Zero-knowledge proofs are the way to go for this type of thing, I find it mind-boggling that the US lets itself be bamboozled into complete lack of privacy.
My stance is that if somebody is a minor, his/her/their parents/tutors/legal guardian are responsible for what they can/cannot do online, and that the mechanism to enforce that is parental control on devices.
Having said that, open-source zero-knowledge proofs are infinitely less evil (I refuse to say "better") than commercial cloud-based age monitoring baked into every OS
To be honest, I worry that the framing of this legislation and ZKP generally presents a false dichotomy, where second-option bias[1] prevails because of the draconian first option.
There's always another option: don't implement age verification laws at all.
App and website developers shouldn't be burdened with extra costly liability to make sure someone's kids don't read a curse word, parents can use the plethora of parental controls on the market if they're that worried.
[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Appeal_to_the_minority#Second-...
Why not? Physical businesses have liability if they provide age restricted items to children. As far as I know, strip clubs are liable for who enters. Selling alcohol to a child carries personal criminal liability for store clerks. Assuming society decides to restrict something from children, why should online businesses be exempt?
On who should be responsible, parents or businesses, historically the answer has been both. Parents have decision making authority. Businesses must not undermine that by providing service to minors.
Physical businesses nominally aren't selling their items to people across state or country borders.
Of course, we threw that out when we decided people could buy things online. How'd that tax loophole turn out?
These are often clear cut. They're physical controlled items. Tobacco, alcohol, guns, physical porn, and sometimes things like spray paint.
The internet is not. There are people who believe discussions about human sexuality (ie "how do I know if I'm gay?") should be age restricted. There are people who believe any discussion about the human form should be age restricted. What about discussions of other forms of government? Plenty would prefer their children not be able to learn about communism from anywhere other than the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
The landscape of age restricting information is infinitely more complex than age restricting physical items. This complexity enables certain actors to censor wide swaths of information due to a provider's fear of liability.
This is closer to a law that says "if a store sells an item that is used to damage property whatsoever, they are liable", so now the store owner must fear the full can of soda could be used to break a window.
So again, assuming we have decided to restrict something (and there are clear lines online too like commercial porn sites, or sites that sell alcohol (which already comes with an ID check!)), why isn't liability for online providers the obvious conclusion?
Surely you can find a rationalwiki article for your fallacy too.
App and website operators should add one static header. [1] That's it, nothing more. Site operators could do this in their sleep.
User-agents must look for said header [1] and activate parental controls if they were enabled on the device by a parent. That's it, nothing more. No signalling to a website, no leaking data, no tracking, no identifying. A junior developer could do this in their sleep.
None of this will happen of course as bribery (lobbying) is involved.
Where do you go to vote for this option?
Recent posters here are clear that porn sites are setting every available signal that they are serving adult-only content.
According to them, you are targeting the wrong audience.
Facebook/Instagram studying how to get young users addicted should be of greater concern. I have my doubts about the effectiveness of age-based blocking there, though.
> give parents the ABILITY to advertise the users age to browsers, apps and everything in between.
Accounts and Applications to services that provide countent are set to a country-specific age rating restrictions (PG, 12+, 18+, whatever). That's it.
None of the things you mentioned have any point to concern themself with the age or age-bracket of the user in front of the device. This can and will be abused. This is very obvious. Think about it.
So on the Sony consoles I created an account for my child and guess what they have implemented some stuff to block children from adult content on some stuff.
So if Big Tech would actually want to prevent laws to be created could make it easy for a parent to setup the account for a child (most children this days have mobile stuff and consoles so they could start with those), we just need the browsers to read the age flag from the OS and put it in a header, then the websites owners can respect that flag.
I know that someone would say that some clever teen would crack their locked down windows/linux to change the flag but this is a super rare case, we should start with the 99% cases, mobile phones and consoles are already locked down so an OS API that tells the browser if this is an child account and a browser header would solve the issue, most porn websites or similar adult sites would have no reason not to respect this header , it would make their job easier then say Steam having to always popup a birth date thing when a game is mature.
Let's go back to parenting: yes, world is a scary place if you get into it unprepared.
