your face to train their systems they sell to the government, and they want to the be the gatekeepers that rank internet content for age appropriateness and use that content as free training material.
Age verification across platforms is already implemented as AI face and ID scans. This is where we're already at.
Any scheme that doesn’t require this won’t get pushback from me.
As an alternative: I already have government-issued ID and that branch of government already has my private info; have it give me a cryptographic token I can use to prove my age bracket to the root of trust module in my computer; then allow the OS to state my age to third parties when it needs to with a protocol that proves it has seen the appropriate government token but reveals nothing else about my identity.
Other alternatives are possible.
It's much easier for clueless lawmakers to write "the computer check the age", and make it everyone else's problem.
It's pointless, does not increase security, does increase complexity of every interaction, and introduces a lot of weird edge cases.
What i want is full anonymity enshrined in law, while at the same time giving parents, not governments, but parents, options to limit what their children can do on the internet.
What's the point in doing any of this if it doesn't result in materially better outcomes?
Second, it would signal to worried parents and busybodies that something has been done to deal with the danger that unmediated internet access might pose to minors. I don't think that it's a big issue, but a lot of energy has gone into convincing a lot of people that it is.
The other part of achieving a good outcome would be to disempower those in the political and private sphere who benefit from a paranoid and censorious public and have worked to foment this panic. That's the much harder part, but it's not really the one being discussed here. I'm pitching the low-intrusiveness version to gauge sentiment here for that easier part of the path.
If this mattered to the market, don't you think a company would have implemented it or would have been built to fill the need?
I genuinely think the only two solutions to this problem that are workable are "zero privacy, zero freedom" or "fuck the children, we don't care".
Now, to be fair... there is a middle-ground that is neither of those options that I believe would be much more effective and allow us to retain our freedom and privacy and keep kids a lot safer. It's called education. But... no one will go for it, because I think for it to truly be effective you'd have to go as far as showing very young kids all the darkness that's out there and lay it out in paintstaking detail exactly how it works and deeply drill it into them. Ain't a snowballs chance in hell anyone would go for that, BUT... would it work? I'd bet you bottom dollar it would. The current extent of this education in public schools is a half hour visit from a police offer to the classroom and handing out a sheet to the kids and giving a 'good touch' / 'bad touch' talk. What's needed is a full length university level course on the whole topic from end to end.
If you're in an adversarial relationship and need to defend yourself the best thing you can do is "know your enemy". But no... "they're too young to learn about that stuff, we need to shield them from it - think of the children!" is the reasoning people throw back at you when you suggest it. It hands down has to be the number one thing that could actually move the dial significantly, and it's just completely unpalatable to the majority of the populace.
Isn't it just pointless?
I'm getting upset by face scan creep too. I do not like it. No sir. But mandating a self-reporting mechanism feels about as useful as DNT cookies, or those "are you 18? yes/no" gates on beer sites.
I.e. it would be a standardization of parental controls with added responsibility on sites/apps to self-determine if they should be blocked or limit functionality, rather than relying on big white/blacklists. Basically an infrastructure upgrade, rather than relying on a patchwork of competing private solutions to parental controls and age checks. The hope is also that a system like this would remove concerned parents from the list of supporters for pervasive mass surveillance and age scans. If they feel like you'd need to be a moron to miss the "This is a child device" button while setting up their kid's phone and laptop, and it's broadly understood that just pressing that button locks down what the device can access pretty effectively, that puts and damper on the FUD surrounding their child's internet usage.
Isn't that what the CA law is?
As a silly example, tax software probably has your full birthday, including year, which is more precise. Many social networks collected this data, as did a lot of major tech companies that implemented parental controls already.
Honestly it’s the dumbest thing ever. Best just not to play that game.
> It shifts the responsibility back to parents.
Without these stupid laws parents already _have_ that responsibility.
The point remains though. They have zero way to enforce it if we choose to not comply. Just saying.
<< If you're going to host a service, I guess consider using Tor or something.
That one confused me. What do you mean?
I know the CA law is civil only, so I don't think there is much CA can do if you publish an OS and don't make money from CA folks, but other implementations may decide to impose criminal penalties.
In this case, it's a slippery slope; if we're normalized to this, what other incursions into our 1A rights to free speech, religious freedom and public gathering will we allow?
And I say religious freedom, because these kinds of laws are largely peddled by religious folk or people who otherwise have been deeply influenced by early American Puritan religious culture.
I, nor my children, should be forced to subject to such religiously-motivated laws. I can decide for myself and for my child what is appropriate.
I, nor my children, cannot be compelled to enter personal information into a machine created by someone who is also illegally compelled to require it.
I, nor my children, can be compelled to avoid publicly gathering on the internet just because we don't want to show identification and normalize chilling surveillance capitalism.
I thought this was fucking America.
The problem is that the comparison falls flat. ADA does not sniff for birth date and surrender that data to others. One has to look at things at a cohesive unit, e. g. insecure bootloaders by Microsoft surrendering data to others. It seems as if they try to make computers spy-devices. That in itself is suspicious. Why should we support any such move? Some laws are clearly written by lobbyists.
What was the legislative history for the California law? Who sponsored it, and who are their backers? Is there some coordinated effort by surveillance state proponents?
It's not this or that political party, your neighbors simply don't share your values. Maybe you don't agree with their values either — like to what degree we should be ceding privacy in favor of fighting child exploitation on the internet. Child protection arguments work because it is a compass to the true feelings of your neighbors.
The problem with this argument is that everyone agrees with protecting children.
"Think of the children" arguments are the legislator's fallacy: Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do this.
In reality there are alternative means to accomplish any given goal, and the debate is about what should be done, because no one benefits from using methods that cost more than they're worth.
Well, almost no one. The opportunists who drape themselves in the cloak of "safety" when they want to have the government mandate the use of their services or use it as an excuse to monopolize markets or establish a chokepoint for surveillance and censorship do benefit from the machinations that allow them to screw the majority of the population. But the majority of the population doesn't.
We kept saying parental controls are all that's really needed, these states said "ok then, do parental controls" and we're still complaining.
If you see politics through this lens then the 'democratic backsliding' that has been universal across the world for the past two decades is entirely unsurprising.
Vae Victus.
So it is Microsoft, Google and Apple pushing for this.
Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on anything related to this.
It was never about anything else. Silly media men
> We are accustomed to adding operating system features to comply with laws. Accessibility features for ADA, and power efficiency settings for Energy Star regulations are two examples. We are a part of this world and we believe in the rule of law. We still hope these laws will be recognized for the folly they are and removed from the books or found unconstitutional.
