System76 on Age Verification Laws

https://blog.system76.com/post/system76-on-age-verification/

by LorenDB • 5 months ago

850 599 5 months ago

blog.system76.com

akersten7• 5 months ago

Aaaaand to throw it all away at the end with "well when the rubber meets the road we'll comply anyway, thanks for inhaling my hot air." Take a damn stand and dare them to sue the hacker known as Linux or whatever.

sahilkerkar• 5 months ago

I'd say that anger is better directed towards the legislators in charge of creating these absurd policies, not the folks at System76. It's not reasonable to expect a company to sacrifice its entire business on a moral battlefield.

jrm42• 5 months ago

Right, but in turn it is absolutely reasonable and good for consumers to threaten a company with (legal) harm or extinction on a moral battlefield.

bitwize• 5 months ago

Age attestation (edited) is the law now in California. Noncompliance can mean stiff penalties. If you don't like it, write your Congressman.

rockskon3• 5 months ago

*attestation, not verification

arjie• 5 months ago

tl;dr they don't like them and don't want them in place but will comply

Tyrubias• 5 months ago

I don’t like to shill for companies, but I’m glad System76 made a statement. The addendum does feel like their legal team made them add it though:

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.

panja• 5 months ago

Gotta find a way to profitability I suppose

threatofrain• 5 months ago

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.

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.

ls612• 5 months ago

It is as Aristotle said, the average person is a natural born slave (to their emotions, and thus to the rhetoriticians most skilled in changing them). That is why democracy always fails in the end. Americans just had such good geographic and historic luck to delay this reckoning by a century or two.

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.

AnthonyMouse17• 5 months ago

your neighbors simply don't share your values

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.

hulitu• 5 months ago

The California law, and Colorado law modeled after it, were agreed in concert with major operating system providers.

So it is Microsoft, Google and Apple pushing for this.

teekert• 5 months ago

Makes sense, these laws are great for the establishment. Difficult to adhere to for newcomers or smaller parties. Compliance to this madness eats away a much larger proportion of thin profits.

Thorrez• 5 months ago

That quote doesn't imply that those companies are pushing for it. The lawmakers might be pushing for it, and the companies might be ambivalent to whether it's done or not but said "if you're going to do this, then it should be worded this way."

Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on anything related to this.

idle_zealot11• 5 months ago

No one should have to provide any personal details to use any general computing device

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.

edflsafoiewq• 5 months ago

What makes you think this is going to stave off that world? More likely you'll get both, since I doubt this API is going to satisfy other states' age verification requirements.

heavyset_go11• 5 months ago

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

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.

thayne• 5 months ago

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?

Isn't that what the CA law is?

AnthonyMouse17• 5 months ago

The main problem with the "report your age to the website" proposals is that they're backwards. You shouldn't be leaking your age to the service.

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.

sophrosyne42• 5 months ago

The push to do biometric data collection is entirely the result of entrepreneurs trying to get ahead before laws are passed. Their behavior is the result of the push to restrict the open internet. If we don't do anything, they will stop. You don't always have to do "something". Sometimes the harm comes by trying to do something.

flir• 5 months ago

Is that still too onerous?

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.

latentsea2• 5 months ago

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?

What's the point in doing any of this if it doesn't result in materially better outcomes?

iugtmkbdfil8343• 5 months ago

Sadly, the only real response here is non-compliance. Recently, credit card company wanted me to provide ID upon login ( I was amused -- while my setup may not be common, it has not changed for years now ). So I didn't and just ignored it. I checked on it this month and it suddenly was fine. But then.. one has to be willing to take a hit to their credit and whatnot.

The point remains though. They have zero way to enforce it if we choose to not comply. Just saying.

Alan_Writer• 5 months ago

Totally agree, but I think we are heading to a full intrusion system in every aspect. And this is just the beginning. Even decentralized identity systems are not that decentralized, of course.

tsukikage• 5 months ago

My objection to all this stuff is the requirement to share government ID / biometrics / credit card info etc with arbitrary third party sites, their 228 partners who value my privacy and need all my data for legitimate interest, and whatever criminals any of those leak everything to, and also give the government an easily searchable history of what I read when those sites propagate the info back.

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.

Xelbair• 5 months ago

Exactly the same way as i do now for such laws.

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.

soulofmischief• 5 months ago

A cornerstone philosophy behind the American legal system is that we must view every single increase in State power as a potential slippery slope, and must prove that it isn't.

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.

jprjr_• 5 months ago

I think a better approach would be incentives versus punishments.

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.

pc86• 5 months ago

I also agree with S76 that some laws regarding how an operating system intended for wide use should function are acceptable.

The only laws the government should pass regulating software running on someones computer are laws protecting those consumers from the companies writing that software. For example, anti-malware/anti-spyware.

The government has no business telling a random company that their software needs to report my age, whether it's unverified and self-reported or not.

ApolloFortyNine2• 5 months ago

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.

The only reason they'd _have_ to do that is government laws making them do so. When the law is vague around what age verification is, if one company decided to do ID verification, now any site that doesn't might not be doing 'enough' in the eyes of the law (it'd come down to a court case if not specifically defined).

Though it may seem more convenient to just do it at the os level (though really the browser level would make more sense with a required header/cookie no?), I'd be shocked if you don't see it expanded in the future to be more than a checkbox.

Hizonner4• 5 months ago

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?

Yes, because (a) it wouldn't do anything, and (b) it would take about 5 seconds for the morons who push this stuff to start whining about that fact, and using the fact that "Society(TM) has mandated this and people are avoiding it" to demand effective verification, which would be a huge disaster.

They won't be placated by anything short of total victory, and if you give them anything, you're just enouraging them.

shevy-java3• 5 months ago

Accessibility features for ADA

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.

FpUser• 5 months ago

I remember western public laughing about requirement of the former USSR to register a typewriters. So we have a case of he who slays the dragon becomes one

brutal_noodle• 4 months ago

register a typewriters

_register typewriters_

he who slays the dragon

никто тут этого кина не видел и никто не понял какого в сраку дракона в какую позу.

у меня тоже знакомый из СССР->США->Канада прокатился в 90-ых. вы не из академгородка?

gzread73• 5 months ago

The California law doesn't strip away any anonymity or privacy except for the additional fingerprint signal of you being a kid or not, which is no worse than Accept-Language

hellojesus22• 5 months ago

It kind of does. Depending on how the mechanism works, if I check the user's age every time my executable is launched, and my user launches daily, I can determine with certainty what the user's birthday is. That information may be enough to deanonyimize in rural regions. It certainly gives away pii.

EmbarrassedHelp2• 5 months ago

That additional "fingerprint" makes it easier to track people online. If the system was meant to protect privacy and anonymity, the signal would only be present if the user was underage.

sharperguy• 5 months ago

The same politicians who claim to support the free market will do deals like ttis with corporate oligopolies to cement their position into eternity.

curt152• 5 months ago

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.

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?

Spivak• 5 months ago

I mean I can already answer the last question in the affirmative even without knowing anything else. That's just how the sausage is made—if you see similar laws being pitched in multiple states it's because some org is lobbying for it. It's not so much coordination but all coming from the same place. Now they're probably not cloak and dagger surveillance state people, just misguided folks who are true believers in the protecting children narrative.

Generally any actual surveillance state people would be tag-along donors to the org.

jadbox• 5 months ago

Why can't it be the BROWSER that reports age instead of the OS?

strangattractor• 5 months ago

Cigarette vending machines had little stickers that said it was illegal for those under 18 to purchase cigarettes. Sure stopped all my friends from buying them.