Permission restricted registry entry (already exists) and a syscall that reads it (already exists) for windows and a file that requires sudo to edit (already exists) and a syscall to read it (already exists). Works on every distro automatically as well including android phones since they run the linux kernel anyway. Apple can figure it out and they already have appleid.
Responsibility should be on the website to not provide the content if the header is sent with an inappropriate age, and for the parent to set it up on the device, or to not provide a child a device without child-safe restrictions.
It seems very obviously simple to me, and I don't see why any of these other systems have gained steam everywhere all of a sudden (apart from a desire to enhance tracking).
Meh, I use it, but it's super annoying and I think that with my Daughter I'll take a different approach (but it will be some years before that is relevant).
On Android: The kid can easily go on Snapchat (after approval of install of course, and then you can just see their "friends") before Pokemon Go (just a pain to get working, it keeps presenting some borked version which led to a lot of confusion at first). I just lied about his age in a bunch of places at some point. Snapchat is horrible and sick from our experiences in the first week.
On Windows: It's a curated set of websites (and no FireFox) or access to everything. It's not even workable for just school. Granting kids access to our own minercraft servers: My god, I felt dirty about what the other parents had to go through to enable that.
Imho there is a place for regulation in that, actually. Devices that parents are managing as child devices could include an OS API and browser HTTP header for "hey is this a child?" These devices are functionally adminned by the parent so the owner of the device is still in control, just not the user.
Just like the cookie thing - these things should all be HTTP headers.
"This site is requesting your something, do you want to send it?
Y/N [X] remember my choice."
Do that for GPS, browser fingerprint, off-domain tracking cookies (not the stupid cookie banner), adulthood information, etc.
It would be perfectly reasonable for the EU to legislate that. "OS and browsers are required to offer an API to expose age verification status of the client, and the device is required to let an administrative user set it, and provide instructions to parents on how to lock down a device such that their child user's device will be marked as a child without the ability for the child to change it".
Either way, though, I'm far more worried about children being radicalized online by political extremists than I am about them occasionally seeing a penis. And a lot of radicalizing content is not considered "adult".
I owe everything about who I am today to learning how to circumvent firewalls and other forms of restriction. I would almost certainly be dead if I hadn't learned to socialize and program on the web despite it being strictly forbidden at home. Most of my interests, politics and personality were forged at 2am, as quiet as possible, browsing the web on live discs. I now support myself through those interests.
We're so quick to forget that kids are people, too. And today, they often know how to safely navigate the internet better than their aging caretakers who have allowed editorial "news" and social media to warp their minds.
Even for people who think they're really doing a good thing by supporting these kinds of insane laws that are designed to restrict our 1A rights: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
As a parent, sure, that is my stance as well. What... what other stances are there even? How would they work?
But the implementation matters, and almost all of these bills internationally are being done in bad faith by coordinated big-money groups against technologically illiterate and reactionary populist governments.
(if we really want to get into an argument, there's what the UK calls "Gillick competence": the ability of children to seek medical treatment without the knowledge and against the will of their parents)
I would personally favour allowing parents to buy drinks for children below the current limits (18 without a meal, 16 for wine, beer and cider with a meal).
The alternative to this is empowering parents by regulating SIM cards (child safe cards already exist) and allowing parents to control internet connectivity either through the ISP or at the router - far better than regulating general purpose devices. The devices come with sensible defaults that parents can change.
Maybe a majority of people today agree with that, but I know I don't and I never hear that assumption debated directly.
"You‘re reading about evolution! Not in my house"
Examples: most children believe in the same religion as their parents, and can visit friends and places only if/when allowed by their parents.
This is simply extending the same level of control to the internet.
Government-mandated restrictions are completely another level.
Who controls your age if you want to see an R-rated movie?
This is simply extending the same level of control to the internet.
More control for parents is a completely different level.
Does the US have a zero-knowledge proof system that is mentioned in the discussion?
> Having said that, open-source zero-knowledge proofs are infinitely less evil (I refuse to say "better") than commercial cloud-based age monitoring baked into every OS
Parent prefers more control by parents over zero-knowledge proof
I do think parental controls can be and are abused for evil, but they're still better than the alternative. Zero-knowledge proof is not an alternative, and to suggest that it is is misunderstanding the situation. These laws are proposed and funded by people who want complete surveillance of the population. Zero-knowledge proof is, therefore, explicitly contrary to the goal and will never be implemented under any circumstances. Suggesting that it can be muddies the issue and tricks people into supporting legislation that exists only to be used against them.
