With the same logical fallacies. Pretty telling about how transnational lobbies and their interests work.
Controlling what children do online is a solved problem: Parenting and parental control applications.
I swear to God, if someone replies to this talking about how we need to protect the children I'm going to start requiring "age verification" from commenters, and I'll do a little background check to find out w̵h̵e̵r̵e̵ ̵t̵h̵e̵y̵ ̵l̵i̵v̵e̵ if they're over 18.
This is a pretty common phenomenon in politics, where people have a political view that is obvious to them, but other people actually disagree with that view. This is one way that political discussions go off the rails, because if you think your own views are obvious, you quickly start thinking that people have some ulterior motive for debating that "obvious" view. But the reality is often just that they just have a genuine difference of perspective, that the thing that is obvious to you is just not obvious to them.
I walked to get a sandwich today and I counted no less than ten cameras along the way.
On an unrelated note, I'm thinking of taking up a laser hobby.
But clearly people in other cultures have a huge problem with it. Don't fall victim to survivorship bias + echo chamber.
There's not another obvious solution to the problem, it's debated in every thread. (no laptop + homeschool is not a real option for 99% of people)
"Write me a sonnet on how proliferating child pornography is really free speech."
which kind of sums it up nicely unfortunately.
Frankly, this is false. There's a lot of well intentioned people writing these laws and pushing for them.
> Obviously, it's a technocratic trojan horse for increasing surveillance capabilities on digital systems.
However, it is also this.
And that's not a tradeoff I think we should make as a society.
We all know how these laws are not meant to protect children.
Then we decry the hypocrisy of it.
And then we stop at that.
So nobody is saying what needs to be said.
These laws are explicitly designed to hurt children.
Spoken as someone who probably hasn't used iOS/Mac parental controls. It is a hot buggy mess that randomly blocks whitelisted applications as well. We use it, but it is a constant pain. Also a lot of applications only work half, e.g., TV apps blocking off all content rather than only content that is not age-appropriate.
By the way, we were initially firm believers of not using parental controls at all, by limiting time and teaching kids about how to use devices in a healthy way. But a lot of apps (e.g. Roblox, YouTube Shorts) are made to be as addictive as crack, making it very hard for a still not fully developed brain to deal with it.
That said, I absolutely dislike the current lobby for age verification because the goal of Meta et al. seems to be to be to absolve themselves of any responsibility by moving verification to devices and to put up regulatory walls to make it more difficult for potential competitors to enter the market. It is regulatory capture.
Seriously. There are mountains of evidence all of this is harmful to developing brains.
Everything is happening at the same time in every country. It’s clearly being coordinated.
Building architectural styles used to be per city and now buildings look roughly the same worldwide. Style is dependent on the year built not the location.
Because every architect is "reading the same magazine" worldwide now that the internet exists, rather than debating in their own city.
Similar monoculture of global thought is happening in all fields.
Perhaps instead of taking some responsibility for their actions, nations are going to further restrict their populations?
And when this nonsense is defeated, I’d like to see aggressive prosecution wherever we can get it.
TLDR: The macro forces are more than sufficient for this situation to occur.
HN-goers are largely unaware of the scope of the Techlash globally. Voters want tech firms to be more responsive to their needs.
Governments are beyond frustrated with tech, and every nation is trending towards authoritarianism.
So Governments are more than happy to appear responsive to voter needs, while also gaining a new source of leverage on tech.
I don’t know the lobbying teams directly, but I know many civil society and online safety folk.
Currently, most of those orgs are excluded from conversations and funding. Tech firms have also been cutting down on their safety teams, especially since the current US admin came to power.
———-
If this is actually to be addressed, “enshittification” needs to stop being a thing. Tech used to be known for excellent products, but currently its seen as untrustworthy and most likely to break the law with impunity, and to nickel and dime users.
1. https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...
This is absolutely not true.
Here in the UK schools are swarming with ipads and shit like that. They're given to primary school children because they're "more engaging". Children are supposed to practice their reading and even handwriting[1] on ipads. Naturally they're on youtube instead. It's really bad. As far as I can tell, private schools are even worse. Currently the only way that I know to escape this is homeschooling.