Seems exactly like the useless process fixation that Abundance advocates abhor.

paulddraper• 5 months ago

Point being the service provider/vendor has to do it directly.

cmxch• 5 months ago

Still not good enough to comply in advance.

piraccini• 5 months ago

I love Pop!_OS (and Cosmic) but if they start with this bullshit I need to switch to other Linux distributions. Worst case, will build my own...

byproxy• 5 months ago

What constitutes "this bullshit"?

winrid2• 5 months ago

Your ISP will require it.

whywhywhywhy4• 5 months ago

Crazy how few can see where this is heading and don't realize locked down OS with age verification is now the norm, iOS has it.

hellojesus22• 5 months ago

Are these laws not 1A violations due to code being speech and the gov not being allowed to compel speech?

dragonwriter7• 5 months ago

To the extent code is functional rather than expressive it is not speech, and when the government seeks to compel code, it generally seeks to compel function not expressive content.

(That doesn’t mean it is not a bad idea, and even perhaps unconstitutional for other reasons.)

arcfour6• 5 months ago

Code is speech, though, and is protected by the first amendment: see Bernstein v. United States.

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.

cobbzilla• 5 months ago

Bernstein v US says you’re right but let’s see if it gets there and hope they get legal reasoning right. One can hope the EFF and others are on this. Anyone know about any current challenges?

gzread73• 5 months ago

To about the same extent that food labeling is a 1A violation.

muyuu18• 5 months ago

I'm not American but it seems to me like both things are violations, which is troubling because you enter into the disturbing necessity to start carving exceptions

obviously these regulations are very different, but both do compel speech

cyberax• 5 months ago

The age verification laws are awesome!

I mean... How else would you educate children about computers and evading stupid restrictions?

jrm42• 5 months ago

I mean, genuine question, is Linux Mint or MX Linux endangered by this?

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.

pgn674• 5 months ago

I think this is the way that Linux desktop distributions are endangered, quoting from the article: "... 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."

gzread73• 5 months ago

Not by the California law, since that law poses no danger.

k310• 5 months ago

I have to wonder

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?

armadyl• 5 months ago

I could see them eventually going far enough to bypass all of that and either requiring age verification at the point of the internet uplink on the ISP side or making it a crime similar to using a fake ID to buy alcohol if you try to bypass it. And then also punish companies that happen to be serving underage/non verified users.

akersten7• 5 months ago

There is already age verification at the ISP level. They only sell Internet service to adults. What the adults choose to do with it or with whom they share it with should be of zero concern to the government.

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.

deno5• 5 months ago

Yes, it will be ineffective, so then they will point at all those examples, but will they decide the law is stupid? Of course not.

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.

gzread73• 5 months ago

Why do you have to mod your distro when you could simply go to the settings program and set "age bracket" to "18+"?

al_borland2• 5 months ago

Throwing them into the deep end when they’re 16 or 18 is too late.

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.

FuckButtons2• 5 months ago

Counterpoint, my parents didn’t shelter me from shit and my life went off the rails at 12.

Guestmodinfo• 5 months ago

12 is the magic number when things start going to shit. I'm sorry for what happened to you but maybe you should start a counselling service for clueless parents and tell them what should they do and what they shouldn't to correctly shelter the children. Because sheltering is an art. I think about it all the time. I always wish some one would take a bit of money but tell me how to guide or not guide my child to be independent in the rough world and to take decisions independently

ball_of_lint4• 5 months ago

There needs to be both things - the opportunity to make mistakes, and the support to make it okay after mistakes are made.

Sounds like you got the first but not the second, which must have been tough. Hope you're doing better now.

Dylan168076• 5 months ago

That's not a counterpoint. The inverse of "shelter too long" is "shelter less long", not "zero shelter ever".

(And the proper way to do "less long" is to slowly loosen up over time.)

lawn• 5 months ago

There's a balance to be struck, it shouldn't be all or nothing.

jusssi5• 5 months ago

Potential confusion of cause and effect: maybe some weren't given any freedom because they were repeatedly unable to self-regulate.

Tade0• 5 months ago

It's not an innate ability. Takes a solid decade of actual parenting for people to acquire this skill.

And if the person is high energy, then that energy needs to be channeled.

mrheosuper• 5 months ago

if they are unable to self-regulate, then jailing them at home and school is definitely not a solution for that.

themafia2• 5 months ago

Then it's a questionable move to one day hand them _all_ the responsibility they had previously lacked.

You can also ask if the rate of this occurrence is increasing or decreasing.

pona-a• 5 months ago

It is a common tactic among abusive parents to convince their child without them, they'd be unable to survive in the wider world. Any mistakes will become irrefutable proof thereof, and any attempts to break this control and do things on their own will be treated as ingratitude, often prompting the abuser to instantly abandon all parental duties to "teach a lesson".

2OEH8eoCRo04• 5 months ago

This is a comforting fiction. I've seen it go both ways where children with freedom develop pornography or drug habits and sheltered kids turn out well-adjusted and regulated.

HighGoldstein• 5 months ago

Freedom without supervision vs supervision without freedom, both failures of parenting.

thunderfork• 5 months ago

"pornography habits"

Putting onanism in the same sentence as drug abuse really weakens your argument.

Aachen8• 5 months ago

I thought it was a typo but I see you've replied elsewhere that these really are the two options

I've seen it go both ways where children with freedom [turn bad] and sheltered kids turn [good]

So you've seen it one way, as in, each approach leading to one specific outcome? "Both ways" would be sheltered leading to different outcomes in different cases, or unsheltered leading to different outcomes in different cases

I don't feel like I've been sheltered. My parents literally proposed that I drink some alcohol and encouraged that I go out partying at some point. Both things still don't interest me. (At least they didn't tell me to smoke, lol. But alcohol seems to be considered normal and potentially even healthy in small doses so they thought I should try it.) Online, I later learned that their opinion was that I'll just not look up things which I don't want to see, and in my case that has been true. I'm sorry to tell you I never had a porn addiction

Someone else pointed out that such anecdotes are survivorship bias: you might not see the people that didn't turn out alright. In my case that's certainly true, I'm not sure that I know anyone who didn't turn out okay. We take different paths through life but if you can provide for yourself and dependents, and are happy most of the time, I'd count that as success (also dependent on age: I'm not counting that my 90yo grandpa is currently often unhappy due to bad health)

trinsic22• 5 months ago

I have been saying this all along. You can't prevent kids from getting around restrictions. All you can do is try to help them understand what they find on the other side and what some options are. Age-gating is just a way to push forward a surveillance agenda. The fact thats happening everywhere all at once proves my point.

dylan604• 5 months ago

You can prevent kids from getting around restrictions

I'm guessing you meant can't

trinsic22• 5 months ago

Yes. Fixed

heavyset_go11• 5 months ago

It's pushed both by those with surveillance agendas and AI companies like Anthropic, who donated millions to PACs and politicians that are pushing online age verification and surveillance laws[1].

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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47162956

bruceb• 5 months ago

You can. Most children are not going to end up on HN when they are older. The stories you read here about hacking system at 11 are outliers.

leni536• 5 months ago

And the outliers brag about them, then help out their classmates.

stephbook2• 5 months ago

What you're saying is we should allow kids to buy tobacco, to gamble, to purchase Meth and Heroine because Kids get around restrictions anyway

budududuroiu• 5 months ago

What you're saying is we should allow kids to buy tobacco, to gamble, to purchase Meth and Heroine because Kids get around restrictions anyway

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

gzread73• 5 months ago

It's basically the same as forbidding bars from serving minors. Minors can still get alcohol, but we still do it.

ArchieScrivener• 5 months ago

California and Colorado do not get to govern out of state residence, thats interstate commerce and its federal domain, period.

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.

heavyset_go11• 5 months ago

Just a reminder of what liability the CA age verification law imposes upon developers and providers.

