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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TZubiri 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

"It's the principle of the matter. The State should not be allowed to compel speech (what code you write)"

What a stretch man. Is banning nuclear weapons a restriction of free speech because it compels speech (the blueprints and specs engineers write).

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raincole 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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 an hour 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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slopinthebag an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm curious what a poll of public opinion would say about certain demographics in 1930's Germany. Does that seem like a good argument for what the government should and shouldn't do?

A reasonable compromise? With who? Who here is somehow required to "compromise"?