First of all, what does the US government have to do with this?

Second, I made quite a detailed comment. Which bits do you disagree with and why?

Software very rarely has an individual’s vision behind it in the same way movies do. At least publicly. There are a small handful of game developers you could say that about, but outside of games the only time a single creator’s vision is relevant in that way is when they also do have creative control over it, and so the need for such a pseudonym doesn’t exist.

Most people are viewing this as a good way to prevent misinformation brainwashing

If only the government had actually made that the law. Crack down on the harmful algorithms that commercial social media use, instead of this shit.

My server just took a vote and changed our one NSFW channel to no longer be marked NSFW. All we used that channel for was posting slightly sex-themed memes anyway.

I personally see zero downsides to this

I would encourage you to read my comment in another thread. There’s the beginning of a good idea in this legislation, but nearly everything about how it’s actually done is awful.

No kids getting fined or arrested for using VPNs or buying accounts off others

It’s actually explicitly not going to do that. The social media companies are the only ones with any legal burden here. That’s the intent, and you don’t need to go into cooker nonsense to justify it. It’s no different from how a harm reductionist approach to drugs involves targeting dealers, not people buying for personal use.

What do you guys think about this? I think its a big positive.

It’s not. But not for the reason you say.

I get why they do it. Its to make people upload identification documents

This is just some conspiracy theory nonsense. The law specifically says that photo ID cannot be the only way users can verify themselves. And it also says that any uploaded documents must not be used for any other purpose. No, the reason behind the law is exactly what they say it is: to protect kids. They’re just really bad at their job and don’t understand the ways this law will not accomplish that goal.

I’ll repost some of my comments from elsewhere:

The ultimate goal is a good one. Keep kids safe from dangerous social media algorithms. The method used to arrive at it…the Government did the wrong thing at pretty much every opportunity they possibly could.

Step 1: the government should have considered regulating the actual algorithms. We know that Facebook has commissioned internal studies which told them certain features of their algorithm were harmful, and they decided to keep it that way because it increased stickiness a little bit. Regulate the use of harmful algorithms and you fix this not just for children, but for everyone

Step 2: if we’ve decided age verification must be done, it should be done in a way that preserves as much privacy and exposes people to as little risk as possible. The best method would be laws around parental controls. Require operating systems to support robust parental controls, including an API that web browsers and applications can access. Require social media sites and apps do access that API. Require parents to set up their children’s devices correctly.

Step 3: if we really, really do insist on doing it by requiring each and every site do its own age verification, require it be done in privacy-preserving ways. There are secure methods called “zero-knowledge proofs” that could be used, if the government supported it. Or they could mandate that age verification is done using blinded digital signatures. This way, at least when you upload your photo or ID to get your age verified, the site doesn’t actually get to know who you are, and the people doing the age verification don’t get to know which sites you’re accessing.

Step 4: make it apply to actually-harmful uses of social media, not a blanket ban on literally everything. Pixelfed is not harmful in the way Instagram is. It just isn’t. It doesn’t have the same insidious algorithms. Likewise Mastodon compared to Xitter. And why does Roblox, the site that has been the subject of multiple reports into how it facilitates child abuse get a pass, while Aussie.Zone has to do some ridiculous stuff to verify people’s age? Not to mention Discord, which is clearly social media, and 4chan, which is…4chan.

Step 5: consider the positive things social media can do. Especially for neurodiverse and LGBTQ+ kids, finding supportive communities can be a literal life-saver, and social media is great at that.

Step 3.5: look at the UK. Their age restriction has been an absolute failure. People using footage from video games to prove they’re old enough. Other people having their documents leaked because of insecure age verification processes and companies keeping data they absolutely should not be holding on to

And perhaps most importantly:

Step 0: Transparent democratic processes

Don’t put up legislation and pass it within 1 week. Don’t restrict public submissions to a mere 24 hours. Don’t spend just 4 hours pretending to consider those public submissions that did manage to squeeze into your tight timeframe. There is literally no excuse for a Government to ever act that fast (with possible exception for quick responses to sudden, unexpected, acute crises, which this definitely is not). Good legislation takes time. Good democratic processes require listening to and considering a broad range of opinions. Even if everything about what the legislation delivered actually ended up perfect, this would be an absolutely shameful piece of legislation for the untransparent, anti-democratic way in which it was passed into law.