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.

stephbook2• 5 months ago

How do you know all this before any court decided upon it?

heavyset_go11• 5 months ago

Do you want to go to court to find out where the line is? That's expensive, risky and time consuming. It's easier to just scan faces and IDs to make sure your users are of age and not take on that liability.

wtallis2• 5 months ago

if they have reason to believe users are underage

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.

heavyset_go11• 5 months ago

That would have to be litigated in court, and the easiest and cheapest way to avoid litigation is to just scan faces and IDs so you're sure your users won't upload or say anything that can bankrupt you while you sleep.

crote2• 5 months ago

I read it the exact opposite way: you are forbidden from using facial and ID scans solely for age verification (as the OS-provided signal shall be the primary indicator of age), but if you already need to obtain the user's age for other reasons using more reliable means (say, a banking KYC law requiring ID scans) you are not required to discard this more reliable source in favor of the OS-provided signal.

gzread73• 5 months ago

I read it as you're not allowed to discard the more reliable source.

gzread73• 5 months ago

If you aren't already scanning ID or similar then you don't have clear and convincing reasoning to believe the user is underage.

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.

lokar• 5 months ago

How does a website know if the age signal from a client is authentic? That seems unworkable.

choonway• 5 months ago

this is how and adult sounds like in a room full of children.

charcircuit3• 5 months ago

I don't think the argument that children might bypass parental controls therefore devices should not have parental controls.

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.

bradley132• 5 months ago

These lawd prove one thing: the politicians know nothing about the subject matter.

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?

gzread73• 5 months ago

Can you elaborate what you know that the writers of the California law don't know?

DoctorMckay101• 5 months ago

I was gifted my first computer, running Windows 95, at 11 years of age. By age 13 I was probably within the five people who better understood how to do stuff on a computer in my town. By age 16 I was making Pokemon hackroms, flash animations for newgrounds and translating manga for pirate sites in photoshop. By then I knew my entire life would be tied to computers somehow.

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

colinmarc3• 5 months ago

There are obviously certain harms we are comfortable (trying to) prevent 13yos from having access to. So it's a matter of degree.

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.

wao0uuno5• 5 months ago

So maybe instead of trying to control the people we could try controlling the corporations responsible for this problem? Bring back the old internet. Make addictive services and algorithmic recommendations illegal. Make commercial entities more responsible for the services they offer.

gzread73• 5 months ago

No, they want your parents to have the optional option to dictate how you use your device.

bradley132• 5 months ago

Let's be clear: this is a first step. The obvious next step is to require proof of age.

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...

azangru• 5 months ago

Why is this an international movement? Suddenly, simultaneously, all over the Western world?

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?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0024x58

wao0uuno5• 5 months ago

So where are those big protests and public calls for online age verification? It all seems to be coming from the very top. I have not heard of anyone that actually want any of this. The fact that politicians are to be excluded from European regulations is only a proof that it's all a scheme to kill what remains of privacy and freedom of speech online.

fruitworks• 5 months ago

Why are all of these attempts at controlling the web coinciding at the same time now? I don't think it is a coincidence that this is happening at the same time that the younger generation wakes up to our greatest ally.

gzread73• 5 months ago

Because there's only one internet and it's becoming a problem for every country at the same time because it's the same problem.

3A2D502• 5 months ago

I'll echo what I've already said elsewhere in the comment section. It's about AI! Particularly massive swarms of persuasive AI controlled by an adversary convincing the public to elect bad people with bad policies. Also, companies that rely on ad revenue would love to serve ads only to humans instead of bots.

vasco• 5 months ago

This is the one thing that truly scares me. I've decided I'm not going to verify my age anywhere or use facial recognition apps to login anywhere. And this is a much bigger fear for my job than AI.

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?

krautburglar2• 5 months ago

The prostitutes pushing for this do not deserve words. They deserve ridicule, public humiliation, and worse. The computer is a tool. Whoever would encumber it is an obvious shill for the corporations (google/apple/microsoft) who would like to attach an identity (i.e. tolls and controls) to actions prior generations could do freely and without surcharge. It is a modern-day enclosure movement. Its proponents should be juicily spat upon.

vladms2• 5 months ago

Is this the free speech we are trying to protect?

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).

krautburglar2• 5 months ago

This is not a “free speech” issue. This is an assault upon the citizenry. This is the rich and the powerful trying to put everyone’s ass on the plantation. Some want it to extract wealth from you (thievery). Others want it to control you (slavery). They are begging for the guillotines.

hananova4• 5 months ago

I can't fathom all the rage and confusion here about these laws. It's been a well-known effect since forever that when a government deems that something needs to be done, they'll go for the first "something-shaped" solution.

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.

shevy-java3• 5 months ago

We, collectively, only have ourselves to blame, and now it's too late.

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.

pear012• 5 months ago

The invocation of "lobbyists" in this context is meaningless. People lobby for all kinds of things. Doesn't really matter once it becomes a law anyway.

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.

hananova4• 5 months ago

Because the government has a monopoly on violence and enforcement of the law. That’s why they can force you. If you don’t like it, move somewhere else.

Also, the uproar here is hilarious, because many people here literally get paid to work on privacy-destruction-machines. But now that the government is the one doing it, it’s suddenly bad. Give me a break.

And yes, I can say that my conscience is clear. I may not be rich, I may have had to quit two jobs and spend two years homeless because I did not want to implement immoral or unethical code. But my conscience is clear.

kortilla3• 5 months ago

Speak for yourself. This is impacting open source and is fundamentally against the open source ethos.

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.

dpe822• 5 months ago

I'm probably missing something, but when I read the California statute I didn't understand it to be anything like "computers enforcing age" - more like, when you create an account it needs to ask your age, and then provide a system API by which apps can ask what bracket the account holder is in. This seems better than the current solution of every app asking independently?

Again, I'm probably missing something but it strikes me as pretty trivial to comply with?

panny4• 5 months ago

We, collectively, only have ourselves to blame, and now it's too late.

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...

hananova4• 5 months ago

I’m not sure why you’re bringing up LLMs at all. I’m very anti-AI, so you’re barking up the wrong tree.

Either way, your first paragraph is irrelevant. If your local law says that your software needs to obey some law, then it has to, and that’s that. You can whine all you want about privacy and freedom, but the law is the law.

vaylian• 5 months ago

The industry had a chance to do something practical, the industry chose not to

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.

Jean-Papoulos• 5 months ago

We, collectively, only have ourselves to blame, and now it's too late.

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.

ray_v2• 5 months ago

Someone else posted this in the thread, by it pretty much sums it up - Vae victis.

We somehow lost the war of freedom of privacy ... or, maybe the battle still rages

charcircuit3• 5 months ago

Democracy is not about what you want. If the majority want something you don't, the best you can do is find a compromise. There is no option of doing nothing and keep computers the same as they have been if the majority want change.

marssaxman• 5 months ago

"because we didn't do a stupid and pointless thing, now we are being forced to do a stupid and pointless thing, therefore we are to blame"

Uh, no.

shevy-java3• 5 months ago

So this has recently also affected Ubuntu.

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.

senfiaj5• 5 months ago

I agree this is bullshit. But at least you can lie to the OS about your age. Technically it's almost the same as OS asking you "Pick a date and a number from 1 to 100 and I'll report it to the software / websites. But don't worry, I'll not verify you.". If you pick randomly (over age 18 or whatever), technically, you don't provide any useful information.

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.

gzread73• 5 months ago

The whole thing is clearly intended to be optional anyway. If your parents want you to have an unrestricted account, they can say you're over 18, or they can give you full control over the computer. If they want you to have a restricted account, they give you a non-root user account with a different age bracket.

verdverm• 5 months ago

Good words, glad to see more companies taking a principled stance on these important matters. That leading quote is great for sharing with non-technical friends. We have 365d 23h of non-voting time to take direct action to make our world better.

himata4113• 5 months ago

I don't really see a problem where there is a standard api (or even syscall!) to rethrieve a persons age bracket and for various apps being able to easily implement it. But please make it fucking optional.