In a benevolent dictatorship, sure, go for a zero-knowledge proof verification as your solution. In the reality of democracy, where politicians are corporate puppets who cloak surveillance laws in "think of the children" to rally support from the masses, we need to convince people to see through the lie and reject the proposals outright while reassuring them that they can protect the children themselves via parental controls. You will never be able to sufficiently inform 50.1% of the population of any country of what zero-knowledge proof even means, let alone convince them to support age verification laws but strictly conditional on ZKP requirements. That level of nuance is far too much to ask of millions of people who are not technically-informed, and idealism needs to give way to pragmatism if we wish to avoid the worst-case scenario.
With no proof it will protect anyone from proven harm.
Why is this such a sticking point in US politics? If the "undocumented" people aren't supposed to be in the country in the first place, why should rest of society cater to them? Even if you're against age verification for other reasons, dragging in the immigration angle is just going to alienate the other half of the population who don't share your view on undocumented people, and is a great way to turn a non-partisan issue into a partisan one. It's kind of like campaigning for medicare for all, and then listing "free abortions and gender affirming surgery" as one of the arguments for it.
That said, government agencies have been doing a terrible job at keeping the private information of citizens safe. But it is nowhere nearly as bad as the US. My best childhood friend died in very questionable circumstances in 2009 in the US in very questionable circumstances. He had a US citizenship and we never really found out what had happened(to the point where we never really got any definitive proof that he had died). But that didn't stop me from trying and I was blown away by the fact that I could log into a US government website, register with a burner mail, pay 2 bucks with an anonymous gift credit/debit card and get a scanned copy of his death certificate in my email. And I didn't even have to provide his passport/id/anything. Just his name.
Point is, the US has been terrible at privacy for as long as I can remember. It is probably worse now with Facebook and Ellison holding TikTok.
I don't mean to be the average gloating US citizen, but I'm pretty sure we're the largest threat to the Earth.
The root of the problem is Russia, always has been.
Surely you meant this as hyperbole, right? If not, I would love your reasoning as to why its a bigger threat than literally anything and anyone else.
Reasoning: experience.
But they invest large amounts of money to propaganda channels everywhere, have direct military influence in large parts of Africa, are known to poison people in the UK and elsewhere, etc.
> its relative strength has only lessened over the decades Russia is not a _physical_ threat outside of its immediate proximity.
But they invest large amounts of money to propaganda channels everywhere, have direct military influence in large parts of Africa, are known to poison people in the UK and elsewhere, etc.
> Is it not?
No, and no part of your comment really seems to argue otherwise? I know about current world events. Your argument was that "experience" is a good enough reason to make a blanket statement about a country and all its people, and you doubled down on it, so it's not even like I'm constructing a strawman here or anything.
It's just wild to me how far this kind of blind hate goes. If "experience" is enough to say that a country is a bigger threat to civilization(!) than, lets say, pandemics, natural disasters, global nuclear war, etc., then there really remains no basis for any kind of healthy discussion. At that point it's just blind hatred.
I'm trying to steer the conversation to stay factual, because I usually appreciate HN for its clear communication style. Sorry for offending you and I'm sorry if I've caused you further suffering. Let's not continue this conversation.
I keep hearing this but I struggle to find any sources, beyond articles like [1] which are... not particularly good sources, even a reddit comment would be a better primary source than that.
I'm not trying to be combative, I just genuinely struggle to find primary sources, probably because I'm using the wrong keywords or something.
I understand the reasoning, but I would love to actually see/read/hear/whatever where Putin "states" this desire explicitly!
[1] https://gppreview.com/2015/02/12/putins-dream-reborn-ussr-un...
Surely I'm missing something here. Putin's 2023 "The Concept of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation" also does not state conquering back former USSR states. Where is it? If he states it so clearly that people keep quoting it, surely there must be a source for it? Sorry if I'm a PITA.