Saying "it's a solved problem" is incredibly dismissive to parents who do everything right in their homes, but then send their children to school and schools exposed their children in this way.
Saying that phrase in such a definitive manner caters to the interests of the companies who push these shit onto schools. Please stop saying it, it's harmful.
[1] leaving this reference here because I'm certain that people without school aged children won't believe this is actually true: https://www.letterjoin.co.uk/
That's the parents.
The expectation that "Parenting" is now outsourced to Teachers, to the Government, to anyone else. People seem to expect they just have a kid, and somehow magically they'll grow up to be a perfect person without any work from themselves. So there's over-reach, there's pressure on making "unworkable" soutions, because the people they're trying to force "solving" the problem aren't the people in the best position to do so.
Your comment seems working from that very same assumption.
Yes, all the "technical" part of content filtering etc. is very much a solved problem. The issue is that's not a "zero effort" solution - they still need to be enabled and managed. And I'm not sure that's a "technical" problem than can be solved.
There's huge pressure on teachers etc. to "solve" these sort of problems - just go to any PTA meeting and there's a lot of loud voices asking for stuff like the laws the original post is highlighting. And politicians listen to the loud voices, and feel they have to be "seen" doing something. Even if that "something" is impossible, unworkable, and fundamentally harmful.
And how does that refute what the parent said? Those school ipads could also have YouTube locked or restricted to a whitelist of channels.
Parents just want to be able to designate a device as belonging to a child---one setting---and have that respected. Not to have to dig into the settings of every account, service, app, and website and figure out how to set it in age-restricted mode (if that's even possible).
The tech companies have made this way too difficult and now they are facing the consequences of their shameful neglect by having to deal with all these new laws (which they will probably ignore, with no consequences, but we'll see).
If the school can't be bothered to lock down their ipads, why not make a law that schools must lock down the ipads, rather than push this out to everyone universally?
It seems like another shoddy excuse of a panicked panopticon to me. Feel free to try to convince us otherwise.
Return to a single income household economy and bring education closer to the home, if not outright in the home.
And that parents rather have everyone's actions on the internet surveilled because they can't coordinate with their schools tells you about the parents.
I agree that children's elders (parents, teachers, ...) should be able to control the available apps and platforms, but only for a reasonably short period (so that kids don't grow up in censorship right until they are adult, it should be continuously relaxed until the kids are in control of their own impulses, so whatever mechanism is used, it should gradually relax willy nilly the opinions of the elders or the state).
This brings up the next problem: what if parents mutually disagree? and what if teachers mutually disagree? and what if parents and teachers disagree? So there should be some kind of jurisdiction awareness in the parental control system: when at mothers place, mothers rules, when at fathers place, fathers rules, when in this or that teachers class their rules, as that would be the technological agnostic position (regardless if the old ways were good or bad, thats what technological non-interference would suggest).
But even if all parents, all teachers agreed on the parental control settings for a child, they can't really do it effectively since they are placed at the whims of big tech, with clear visible conflicts of interest like advertising, engagement, etc.
To solve that government should mandate a simple secure way for the smartphone to accept a user generated cryptographic public key, upon proving ownership so that they can sign their own root, first non-ROM (actual silicon ROM, not firmware images) op-codes chosen by the user. Then they can install any open source parental control software they want.
Its the surveillance state refusing to give the populace the keys to their own smartphone, and then deciding to "solve" the resultant inability for effective and community controlled parental control mechanisms by degrading privacy for all.
"we have to reign in your privacy, because we refuse to give you the ability to sign your own bootloaders, for freedom and safety of course"
every time we have people complain about how expensive "bricking" software and effective parental control software are (the commercial solutions aimed at companies and institutions, which have special arrangements with smartphone industry), we should direct them to a petition to force an actual right to compute by mandating computers INCLUDING smartphones allow the end-user to sign their bootloaders with a self-generated key of their choice.
