Liberty has costs, but it’s worth it.
The irony
This is going to end up in the Supreme Court as a First Amendment challenge because if code is speech, then age verification is code and therefore compelled speech by the government.
Anybody who complies with this is a fucking sheep. We need people who will stand up and strip age verification code out of any Linux operating system that dares to implement it. For example, if Ubuntu implements it, we need somebody to stand up, strip the verification code out of it, and then release it as Ubuntu free or whatever.
Louis Rossmann does a pretty good job of covering the choice between complying and going out of business from his own experience. https://youtube.com/watch?v=eCtWeNwOb9w
It’s crazy how much a single state in a single country can potentially dictate how we use our own tech
Last week in Cabo, Mexico, an adult friend thought it would be hilarious to add El Mencho to a picture of our dinner outing, text it to his parents, and tell them we met a new “friend”. He asked ChatGPT to add El Mencho to a photo. It refused. My under-13 child said “oh, I got this”, found a photo of El Mencho, asked ChatGPT to add the person from the photo to the dinner party photo and voilà, we’re enjoying drinks with El Mencho. Our friend’s parents asked what’s wrong with him. I was an impressed Dad.
This is indeed some very touching story, dinner with a leader of CJNG? At that point I would ask how the hell do you even know his name but
Mmmm
Anyone in Mexico knows that name, and just because you don’t see the humor in it, doesn’t mean it’s bad. It’s dark humor and we have a lot of it in Mexico
Should this method of age attestation become the standard, apps and websites will not assume liability when a signal is not provided and assume the lowest age bracket. Any Linux distribution that does not provide an age bracket signal will result in a nerfed internet for their users
Fuck just as I commented yesterday about this BS entering Linux kernel, it can become new reality
Oh my God it’s gonna happen. Teenagers are gonna start learning to install hacked Linux distros that lie about their age for access to porn. This might actually be the biggest boon for tech literacy ever.
isn’t this just asking your age when the OS is installed? in that case can’t they just install any non-hacked distro and lie? there’s no verification, is there?
Depends on the state/law. Also from the blog
It can get worse. New York’s proposed Senate Bill S8102A requires adults to prove they’re adults to use a computer, exercise bike, smart watch, or car if the device is internet enabled with app ecosystems. The bill explicitly forbids self-reporting and leaves the allowed methods to regulations written by the Attorney General. Practical methods for a bill of such extreme breadth would require, in many instances, providing private information to a third-party just to use a computer at all. Privacy disappears.
These days a computer is pretty much another lobe of your brain. What happens when we actually have computers embedded inside of us? Are they going to restrict access to our own cognition?
That made me think of this very old Tom Scott video.
After a word from our sponsor
Please drink verification can.
words? Where we’re going to we don’t need words
imagine government regulating what kinds of feelings are allowed in mind ads
we’re screwed
There’s an episode of Black Mirror about exactly that and it was hella depressing. I think it starred Chris O’Dowd and Mya Rudolph, who are both usually really funny actors, but it was the opposite of funny.
S7 E1 “Common People”. I had to stop watching towards the end because I nearly threw up.
There’s an earlier one: Episode 7 overall, “White Christmas”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_(Black_Mirror)
Rashida Jones*
These days a computer is pretty much another lobe of your brain.
That’s bad, you know that’s bad right?
I have tens of thousands of notes in my notes app. Please explain where I’m supposed to store that without a computer. Or am I supposed to just forget all that?
It can be bad, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s not bad if you’re just using it as a tool and understand that it’s not your only tool. Heavy equipment operators use their machines like extensions of their body. It doesn’t mean it’s bad or that they forget how to use their arms and legs or that they don’t still exercise their arms and legs sometimes. Use tools when it’s appropriate to and don’t when it isn’t, and always make sure you can use a variety of different tools including the ones you were born with and you’ll be fine.
I know where you’re coming from. I’d say it’s algorithm driven and platform centric consumption that’s bad. If things were more open, it’d be easier to use things like RSS readers to control your influences. The laws should be enforcing open standards, not closing things down.
The laws should be enforcing open standards, not closing things down.
The CA law does push for open standards.
Specifically a standard way for app stores to get the age range of users, the alternatives are:
- Bury heads in sand and let companies target kids
- UK/AUS style bans.
Realistically I think talking about RSS readers as a way to stop kids getting hooked on loot boxes is burying your head in the sand though.
It’s an open standard that could lead to tighter controls on devices in the future. That’s an extremely slippery slope. Wouldn’t it make more sense to require age verification for social media platforms and outlaw online gambling? Why deanonymize the devices themselves? I suspect it has nothing to do with protecting children.
If I had to speculate, I think the people in power are scared of how much on-device AI could empower the masses and they’re laying the groundwork to curtail it right now.
It’s an open standard that could lead to tighter controls on devices in the future.
You could say that about anything? Are you opposed to oauth/openid because it could lead to tighter controls in the future?
Why deanonymize the devices themselves?
Have you read the law? It doesn’t deanonymize anything.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to require age verification for social media platforms?