To be clear, I'm interested in this because this would be a fantastic argument to bring to discussions, but without having seen a source, I don't think I could.
I think Dugin's book is like that. Sure, Dugin said it, not Putin. But IIRC Putin did some things to make Dugin's book more influential. I forget the specifics - making it required reading in the Russian military academies, maybe?
There have been other statements by Russian politicians who are widely regarded as Putin's mouthpieces. Medvedev, certain key figures in the Russian parliament. I know I've seen that, though I don't recall the specifics.
So Putin maybe didn't say it. And yet, his endorsed mouthpieces (more than one) do say it.
You said "without having seen a source". Well, I didn't give you one. But if you want to look, I have given some places to start.
> making it required reading in the Russian military academies, maybe
Yeah, I think he did.
> So Putin maybe didn't say it.
That's my concern. When people make the statement that he did, when he didn't, they essentially preempt any reasonably discussion and start it off on the entirely wrong foot.
If I want to have a discussion with my neighbor about him not cleaning up his own trash, surely I would not start the discussion with "you LOVE living in trash, don't you", even if I can reasonably deduce that he does. It just turns the entire discussion hostile to make claims that aren't supported, and it weakens all subsequent arguments!
So I don't think it's the entirely wrong foot. It's a shortcut and an imprecision, but the point (that Putin actually thinks this) seems to be valid. (Though one should have less than 100% certainty that it represents his position - but with Putin, that should apply to a direct quote as well.)
The only authority that can be trusted to do age verification is the government.
You know, those people who give you birth certificates, passports, SSNs, driver's licenses, etc.
The idea that parental supervision here is sufficient has been shown to be wholly inadequate. I'm sorry but that train has sailed. Age verification is coming. It's just a question of who does it and what form it takes.
Take Youtube, for example. I think it should work like this:
1. If you're not of sufficient age, you simply don't see comments. At all;
2. Minors shouldn't see ads. At all;
3. Videos deemed to have age-restricted content should be visible;
4. If you're not logged in, you're treated as an age-restricted user; and
5. Viewing via a VPN means you need age verification regardless of your country of origin.
It's not perfect. It doesn't have to be.
once you get this you stop asking why the tech details are the way they are.
Like, in general, a software change to add an "age class" attribute to user accounts and a syscall "what's this attribute for the current user account" would satisfy the California bill and that's a relatively minor change (the bad part is the NY bill that allegedly requires technical verification of whatever the user claimed).
The weird issue is how should that attribute be filled for the 'root' or 'www-data' user of a linux machine I have on the cloud. Or, to put aside open source for that matter, the Administrator account on a Windows Active Directory system.
Because "user accounts" don't necessarily have any mapping (much less a 1-to-1 mapping) to a person; many user accounts are personal but many are not.
These bills also need to be opposed on a legal/political level.
Something I realized last night is that people who lie about their age to send false signals may inadvertently open themselves up to CFAA liability (a felony). So this is a serious matter for users who want to maintain anonymity.
I do think there is a stronger case against the next under-18 Aaron Swartz, who will get hit with 200 felonies for setting his age wrong (one felony per app/service) after pissing off someone important.
If I get arrested for lying about my age, when I'm of age, then they could probably get me on a whim already anyway. No point in trying to fall in line.
We should also update all FOSS license terms to explicitly exclude Meta or any affilites from using any software licensed under them.
Update the terms to indicate that you can do what you want, but this OS is probably not compliant with states run by evil dipshits.
Heck, Linus Torvalds should just add an amendment to the next release of the Linux Kernel that makes it illegal to use in any jurisdiction that requires age verification laws.
This would obviously cause such a massive disruption (especially in California) that the age laws would have to be rolled back immediately.
This seems like a no-brainer to me but I am admittedly ignorant on this situation. I'm sure there's a good reason why this isn't happening if anyone cares to explain.
If it's not (fully) your code, you aren't free to set the licence conditions; Linus can't do that without getting approval from 100% (not 99% or so) of authors who contributed code.
What one can do is add an informative disclaimer saying "To the best of our knowledge, installing or running this thing in California is prohibited - we permit to do whatever you want with it, but how you'll comply with that law is your business".
