The California law is actually the best form of age verification one can imagine. It only requires the OS to let the user to 'signal' their age. In other words, it's more like a checkbox asking if you're older than 18, instead of scanning your face or driving license. It doesn't require a cloud account either. Storing the ages the user inputted in /etc/ages besides /etc/passed and providing an API to read it is compliance.

How is it so bad that we need some civil disobedience movement over it? On the contrary to, UK's Online Safety Act and China asking all online platforms to verify your phone number?

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akersten an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Just because it's easy doesn't mean it's right. Give legislative busybodies the ability to force this little flag into the OS because it's no big deal, and next year they'll say "hey, make sure you only report 18+ if secure boot is enabled" and 5 years later it'll be "hey, you can only report 18+ if one of our Identity Partners has confirmed it."

It's the principle of the matter. The State should not be allowed to compel speech (what code you write) in your open source project. It may sound stubborn but if we don't fight it now it will only grow little by "easy feature" little.

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raincole 18 minutes ago | parent [-]

You see a slippery slope and I see a reasonable compromise. It's a wildly popular opinion that we should control which age groups can use social media[0][1][2]. Do you think these polls are astroturfed? If not, it's clear people want some sort of age verification, and I think California's way is the least intrusive.

And I know someone is going to say 'then we should regulate social media sites to force them to verify the users' ages...' no god please no. Normalizing cloud-based age verification is far, far worse than AB 1043. If there is a principle to be set that should be: cloud should trust local, not vice versa.

[0]: https://yougov.com/articles/51000-support-for-under-16-socia...

[1]: https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/widespread-support-banning-socia...

[2]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/gen-z-social...

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akersten 10 minutes ago | parent [-]

People, generally, have no grasp of what they really want or what downstream effects of what they think they want look like. They don't know what it would take to effect that ban. In fact, I would speculate that if the same group were asked "should you, personally, have to scan your ID to visit Facebook," you'd see a meaningful shift in responses. (yes, I know that's not the way this particular CA proposal would be implemented, the point is that people are fickle and polls are not a good guide for lawmaking)

I also don't base my principles on the desires of the masses. It's our duty as people who understand the technology to prevent the controversy-de-jour from wagging our dog.

I share your feeling that if everyone did it this way and the world promised to stop making bad, privacy-invading ID laws I could grin and bear it. I don't see that happening, thus I am hostile to it in any flavor.

	▲	raincole 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> They don't know what it would take to effect that ban. Exactly. This is why if there is no some less evil way to appease these stupid people we'll go all the way straight to the evilest way. Stupid and uninformed people do actually vote.

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crooked-v an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think the bigger factor there is that it requires apps to use that, which preempts things like Discord sharing info with Peter Thiel in the name of age verification.

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soulofmischief an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

One day ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47364591

> Have you heard of the slippery slope? A cornerstone of American political philosophy?

> Arguments like this one are why the authoritarian ratchet continues to turn unimpeded over time.

Compelling any speech or written code is a violation of our rights as recognized by the first amendment of the United States Constitution.

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martin-t an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Because people don't have real power, it's all indirect through politicians who are manipulated or paid by professionals.

Democracy should be direct and the gating function shouldn't be age but a test of intelligence, logical reasoning, general knowledge and ability to detect manipulation.