| ▲ | akersten 5 hours ago |
| Now this is what open source development should look like. I cannot believe a few days ago I was thumbing through an email thread on freedesktop.org about how they could implement the mandatory government API in dbus. Can they not read their own domain name? |
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| ▲ | kykat 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| The API seems like a funny joke anyway, `sudo setage 12987123`, done. |
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| ▲ | matthewfcarlson 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Oh nice! I’ve been wanting to ask someone of your age, how was the Middle Miocene Climate Optimum? | | |
| ▲ | amarant 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The climate was optimal. Everything else was kinda mid tbh. | |
| ▲ | lavela an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | It being Linux those would obviously be seconds so they are roughly half a year old. |
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| ▲ | pocksuppet 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | kykat 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I wouldn't be so sure, I think the ultimate goal is to link your network activity to your government id, just like the way it's done in China. So the only root left is the government basically. | | |
| ▲ | lambda 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The whole point of the California/Colorado laws is to provide an alternative to that. The whole point is that it provides a privacy preserving way to provide a signal about whether someone is in a particular age bracket, without requiring any kind of third party ID verification. I am so puzzled by everyone who objects so strongly to these operating system based opt in systems; all it does is provide for a way for a parent to indicate the age of a child's account, and an API for apps and browsers to get that information. If you're the owner/admin of a system, you get to set that information however you want, and it's required that it only provides ranges and not specific birthdays in order to be privacy preserving. | | |
| ▲ | dataflow 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I had the same reaction as you this entire time until half an hour ago when I saw the second link in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47382650 Meta being behind all of these efforts makes it incredibly suspicious, especially given the New York law is ridiculously more invasive than the California one. It sure makes it seem like there's likely a larger plan here that this is merely facilitating. So I don't think I can still buy it at face value that California's version is a good-faith attempt to balance privacy and child safety, even if that's what it is in the eyes of the legislature, given who's actually behind it and what else they've been pushing for. | | |
| ▲ | pocksuppet 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The larger plan is probably to avoid banning social media for under-18s | | |
| ▲ | smsm42 21 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Or get another source of demographic data and suppress smaller competitors who can't comply with onerous regulation. |
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| ▲ | macintux 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I am so puzzled by everyone who objects so strongly to these operating system based opt in systems The government legislating APIs is an uncomfortable precedent given the culture wars that are raging right now. There seems little reason to expect this will stop here. | | |
| ▲ | lambda an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | They are not legislating specific APIs. They are legislating that an API has to be provided, just like other laws legislate that you have to provide accessibility APIs, but the details of the APIs are left up to the companies. I work in aviation, a highly regulated field. And that's a good thing. It does take some work to regulate well; there has been a migration in aviation to more prescriptive regulation about how things need to be, to less prescriptive like what the ultimate performance needs to be. But yeah, the aviation regulations aren't that you have to implement something a specific way, but that you have to be able to show that your aircraft has no more than a certain probability of catastrophic failure (where the probability varies base on certain things like the size and type of aircraft). For this age verification law, all that is required is that there is an API provided for this purpose, and there is a way for the owner of the machine to set up user accounts with age information indicated, and that the APIs need to provide several rough age ranges, not specific birthdays. | |
| ▲ | pocksuppet 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What does "the government legislating APIs" mean? The ADA means every OS has to support screen readers. |
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| ▲ | spigottoday 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm confused. What's the age definition of child? 12, 15, 18? Does this mean its against the law for children to install an operating system? What is the penalty for a child doing this and putting the wrong age or just doing it at all? What is the penalty for a parent or guardian of the child that does this? What happens to the parent or child if the child circumvents this control? Will child services be involved? Criminal penalties? Of course the only way to know an adult is the administrator is to tie the users government I'd to the account. Could this be done in some zero knowledge anonymous way? Sure, but I don't think it's likely. This seems to be the thin end of yet another wedge. The trend seems to be to be that we should be identified and survield every moment of our lives. The question is who does this surveillance serve? How much access do you have to your government or employer's data or advertisers or educators or ...? How does their access serve you? | | |
| ▲ | wtallis 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's a very long list of questions, most of which you wouldn't need to ask if you spent ten minutes reading the law. And the rhetorical point you seem to be working toward is much less effective when more than half of those questions evaporate. |
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| ▲ | lavela an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | This holds true until you pass to the next age bracket for the first time. |
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| ▲ | pocksuppet 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Are we talking about what actually happened, or are we talking about doomsday fantasies? | |
| ▲ | delusional 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well I think the goal is to link it with hackernews account such that ycombinator can accuratly measure how many of their startups you're interacting with. |
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| ▲ | charcircuit 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Associating open source with projects that brazenly violate the law is not what open source should look like. |
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| ▲ | akersten an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Sorry, was I too punk rock on hacker news? | |
| ▲ | 3842056935870 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It is when those laws were passed by totalitarian idiots. | | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Unjust laws should be violated. | | |
| ▲ | akoboldfrying an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Who decides if a law is unjust? | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira an hour ago | parent [-] | | We do. Using our consciences. | | |
| ▲ | akoboldfrying an hour ago | parent [-] | | What if two people's consciences disagree? | | |
| ▲ | seemaze 9 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | No need to hypothesize, just take a look around | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Do it regardless. If you're right other people will realize that. If not, they won't. | | |
| ▲ | throw10920 7 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > If you're right other people will realize that. If not, they won't. That literally does not answer the GP's question. You're just an anarchist. We can save a lot of steps if you just state that outright. |
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| ▲ | charcircuit 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This leads to anarchy or selective enforcement. Unjust laws should be removed. | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira an hour ago | parent [-] | | > Unjust laws should be removed. Yeah, in an ideal world. Good luck with that. We live in a deeply unjust world where laws are literally bought and paid for by corporations. This age verification nonsense is just the latest example. They aren't going to sit idle if we attack their lobbying efforts, they're going to come after us. God only knows what a surveillance company like Meta can do to you if they really hate your guts. | | |
| ▲ | throw10920 8 minutes ago | parent [-] | | OK, so then you think the entire system is corrupt, and you should reform it. Selective rejection of laws based on your own personal morals is wrong in every circumstance. Either you believe the system is just and you follow all the rules (and work through the system to changes the individual rules you believe are unjust), or you believe that the system is fundamentally unjust and you take drastic action to fix it. If you don't, then you're a hypocrite - you don't really believe that the system is unjust, you're just using that as an excuse to selectively ignore laws you disagree with. |
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