A "Linux distro" is not the Linux kernel. It's possible for some distros to add such license terms to their distribution media, but others like Debian and Debian-based ones adhere to the GPL so no go.
If this was somehow introduced without anyone noticing and deployed, imagine the damage it would cause.
If we're fantasizing here, I like to imagine two major OS makers trying to comply these laws, fail miserably, and let FOSS OSes and kernels more recognition in the desktop market.
Ideally, getting these servers to auto turn off the day this goes into effect ("In compliance with this new law, Linux is now temporarily unusable. Please <call to action>.") would be glorious for getting the bill staved off, or killed.
It would hurt some productivity, but that is a risk these lawmakers taking donations are probably willing to make.
If anything, Meta’s utility would seem to shrink if the OS handles proof of being a real person.
It also gives them more information on users as a bonus. Further, verification with a real ID is also a quite effective barrier against excessive bots.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/congresss-crusade-age-...
Not saying I think it's a good idea to provide the year of birth to all sites, but (session ID, year of birth) is the only information they would need. The problem is proving who's behind the keyboard at the time of asking, which would require challenge-response, and is why I think this should be an online platform, not a hardware PKI gadget with keys inevitably tied to individuals.
Anthropic donated $20 million to Public First Action, a PAC that promotes Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn and her sponsored Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill that will force everyone to scan their faces and IDs to use the internet under the guise of saving the children.
The legislative angle taken by companies like Anthropic is that they will provide the censorship gatekeeping infrastructure to scan all user-generated content that gets posted online for "appropriateness", guaranteeing AI providers a constant firehose of novel content they can train on and get paid for the free training. AI companies will also get paid to train on videos of everyone's faces and IDs.
As for why Blackburn supports KOSA:
Asked what conservatives’ top priorities should be right now, Senator Blackburn answered, “protecting minor children from the transgender [sic] in this culture and that influence.” She then talked about how KOSA could address this problem, and named social media platforms as places “where children are being indoctrinated.”
If Anthropic, the PACs it supports and Blackburn get their way with KOSA, the end result will be that anything posted on the internet will be able to be traced back to you.
Instead of just creating a course that explains how to child-proof a device, we have to surveil everyone.
It's to save the kids.
We care about the kids. We don't bomb them.
one scary observation is that each year, less and less people care. at least, this is true among my students. plenty of them believe the 'protect the children' line and are more than willing to do whatever the government/big tech suggests. or they just shrug ("what difference would i make?").
for context, i teach at a college level, in tech. a few of my classes are from the cybersec program, one of the programs that should understand and care about the implications of bills like these, and even the majority of them do not care about this stuff anymore. they grew up with instagram and facebook and cameras everywhere. they grew up knowing that any little fuck up they have is recorded and posted online. they know that by the time they go to college, all of their data has already been leaked a few times. they never really had an expectation of privacy in the first place, so it just isnt a big deal.
as someone who interacts with this next generation of "hackers" on a daily basis... the concept of cypherpunk is gone. i got into this field because of my beliefs. they are going into this field because they want a chance at buying a house some day, and know that big tech has big bucks.
i am tired. and i recognize that this is exactly what they (lobbyists, meta, etc.) want! but i am tired and discouraged. more and more i find myself having to actively fight the urge to give up. i am not ready to give up just yet... but, i am sorry to say that as someone closer to retirement than i am comfortable admitting, i only have so much energy left.
I’d write my senator but they won’t do shit. Is there anything that can seriously be done?
Do you know how democracy works? There are these people called representatives. They are hired by you. They pass laws. They only get to continue having a job if people like you vote for them. When you tell them "I don't like the law you are passing", they are hearing "the people who hire me are angry with me". The more people that are angry at what they're doing, the more their job is at risk.
They do what the lobbyists say because somebody else is doing the work, and they get paid (by the lobbyist). But they won't have a job to get paid for if the voters don't vote for them again. So your entire defense against tyranny and bad laws is you speaking out. If you never talk to your reps (or vote), you're telling them you don't care what kind of government it is, and they really will do whatever they want.
You have to tell them how you feel, along with all the rest of us. That's the only power we have.