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.

gzread73• 5 months ago

The law says it must ask for age when creating an account other than the first one. So that's mandated. But there's no verification of the age you enter, and in fact, it's forbidden to verify it. It's really just to give parents the option to set up child accounts.

VLM4• 5 months ago

"The law" There is no "The law" there are multiple levels of government implementing multiple solutions all different and somewhat incompatible.

Honestly, probably by intention. Its sort of a SLAPP attack on the entire world population.

_slih• 5 months ago

requiring the OS to broadcast an age bracket to every app and website is building a new tracking vector and calling it child safety lol

winrid2• 5 months ago

None of these people actually care about children.

gzread73• 5 months ago

Is it worse than Accept-Language? It's got less bits of entropy.

Aachen8• 5 months ago

Is that still higher entropy when you already (necessarily) have the IP address?

225.12.3.11 sends two requests, both with accept-language nl_BE

226.4.5.244 sends two requests, one with age bracket 13–15 and one with bracket 18+

Which group is easier to track people within a (NAT) household..

saltysalt3• 5 months ago

It's sad to see such big brother crap in Linux, which sees like the exact opposite of the hacker ethos it was originally built upon.

gzread73• 5 months ago

Mandating the existence of a parental control setting that's completely optional to use is hardly Big Brother.

saltysalt3• 5 months ago

When did we get to vote on this?

sp1rit• 5 months ago

I wonder who is behind this sudden push for these age verification laws. This wasn't an issue until recently and suddenly there are not just laws in California and Colorado, but also New York and Brazil.

merlindru2• 5 months ago

...and Australia, and New Zealand, and the UK, and Norway, and Spain, and France, and the EU

Aldipower3• 5 months ago

Social media age verification is absolutely not the same as age verification at OS login level. Do not mix the things up.

ycombinator_acc3• 5 months ago

I got the impression they were kick-started by Anglo countries (the Five Eyes, whatever you wanna call them), then gradually picked up by the rest.

irusensei• 5 months ago

There is a nascent industry of AI backed surveillance now so you can be 200% sure a lot of lobbying happened in closed rooms.

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.

globemaster992• 5 months ago

So much for freedom and democracy lectured by Americans and westerners to the rest of the world. This is just censorship of every form of freedom of speech. This got nothing to do with children or youth. They will eventually censor and track everyone.

wao0uuno5• 5 months ago

I feel the same way. Looks like online "privacy" and "anonymity" will cease to exist within our lifetime. It's already starting with those "privacy respecting" solutions like zero trust age verification but that will quickly be deemed insufficient and because the legal framework will be already present it will very quickly and smoothly turn into full blown surveillance and censorship. Time to setup I2P on my server and donate some bandwidth but I'm sure they'll make that illegal too.

globemaster992• 5 months ago

True.Like many other nefarious things British started this with child protection act, which got nothing to do with children, considering their long history of pedophiles. Slowly all the other governments using the same pretext and template. Time to use pigeons and own peer to peer communication.

user39393822• 5 months ago

Next step coming soon is “well we need a license scan if you tell the OS you’re over 18”. macOS already requires a 6 step process to “trust” regular programs not from their app store. So this is just end to end control of our machines.

hellojesus22• 5 months ago

Yes. Soon ISPs will require hardware based remote attlestations to prove you haven't modified any software that wants to send or receive packets through them.

Aachen8• 5 months ago

You mean a dedicated license that proves the holder is over 18, separate from your identity such that it's not usable for tracking or identity theft when the verification platform gets hacked?

gzread73• 5 months ago

If you don't want to be censored just don't check the checkbox that says "this device is for a child, please censor adult content"? There's no passport check in the CA/CO law, in fact it's expressly forbidden.

nickslaughter022• 5 months ago

It can get worse. New York’s proposed Senate Bill S8102A requires adults to prove they’re adults to use a computer, exercise bike, smart watch, or car if the device is internet enabled with app ecosystems. The bill explicitly forbids self-reporting and leaves the allowed methods to regulations written by the Attorney General.

7777332215• 5 months ago

Don't see how anyone is gonna make me do anything. Just evade anything like this through various means and opt out of things that reduce your quality of life (by destroying your freedom and making you a slave)

akersten7• 5 months ago

We should collectively make sure that any PRs trying to land these changes are very well reviewed. We wouldn't want any security holes to slip by. I think a couple dozen rounds of reviews should suffice. I've heard great things about how productive AI can be at generating very thorough code quality assessments. After all, we should only ship it once it's perfect.

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.

EmbarrassedHelp2• 5 months ago

The PRs should only be allowed if they only create a flag when the user is underage. Otherwise its just another point of data that makes fingerprinting easier.

cassonmars2• 5 months ago

It's simple. Don't comply. Software engineers, despite not having the same requirement of mechanical engineers, should uphold the ethical obligations of their craft. This law is harmful. Given the requirement of compelled speech, given code has been _proven_ to be such, Do. Not. Comply.

chickensong2• 5 months ago

Never considered it! Unless strong encryption is banned, this will never work.

P.S. Is your handle a reference to Cats on Mars by Seatbelts? Yoko Kanno <3

cassonmars2• 5 months ago

Yes!

drnick13• 5 months ago

California may be able to target companies like System76, but it will be completely powerless against modular and decentralized distros like Debian and Arch.

Aldipower3• 5 months ago

Yeah, living in Europe it simply makes me scratching my head how this law could affect me. It won't. No Californian law will tell me what I should do.

muyuu18• 5 months ago

these things are insidious

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

LunicLynx• 5 months ago

It’s simple you can’t go drinking under age, you can’t drive a car under age. And the harm that can come from the internet is well above this so it makes sense to also ask for id. I agree though that it needs a system to protect information. It’s not about the system being always fail safe it’s about the general rule that by default what is happening is not legal to protect and not put the burden on every parent or family.

„But Jonas parents allow him to do that“ in reality Jonas parents should not have a say in this.

tuetuopay3• 5 months ago

The harm is well above (even that is arguable), but the probability of getting harmed is so much lower it's not even comparable.

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).

gzread73• 5 months ago

I don't think the probability is low. What percentage of children are brainrotted by TikTok?

colinmarc3• 5 months ago

I'm surprised by the complete lack of dissent or even nuance in the discussion here. I'm much more ambivalent on this: the historical record for prohibition is not good, but instagram and the like are uniquely and disastrously harmful and the companies pushing them on children are powerful in a way that has no real historical precedent. In the balance, anything the reduces the power those companies have over our lives (and our politics) has to be at least considered. In other words, I don't think this is necessarily the right measure - but I'm desperate.

Didn't regulating cigarettes kind of work?

xyzal• 5 months ago

Online discourse is sadly doomed. And if not yet, then tomorrow surely.

https://arxiv.org/html/2506.06299v4

jgtrosh• 5 months ago

To my surprise, this graph [0] shows that even when taking into account vaping, it seems that smoking has truly gone down in the US.

[0] https://ecigone.com/featured/vaping-statistics/

olsondv• 5 months ago

Sure, age restrictions played a part. But the larger reasons are the increased awareness of direct health effects, banning it in public spaces, and taxing the hell out of tobacco. I’d bet if they restricted app usage in specific locations, that alone would break the habit for some people. And imagine if you charged them each time they logged on.

peyton2• 5 months ago

Didn't regulating cigarettes kind of work?

That’s commerce. The regulatory target in the case is speech. We don’t do that here.

StingyJelly• 5 months ago

instagram and the like are uniquely and disastrously harmful

-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.

sunaookami• 5 months ago

I'm surprised people still fall for the "think of the children!" excuse.

wink• 5 months ago

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.

alerighi• 5 months ago

It's not the job of the operating system to protect children. Social media is bad even for adults, to my point of view why they don't address the source of the problem, banning what Instagram, TikTok, etc. is doing that is bad even for adults, and don't make laws that restricts even more what a person can do with their personal computer (if this law comes into effect it's like saying it would be illegal to run Linux or whatever OS that doesn't implement this bullshit)?