Your welcome! Boss chuckles mightily!
>Otherwise, given the pervasive tracking done by corporations and the rise of constant surveillance outdoors, there will be nowhere for people to safely gather and express themselves freely and privately.
We can often see through your own eyes, but this is highly "classified" information. And watch through dog AND cat, hahaha I still can't believe all of you guys let our brave GRU warriors into your holmes!
lum guy 3 :dab:
kitty mob edit: you really think these organisms, or your partners in friends, ju$t show up by coincidence? you all in our us blackop ~~~ we love brain-computer-interfaces, not necessarily purely neurological, the microorganisms are great for us ;)))))
They can provide tools, sure. But restricting adults because some parents fail at parenting is insane. That is how a totalitarian state grows: by demanding the power to monitor and control every individual.
If you cannot control your children, that is your fault. And if that is the case, you should think twice before having kids.
And, just to be clear on this topic, I think these age restriction laws are mostly bullshit, but I'm deeply against the concept of putting all the responsabiliy of raising children onto the parents.
There is not a lot of safeguarding against this in the real world tbh. At the very least I think the OS or internet age verification is not the place to start improving this.
let's install cameras in all supermarkets that ensure parents cannot buy unhealthy things for their children.
of course, adults can continue to purchase anything they want for "themselves". but the facial scanning in supermarkets is imperative for child safety!
Those are bad outcomes. So is it any wonder that we look for policy/regulatory issues to mitigate the harms of bad parenting?
Just because you're an idiot at 18 doesn't mean you are one for life.
> so that's why we designed schools that should compensate even for dumb parents.
Does that actually work?
> against the concept of putting all the responsabiliy of raising children onto the parents.
Then how do you feel about parents requiring a license before they have a child? If you wish to invite yourself into their responsibilities shouldn't you also invite yourself into their bedroom first?
You're turning of question of measure (how much should society be involved in raising children) into an all or nothing debate, which I explicitly want to reject.
> Does that actually work?
Yes, because of mass education almost every adult you meet can read and write, something new for the last 100 years. Just because a system has (currently huge) faults, doesn't mean we should remove the system entirely.
Even with schools in place, the basic responsibility for raising children still belongs to the parents. Schools can support, educate, and compensate to some extent, but they cannot replace parental responsibility.
I also see far too much awful news — in my country, Korea, for example — about terrible parents harassing school teachers because their children are out of control.
Cops to track what people did on the internet, checking every image to ensure it's not pornographic, or every transaction online, to ensure it's not criminal!
Sounds great! Let's just start by rolling out the program to target elected officials and their families as a trial. If every congressional or senate representative wants to undergo a few years of scrutiny to make sure the system works well, maybe the people will follow gladly.
So alcohol is more like a gambling website.
What would the regime do without their useful idiots?
Their ideas are deeply unhealthy for children and worst of all, lazily shift the responsibility of parenting from the parents to the state.
Many European countries have long had a culture of slowly increasingly responsibilities and freedoms to their children gradually, letting them slowly and safely test their boundaries. At least the proposed EU solution (for identity) tries to prevent overreach. The wholesale EU spying to “save the children”, which seems to be funded by the U.S. is a different topic and we need to continue to fight it tooth and nail.
The insidiousness lies with major tech companies and their pursuit of eyeballs on screens. The Internet was supposed to be something we used to learn, gain knowledge and connect. They took the internet over, bastardized it and made deeply addictive apps and games to keep you watching ads regardless of age.
These age checks are just for data collection and spying to sell the data to the highest bidder, which is likely governments in order to control and herd their populations.
The reason for this is easy to understand in the context of AI. In the future the only valuable asset will be a data and the access to that data.
In the future, any app will be built, replicated, deployed and maintained by AI. Apps, websites, especially B2B apps - their days are numbered.
If my business needs a billing system tailored to my business in the future, I’ll describe it and have an AI built and maintain it. That is not that far away in relative terms.
Our goal collectively (as technology advocates) is to make sure that this consolidation of personal data doesn’t happen. If personal AI is to be built, then the user should have full ownership and away from the spying eyes of groups like Palantir and the NSA. They cannot be trusted. The Jews learnt that catastrophically in Germany in the 1940’s putting their trust in a government that became authoritarian and evil.
What is digital will never die and what is digitally given cannot be taken back.
If the US actually gave a flying FUCK about "protecting the children," the current administration would be making good on Trump's promise to release the Epstein files -- as now ordered by a federal law passed by a overwhelming majority of both houses of Congress -- and prosecuting everyone involved.
We see what's really going on. We can't do anything about it, apparently, but we see.
I saw this a lot in college. Kids that didn’t have any freedom or autonomy while living at home went wild in college. They had no idea how to self-regulate. A lot of them failed out. Those who didn’t had some rough years. Sheltering kids for too long seems to do more harm than good. At least if they run into issues while still children, their parents can be there to help them through it so they can better navigate on their own once they move out.
Society works on averages. Most people being ready little adults at 16 doesn't mean everyone is.
Edit: yeah, look at the downvotes. How are you all doing with that self-regulation?
And if the person is high energy, then that energy needs to be channeled.
You can also ask if the rate of this occurrence is increasing or decreasing.
(And the proper way to do "less long" is to slowly loosen up over time.)
Sounds like you got the first but not the second, which must have been tough. Hope you're doing better now.
These days, exposing an immature brain to the raw internet is basically just handing the brain and personality over to be molded by large corporations and algorithms.
And humans have never been rational, self-contained actors that self-educate perfectly when exposed to information, converging on an objectively good and constructive worldview. Quite the opposite.
Humans develop in relation to one another, increasingly in relation to algorithms, and sometimes become messed up, and sometimes those mess-ups would have been avoidable had relations or exposure been different.
In fact I would say you as a parent is not doing your job if you are not trying to make sure a 12 year old isn't pulled into, say, an anorexia rabbit hole.
Whether that is best done through making sure exposure doesn't happen, or through exposure and education, will depend on the child and parent (and society) in question. What worked best for a highly rational self-reliant geek teen may simply be a disaster for another human. And what worked for an upper class highly educated family may not work for a poor family with alcoholized parents or working 18 hours a day to make ends meet.