You say that like requiring Reddit to do actual age verification is better than your OS asking you to enter your age on your account.
and outlaw online gambling?
I think we should ban online gambling, but that’s also an actual ban instead of the open standards that YOU were asking for.
If the social media platforms are the problem, then why control the devices and not the social media platforms? Makes no sense unless there’s an ulterior motive.
What control do you think this law puts on devices?
deleted by creator
Very insightful and well written! These Age verification laws are going too far and were never about the kids to being with.
Did you read the same article or law?
CA’s law isn’t age verification, it’s an API to return the age bracket for a kid to app stores, the article correctly notes that it won’t be verifying anything.
It’s “foot between the door”.
Once this has been established as “normal”, they’ll slowly pile on more and more restrictions.
Better to call out this bullshit know instead of mindlessly agreeing.
Fuck that was the best episode in the season…for the wrong reasons.
IMO it’s Better to support a good initiative than supporting corporations by mindlessly believing all the fearslop generated to protect them.
It’s meant to manufacture consent.
Come back in 5 years and see if they’re still satisfied with it.
Unlike the lootboxes you think kids should have unrestricted access to, I’m sure the corporations will be satisfied and won’t push even worse technology on kidsm
Don’t put words in be to my mouth you filthy liar.
Lootboxes should be straight up banned, along with all other online gambling , which has become a bigger scam than crypto at this point.
If you are mad at gambling, you don’t focus the government to track the speech of everyone through a slow-boil process to make it socially inevitable that our fucking retinal scans are uploaded to a central government database that tracks everything we post online.
Just ban the gambling. It should never have been allowed. That’s the legal protection you need.
you don’t focus the government to track the speech of everyone through a slow-boil process to make it socially inevitable that our fucking retinal scans are uploaded to a central government database that tracks everything we post online.
Lmao have you actually read what the law actually says.
Hear me out: maybe just maybe parents could show some fucking responsibility regarding their children and access to the internet.
Quit pushing “help the children!!” propaganda man.
Hear me out a non-invasive API isn’t some terrible invasion of privacy, you already send user-agent strings to servers.
Quit believing all the fearslop you see online man.
I don’t actually. That’s why I use ad block and Librewolf.
They still send user-agent strings.
Yeah last I checked we’re in the middle of fascist takeover intertwined with the technocracy. Do you even believe your bullshit?
And yet here you are fighting to defend corporations from regulations, somehow thinking you’re not on the side of facism. 🤷♂️
Its demographic data; if the apps themselves have any access to it at all, it will be misused by advertising companies to see if they’re attracting kids (assuming people are actually truthful; i was totally 18 when i first looked at porn, trust me bro).
To tear a company to shreds for getting kids addicted to loot boxes you first have to show they know their targeting kids.
This isn’t about porn, it’s about app stores & Roblox.
You’re forgetting that the parents are more responsible to their children’s safety. Don’t be like getting your 13 yr old gta 5. Easiest thing to do is buy an off the shelf solution for your win11 device to restrict and monitor.
After reading that it sure seems like they said a lot just to say that in the end they’ll probably end up complying.
Yeah I started reading, and it felt like one of those long winded recipe intros so I was like fuck this
Thank you for distilling that.
They outline the issues from their perspective.
What else should they do? Break their own licence model (which prohibits (geographic) discrimination) or break the law? It’s either one of those two or comply.
then break the law
that’s a solution if you’re a hobbyist living in Kazakhstan, not if you’re a business operating in the USA (with multiple people and their families depending on you not screwing up)
Ok, then just start region blocking places with these laws. If the OS connects to the internet and sees it’s in a banned region it locks itself down irreparably or deletes the network drivers and permanently blocks reinstallation. Region block all said regions from even downloading the install files. Put a legally valid entry in the EULA saying that use in those regions is absolutely prohibited without exception and any use by anyone is without the company’s permission and all responsibility for that is on the user.
That’s an utterly ignorant statement.
To expect others, often volunteer, to take such a personal risk because the legislation in one part of the world is utterly fucked. How about expecting the people who actually live in the country and state and have a chance to influence those laws to step up their game instead of trying to tell third parties to take individual and personal consequence.
This article was so well-written that I was briefly surprised to encounter the term “nerfed” in the middle. I guess it’s common parlance in tech circles at this point.
That’s a lot of fancy words to say they’re bending the knee
A relatively small company can’t afford to fight a protracted legal battle or simply ignore the law. They have employees with families, and $800/hr for legal representation adds up fast, not to mention potentially getting hit with $6500 fines per infraction for refusal to comply. They also can’t afford to just not sell in California, which has a huge chunk of the US population.
We don’t have to be happy about the state of things, but it’s not their fault that capitalism and authoritarianism have effectively forced them to comply.
Be upset by all means, but remember to focus your anger upon those who actually put/is putting these laws in place.
Nah, I actively choose to be mad at people who comply with this shit.
The politicians and oligarchs are always going to be shit no matter what. That’s a fundamental law of the universe. Everyone else has a choice.