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.

abc123abc1232• 5 months ago

Flawed analogy. Cigarettes are physical goods, and regulating them does not spread easily to other things.

Everything online is virtual, and implementing surveillance in one area, almost always spreads, infecting everything else, until we've built 1984.

mlrtime5• 5 months ago

Most of us are old enough for 'you wouldn't download a car' nonsense...

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".

senfiaj5• 5 months ago

But why not force age verification / content restriction on Facebook / Instagram / alikes instead? There aren't really that many big players, isn't it?

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?

gzread73• 5 months ago

How would you impose it on them? Facebook's only way to tell your age is for you to upload an ID document and don't we want to avoid that? But when a parent buys a device for their child, they can just enable the setting that says "this device is for a child" and then Facebook can see that setting, with no further identity information transmitted. That's better privacy, not worse.

muyuu18• 5 months ago

optionality already exists and works very well

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

slavik81• 5 months ago

instagram and the like are uniquely and disastrously harmful

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.

voxic11• 5 months ago

Did regulating cigarettes kind of work? I ask just because I don't actually know. I always assumed that the regulations were a reflection of the growing society wide distaste of cigarettes and not a cause of it. If regulations were enough to change peoples attitudes towards something then why did alcohol prohibition fail so hard?

labcomputer7• 5 months ago

I mean, cigarette usage in the US is down massively since the US banned cigarette advertising to kids and actually started enforcing the ban on cigarette sales to kids.

Meanwhile, after cigarette companies spent some time thinking about how to solve the problem of falling sales, "vape" (which did not have the same regulations) sales surged first in kids, who have continued to use those products into adulthood (after they became addicted).

So, I would say "yes" regulating cigarettes not only worked, but was a massive public health success.

kraf• 5 months ago

Comparing today's internet to the 90s is hardly fair. It has become extremely predatory, and most places youth gravitate towards are controlled by algorithms with the goal of getting them hooked on the platforms to make them available for manipulation by the platform's customers.

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.

mendyberger• 5 months ago

Comparing today's internet to the 90s is hardly fair. It has become extremely predatory...

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.

gzread73• 5 months ago

If you're geeky enough to install a virtual machine and know that will break the restrictions, you're probably mature enough to not need them.

Banning pubs from selling to minors doesn't work, but we should still do it, right?

deno5• 5 months ago

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.

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.

vladms2• 5 months ago

... will be required to squash free speech as soon as possible.

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.

abc123abc1232• 5 months ago

Yep, the digital wallet will become the authoritarian, beating heart of your life. If you don't comply with the EU, you can say bye, bye, to your bank account, any online interaction, they block your right to travel and so on.

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.

sham1• 5 months ago

One question about this doomsday scenario: "cui bono"? What does the EU gain from squashing free speech in your mind?

whywhywhywhy4• 5 months ago

None of this is for what you're describing though, there is no reality where such wildly different countries and states in different corners of the world all decided coincidentally to all do this within 6 months of each other. We know it's not "well maybe they saw X country and thought it was a good idea" because even percolating the policy would have taken over a year.

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.

dbdr• 5 months ago

This law feels like a battle in The Coming War on General Computation, as Cory Doctorow put it:

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

muyuu18• 5 months ago

all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship, which is why all this stuff matters

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

utopiah• 5 months ago

On using VMs I suggested something similar earlier https://lemmy.ml/post/43994511/24315514 so it's clearly not a deep or original ideas. It will be figured out quickly. In fact any kid reading that article or those comments is probably already researching about this topic and chatting about their successes and failures with friends. No way it can hold.

0xbadcafebee• 5 months ago

"Age verification" is such a politician's way to label this. It doesn't actually verify your age. What it does do is set the groundwork to argue that none of us should use any software on any computer that an App Store with Age Verification doesn't allow us to.

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.

convivialdingo• 5 months ago

Or anti-Democrat forum? Let's not pretend this isn't a California law, or a bipartisan political power grab.

r2vcap2• 5 months ago

Fxxk off, to all political actors pretending this is about child protection. Protecting children is not the job of the OS, the device manufacturer, or the internet service provider. It is the parent’s job. If you cannot supervise, monitor, and discipline your child’s internet use, that is your failure, not theirs.

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.

mihaic3• 5 months ago

In general, I argue for less state control on anything. But your argument seems flawed from its core. If someone is a bad parent, should we simply ignore it and let the children turn out idiots as well? And the line is often blurry, so that's why we designed schools that should compensate even for dumb parents.

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.

therobopsych• 5 months ago

If not parents then the school or the local council - you can’t parent from the government down

r2vcap2• 5 months ago

I assume you live in the free world. Some socialist states in history, such as East Germany, pushed child-rearing and early education much further into the hands of the state through extensive state-run childcare and kindergarten systems. That model is gone, and for good reason.

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.

peyton2• 5 months ago

It’s compelled speech. A transmission of expression required by law. The argument settled in 1791. The First Amendment does not permit the government to compel a person’s speech just because the government believes the expression thereof furthers that person’s interests.

trashb• 5 months ago

we simply ignore it and let the children turn out idiots as well

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.

themafia2• 5 months ago

should we simply ignore it and let the children turn out idiots as well?

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?

hypercube33• 5 months ago

You make a good point that society may be responsible as well, however we are arguing over trying to use technology to solve meatland problems and this one never should be automated into tech, ever. It's putting burden on artists and engineers to solve things they aren't causing or really responsible for.

a4564634• 5 months ago

Lmao you are a bad parent if you decide to have kids and then expect the world to take care of them for you

xphos• 5 months ago

To be fair if the the parent is garbage there isn't anything the state today can do to truly prevent the child from being corrupted short of taking the child. We ensure that vaccine laws are difficult to enforce, we ensure that the child cannot have any privacy from the parent codified at school. At every stage we gave parents essentially absolute authority over there children with exception to maybe physical abuse. And I say maybe because even in physically abusive parent, it can be difficult for the child to advocate and escape. They can ask to be emencipated but the odds are stacked against you that you can proof you can support yourself financially.

All this to say is while I think the OP is mean about it they but are not wrong. The law argues heavily the parent is supreme at least in the US. But this specific law push the responsiblity of being the supreme authority off of parents. I know you don't like that concept but I think it is very easy to argue that any other model is going to be unacceptable to a pluraity of parents. Thats not to be confused with a parent is responsible for everything there child does because thats not true. But the consquence of that thinking is that children ultimately have some responsiblity in the things they do over the parent, which I think the authors of this law would be sweating at such a statement.

Personally I think the biggest issue for children is impulse control around social media and to be frank I don't think Adults are necessiarly able to deal with the onslaught of endless feed short form video content either. I don't think our brains are built against it very well. I don't know what the solution is but I think what made youtube without shorts different from tiktok is the endless scroll nature. The added friction actually protected peoples conscious and something to add a minimal friction to interactions would actually be massively beneficial to society at large

cultofmetatron2• 5 months ago

this whole thing is part of building a mechanism to restrict free speech down the line to cover for a certain "greatest ally" of the united states. make no mistake, the "not a genocide" over the last two years and the recent "not a war" is very much related to this.

gzread73• 5 months ago

How does mandating every OS to have a parental controls API lead to wholesale suppression of speech? Will they mandate it to always be set to the most restrictive setting?

mxfh• 5 months ago

sure, let all retailers sell alcohol to children to test your theory.

tommica• 5 months ago

Logic does not work, because alcohol in this case is a product being purchased - Kids can go to the store and buy other things.