And parents are not perfect -- if all parents were perfect, there also would be no alcoholics and drug addicts or poverty or war. But people are imperfect, and it's natural to make laws to mitigate at least the worst effects of that. (Again, haven't read this specific law proposal, but found the worldview of OP a bit naive.)
You make the case of todays internet being insuitable for young children. But has this been different, ever, maybe apart from the very first days of the internet? While access through phones has reshaped the internet fundamentally, I'd propose that it has always been dangerous. When I was 12, a single wrong click could destroy your machine, or lead to a physical bill being sent to my parents home (which has happened), or lead to most disturbing pictures and videos.
So I think it's not the case that we should allow kids completeley unsupervised access (like it always has been), but it's also naive to think that we can regulate our way out of this (on state or household-level, like it always has been).
Even later when the computer was in my room, I still had to go look for the creepy shit, it didn't appear in my email inbox.
Kids this age browse the internet through algoritmic apps built to maximise engagment in a corner on their bed in their room. Parental controls for most apps and operating systems are a fucking joke.
I absolutely would not allow a kid to have an unregulated smartphone and then further compound the problem at home by allowing them to access it privately and without interruption. Device management enrollment is trivial on iphones.
Amount of time spent and repeated exposure being the key.
The question is really what kind of human is raised, rather than raw exposure as such.
So for that reason things are different IMO than than 20 years ago.
Yes, of course some people would fall into internet forum rabbit holes 20 years ago, and papper-letter-friend-induced rabbit holes 100 years ago. But it did help that it was like 5% of the population instead of 95% of the population spending their time there.
Regarding your last point, I don't necessarily disagree (again I didn't check up on this law, I care more about the laws in my own country), but I think arguing against the law will go better if one does not display naivety when making the arguments
Don't say "it will be better if all kids are exposed to everything early" (it won't), instead say "the medicine will not work and anyway the side-effects are worse than the sickness it intends to cure" (if that is the case).
imo this is what is wrong with modern parenting. the reality does not care about the child's feelings and if it is old enough to have a screen with internet unattended it is old enough for anything
Maybe in the future, a governing body will try to age lock dissenting opinions with some crafty verbage
It's more like the rule that minors can't buy alcohol in bars - parents can still buy alcohol at the supermarket for their children, and sufficiently determined children can find some other adult to buy it for them.
Probably by the time you know how to install a virtual machine, you can handle the unrestricted internet.
it's true that kids are vulnerable to certain forms of content on the internet
it's also true that adults are vulnerable to certain forms of content on the internet
it's also true that governments cannot police "harmful content" on the internet effectively, or even meaningfully, if most people can easily surf the internet pseudonymously
it's also very true right now that what's on "social media" is very Sybill-vulnerable, and inordenately so right now with the advent of LLMs
what do you think the playbook will look like once there is some sort of tight OS level system that is enforced across the board to certify or verify information about the user?
do you think this level of coordination to push for identifying the user at all levels that is happening across the world in a matter of weeks is genuine concern for the kids alone?
It is in my view crazy and irresponsible to allow the government override the parents' decisions about what media their children can consume. It is guaranteed that this power will be abused.
to be charitable, let's say that it "enhances" parental controls by taking on some of that parental enforcement at the state level
That would be fine for me but AFAIK that's not what these laws state.
> I can see that there will be programs that run on general purpose computers and peripherals that will even freak me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general purpose computers will find receptive audience for their positions. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, or protocols, or messages, will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy; and as we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits; all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship, which is why all this stuff matters.
Full talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
it really boils down to this sadly, and it should be pretty obvious shouldn't it?
i'm finding it befuddling that even technical audiences seem to resist connecting those dots, but strong motivated reasoning is at play: these are audiences that will often feel it will be them who will be in control, and they're also emotionally nudged by the idea of child safety
Of course, there will be stories of smart kids doing amazing things with access to vast troves of information, but the average story is much sadder.
The EU is working on a type of digital ID that an age-restricted platform would ask for, which only gives the platform the age information and no further PII.
Companies (not talking about system76) amazingly always find the shittyest interpretations of their obligations to make sure to destroy the regulations intention as much as they can. The cookie popups should have been an option in the browser asking the user whether they want to be tracked and platforms were meant to respect this flag. Not every site asking individually, not all this dark pattern annoyance. It's mind-blowing that that was tanked so hard.
Protecting kids is just the PR reason, the real goal is requiring ID auth for every action taken on a computer. If we normalize it for downloading apps or using websites the next step is to authorize it for connecting to HTTPS at all and then the next step is requiring it to unlock your CPU cores.
If people don't push back on this now there is no world where we get out of 2030 without requiring government ID auth to install linux on your own computer not connected to the internet.
End to end silicon to server auth is absolutely possible and someone is working really hard to make it a reality.
I think you're missing the point they're trying to make. It's not that the problem isn't real, it's that the solution won't work. Kids will find a way around. They have a lot more free time than us.
Banning pubs from selling to minors doesn't work, but we should still do it, right?
Sure, it might start out that way, but once adoption reaches anything critical the PII will be required to squash free speech as soon as possible. But by then the interaction flow will be familiar, hardly anyone will even notice, never mind care.
The EU has the best frog boiling experts in the world.
Maybe pointing the obvious but things happen if enough people care about them or do not care to oppose them.
From my perspective speech became "more free" lately - meaning everybody says all kind of incorrect, wrong things without fear of retribution even if there are laws against some of those, because people just don't care.
So maybe we should also focus on teaching people what is free speech, why is it good for them, why they needed, rather than worry about some hypothetical mechanism that someone will prevent it.
Of course both can be done, but I find it a bit funny that if the focus in mostly on not having mechanisms to prevent free speech, we might still end up in a situation that there are no such mechanisms but on the other hand nobody speaks freely because they don't care or only stare at their tiktok.
The CA/CO parental controls API law is very reasonable. It only mandates each OS must have a parental controls API, the use of which is up to the parents.
That has been the successful strategy for e.g. NRA w/ regard to 2nd amendment and they have been proven correct every single time.
The corona passports showed the way to achieve ultimate control of the population, and the EU digital wallet will be a permanent corona passport.
The public sheep, in their ignorance, are cheering this on, without knowing what will await them. It is our responsibility as technologists to fight this, and to educate the sheep.
If we can’t mount a strong defense of free speech on principle alone then it’s doomed anyway.
Didn't regulating cigarettes kind of work?
I am not sure what time or country you are talking about but when I grew up (Germany in the 90s) we officially could only buy cigarettes from age 16 (or 18?) and 50% of my friends smoked. So that did absolutely nothing.