PoopOS is garbage. any distro that defaults to wayland is guaranteed trash
ml user has shitty opinions
Par for the course.
Every major DE defaults to Wayland now, bruv. You can give up the X11 pitchfork. Even holdouts like Cinnamon have added experimental support.
I don’t think anything defaulting to Wayland is guaranteed trash, but I also think there should be way more X11 pitchfork people. Or at least less hatred directed at them when they pop up.
“just get with the times it’s THE FUTURE and you’re not allowed to say no!” is… not cool. Especially when Wayland is unusable for anything outside of “the ordinary”, by design.
– Frost
I don’t hate X11, but I do think it’s holding us back, so I get the sentiment that many people have. It’s also important to note that it’s human nature to dig our heels in and resist change, so you have to keep your own biases in check.
Wayland is technically more modern and secure, which is important. That said, X11 is still needed and I don’t think we should discount it yet.
I’m curious what “non-normal” things you’re referring to. I’ve found that Wayland and xwayland do everything I need them to and I have a few things I’d consider abnormal.
Hah, yeah, you probably don’t have a CRT monitor!
Having custom resolution support is INCREDIBLY important for them, because they have no native resolution and you can just throw pretty much anything at them and it looks fantastic. It’s great for getting high refresh rates in games, especially since decreasing the resolution means you don’t have to work as hard for that framerate, without the nastiness of upscaling.
And also our monitor reports 1280x1024 as the highest resolution. Which… is the wrong aspect ratio. ??? So we NEED custom resolutions to even have a usable monitor.
KDE finally came out with support for this… in a version that’s not in Debian yet… like, one major release before dropping X11 support completely. And pretty much every other desktop on the planet is just out in the cold (except for all the window managers that base off of wlroots or something, I think it has an equivalent). Gnome? Good fucking luck.
Oh and screenshot tools. Those are tied to the DE now! Want to use a competing screenshot tool? You just… uh… can’t. I mean we’re on KDE and Spectacle is pretty great so it doesn’t really affect us, but if we didn’t like Spectacle, we’d be more or less screwed under Wayland.
Also scaling the screen. I don’t mean widget toolkit scaling. I mean e.g. integer scaling the screen pixels from 1920x1080 to 4K, a simple 2x2 for 4K TVs, or what-have-you. (Because 4K TVs don’t do this themselves even though they really should.) Or going the other way, rendering at 1280x960 and then downscaling to 640x480 so our CRT can get 120Hz. Easy on X11. Straight-up impossible on Wayland.
Oh yeah, and did I mention temporarily (not as default) disabling our PS4 controller’s trackpad from working as a mouse, without disabling any other trackpad on the system, without disabling its ability to work as a button or whatever in Steam Input? That too.
Stuff like that.
But also more generally, the whole attitude of “you’re just a Luddite who’s HOLDING US BACK!!” that people do. See also systemd.
(I don’t like systemd for completely different reasons (political rather than technical) but the very similar “you just need to get with the times!!!” attitude is also a massive turnoff for basically the same reason.)
(Also see also Rust. Ditto.)
By contrast, Pipewire? Legitimate improvement. It’s not just a “change bad” thing. There’s a reason Wayland/systemd/rust are controversial and Pipewire isn’t. A lot of it is the attitude, I think. People aren’t forcing Pipewire, either, and on the app side most stuff seems to still be the Pulseaudio API which is completely fine and means you can use either.
The only solution is to educate our children about life with digital abundance. Throwing them into the deep end when they’re 16 or 18 is too late. It’s a wonderful and weird world.
I’ve been seeing this or some variant of it, as if current protections are sufficient and we just need better parents. Yet having this provides another layer to teach and monitor.
Also the damage social media does for a 16 year old is far less than an 11 or 13 year old.
for anyone still on the fence if astroturfing bots are on lemmy.
exhibit A.
everyone I disagree with is a bot
Pathetic!
never said I agree or disagree with you.
just pointed out you’re astroturfing.
How is disagreeing with the hysteria “astroturfing”?
If you’re going to call everyone not on board with your fear cult a bot you could at least stick to your claim instead of changing them.
you have yet to deny you’re astroturfing…
So you know what astroturfing means?
I’m clearly not presenting myself as a grassroots campaign for something, I’m just laughing at the reddit/Lemmy hivemind’s collective hallucination on this.
I’m just laughing at the reddit/Lemmy hivemind’s collective hallucination on this.
got it. the right to privacy is a joke to you.
It’s more about experience than age. If you prevent 13 year olds from gaining online experience, they’ll have the same level of inexperience when you expose them to the internet at 16.
So you agree it’s good to expose them in a limited way between 13-16 so they gain some experience without being preyed on by predators like Epstein and Kotick?
You agree the law is good then or do you think we should hook babies up to iPads to build up immunity like RFK and the antivax cultists that believe in chickenpox parties over regulations.
Or even a 6 year old judging by the amount of literal toddlers with full blown iPads