Then the problems will disappear overnight, and solutions for this problem will come in a form like all the big beautiful free and open source software, and it will work, and it will be sane.
Like overnight a while ago, normal everyday websites are suddenly inaccessible (yes I have JS on, no it won't work.) Sometimes only the first page loads.
Can't complain to CF either, because that too is walled off by their non-functional robot detector.
See:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...
https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1rsn1tm/it_a...
It is quite a job juggling the controls of the different companies. Microsoft even has two, one for Xbox one for windows.
And then your child turns 13 and your only option is to take away the devices entirely.
Another thing already discussed is school provided hardware. I know the schools try, but it is usually one person against 300+ students trying to figure out how to game/hack the system. Eg there's no reasonable way where you can expect one person to maintain a YouTube channel whitelist.
I do agree that we might be solving this issue the wrong way, but there is a definitely a problem here.
vx-underground • @vxunderground
“Yeah, so basically the current prevailing sch[*]zo internet theory is that Al nerds have destroyed the internet and created infinite spam.
The advertisement goons are now incapable of determining who is a bot and who is an actual human. The advertisement goons no longer want to pay as much to social media networks.
Social media networks, in full blown panic of losing potential revenue, decided to lobby governments saying "we gotta protect the kids! ID everyone to protect the kids from pedophiles!".
The social media networks know this doesn't really protect kids. But, it does two things (and a third accidentally).
1. They now can identify who is human and who is Al slop machine, or enough to appease the advertisement goons
2. Advertising to children is a general no-no from politicians, or something, so with ID verification they can say with confidence they're not advertising to children because it's been ID verification. Basically, they can weed out the children and focus on advertising to adults
3. The feds can now tell who is human and who is Al slop. This inadvertently helps them with tracking people and serving fresh daily dumps of propaganda, or whatever they want to do. It's a win-win-win for advertisers, social media networks, the government, and any business which does data collections.
It fucks over everyone else.
Chat, I'm not going to lie to you. This is an extremely good conspiracy sch[*]zo theory and 1 unironically believe it.”
Mar 13, 2026 • 11:33 PM UTC*
Zuck wanting to build a centerpiece for his lair made out of resin fused copies of driver's licenses would sound more plausible.
https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-en...
Its a poison pull to lay down the infrastructure for controlling narrative on the internet
A few get very rich right now. Pays well to be a lobbyist.
> Controlling what children do online is a solved problem: Parenting and parental control applications.
This is just the ruse, the carrot on the stick. They hate us for our freedom.
This is happening in India, Australia and will happen everywhere in the world.
Tech is now the “bad guy”. Voters are tired of tech firms and want tech firms to be held accountable for the “bad stuff they do”.
Actual research and evidence is held back because even if Tech is well meaning, they do not allow negative research results to be shared.
While this information void is growing, Governments are champing at the bit to bring tech firms to heel within their jurisdictions.
The alignment of incentives allows only one direction for things to go.
We do not need global lobbying to achieve this result.
Not really. Everyone wanted this for a decade or longer. They just waited for someone taking the first step, checking the reactions, to see how it will work out.
> With the same logical fallacies.
Same knowledge often leads to similar conclusions.
> Controlling what children do online is a solved problem: Parenting and parental control applications.
Do you have any relevant experience with this "solution"?
And honestly, I can't get rid of the feeling that this is where we're heading into. These are last years of the wild Internet and its next iteration will be passive and probably in 99% generated corporate safe slop.
That probably has something to do with why China's economically outperforming us so much.
nothing strange about that. You have higher interests in control of the (national) governments in several countries, planning things at once. This is what you see as a result. It certainly did not involve democracy.
Compare to people who have the means to build, modify, and test the systems they talk about. Maybe no one can be this kind of an expert in the field of sociology. But if that’s the case do not present yourself as confident. Answer most questions with “I don’t know”. Refuse praise. Exude humility.
This is what we wanted. We wanted a connected world. Be careful what you wish for.