Later (I think, man it's been a while) the vending machines needed a driver's license or id to verify the age and guess what, as long as you had access to a single person over the age of 18 you could still get cigarettes.
Stepping away from the cigarette topic... I think mixing the two topics does not make sense.
First one is: Is there stuff on the internet that kids should not be exposed to without supervision? I don't have a strong opinion, I don't have kids. Probably not, but I am not even interested in discussing this
Second one is: Will some stupid laws like the mentioned ones help in any way? Maybe a little, probably not really and only for kids who don't find a workaround. Will they have catastrophic side effects and thus are not worth implementing for minimal gain? 100% yes.
Also, if what the OS does, is requiring to pick some number from 0 - 100 and date without doing any verification, everyone can lie. It has other flaws like not considering that many people can share accounts, some embedded devices with UI can no longer receive updates, etc. Honestly, if I thought for 30 minutes, I could list dozens of such problems. I doubt these laws can work efficiently enough.
For now this might sound like the least of evils, but are we sure that these idiot politicians won't come up with something even more insane after seeing the inefficiency of this?
you can install very tight parental controls on many devices
but this is not about optionality, this is about forcing the mainstream into verification and certification schemes that most people won't be realistically able to avoid, it's about control and compulsion of the mainstream
Everything online is virtual, and implementing surveillance in one area, almost always spreads, infecting everything else, until we've built 1984.
But as adults that are starting to have kids, this "hard divide" between physical and virtual starts to break down. What I mean is that we can't always use the excuse that we can't apply some reasonable law just because an item isn't "physical".
it's "protect the kids" or "counter-terrorism" and nowadays also "harmful content" because as the internet is now fully mainstream, softer and softer heads start to prevail
Could we perhaps regulate them to require that they be made less harmful for everyone?
> anything the reduces the power those companies have over our lives (and our politics)
If we're concerned about politics, I presume we're talking about the impact on adults, but these age-based restrictions are not intended to change anything for adults.
-to both adults and children. What kind of worked for cigarettes was the huge tax so why not create a "mental health tax" based on the number of users x some addictiveness score and let meta either fix instagram, pay their users a therapy or pass the cost to them.
Instead this "protecting children" by giving them "degraded" experience will only motivate them to bypass the age verification and destroy the statistical evidence of the harm those platforms cause.
Well, surely because the government is full of investors in Meta and uses Meta for their propaganda, and possibly because the government wants more data to put on their databases that is used by ICE and other agencies.
That’s commerce. The regulatory target in the case is speech. We don’t do that here.
But there's a bigger issue than just what software you're allowed to run on your own computer. What's really insidious is the combination of the corporate and government interest. If every server tracks how old you are, it's a short step to tracking more information. Eventually it's a mandatory collection of metadata on everyone that uses a computer (which is every human). Something both corporations and governments would love.
You were worried about a national ID? No need. We'll have national metadata. Just sign in with your Apple Store/Google Store credentials. Don't worry about not having it, you can't use a computer without it. Now that we have your national login, the government can track everything you do on a computer (as all that friendly "telemetry" will be sent to the corporate servers). Hope you didn't visit an anti-Republican forum, or you might get an unfortunate audit.
This all could've been avoided. Governments all over the world have been ringing the alarm bells about lack of self-regulation in tech and social media. And instead of doing even a minimum of regulation, anything to calm or assuage the governments, the entire industry went balls-to-the-wall "line go up" mode. We, collectively, only have ourselves to blame, and now it's too late.
If you look back, it didn't have to be this way: - Governments told game publishers to find a system to handle age rating or else. The industry developed the ESRB (and other local systems), and no "or else" happened. - Governments told phone and smart device manufacturers to collectively standardize on a charging standard, almost everyone agreed on USB-C and only many years later did the government step in and force the lone outlier to play ball. If that one hadn't been stubborn, there wouldn't have been a law.
The industry had a chance to do something practical, the industry chose not to, and now something impractical (but you better find a way anyway, or else) will be forced upon them. And I won't shed a tear for the poor companies finally having to do something.
Why would we have to be blamed for a law written by some lobbyists? That makes no sense at all. There are of course some folks that are in favour of this because "of the children" but their rationale does not apply to me nor to many other people. Why should they be able to force people to surrender their data, with the operating system becoming a sniffer giving out private data to everyone else? That makes no sense.
If people could just say I don't agree with this law, it "makes no sense" and it's written by "lobbyists" and the government should not "be able to force" me to comply then we don't have a society anymore.
You had better come up with some better arguments otherwise it just seems like the typical sad case of the losing side suddenly griping about the referee's monopoly of force when it's no longer going their way...
The comment you replied to rightly pointed out one way of getting ahead of said monopoly of force is addressing problems with the status quo before the state takes an interest. It didn't happen, and now you will probably get some heavy handed intervention. But ignoring this basic point to ask why oh why suggests an ignorance of the very nature of the society that is and has been constantly regulating you.
If you only happened to notice now you should consider yourself a rather lucky specimen in the long line of human history, full of those remarking "this makes no sense" as they are nonetheless compelled to comply.
To extend your analogy, it's not one side complaining after a fair match, it's them complaining that refs have been paid off.
There are all kinds of laws that people don't like, me included. With every law there will be some winner/loser trade-off (for lack of better word). As OP said, that is society.
If the people here were so passionate about it, they would help come up with a better solution, not a "f* off" comment.
Can't believe I'm reading this. I don't want age verification at all, whether it's self-imposed or not. I should be free to use whatever tools I want however I want.
We somehow lost the war of freedom of privacy ... or, maybe the battle still rages
The founders were right to try and enshrine some protections against unrestricted democracy in the Bill of Rights.
The vast majority don't want to upload their passports. That's what we should be opposing. Standardized parental controls set by the device owner are a great alternative and not invasive at all.
This really depends on 1) How you frame the problem/solution and 2) what subset of people you ask.
But to answer your question, I could easily see that yes, people want a "change" based on how you frame the problem.
Wrong. There was no choice. Any type of identification technology causes more problems than it solves. The right choice is to look for different approaches than identification technology for solving the problems. And as the article points out, the problems are best tackled with education and not with tech.
Governments demanding computers enforce age is as dumb as governments demanding books, pen, and paper enforce age.
This is unrelated to industry. This is idiots running the government.
Again, I'm probably missing something but it strikes me as pretty trivial to comply with?