So alcohol is more like a gambling website.

brendoelfrendo• 5 months ago

Man, it's really great that we can make laws tailored to specific circumstances and not treat everything the same, too bad you never learned that.

dmuso• 5 months ago

Parenting rule still applies

tyler33• 5 months ago

of course it is an excuse for controlling/spy on us, every children use and will keep using their parent computer/phone

newsclues2• 5 months ago

What if we had ISP police?

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.

curt152• 5 months ago

Welcome to CCP China!

morissette• 5 months ago

Definitely started exploring at 8/9 writing Perl and CGI

egorfine• 5 months ago

None of the facts he states are unknown or new to the authors of the mentioned bills.

dataflow• 5 months ago

A parent that creates a non-admin account on a computer, sets the age for a child account they create, and hands the computer over is in no different state. The child can install a virtual machine, create an account on the virtual machine and set the age to 18 or over.

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.

hellojesus22• 5 months ago

The law necessarily exists for parents that aren't tech literate, since we already have the ability to monitor and lock kids out from adult content.

Do we really think parents will notice that a kid has installed a specific executable? The purpose of this law is to allow parents to outsource caring out which executables are safe, so there is no reason they would check.

Plus a kid can just live boot from a USB if the parent doesn't lock the bios, which would give them an ephemeral session to do whatever they want without the parent knowing unless caught-in-the-act.

purplehat_2• 5 months ago

I'm surprised zero-knowledge proofs have not been mentioned. This is a technique where (for example) the government signs your digital license, then you can present a proof that you are over 18 to a site without revealing anything else about yourself. ZKPassport exists, Privacy Pass is an implementation being standardized by the IETF, and Google is working on a similar implementation. Granted, these are not yet widely used, but I'd be very interested in hearing HN's thoughts on this.

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.

wao0uuno5• 5 months ago

Sounds cool but do you believe it's really about protecting children? Since when do politicians care about this so much? I have not heard of any protests or public calls for better child protection online. It's really all about control and elimination of freedom of speech and information. They want to set up a legal framework and get people more comfortable with the idea of closed and controlled internet. Then they'll argue that age verification alone is ineffective because its too easy to circumvent so they'll start rolling out less "private" solutions that will benefit them and their sponsors greatly.

purplehat_2• 5 months ago

I'm not sure anyone is being this explicitly malicious. Parents' groups, child safety organizations, and researchers have been at this for years, and while I agree with you that the solutions are very misguided, I think it does our own priorities a disservice to stick our fingers in our ears with regards to their concerns.

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.

ibizaman• 5 months ago

The challenges we face are neither technical nor legal. The only solution is to educate our children about life with digital abundance. Throwing them into the deep end when they’re 16 or 18 is too late. It’s a wonderful and weird world. Yes, there are dark corners. There always will be. We have to teach our children what to do when they encounter them and we have to trust them.

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.

OutOfHere• 5 months ago

As a resident of New York, I am disturbed to see Democrat representatives introduce such horrific bills. I guess I will not be voting Democrat again!

dagss3• 5 months ago

Not commenting on this specific law, but I do believe the premise that children should be exposed to everything is wrong, and that the overall view on humans in this post is naive.

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.)

thunfischtoast• 5 months ago

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.

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).

dagss3• 5 months ago

I think there is a drastic difference between being once off exposed to bad images, and an algorithm making a choice of whether to subtly over time expose the Pokemon-interested child to racist Pokemon videos vs non-racist Pokemon videos on Tiktok. (Or anorexic Pokemon videos, or..)

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).

theshrike792• 5 months ago

When my generation "accessed the internet", there was a massive dial-up sound and the single family PC was in the living room, visible to everyone.

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.

labcomputer7• 5 months ago

This feels like an extremely naive take.

Even as late as the mid-aughts the internet was mostly nerdy technical information, real people sincerely discussing various topics, and the very worst thing was a little bit of (mostly still-image) porn if you were looking for it.

Kids back then weren't targeted by a stream of continuously A/B tested algorithmic content intended to tell them what to think and shape their brains. Overwhelming evidence exists that social media (as it exists today) is bad for the mental health of young people (and probably adults, too, but at least adults have the presence of mind and lack of social pressure to delete Facebook).

FetusP• 5 months ago

But, should it be the governments responsibility to decide/control how children are raised, and what they are exposed to?

Maybe in the future, a governing body will try to age lock dissenting opinions with some crafty verbage

gzread73• 5 months ago

The CA/CO law only requires the option to enable parental controls on an account, and as the article points out, can be worked around by a sufficiently determined child using something like a virtual machine. This is not really the government deciding how children should be raised. The parent still has the ability to choose to apply the parental controls.

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.

jonathanstrange3• 5 months ago

My view is that this must be left entirely to the parents. The only time a government should be allowed to interfere is when there are child abuse or neglect cases against the parents and the children are put under child protective care.

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.

gzread73• 5 months ago

The CA/CO law is literally the government writing a law that says it shall be left to the parents but the device must give the parents the options they need.

nicman233• 5 months ago

believe the premise that children should be exposed to everything is wrong

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

gzread73• 5 months ago

I don't understand what you're trying to say in this comment. Can you reword it?

muyuu18• 5 months ago

ok, that is the argument with merit in favour of shielding kids from the internet - now let's consider how does it look like when the locus of responsibility is governments

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?

eloisant• 5 months ago

I agree, and I believe too many geeks who are now parents (including the author of the blog post) do not realize that the computers they grew up with, and in particular the Internet they grew up with, is nothing like computers (phones) and the Internet kids have access today.

intrasight• 5 months ago

The Grimm fairy tales (1819) are full of graphical violence, child abuse, anti-semitism, and incest. They are much more harmful than anything that I've encountered on the Internet. So why are we discussing internet harms instead of book harms? Because people are fucking stupid.

And why are we getting concerned about "sharing private information with random web sites" when that's not the solution being discussed. The solution is a simple handshake:

service: Is the person assigned this device old enough to use this service?

idp proxy: yes|no

a4564634• 5 months ago

If you are not perfect, then don't have kids then. If you can't take care of them and nurture them with the attention that they need and rightfully deserve.

jajuuka2• 5 months ago

I've seen this view applied to things like TikTok and Instagram. Especially with the recent lawsuit. But then when to comes to addressing it most people seem to flip completely and bemoan parenting and internet freedom. It just ends up in a circular pattern of "this is awful, but we shouldn't do anything about it. These companies are poisoning kids, but any attempts to rectify that are infringing on my right to the internet." Makes a lot of conversations around this topic feel entirely pointless.

badpenny• 5 months ago

Remember when it was the parents' responsibility to raise their children?

gzread73• 5 months ago

It still is. The California law insists that parents should be given the features they need to raise their children.

whywhywhywhy4• 5 months ago

Linux distributions could do a lot of good geo blocking California right now.

senfiaj5• 5 months ago

What if 1/3 of US states and some EU countries joins them? Will they block so many users? Also blocking is easier for smaller distros, not so much for Valve, Red Hat and Ubuntu.

whywhywhywhy4• 5 months ago

We’re heading to needed ID verification to even run code on a computer so why should I care if a few people can’t download Linux for a while, you need them to be inconvenienced to push back.

defraudbah• 5 months ago

remember El Mencho, it should have been a title!