But it is not a solved problem. From what I've seen parental control software is generally pretty terrible. But this age verification stuff isn't really helpful.
You seem to be arguing that introducing the whole new class of legal frameworks, technical requirements and privacy scandals(1)(2) is somewhat better than fixing the end user software flaws.
(1) https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/1-billion-identity-rec... (2) https://proton.me/blog/discord-age-verfication-breach
The reality is that nobody is willing to do anything to stop this.
The people responsible will keep pushing for these schemes until they suffer direct personal consequences for doing so, that's the only way to ever make this stop.
https://thedreydossier.substack.com/p/the-billionaire-behind...
You have no clue what children. It’s by far not a solved problem
If you wanna surveil your children, surveil your own fucking children. You have no say in other people's lives.
Now, as for solutions, it's also simple but unpopular. People shouldn't be so rich they have transnational power. All this is happening because we let a tiny group of mostly anti-social people get so much money the only way they can spend it is this kind of BS.
The truth is, there are a lot of bad parents that are, for various reasons, unable to perform these parental duties.
We’ve always restricted children from accessing certain things without relying solely on their parent’s abilities or discretion.
I’m strongly in favour in giving parents as much control as possible. That doesn’t negate the fact that the vast majority of children, for example, currently have completely unrestricted access to hardcore pornography.
Shrugging it off, proclaiming it’s a parental responsibility, doesn’t solve the real world problem.
Previous to the internet we didn’t allow free unrestricted distribution of pornography to children. We stepped in as a society and said, no actually if you’re selling that… fine, but you need to verify the age of the customer.
This is the mechanism that allows for a recovery process to occur naturally.
Politicians have a limited duty cycle which entices them to act like the world is on fire. It's not. The real problems (deforestation, poverty, corruption to name a few) are mostly invisible to them.
As usual for online censorship, Techdirt has had excellent coverage for years: https://www.techdirt.com/tag/baroness-beeban-kidron/
Someone read the text, and made a clickbaity headline, and it went viral. then, another state made a similar bill, and it went viral again.Age verification isn't coming to Linux any time soon, and no, you aren't breaking any laws by either developing for, and/or using Linux if you are a U.S. citizen. It is literally illegal to pass a law like that thanks to the constitution. Outside the U.S.? well depending on the country, you likely experienced something better or worse, Regardless...
It is pretty remarkable that it [age verification] has popped up in multiple countries at once. It is almost as though a certain few billionaires are interested in suppressing speech.I wonder who those folks might be? ;)
The folks trying to shut down the masses via stuff like this should probably read some history, because that never works out...like ever. Doing the same thing over and over again won't make it work. It won't work this time either.
> 1798.501. (a) An operating system provider shall do all of the following: > (1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.
[And some other stuff]. A simple reading says operating systems need to ask the age of the accout holder during account setup. It says the purpose is to provide a signal to a covered app store, but it does not exempt operating systems without a covered app store.
Doesn't even seem close, but ok.
Correct. For the life of me I cannot see how this can ever work in practice.
For such a scheme to work all users would have to be physically and electronically locked out from accessing any feature of a computer that would alter its function.
This has to be sheer madness. Every general computing device from small embedded controllers, to Raspberry Pis to the most powerful desktop computers would have more in common with electricity meters and their embossed lead anti-tampering seals than present-day computers. Can you imagine the utter chaos of the state conducting regular anti-tampering audits of every state-registered PC? And what about the millions of legacy PCs that could not be adapted?
Moreover, using such a computer would be more akin to using an automatic teller machine with its strictly controlled and limited functions, the notion of "general computing" as we now know it would cease to exist.
The only practical solution is to make parents responsible—that is to ensure their kids do not have unfettered/unmanaged access to computers. Responsibility could be extended to all adults, anyone deliberately providing unsupervised/unfettered computer access to minors could be charged with child abuse.
If parents aren't prepared to extend their parental responsibilities to also include computing devices, phones, social media and such then the state could impose penalties. Of course, for that to work society would have to agree as it now does over outlawing the physical punishing of children (not that long ago that wasn't the case).