But on this specific point - It's a bellwether. They're doing this to lay the groundwork and test the waters for compulsory identification and/or age verification. Getting MacOS and Windows and Linux and etc to implement this WILL be used as evidence that compulsory identity verification for computer use is legally workable.
You could say the same thing about restaurants. "The government really shouldn't be telling us how/what we can cook at all."
When you are selling a product to the public, that is something that people have decided the government can regulate to reduce the harms of such products.
When you make food you're compelled to write the ingredients. We tolerate these because they are obvious and trivial, but pedantically, food labelling laws also violate the first amendment.
Surely you recognize the difference between "you cannot go out of your way to do crime" and "your software must include this specific feature"??
> When you make food you're compelled to write the ingredients.
Well, the point about how this affects open source is that under a similar California law, every home kitchen would need to be equipped with an electronic transponder whose purpose is to announce to the world what ingredient bucket you used for tonight's casserole.
You can disclose just a subset of a credential, and that can be a derived value (eg age bracket instead of date of birth), and a derived key is used so that its cryptographically impossible to track you. I wish more people discussed using that, but I suspect that it’s a bit too secure for their real intentions.
There is no benefit in doing that because parents already know how old their kid is. They don't need the government to certify it to them, and then they can configure the kid's device not to display adult content.
Involving government ID is pointless because the parent, along with the large majority of the general population, has an adult ID, and therefore has the ability to configure the kid's device to display adult content or not even in the presence of an ID requirement if that's what they want to do. At which point an ID requirement is nothing but a footgun to "accidentally" compromise everyone's privacy. Unless that was the point.
A) under 13 years of age, or B) at least 13 years of age and under 16 years of age, or C) at least 16 years of age and under 18 years of age or D) at least 18 years of age.
that's it. The OS can decide how it wants to implement that, but personally I'd literally just do get_age_bracket_enum(now() - get_user_birthday());
The bill is here: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
The uproar seems to be extremely overblown.
I mean, "compelled speech"? Really? That's people's argument? This is about as bad as the government compelling you to write a copyright notice.
The well should be poisoned. The whole idea is poison.
Uh, no.
No, "we" really don't. I wrote software. It's free. You're welcome to use it, or not. Nobody is forcing my software on you. You are not allowed to tell me that the software I wrote, for free, and gave to you, for free, needs to have features that I don't care about.
You have an LLM now. I'm obsolete now, right? Do it. Build your nerfed distro, and make it popular. Oh, yeah... there isn't a single solitary disto built by an LLM, is there? Not even one. Wow. I wonder why...
Don't let phone manufacturers lock the bootloader on phones. Let the device owner lock it with a password if they decide to. Someone will make a child-friendly OS if there is demand. Tech-savvy parents should be able to install that on their kid's phone and then lock the bootloader.
What about non-tech-savvy parents?
There should be a toggle in the phone's settings to enable/disable app installation with a password, like sudo. This will let parents control what apps get installed/uninstalled on their kid's device.
But what about apps or online services that adults also use?
Apps and online services can add a password-protected toggle in their user account settings that enables child mode. Parents can take their child's phone, enable it, and set the password.
----
All it takes is some password-protected toggles. They will work better than every remote verification scheme.
The only problem with this solution is that it does not help certain governments build their global mass surveillence and propaganda apparatus, and tech companies can't collect more of your personal info to sell, and they can't make your devices obsolete whenever they want.
It also prevents the legitimization of app store monopolies because no centralized authority is needed to create or enforce a rating system. And there will always be apps that don't comply with a rating system out of privacy concerns (it leaks the user's age, which is just an extra data point to track you with), and then they'll eventually try to ban non-compliant apps from running on the device completely. That's what enforcing an age-based standard would take. And even then it would still not fulfill its (claimed) purpose that well.
Principle-wise, parenting should be the responsibility of parents, not governments or corporations. Those large organizations have their own agendas which are somewhat misaligned with the individual human being.
—-system76 customer
(That doesn’t mean it is not a bad idea, and even perhaps unconstitutional for other reasons.)
I don't think a cryptographic algorithm is "expressive" any more than it is purely functional; indeed, the 9th circuit evaluated and rejected the expressive/functional distinction for source code in the above case.
Regardless - code is speech, and the government cannot compel or prevent speech except in very narrow circumstances.
That is very much overstating the holding in the case [0], the most relevant part of which seems to be:
“encryption software, in its source code form and as employed by those in the field of cryptography, must be viewed as expressive for First Amendment purposes”
The ruling spends a key bit of analysis discussing the expressive function of source code in this field as distinct from the function of object code in controlling a computer.
A law compelling providing functionality which it is merely most convenient to comply with by creating source code as part of the process is not directing speech, any more than an law delivery of physical goods where the most convenient method of doing so involves interacting by speech with the person who physically holds them on your behalf is.
[0] text here: https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F3/176/176.F3d...
I think you should read it a bit more closely. The court threw out the "functional/expressive" argument for source code, like I said in my original comment.
Secondly, what are you talking about that source code is the most "convenient" way to implement this? It's the literal, only possible way to present an interface to a user, ask them a question, and "signal" to other applications if the user is a minor or not. You're being completely nonsensical there. There's no other way to do that: someone must write some code. The bill specifically says "an API"!
That's forced labor. I'm not required to write a line of code to please anyone. It's free software with no warranty. They have LLMs, let's see them build it. :)
> That's forced labor.
Well, that's a 13th Amendment issue not a 1st Amendment one, but, in any case, its not forced if it doesn't direct who does the work to create the functionality, only requires you to have the functionality provided if you are doing some other activity, it is more of an in-kind tax. [0] (Now, if you want to make an argument that when the activity it is conditioned on is expressive that that makes it a 1A violation as a content-based regulation when the condition is tied to the content of the expressive act, that is a better 1A argument, that might actually have some merit against many of the real uses of, say, age verification laws; but “if I am doing this activity, I must either create or acquire and use software that has a specified function” is not, in general, a 1A violation.)
[0] It's not really that other than metaphorically, either, any more than every regulation of any kind is an “in-kind tax”, but its far closer to that than “forced labor”.
Good, because I'm not writing it, f\/ck them. Free software, no warranty. Use it if you want to. Otherwise, pound sand.
Don't you mean "bad"? Shouldn't you want it to be a violation of the constitution so it gets thrown out?