IndySun2• 5 months ago

"Liberty has costs, but it’s worth it"

The whole point. Very well worded post. I weep for the all digital future.

moonlion_eth• 5 months ago

I was enrolled in the united states navy nuclear program at 17. we are just making kids dumb with this bullshit

xtanx2• 5 months ago

Organize and fight the policy. Do not take your frustration out on people and companies that just try to adjust to a law. Talk to your representatives. Create educational websites similar to fightchatcontrol.eu.

user39393822• 5 months ago

At least in the US check out the 2014 Princeton study on citizen preferences. Our Democracy is a sham, those mechanisms don’t actually have any power to change anything.

xtanx2• 5 months ago

That's why we need to organize extra hard.

gzread73• 5 months ago

But this is actually a really good policy? It just says every OS shall have a UI to turn parental controls on or off, and an API to check if they're turned on. That's a good thing. It satisfies the reasons people wanted age verification, without actually doing age verification.

nottorp5• 5 months ago

Yes but the next step is forbidding open source OSes because they can be modified to lie on this API check.

ed_blackburn• 5 months ago

This is becoming a wedge issue. It should not be. As an industry, we can solve this. As an industry, we have too. If we don't, legislators will do it for us. And they'll make a bad job of it. And if you petition your local legislator wherever yiu are in the world, then that's cool, but if this is solved locally, we will see serious fragmentation. As an industry projecting ones politics isn't going to make much difference.

motbus3• 5 months ago

If my parents blocked me from doing admin stuff (which was not even possible back then) I would certainly not started to code by myself when I was a tween

More concerning than that is that it all doesn't seem because they care about teenagers and kids.

b3lvedere• 5 months ago

I don’t really mind age verification, since we do it in real life (outside the internet) constantly for products and services that are meant for adults, like some-rated movies and alcohol.

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.

gzread73• 5 months ago

There's no age verification in this law...

Traster• 5 months ago

I'm in two minds about this. I think that by and large We Have A Problem. And i don't mean a problem with children on the internet. We have a problem with people on the internet. There are so many examples of grown adults who have clearly become addled.

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.

gzread73• 5 months ago

The problem is that putting restrictions on adults comes with a thousand times more outrage than putting restrictions on kids, and look how much outrage there already is about putting restrictions on kids at the discretion of their parents. If we can't even give parents the option to keep kids away from bad stuff, then mandatorily keeping adults away from bad stuff is a complete non-starter. They'd probably burn down Parliament.

nottorp5• 5 months ago

And i don't mean a problem with children on the internet. We have a problem with people on the internet.

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.

txrx00003• 5 months ago

Rather than age verification, this is what we should be doing instead:

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.

gzread73• 5 months ago

Why necessarily with a password - what's wrong with the option to say "only allow installation of apps suitable for under 13s"?

txrx00003• 5 months ago

The idea is to let parents decide which apps are suitable for their child, for each child. Password-gating app installation (just like sudo on Linux) is not only easier to implement and use, but also much more flexible and powerful than a fixed age-based rating system.

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.

Aachen8• 5 months ago

This approach makes sense to me, though I'd expand password to be a broader term because people might prefer different authentication methods or approving a request to install software from their own device or so

jdashg2• 5 months ago

We all demand Windows but without ads, but that doesn't cause the market to spit one out. The OS market isn't a healthy market, and government is stepping in here in part because of that market failure to provide a satisfactory solution here.

txrx00003• 4 months ago

The smartphone OS market is not healthy precisely because manufacturers lock their bootloaders (among other anti-competitive tricks, like a proprietary IMS stack), which stifles market competition. The desktop OS market does not have this problem. There are many Linux distros and they're getting better everyday, they'll eventually replace Windows as Windows slowly enshittifies.

cs02rm0• 5 months ago

I admire the attempt to make a logical argument against these laws taken at face value, but I can't help think that's giving them too much credit.

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.

2OEH8eoCRo04• 5 months ago

Parents keep saying this is untenable and you guys keep telling them to just parent harder. I think that dismissing their concerns will lead to the most egregious worst of all worlds age verification. Never tell people that their problems aren't real.

Aeolun• 5 months ago

I think all this shit is silly. If I could manage to figure out how the internet worked at 12, then so can my son. Or well, a bit younger, but it’s fine. He has at least one parent to guide him.

3A2D502• 5 months ago

I think there is an unspoken concern among policy makers about how sophisticated AI is becoming. I think they envision a scenario of swarms persuasive AI bots controlled by an adversary, pushing people to elect bad actors with bad policies. So the main objective isn't to protect the children it is to eliminate anonymity! At some point these age verification requirements will go from answering a simple question to providing your ID. I'll add that there is also an aligned interest with companies that rely on ad revenue as they don't want to serve ads to bots!

bill_joy_fanboy• 5 months ago

As if "policy makers" in the U.S. care about anything other than getting re-elected and continuing to deceive and scam the public.

fredgrott• 5 months ago

I remember idiot lab staff telling me in early 1990s that I could not install the free version of Mozilla browser on university lab computers....my go to reply was can you effing read the damn TOS.....free was in the very first sentence....

everdrive2• 5 months ago

In addition to System76's thoughtful response here, does anyone have a good _personal_ plan for what to do? Possibilities I'm thinking about include:

- 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?

glitchc2• 5 months ago

It's self attesting. Just set your year of birth to 1970.

senfiaj5• 5 months ago

But if they see a weird distribution of birth dates, won't they come up with even more insane regulations?

everdrive2• 5 months ago

I think it depends. The OS provides an API signal -- presumably that websites can access. So if a site decides you're lying, what happens then? For instance, 100% of bots and malicious actors will lie, unless they think they can get what they need by being a child.

agentultra• 5 months ago

What’s the plan when hardware manufacturers are legally required to add an age verification TPM-like module that only enables verified OS’s to boot?

I hope things won’t go that way but I do think it’s likely they will.

EvanAnderson• 5 months ago

Individual ownership of networked general purpose computers, and the ability to organize dissent they create, are too dangerous for many powerful interests. It has always seemed inevitable to me that computers will be taken away from us.

slicktux• 5 months ago

I wonder how this law affects Gentoo or LFS since one builds the OS..?

markus_zhang• 5 months ago

The "Age verification" is simply an excuse to add tracking on system software. Very soon they are going to do the same to hardware too, I guess, so it is going to be very hard to find hardware that is truly safe from tampering.

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.

junto2• 5 months ago

I’m tired of the U.S. nanny state with its pilgrim-religious historical backdrop of prudishness, infecting everyone outside its own borders.

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.

luke727• 5 months ago

You should look into what's actually happening in other countries before blaming it on "the U.S. nanny state". The rest of the Anglosphere makes the United States look like a Libertarian utopia. I live in the United Kingdom, and brother - this is who they are. I assume Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are similar. There are real problems re: "think of the children" in the United States, but if you think "the U.S. nanny state" is bad then you have no fucking clue how bad things could be.

a4564634• 5 months ago

Eh nothing what you said takes away from the parent's points

TheRealDunkirk• 5 months ago

You literally blamed these moves on US religious prudishness, and then said that they were only about surveillance. Which is it? Just kidding. We all know it's nothing more than surveillance and control, and you just have an anti-religious axe to grind.

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.

muyuu18• 5 months ago

tbf this is not coming from the US only, the push in Europe for this sort of legislation is very strong and we will see more of this coming soon

junto2• 5 months ago

Who do you think is applying pressure on certain EU politicians to keep pushing this topic?

mondainx• 5 months ago

If this stupid bullshit existed in 1982, He is 100% correct, I would have lied to use my Commodore 64 or Sinclair 1000.

VLM4• 5 months ago

Two meta observations about the comments:

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.

a4564634• 5 months ago

The laws should regulate Meta, Google, Apple, TikTok, Microsoft and closed source vendors. On the one hand they want monopoly, but the cost of that regulation is now on opensource individual people's speech?

youknownothing• 5 months ago

The only solution is to educate our children about life with digital abundance.

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.

throwway120385• 5 months ago

I don't think there's a good legalistic solution to this other than to delegate the work of finding solutions to a regulator. No single law can be broad enough to cover everything. But empowering a regulatory body to research problems full time and to create solutions is probably the best approach.

hm-nah2• 5 months ago

Using a dead human’s likeness in jest is wack. Encouraging and rewarding a young person to perform this twisted act should not be normalized.

—-system76 customer

twodave• 5 months ago

Why? They’re dead. They can’t be offended.

hm-nah2• 5 months ago

Using a deceased human’s likeness in jest like this is wack. Encouraging and rewarding a young person in this twisted act should not be normalized.

