Btw, it doesn't need to be actively coordinated for this to happen.

Building architectural styles used to be per city and now buildings look roughly the same worldwide. Style is dependent on the year built not the location.

Because every architect is "reading the same magazine" worldwide now that the internet exists, rather than debating in their own city.

Similar monoculture of global thought is happening in all fields.

My guess would be some very influential NGO(s). But I haven't looked into it or thought about it.

The simpler explanation is that we live in a world that is more connected than ever so politicians, campaigners and the rest can get policy ideas almost instantly. There is no grand conspiracy, just a smaller world.

Well obviously? It's literally being broadcast in the news when diplomats talk to each other. What do you think they are talking about if not policy discussions?

It's almost like a well-monied or well-connected lobbyist is pushing this heavily. Multiple contenders out there as to who it could be. But regardless of who the originator is, the push can be kneecapped. Imagine jurisdictions that have an opposite push - one that criminalizes use of age verification software such as mandating providing government ID or facial scans. It can be done!

There's no (state) school giving out tablets that aren't pretty much single-use locked down devices.

That's the parents.

The expectation that "Parenting" is now outsourced to Teachers, to the Government, to anyone else. People seem to expect they just have a kid, and somehow magically they'll grow up to be a perfect person without any work from themselves. So there's over-reach, there's pressure on making "unworkable" soutions, because the people they're trying to force "solving" the problem aren't the people in the best position to do so.

Your comment seems working from that very same assumption.

Yes, all the "technical" part of content filtering etc. is very much a solved problem. The issue is that's not a "zero effort" solution - they still need to be enabled and managed. And I'm not sure that's a "technical" problem than can be solved.

There's huge pressure on teachers etc. to "solve" these sort of problems - just go to any PTA meeting and there's a lot of loud voices asking for stuff like the laws the original post is highlighting. And politicians listen to the loud voices, and feel they have to be "seen" doing something. Even if that "something" is impossible, unworkable, and fundamentally harmful.

>>> Controlling what children do online is a solved problem: Parenting and parental control applications. >This is absolutely not true.Here in the UK schools are swarming with ipads and shit like that. They're given to primary school children because they're "more engaging". Children are supposed to practice their reading and even handwriting on ipads. Naturally they're on youtube instead. It's really bad.

And how does that refute what the parent said? Those school ipads could also have YouTube locked or restricted to a whitelist of channels.

But this is ridiculous. The problem was created by the state (which ultimately runs the schools), and now the state wants to impose additional rules on a bunch of totally unrelated adults to (probably fail to) solve their self-imposed problem.

Checking what the school is exposing the children to is part of parenting, if enough parents demand parental controls on the iPad you'd get that. Also it sounds insane that any school is given children iPads, if anything the studies show worse outcomes with iPads

Since schooling closer to home obviously solves this problem, and a host of many other problems, and doesn't introduce any real problems (bad schools don't save kids from bad parents, which seems to be a rebuttal to home-based education, it would seem to me the answer is obvious:

Return to a single income household economy and bring education closer to the home, if not outright in the home.

This is true but then why regulate every website instead of regulating... The schools

When people say "parental controls" they obviously don't literally mean "parental controls controlled by PARENTS", they mean "parental controls controlled by parents AND OTHER guardians such as teachers and schools".

If the school can't be bothered to lock down their ipads, why not make a law that schools must lock down the ipads, rather than push this out to everyone universally?

It seems like another shoddy excuse of a panicked panopticon to me. Feel free to try to convince us otherwise.

Interesting,are either of those two orgs you linked pushing the age verification policies that the article is rallying against? I would assume so since you posted them here, but it's unclear from the links Wikipedia pages you linked.

Can you elaborate please?

The things that our politicians want to make illegal for children were already illegal for everyone in China.

That probably has something to do with why China's economically outperforming us so much.

That dude gives off such slimy vibes. Not like he’s evil. More like he’s unqualified to be in the position he’s found himself in. His presentations on talk shows gives me the impression he knows just enough about the topic of digital effects on society to throw together a book. The he lets people raise him up to the microphone and speaks for the sake of speaking. Hardly an expert, not an operator.

Compare to people who have the means to build, modify, and test the systems they talk about. Maybe no one can be this kind of an expert in the field of sociology. But if that’s the case do not present yourself as confident. Answer most questions with “I don’t know”. Refuse praise. Exude humility.

And the groundwork was laid by very well connected think-of-the-children evangelicals, transphobes and sex-work-phobes over years. Never forget this. Meta just added nitromethane fuel to a raging fire.

The text of the law says:

> 1798.501. (a) An operating system provider shall do all of the following: > (1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.

[And some other stuff]. A simple reading says operating systems need to ask the age of the accout holder during account setup. It says the purpose is to provide a signal to a covered app store, but it does not exempt operating systems without a covered app store.

I've looked at the bill and it sure seems like it would apply to Linux. What's your case that it doesn't?

I don't think this is a left- or right-wing issue: Australia was one of the first to ban kids from social media, and Australia is not right-wing by any measure. Canada is hardly right-wing, but age verification is bill S-210 in their parliament.

What you're seeing is a coordinated push by transnational interests; Meta's name has come up in discussions of the funding behind this push. At the very lest, verifying age also verifies that a person is real and not a bot, so advertising firms like Meta will benefit from verification. That's not right-wing or left-wing but rather the influence of business over the political, and neither wing of the spectrum is immune to corruption.