Providing an API is required if you do some other thing, but you are not required to do that other thing. Requirements that are triggered by engaging in some other activity are not compulsions if the activity they are triggered by is not compulsory. (Now, whether restricting the thing that triggers the requirement by adding the requirement is permissible is a legitimate question, but that is not the question that is addressed when you ignore the thing triggering the requirement and treat the requirement as a free-standing mandate.)
If you don't want to write, hire someone to write, pay someone to provide an implementation that has already been written, or acquire an implementation already written that is available without payment, such an API, you can simply choose not to do what is defined as being an “operating system provider”, and no obligation attaches,
No one is putting a gun to your head and forcing you to do labor to write code for an API.
I don't know what's wrong with you, honestly, that you would so vivaciously defend this impractical, immoral and completely nonsensical law so vivaciously.
It is seriously disturbing.
I do, these people are entryists and they have evil goals in mind.
Do not hire people like this, and block them from working on your projects.
obviously these regulations are very different, but both do compel speech
It's not enough to adhere to the OS age signal:
> (3) (A) Except as provided in subparagraph (B), a developer shall treat a signal received pursuant to this title as the primary indicator of a user’s age range for purposes of determining the user’s age.
> (B) If a developer has internal clear and convincing information that a user’s age is different than the age indicated by a signal received pursuant to this title, the developer shall use that information as the primary indicator of the user’s age.
Developers are still burdened with additional liability if they have reason to believe users are underage, even if their age flag says otherwise.
The only way to mitigate this liability is to confirm your users are of age with facial and ID scans, as it is implemented across platforms already. Not doing so opens you up to liability if someone ever writes "im 12 lol" on your app/platform.
The law requires "clear and convincing information", not merely "reason to believe". And since the law requires developers to rely on the provide age signal as the primary indicator of the user's age, developers are not incentivized to create a system that uses sophisticated data mining to derive an estimated age. If someone posts a comment on a YouTube video saying "I'm twelve years old and what is this?", that would absolutely not require YouTube to immediately start treating that account as an under-13 account.
Remember, only the state AG can bring a suit under this law, and the penalty is limited to $2500 per child for negligent violations. It's probably cheaper to get insurance against such a judgement than to implement an invasive ID-scanning age verification system (and assume the risks of handling such highly-sensitive personal information).
I'd also argue it's clear and convincing if a kid changes their profile picture to a selfie of themselves, says they're 12, says they're in grade school, etc. Any reasonable person would take that at face value.
> implement an invasive ID-scanning age verification system (and assume the risks of handling such highly-sensitive personal information)
It's already implemented as face and ID scans by all the major platforms as it is. The systems are already there and they're already deployed.
Apps and platforms already integrate with 3rd party age verification platforms who handle the face and ID data, nothing ever has to touch your servers.
That's so fragile, and it's not like they're making those claims to the site, it's natural language posting.
And someone who knows what they're doing would never take "I'm twelve years old and what is this?" at face value.
No one is suggesting a meme should be taken literally.
Like do you really think someone who presents themselves as a child on Pornhub will stay registered and not banned? They aren't going to serve porn to someone who presents themselves as a kid.
I think it's pretty clear and convincing when someone presents themselves as a child on your platform. I'd be convinced and wouldn't take that liability on.
The current analytics profiles are closer to "definitely into Roblox, 70% chance of being 13-18" than "This user was beyond any reasonable doubt born on 07-03-2002". Calling them "clear and convincing information" would be a massive exaggeration.
This section targets spyware companies like Facebook, who already know damn well if the user is underage and this section forbids them from pretending they don't know.
It doesn't say you have to go and become Facebook.
And then there are the desperate attempts to cover actual pedophilia from the people in power. I'll never look at a politician or a so called member of the elites the same way again.
This resonates so much with me. I don’t want to control my kids. I will never be able to protect them from everything. I hope I won’t be able because I want to die before them. I want them to be able to navigate in the world and have all the cognitive tools necessary to avoid being fooled. I want to rest in peace knowing they can in turn educate their own children. I want to trust them and be relieved that I can focus on some tasks of my own without needing to constantly worry about them.
I hope things won’t go that way but I do think it’s likely they will.
once vendors are forced to put on hooks to some enforced age verification system, it will creep everywhere like cookie banners which you cannot escape even in Antarctica
- Switch to a non-compliant distro. (could put me in a dead end down the line depending on what happens)
- Find a browser that can block the API access and just use two browsers.
- Have an "online accounts" computer and an "old fashioned" computer?
- Switch to books and DVDs?
The whole point. Very well worded post. I weep for the all digital future.
I stopped reading at this point, as this is utter non-sense. I mean, it's a beautiful idea, but any person with more than two neurones knows that real-life doesn't work like that. We have law enforcement and prisons because, despite our best efforts in education, some people do go off to become criminals due to a number of factors.
I'm not saying that the present number of laws is adequate, but the solution is a different set of laws, not the complete lack of them. The idea of "simply educate children and we'll all be fine" is utterly moronic.
I do mind a lot of the data process. I do not want my id, personal preferences or any metadata of my self stored anywhere ever. And IF by some weird law some process has to store some data somewhere of me, i want to have very easy full access to it so i can delete it whenever i want. You can keep the process itself but anything else has to go.
Yes, i have a passport. Yes, it was verified and validated. No you may not know or store the color of my eyes.
I also do not want curious kids to be prosecuted for poking around. They should teach them and thank them for finding flaws.
What is almost more disturbing: at least some of the politicians will have been advised by consultants or lobbyists who know what they're advocating for. What's their game?
More concerning than that is that it all doesn't seem because they care about teenagers and kids.
Er, how does a child install a VM from a non-admin account?
> Or the child can simply re-install the OS and not tell their parents.
It's gonna be pretty easy to detect when the parent finds programs are missing/reset or the adult account they created can't log in with their password.
The California law seems entirely tame and sane, whereas the New York bill seems pretty heavy-handed and authoritarian. They are in no way similar to each other.
A. If end users will mod their distros to send a "signal" (TBD?) to websites.
B. If end users will just grab a pirate OS with apps compiled to not care about age.
Hopefully the latest TAILS I downloaded is free of Big (over 18) Brother. And (A)
Or just compile, Gentoo and LFS style.
C. If pirates just take care of all this for friends and neighbors.
D. When, not if, this unconstitutional coercion is challenged in court and cancelled via petition. Remember Proposition 8?
Of course, that's an ineffective argument, because the long-term goal of these laws (in the sense of, "the goal of the system is what it does") was never going to be about keeping kids off the Internet.