—-system76 customer

nickslaughter022• 5 months ago

Petition US Congress: Say no to bad internet bills

https://www.badinternetbills.com/

TYPE_FASTER2• 5 months ago

They know more than I could have ever dreamed at that age.

This is so true.

jajuuka2• 5 months ago

This just seems like virtue signaling. It's not a plan or proposed actions. Just a puff piece about how great things used to be. Not sure who is making their opinions based on what System76 has to say, but I guess they can now.

zerotolerance• 5 months ago

The children are a distraction. They're a secondary justification. Don't lose the plot. This law serves only one outcome: enablement of further authoritarianism.

messh• 5 months ago

"The child can install a virtual machine, create an account on the virtual machine and set the age to 18 or over."

No, the vm is for grownups over 18.

Oleksa_dr3• 5 months ago

I believe it is necessary to implement this at the OS level. This has been needed for a long time, because the “goodwill” approach never works.

The introduction of age verification is something that was to be expected with the growth in the use of the web, rather than individual programs. But there are a bunch of ways to get around it, which you do, but no one will punish you. This way, you will have parental control and transfer it to the website, while facilitating control over minors' access to unwanted content. And this way, websites do not need to implement their own terrible age verification methods. And when people complain that this is a problem for parents, this is exactly what will help parents: once they set the age in parental controls, programs and websites will have to monitor access (following the law, not goodwill).

This way, access can be controlled at the first level, i.e., at the OS level. There is a law, and there will be others to help improve it. In the same way, you can avoid the use of identifiers and, in general, face verification and a bunch of nonsense.

Ultimately, the responsibility lies with parents who did not specify the user's age on the device. But there may be “products” that ignore information from the OS.

Current parental controls do not solve the problem well, because you have to pay for a bunch of questionable products, sacrificing privacy. And it still does not protect against outdated black/white lists. Therefore, the requirement at the OS level to have such control and place responsibility on “products” is an excellent solution in my opinion.

And quite an elegant one at that. Without involving any government identifiers or anything else.

Combined with the widespread implementation of TPM, this will become even more feasible.

akersten7• 5 months ago

I don't know how you can say this:

And quite an elegant one at that. Without involving any government identifiers or anything else.

and this:

There is a law, and there will be others to help improve it.
Combined with the widespread implementation of TPM, this will become even more feasible.

Without coming to the obvious conclusion that the next step will be even further down the road of tying your every action back to a real, verified, trackable identity.

Oleksa_dr3• 5 months ago

Everyone misuses terms: obviously, understandably, 99%. And a bunch of other nonsense, both from supporters and opponents. And what will you achieve? Nothing. What is your decision: to put this on each program separately and let a bunch of scumbags have photos, ages, and other data about your children that can be used for persecution? Or to simplify parental control with a single simple mechanism based on the OS and protocol? And thus put control in the hands of parents and responsibility for content violations on content providers. Then there would be no need for any terrible checks with a bunch of data stored who knows where by who knows whom.

Aachen8• 5 months ago

In your opinion, who should be in charge of the OS? Can I make my own (where you select an age per user upon installing the machine and upon creating subsequent users), or must it be government-sanctioned such that the age verification is watertight?

Oleksa_dr3• 5 months ago

The OS itself provides the client with an API containing simple information about whether the user is an adult or a minor. It is also possible to have a requirement from TPM. The age is specified by the administrator. It is possible to come up with some kind of state ID signature in TPM. The programs themselves have no way of finding out more.

teeray• 5 months ago

Kids are smart and easily learn how to work around restrictions.

Absolutely. I feel like adults frequently mistake kids’ lack of education for stupidity. Lack of education about something is a temporary condition, and kids have ridiculous amounts of time, energy, and motivation to quickly become expert about something they care about. Particularly in reaction to “you can’t do that.”

One possibility: These laws forget that 18 year olds have kid siblings. The 18 year olds need money and like everyone else, enjoy the prospects of easy money. The 18-year-old has a phone bill to pay. These are the makings of a black market. Kid sibling acts as a broker for the older sibling’s services among the kid’s classmates and collect a commission.

goldylochness• 5 months ago

This is a very sensible statement. The legislators are out of control, and are severely unfamiliar with anything related to technology.

This is 100% about spying and information harvesting from users who deserve privacy, and would be better off managing their own children without the help of the government.

kwar13• 5 months ago

The good old "child protection" and "anti-terrorism"... I have gotten numb to seeing either of these

lacoolj• 5 months ago

Hopefully this has a domino affect across the industry and more companies do this.

It really is just a parenting issue at its core.

prmoustache• 5 months ago

If the problem was really kids safety, we would remove abductors and sex predators from the internets. Not kids.

thighbaugh• 5 months ago

Since these things can be made into forks with minor difference relatively easily, instead of playing along with this tech company + creepy government data grab because California says so

So much for privacy I guess, hence pulling out this protecting children BS that I saw too many kids at my urban CA highschool get stabbed to fall for. The fact these tactics still work, where we limit our toothless privacy protections that the firms that don't comply the state might eventually sue when someone with more money than I presses the Attorney General, but then dial it back marketing it as protecting children and people still buy it? Absurd these same people work at such bleeding edge tech firms but then again LLMs can do that busy work they actually are doing better most of the time....

sedatk2• 5 months ago

The only solution is to educate our children

That’s correct, it’s been correct for decades, and parents just won’t do it, not the majority at least. Either they want the state to raise their kids for them, or the task is so complicated and costly that they’re not willing to do it.

But the harms continue to happen, and we’re now left at the mercy of tech-illiterate lawmakers.

xmx982• 5 months ago

Schools could teach cybersecurity to all children. Scanning faces and real-life IDs will fail to solve crime on the internet and will only succeed in destroying our privacy.

sedatk2• 5 months ago

Schools could teach cybersecurity to all children

Yes, but is it even possible to make majority of schools use a common curriculum in the US?

melonpan7• 5 months ago

I'm out of the loop on this whole debacle but can't OS providers just say "Not for use in California" and be done with?

batat• 5 months ago

So it’s neither "yes" nor "no", but some kind of philosophical note somewhere in-between a "Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS Released" and "CodeWeavers tests their ARM64 compatibility on System76" that isn’t even linked to noticeable on the main page.

I mean Wikipedia hung some huge banners to raise awareness, the German wiki even had a "blackout" because of "Directive 2019/790", there was something similar on Reddit etc. I don't expect them to leave the US market or anything like that, but also I don’t even know what to say, as if everyone has already resigned.

hananova4• 5 months ago

So let’s do a little thought experiment. Which of the outcomes is more likely to happen:

1. People somehow, in big enough parts of the world to overcome the “Brussels Effect”, manage to avoid age verification laws getting passed.

2. Laws get passed, but because it was likely to be the case, the tech industry prepared and has an age verification system ready to go that’s “as good as possible” with regards to privacy.

3. Laws get passed, and because the tech industry spent more time fighting it than preparing for it, they’re now forced to implement something suboptimal.

4. Laws get passed, and the tech industry refuses to comply, then more laws get implemented stipulating exactly how the age verification system has to work, and it’s much worse than anything they could’ve come up with had they not been stubborn.

Right now, I think option 1 is so unlikely as to be safe to ignore as an option. And from what dialogue I’m reading, 2 is unlikely as well because some tech bros still think that code can win over laws. I just hope that the stick gets extracted from some of the relevant asses before option 3 turns into option 4.

rolandog• 5 months ago

It feels like "they're" pulling the ladder after building the surveillance state with our free tools.

I wonder if "they're" trying to install a Nomenklatura-style [0] government.

[0]: Alison "alimcforever" McIntyre, The Soviet "communist" elite was already a owning class. <https://youtu.be/QYRMgjKTy1s>

System76 on Age Verification Laws

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