There's 2 axes on the political spectrum. Economic and Social axes. Liberal and Conservative is one dimension (Economic) and Authoritarian and Libertarian is another dimension (Social).

In the US both the Democratic Party (Liberal) and Republican Party (Conservatives) are considered Authoritarian on this 2 dimensional graph.

Milei claims to be a Conservative Libertarian so, in theory, he should be opposed to this. We'll see what he actually does.

Milei is a libertarian, and would be very opposed to such a thing.

Evidence says otherwise: https://web.archive.org/web/20260313125244/https://old.reddi...

We should not give these human rights violations the dignity of being called "solutions", especially as they are anything but.

Oh nice! I’ve been wanting to ask someone of your age, how was the Middle Miocene Climate Optimum?

It's designed for parents to enact parental controls on their children. If you're root, you're the parent. Obviously root can turn off parental controls.

It is when those laws were passed by totalitarian idiots.

Unjust laws should be violated.

I saw this posting from here the other day about how it’s meta wanting to pass the buck to OS and browser vendors a la Section 230: https://web.archive.org/web/20260313125244/https://old.reddi...

Liability? You want to make give parents fines for their children accessing Facebook at a young age?

Yep, the goal of civil disobedience is literally to get sued/charged/arrested in order to force the issue to be (hopefully) properly and publicly resolved.

I have a feeling they're going to be very disappointed with the actual answers they'll receive to these questions.

They argue that they are a coverd application store.

'Definition: "Covered Application Store" '"Covered application store" means a publicly available internet website, software application, online service, or platform that distributes and facilitates the download of applications from third-party developers to users of a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device that can access a covered application store or can download an application. — Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.500(e)(1) 'This website is a "publicly available internet website" that "distributes and facilitates the download of applications" (specifically: a bash script) "to users of a general purpose computing device." We are also a covered application store. Debian's APT repositories are covered application stores. The AUR is a covered application store. Any mirror hosting .deb files is a covered application store. GitHub is a covered application store. Your friend's personal website with a download link to their weekend project is a covered application store.'

The site makes it very clear that the purpose is very explicitly not to "get away with it", it's to try and get fined, presumably to then challenge the legality of the laws in a higher court.

I have all the choice I need, I can build Linux from source and I'm old enough to know this stuff will outlast me.

F*ck Poettering. Want to bet that once he's done the damage his company will be acquired for a large amount of money by Microsoft? This is just another Nokia for them.

The former will be mandated by law, the cookie law requires a way to opt out. Why would you not prefer avoiding a privacy violation over a guaranteed one that is smaller...for now?

Scene. Ext. Town street. Night. Invader military vehicles patrolling, announcing curfew through loudspeakers.

TEEN: *runs at invaders* Hey, you thugs! You can't make me obey! I support Bob, over there! *points at Bob's house*

THUGS: Grrr! Thugs smash!

BOB: Please! I have done nothing! I don't know who that teen is!

JOE: You should be happy to have such a vocal advocate in this important fight.

NARRATOR: Ironically, Bob and Jane were quietly plotting strategy and tactics for the Resistance. Until they and their children were dragged out into the street that night.

We're just antisheeple who'll go for the opposite of whatever our flock leader says.

No one seems to be actually doing that.

> out of style

a bunch of viral tiktok videos could bring it back pretty easy.

> Nobody voted for this. Nobody wants it.

That's just not true!

There's like... one or two people that really, really want it.

They're also rich and powerful.

You're not, and we are not.

Hence our vote simply doesn't get counted.

Or, did you have a different, cutely naive view of how democracy works?

The thing is, I think these are distinctly different approaches. Mandating that OSes collect a provided age and that websites/software collect and use that is very different from making sites liable for providing various types of content to minors. The first one is basically standardizing parental controls. The second one is already happening and results in ID verification approaches. I really, really do not want the second one, and it is already happening.

Average Joe thinks age verification is already palatable. Average Joe is happy to give away a photo of his ID. The alternative to OS age attestation isn't no age verification. It's almost every site, and every piece of internet-connected software, demanding your ID.

Putting your age into your user account is not the same thing.

I don't really want the free internet to be relegated to onion sites and a hypothetical mesh internet. As things stand, every service is going to either tightly control content or adopt age verification because the alternative is being taken down by governments.

They have plenty of power over what website operators and ISPs do, and I rather like the internet.

Apparently, yes.

It's not OS age verification. You put in an age. It does not check whether it's real. It does not ask for an ID. That will get provided to app stores and probably browsers. It should be possible to spoof, too.

The primary use case of this, in my mind, is so that a parent can give their kid a PC and set an age on the user account, and that will result in them being unable to access a variety of content. Same thing for phones.

You are already being limited from accessing certain sites, because those sites are going to ask you to provide an ID. This is an alternative. It frees sites from having to request an ID to verify ages, because the age signal from the OS is legally sufficient. If I'm remembering what I read, it actually bars them from trying to determine your age in other ways.

edit: also, the signal passed from OS to software isn't even your age, it's one of four age groups. three under-age groups, and one adult group. It's not even meaningfully de-anonymizing!

Are you referring to the law that the California governor signed five months ago?

Well, the device tiers could be an intentional joke also

It's shocking how few people here seem to notice it, you would expect people using claude et al all day could feel the distinct smell of slop.

it's basically the government said "no asbestos in food" and some contrarians set up a website selling asbestos food, except not really because they don't have a product.