The computers are not secure and they should only be able to run “verified” operating systems using attestation mechanisms. This was always where this was ultimately going. The idea has been fermenting since the DVD players had copy protections.
It’s the planet destroying asteroid. We know the trajectory, we always knew it was coming for us. But once you can see with the naked eye it’s too late to do anything.
This ties in nicely with the international movement to require ID to use social media.
Why is this an international movement? Suddenly, simultaneously, all over the Western world? It's enough to make on believe in conspiracies...
Sometimes kids hurt themselves through the use of the internet. And their parents lash out to blame someone [0]. And mainstream media pick up these stories. And the worry spreads. And more and more adults of voting age say that yeah, it's only reasonable to protect the kids from that internet monster, because kids are trusting and vulnerable, and won't somebody please think of the children. And they do not push back against age restriction campaigns. And so it goes...
As for the Western world, it generally moves in lockstep, doesn't it?
Second, where are the protests to keep kids out of bars?
Now some 50-60yo politician who has never even created a folder in their desktop without help wants to dictate how I should have used my device?
Fuck'em
The internet you describe has been gone for a long time. The internet that replaced it is several degrees more harmful, to adults and children alike.
And modern hardware is so complex that it is impossible for individuals to build one by their own. We are no longer in the 8-bit/16-bit era. And considering the power of AI -- individuals pretty much mean nothing to the elites.
I have never thought the Dystopian future to be so close -- I always thought it would be X years away. But legislation, the lawyers, are definitely very efficient on this kind of things.
Let's try to figure out what a good policy solution looks like:
- entities with harmful or adult content must require proof of the user being over 18
- entities cannot ask for, store, or process more detailed information without explicit business needs (this should be phrased in a way that disallows Instagram from asking for your birth year, for example)
- entities cannot share this data with other sites, to avoid privacy leaks, unless there is an explicit business need (this is tricky to get right; someone might try to set up a centralized non-anonymous age-verification service, erasing many benefits)
- entities must in general not store or process information about the user that is not strictly relevant to their function
- there ought to be different treatment for anonymous users (which ideally these protocols will allow, just submit proof of work plus a ZKP that you are a human and authorized to access the resource) compared to pseudonymous and non-anonymous users, who are more at risk of being censored or tracked.
There's some loopholes here, but if the government can enact good policy on this I personally think it's feasible. Please share your thoughts, if you have a minute to do so.
There's also an interesting political split to note among the opposition here. I see a lot of people vehemently against this, and as far as I can see this is largely for concerns regarding one of 1) privacy abuses, 2) censorship, or 3) restriction of general computing. Still, there is a problem with harmful content and platforms on the web. (Not just for minors, I don't think we should pretend it doesn't harm adults too.) The privacy crowd seems to be distinctly different from the computing-freedom crowd; the most obvious example is in attitudes towards iOS. As I personally generally align more towards what I perceive as the privacy-focused side, I'm very interested in what people more focused on software freedom think about zero-knowledge proofs as a politically workable solution here.
Can you give an example of how less private solutions will benefit them and their sponsors? I could see big tech / adtech and government surveillance benefitting but I don't think they're the ones behind this push.
As another example, consider the "small web" community, say at Bear Blog, which is a group of technically sophisticated people who routinely complain about the harms of traditional social media. I doubt most of them would support this particular implementation, but they show that there is popular support for solving the ills of at least one of the targets of this legislation.
So to answer your question, yes, I do see this as an attempt to protect people. The restriction of free speech is in my opinion a side effect of this legislation opening the way to worse-designed laws in the future.
Thank god totalitarian bureaucrats and lobbyists descended from the heavens like Prometheus and gave you these tools.
These laws have spread like wildfire around the world with many countries and regions rolling out similar legislation within months of each other, despite the stereotypical lethargy of any and every legislature. That's not the work of some popular uprising of parents clamouring for age verification.
I fear debating the merits of the argument is missing the point; they don't care. They don't care about children, they don't care about the argument, they just want the control.
1) The issue doesn't matter much. Corporate takeover of the internet caused severe damage, but overrunning social media with LLM generated content is a mortal wound. Roughly the same number of humans will be using social media in 2030 as currently use CB radio. Remember near a fifth of the population was using CB radio at the peak in the late 70s. Its too little, too late, closing the barn door after the horses have left is pointless. Like re-arranging deck chairs on the titanic after it hit the iceberg. Once the advertisers get wise to the scam that nobody is seeing their ads except bots, the problem will kind of fix itself. I think TPTB want to use "protecting kids from social media" as the public face of why social media will crash and burn soon to avoid discussion of how LLMs actually killed it, because authoritarians love LLMs and they're in charge (although seemingly everyone else hates LLMs, so I'm sure this will end well).
2) Most of the anti commentary reads a lot like addict speak IRL. Talk to a drunk about how it would be a great idea not to drink or a carb addict about how they should not eat donuts and you'll get absolutely rage blasted in return for threatening their addiction, which in the case of an addict, is their identity. "Well it would be the end of the world if people (me) were not drunk and other people (projection of me) will do anything to feed their addiction so obviously no effort should be made to limit addictions and it won't work anyway because other people (me) will even drink mouthwash or homebrew their own moonshine to get drunk" etc. Note I'm not completely against the anti's and they make some very good points that should be considered, but raging like an addict after their drug of choice is threatened is a VERY bad look and is not helping their case at all, if anything it strengthens the case against the anti's. What the pro's don't understand is you can't fix an addiction externally, addicts gotta addict and punishing them and making them miserable might help the pro's feel superior or at least thankful they're not addicted, but it never helped no one. Social media is "an ill of society" and should be treated as such including sensible regulation, protection of threatened groups, treatment for the addicts, and some compassion and acceptance of the addicts either returning to the real world or dying in the addicted world.
The time is coming where we will unseat legislative traitors who use EU/Old World manipulations in the USA.
An unjust law is no law at all. That is the exception the rule of law requires to remain moral.
One developer began a discussion:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2026-March/04...
Their attempts of a "solution" are quite interesting. One other user suggested that GUI tools ask for the age of the user.
Well ... I have a very strong opinion here. I have been using Linux since over 20 years and I will not ever give any information about my personal data to the computer devices I own and control. So any GUI asking for this specifically would betray me - and I will remove it. (Granted, it is easier to patch out the offending betrayal code and recompile the thing; I do this with KDE where Nate added the pester-donation daemon. Don't complain about this on reddit #kde, he will ban you. KDE needs more money! That's the new KDE. I prefer oldschool KDE but I digress so back to the topic of age "verification").