And that’s not to mention the fact that in some ways, not having an account is making things more dangerous. Like how porn bans in other countries have basically just amounted to PornHub bans, with people able to ignore it by going to shadier sites with far worse content on them and less content moderation. And I’ve seen a number of parents point to YouTube in particular, saying that when their kids had an account, they were able to see the kids’ watch history, and could tell the YouTube algorithm to stop recommending specific channels or types of content. Without an account, you can’t do that.

And, naturally, we’re already seeing cases of kids passing despite being under-age. 11 year-olds who get told they look 18. A 13 year-old whose parent said they could pass for 10, who—just by scrunching his face up a bit—got the facial recognition to say he’s 30+. Shock-horror, facial recognition is not a reliable determiner of age. It never should have been allowed.

That’s definitely interesting, but I use my PC as a general-purpose computer. I’d rather go with a general-purpose distro, like Ubuntu.

I’m being sincere here. I want to know what you’re trying to say, but the way the previous comment was worded, it’s impossible to work it out.

No, OG in this context isn’t original, it means “open graph”. It’s done web metadata that determines how a page will show up when shared on social platforms. If you shared to a site like Facebook, the preview they create would use the OG title and thumbnail. If you use Lemmy’s “automatically detect title” feature, it uses the og:title metadata. This is the title the ABC wanted people to see when it was shared around.

It’s not editorialised, that’s the OG title.

Isn’t that still dual booting? Unless you have two PCs (even if you somehow rigged both PCs up in the same case with separate power buttons), you need a bootloader to choose which drive to boot off of. And unless I’m mistaken, two drives is not going to look notably different to the bootloader from two partitions on the same drive, is it?

I don’t know how those Kernel level anti cheat things work

Not something that matters to me anyway. I don’t own any such games currently, and don’t intend to change that.

But thanks for the tips re the bootloader!

Amusingly, just a couple of minutes after posting that comment, I went to the aoe2 Reddit to check if I was missing some details about a recent patch (for details related to this Lemmy post I had just made). And one of the first posts I saw was this one complaining about that very-much-not-AAA game failing to run recently.

The games in that franchise are like 90% of my gaming tbh. They all get great scores on ProtonDB, but the use a kinda weird hybrid of your Steam account and your Microsoft/Xbox account for syncing player details, and one of my concerns is the Xbox account might not work correctly.

Worst case you just resort to dual boot (don’t forget, always install Windows first)

Yeah, dual booting was definitely the plan. I didn’t know you need to install Windows first though, that’s…disappointing. And frustrating. My plan was to install Linux, stick with that for as long as I can, and if I later decide I need Windows for something, install it then.

or VM

Could be a good option. Dunno how smoothly these games would run in a VM, but worth a shot, and much better than needing to dual boot, if it does work smoothly.

Is Terminal installed by default? I feel like I had to go out and get it manually. It’s a single application with a UI to PowerShell, Windows Command Prompt, WSL, and any other terminals you might have. Maybe Windows 11 has it by default? But I feel like if someone has gone out of their way to install the application, Windows should definitely not be showing a web search result over it.

I honestly don’t mind the fact there’s search there. I do mind the fact that there are any circumstances in which it would default to the web search over a correctly-spelled (or even a correct partial-match) application on my computer. That should never happen.

What does this comment mean?

You can just do reddit

Huh? What does that have to do with anything? Nobody mentioned Reddit, or any websites that they “do”.

A lot of people need various different specific software. Some don’t need it but really want it. The comment you replied to was fairly clear: “if you have to use Windows 11”. In that context:

No need for 3rd Party Software at all. I’m team Linux

Makes no sense.

Yeah that’s my plan. My processor won’t even support Windows 11, so that’s not an option. (I used to think it was a TPM2.0 issue, but checked more recently and it’s not. They just even more arbitrarily decided my processor is too old, while also claiming Windows 11 has the same or lower overhead than 10!) I’m also not far away from needing a hard drive, RAM, and GPU upgrade. So I figure some time reasonably soon I’ll build a new PC. That one won’t be getting Windows on it, unless I discover a game or something that I can’t run on Linux.

If casinos want to be able to use laws like this, they shouldn’t be allowed to kick out people who are too good at the games.

We can just do this.