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| ▲ | ball_of_lint 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The government really shouldn't be telling us how/what we can compute at all. But on this specific point - It's a bellwether. They're doing this to lay the groundwork and test the waters for compulsory identification and/or age verification. Getting MacOS and Windows and Linux and etc to implement this WILL be used as evidence that compulsory identity verification for computer use is legally workable. | | |
| ▲ | ball_of_lint 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | And if the implications of that aren't clear - that would either be unenforceable or be in effect a government rootkit+DRM on every device. | |
| ▲ | charcircuit 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >The government really shouldn't be telling us how/what we can compute at all. You could say the same thing about restaurants. "The government really shouldn't be telling us how/what we can cook at all." When you are selling a product to the public, that is something that people have decided the government can regulate to reduce the harms of such products. | | |
| ▲ | hellojesus 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | What if you aren't selling a product, like open source linux distros? | | |
| ▲ | labcomputer 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Last time I checked, health code regulations still apply to kitchens serving homeless people for free. |
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| ▲ | akersten 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Being "trivial to comply with" is completely disjunct and not at all an argument against "this type of law is fundamentally at odds with the liberty and self-determination that open source projects require and should protect." It's a shot across the bow to open-source, it's literally the government telling you what code your computer has to run. It is gesturing in the direction of existential threat for Free software and I am not exaggerating. It's purposefully "trivial" so you don't notice or protest too much that this is the first time the State is forcing you to include something purely of their own disturbed ideation in your creative work. | | |
| ▲ | gzread 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | Free software is already mandated to do a lot of things, like not defraud the user. If you make a bitcoin wallet that sends 5% of your money to the developer without asking I'm pretty sure you'll be prosecuted, so the government is compelling you to ask the user for consent to do that. When you make food you're compelled to write the ingredients. We tolerate these because they are obvious and trivial, but pedantically, food labelling laws also violate the first amendment. | | |
| ▲ | akersten 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Free software is already mandated to do a lot of things, like not defraud the user. Surely you recognize the difference between "you cannot go out of your way to do crime" and "your software must include this specific feature"?? > When you make food you're compelled to write the ingredients. Well, the point about how this affects open source is that under a similar California law, every home kitchen would need to be equipped with an electronic transponder whose purpose is to announce to the world what ingredient bucket you used for tonight's casserole. | | |
| ▲ | gzread 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Which part of the California law announces your browsing history to the world? |
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| ▲ | brabel 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If that’s true, I think the law is fine. There are good solutions for anonymous disclosure of information about you, the most mature being Verifiable Credentials, which is an open standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verifiable_credentials You can disclose just a subset of a credential, and that can be a derived value (eg age bracket instead of date of birth), and a derived key is used so that its cryptographically impossible to track you. I wish more people discussed using that, but I suspect that it’s a bit too secure for their real intentions. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | In general, any proposal to use government ID for "age verification" over the internet is going to end in someone using it for mass surveillance, and it's probably not wrong to suspect that as the intention to begin with. There is no benefit in doing that because parents already know how old their kid is. They don't need the government to certify it to them, and then they can configure the kid's device not to display adult content. Involving government ID is pointless because the parent, along with the large majority of the general population, has an adult ID, and therefore has the ability to configure the kid's device to display adult content or not even in the presence of an ID requirement if that's what they want to do. At which point an ID requirement is nothing but a footgun to "accidentally" compromise everyone's privacy. Unless that was the point. | | |
| ▲ | gzread 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | The California and Colorado laws don't involve any ID. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | And those are better than the ones that do involve ID, which also exist, but not as good as the thing where the service tells your device the rating of the content instead of the user telling the service their age. | | |
| ▲ | gzread 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | How would that work when the service has mixed content? You'd have to go to kids.facebook.com to get the child-friendly version? With a client-sent signal they can just filter it, the same way Accept-Language can automatically translate the UI. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Elements that contain adult content are tagged and then the user agent doesn't display them. This also has the extremely useful benefit of making you aware that something is being censored, because then it has a censorship box in place of the content. Whenever censorship is happening it should be flagrantly conspicuous rather than invisible. | |
| ▲ | hellojesus 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | But why do we need it at the os level? Couldn't a parent just set a header in the browser for their kid and be done with it? | | |
| ▲ | labcomputer 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | What happens when the kid installs a different browser? | | |
| ▲ | hellojesus 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Agreed. Which is why I think the OS level is dumb. Kids can just live boot or launch a vm or keylog their parents' account. If it's windows, they can just live boot into the OS and get access to pretty much all the files anyway, if the parent didn't encrypt things. My point is, if the implementation is trivial to bypass, why do we need this legislation? Just let the parents use the existing tools we have and parent. |
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| ▲ | dpe82 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It doesn't even need to be that complicated. OS asks you your birthday at setup time. Stores it. Later, an app asks whether the user falls into one of the following brackets: A) under 13 years of age, or B) at least 13 years of age and under 16 years of age, or C) at least 16 years of age and under 18 years of age or D) at least 18 years of age. that's it. The OS can decide how it wants to implement that, but personally I'd literally just do get_age_bracket_enum(now() - get_user_birthday()); The bill is here: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm... The uproar seems to be extremely overblown. | | |
| ▲ | gzread 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think the uproar comes because the well is already poisoned. People are already trained to respond with an outburst of anger to any law that mentions the age of the user, and will find excuses to rationalize that outburst, even when the law isn't that bad. I mean, "compelled speech"? Really? That's people's argument? This is about as bad as the government compelling you to write a copyright notice. | | |
| ▲ | iamnothere 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Compelled speech is bad and it’s something we don’t do, at all. All kinds of bad things come with compelled speech. Mandatory loyalty oaths, erosion of the fifth amendment, compelled work to weaken encryption, etc. The well should be poisoned. The whole idea is poison. |
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