The whole discussion about age "verification" appears to be to force everyone into giving data to the government. I don't buy for a moment that this is about "protecting children". And, even IF it were, I could not care any less about the government's strategy. Even more so as I am not in the country that decided this in the first place, so why would I be forced to comply with it when it ends up with GUI tools wanting to sniff my information and then give it to others? For similar reasons, one reason I use ublock origin is to give as few information to outside entities when I browse the web (I am not 100% consistent here, because I mostly use ublock origin to re-define the user interface, which includes blocking annoying popups and what not; that is the primary use case, but to lessen the information my browser gives to anyone else, is also a good thing. I fail to see why I would want to surrender my private data, unless there is really no alternative, e. g. online financial transactions.)
I also don't think we should call this age "verification" law. This is very clearly written by a lobbiyst or several lobbyists who want to sniff more data off of people. The very underlying idea here is wrong - I would not accept Linux to become a spy-tool for the government. I am not interested in how a government tries to reason about this betrayal - none of those attempts of "explanation" apply in my case. It is simply not the job of the government to sniff after all people at all times. This would normally require a warrant/reasonable suspicion of a crime. Why would people surrender their rights here? Why is a government sniffing after people suddenly? These are important questions. That law suddenly emerging but not in the last +25 years is super-suspicious.
This would be the least of evils (such as ID verification). But a bigger problem is that the implementation is very flawed. It doesn't appear to be very effective. People, including children, can lie. Multiple people can share the same account. Also there are many devices that cannot be updated (such as embedded). My concern is that these idiots might introduce even more extreme laws when they see that it isn't efficient enough.
I hope it will cause so many problems (implementation, backslash, etc) that it will be eventually cancelled.
„But Jonas parents allow him to do that“ in reality Jonas parents should not have a say in this.
Alcohol? Yeah one or two too many drinks and you're in the hospital getting your stomach vacuumed. Driving? Blink and you run over a kid. Internet? You can spend evening and nights over there and not be harmed in any way.
We have full generations of kids that can now be studied about the effects of the internet, starting with millenials. I won't pretend the Internet is a better place now than it was when I was a teen, but it appears to me the "dangerous" things are more focused and concentrated (at least for kids): social networks. It's still a minefield, but with leagues between two mines.
Porn has always been the topic touted for children safety, because it's scary and resonates with conservatives and religious people. Access to is is roughly the same today than it was then, and arguably less dangerous today because the dirty stuff is hidden deeper, thus less likely to stumble upon.
But other than porn, the thing that changed the most is social networks. Addiction, bullying, etc. Facebook 15 years ago was a not serious place. The equivalent today is the best place to get roasted by fellow kids and bullied 24/7 while not being able to get off the hook. The damage is psychological, which is insidious, but not systematic. Not every kid will get bullied, not every kid will be addicted to the algorithm(tm), etc.
In the end, education plays a bigger role than simple age verification. Stimulate your kids, give them things to do other than doomscrolling, and get them on the dark corners of the internet to give them curiosity about the world and un-sanitized stuff (hacking in all forms, etc).
P.S. Is your handle a reference to Cats on Mars by Seatbelts? Yoko Kanno <3
The goal for the AI side is that they get to be censors and gatekeepers of all user-generated content on the internet, their models will rank/grade/censor content for age-appropriateness and they will have the pleasure of being paid to train on all new content uploaded to the internet in real-time, in perpetuity.
This is false equivalence. All of the above are vices that objectively carry more harm than good. There's no inherent harm in using a computer, there's a subset of ways in which using a computer can be harmful, which kids can be taught how to avoid or navigate, there's no subset of meth use that isn't harmful
To be more direct - if you're in any editorial position where something that smells like this might require your approval, please give it the scrutiny it deserves. That is, the same scrutiny that a malicious actor submitting a PR that introduces a PII-leaking security hole would receive. As an industry we need to civil disobedience the fuck out of this.
I live in the UK, I work in London. I can go on X and look at what Elon Musk is posting about the UK and as a reasonable person I can quite reasonably say he's gone mental. The algorithm has broken that mans brain. And it's not just him, a whole slew of establishment women lost their absolute minds about the trans issue (and Graham Linehan). Mumsnet became a centre for radicalization. You know and some one who grew up on the internet at quite a sweet spot I'm very comfortable looking at that stuff and going "Oh yeah, you guys are being groomed by these algorithms and you're defenceless to it".
There's a whole load of "How do we protect the children from this", but I don't think there's actually been much a reckoning with how grown adults are getting sucked into this vortex. The algorithms on the internet clearly have some trap doors that just absolutely funnel people into crazy places.
All of which is to say: We have a serious problem that's effecting everyone not just kids, and I think we've got almost no answers for how to tackle it.
The result is this- poorly thought through sweeping laws that aren't solving the problem, and have massive negative side effects. I think Jonathon Haidt has a lot to answer for in funnelling this complex issue affecting everyone into this reactionary "won't someone think of the children!" campaign for banning technology for kids.
Yes. And having a fixed cut off from 'you can't see omg boobs! on the internet' to 'you can see snuff porn on the internet' won't help.
Unless I'm missing something, I have zero concern for companies who sell out by complying.
The code was "free as in freedom" when you decided to build your company on it; and while you're not legally obligated to defend that freedom, and I, and hopefully other consumers, find that you are morally obligated to.
At the moment only some countries banning porn, social media and gambling. But how soon will I have to do it for a work app? And will I lose my job then if I refuse?
>Limiting a child’s ability to explore what they can do with a computer limits their future.
Parents don't want to limit their children from writing software. Saying that limiting minors from accessing porn will limit their future is another argument I doing think many will agree with.
I do not think the proposal is smart or that will it work, but I am more worried that some people seem to think they hold the absolute truth (on any side of the a debate).
I mean... How else would you educate children about computers and evading stupid restrictions?
Make it optional and assume an adult otherwise, it's a good idea if it's optional and doesn't have dumb fines, you could have fines for not enforcing it / not using the api [porn sites] that already exists [and it doesn't work since 1 button is not age verification].
I see this as a good way for parents and institutions to set up their phones, school laptops etc and would pretty much solve the large majority of these issues while having a fraction of the invasiveness.
Honestly, probably by intention. Its sort of a SLAPP attack on the entire world population.