In addition to that, tell everyone you know. Your friends, family, coworkers, the dude running the local gas station. Explain to them why government-mandated surveillance of everything they do on a computer is a bad idea. Ask them to talk to their reps.
Ideas? Time to spin up a local LLM for some editing advice.
Compare this to what the EU built. The EU Digital Identity Wallet under eIDAS 2.0 is open-source, self-hostable, and uses zero-knowledge proofs. You can prove you're over 18 without revealing your birth date, your name, or anything else. No per-check fees, no proprietary SDKs, no data going to a vendor's cloud. The EU's Digital Services Act puts age verification obligations on Very Large Online Platforms (45M+ monthly users), not on operating systems. FOSS projects that don't act as intermediary services are explicitly outside scope. Micro and small enterprises get additional exemptions.
The US bills assume every operating system is built by a corporation with the infrastructure and revenue to absorb these costs. The EU started from the opposite assumption and built accordingly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_website_authenticati...
QWAC certs are only for "high value" sites: banks, government services, etc. They can only be issued by "Qualified Trust Service Providers" (e.g. digisign, D-TRUST, etc -- not governments), and cost many hundreds of euros. Your blog and mastodon instance and 98% of businesses just aren't affected.
People operating in "high risk" sectors that need access to payment infra (porn, drugs, etc) are, as always, going to have a hard time. That's a worthy conversation, but nothing about QWAC or eIDAS is about "the government not issuing certs to people they don't like".
Secure Boot is just a technology for those that need it, until Microsoft decides it's mandatory for everyone.
Its like they want to keep being seen as the bad guys.
No offline devices. Commercial vendors get your biometric data (and the equivalent of your driver's license / SSN). Every application on the OS can query your data.
If you think it stops with one bill, after they get all the infrastructure for this in place? You're fooling yourself. The whole point of this is to identify you, on every web page you visit, every app you open, on every device you own. Once bills are passed, it's very hard to get them revoked or nullified.
This is the most aggregious, authoritarian, Big Brother government surveillance system ever devised, and it's already law. I am fucking terrified.
(Yes, the EU has a less horrifying version of this. But Google, Apple, and Microsoft still control most of the devices in the world, and they are US companies.)
Because it's hopeless? It's been proven time and time again there's nothing the average person can do to fight this sort of thing.
It's just better to sit back and watch as everything gets ruined.
And a serious question: with deepest respect to the author for their extraordinarily impressive time and effort in this investigation... Why was this not already flagged by political reporters or investigative journalists? I'm not American so maybe I don't understand the media structure over there but it feels like SOMEONE should have been all over this way before it's gotten to the point described in this post.
$70 million is chump change for Meta, yet is far more money than I’ll ever have and does so much to influence state legislation.
Corporations literally buy the laws they want and Silicon Valley is the newest lobbying monster. Genuinely terrifying.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361235
https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings...
The very last people you should trust when it comes to "protecting the children."
(Maybe some unspoken element of concern over social media bots, too - as they evolve from spamming copy+pasted comments to being near-indistinguisable from actual human accounts?)
I don't see it as coincidence that with all these laws passing, suddenly he announces a secure, "controlled", "locked down" version of systemd. Why, RedHat and Ubuntu can simply drop in this new variant, pay a small fee, and be done with compliance.
The reason is that europeans have nothing to win from those "winner-take-all" platforms the US has built in the past decades. Europe has built zero of them.
It contributes very little to Europe's GDP or the overall being of the european. And in some cases, it eats Europe's GDP, moving economic activity back to the US. This is different than for Americans which big tech is a net-positive contributor to society in my POV, mainly because how much economic activity $ it generates.
Big techs provide huge paychecks and made a lot of people rich in the US, and most of its GDP growth in the last decade. But it's a double-edged sword.
They will make laws in favor of them in detriment of the average American, while minting more billionaries than Europe could ever dream of.
Europe will take a long time to get the digital revolution the US already did, but it'll mostly come from regulations and government initiatives. And will be net-positive for humans living in Euope, not for owners of corporations.
I want to open my wallet. It should be the top comment.
And it snowballs, the more favorable laws someone buys, the more favorable their position, and the more they can buy in the future. The transition from "democratic facade" to "outright oligarchy" will be swift and seamless.