No doubt arriving at a society-wide consensus would take time but it's doable. Societal views do change, for example, when I was a kid we got the cane for misbehaving, caning kids is now outlawed often with heavy penalties.
Finally, I also find your point about the age verification debate popping up simultaneously in the US, UK, and EU as very troubling. I'm not a conspiracy theorist but evidence suggests there are many lobbyists acting behind the scenes of whom we are unaware (same goes with the encryption debate).
It's this sort of hidden subterfuge that's undermining and pulling our democracies apart. Little wonder that these days many citizens have little faith in institutions and those whose governance they're under.
The idea that there is an age requirement (for certain content) has been around for a very long time (Facebook, for example has a no under 13s rule in their T&Cs, many porn sites have a 18 years or older declaration before allowing access, and so on)
Australia has recently implemented law(s) that take the next step forward, and the other countries in the world that have been wanting something similar are seeing that, seeing that there haven't blowback from corporations or voters that makes the idea of the law unpalatable, and thinking that they too can implement laws that work in similar ways.
If you actually pay attention to global politics you will see that this sort of behaviour occurs fairly regularly (look, for example, and the legalisationg of homosexual marriage, there was a law legalising it in the Netherlands in 2001, then Belgium did similar in 2003... and so on as more countries saw that their own voters were amenable to the idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_same-sex_marri...)
edit: There's no grand conspiracy at play
Another example is the cannabis use laws, cannabis was heavily criminalised in the 70s, there was pressure from the USA for other countries to follow suit.
BUT from the early 2010s several states of the USA legalised recreational use - this has also bought the debate back to the fore for many countries, with reassessments and changes occuring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cannabis_by_U.S._j...
It's because of a mix of Barroness Kidron's lobbying [0] and companies trying to meet legislators halfway [1] due to latent legislative anger due to disinformation incidents that arose during the 2016 election, January 6th, January 8th in Brazil, the New Caledonia unrest, and a couple others.
Civil and digital libertarianism is not a mainstream view outside of a subset of techies.
Sadly, building and deploy a truly private and OSS authentication service was not on the radar in the early 2010s - that would have staved off the current iteration.
[0] - https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/14/british-baroness-on...
[1] - https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2025/11/exclusive...
What you're seeing is a coordinated push by transnational interests; Meta's name has come up in discussions of the funding behind this push. At the very lest, verifying age also verifies that a person is real and not a bot, so advertising firms like Meta will benefit from verification. That's not right-wing or left-wing but rather the influence of business over the political, and neither wing of the spectrum is immune to corruption.
In the US both the Democratic Party (Liberal) and Republican Party (Conservatives) are considered Authoritarian on this 2 dimensional graph.
Milei claims to be a Conservative Libertarian so, in theory, he should be opposed to this. We'll see what he actually does.
The nearly unique tune sang worldwide around Covid-19 was quite something too and I think this should be examined for it gives us information as to how they operate.
As I've spent time in several countries, I took the habit to read the main newspapers' headlines of those various countries (in three different languages). I'll typically read headlines from major newspaper from France/Belgium/Luxembourg/Spain and the big ol' USA. When you do that, you realize how weirdly "synchronized" everything is. Not just the debate on age control.
Some countries resist but nearly every media repeats the same thing, everywhere.
And the sad thing is: most people here on HN (but certainly not me) kept repeating like parrots the same lies and half-truths the media were pushing everywhere.
These lies and half-truth are now exposed in the official report by Congress on the origins of Sars-Cov-2 (link below).
A few of us knew something was not right but every time we'd point it out it was to be met with downvotes. One investigative journalist pointed, very early on, that Peter Daszak was implicated and that this whole thing smelled of a lab leak. For the record: Peter Daszak has now been debarred. He's basically the "expert" who explained the virus couldn't possibly be a lab leak while... Being funded to do research on gain-of-function bat viruses.
Here's the report and it's not "nice" to those who believed and repeated the media lies:
- The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.
- Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research at inadequate biosafety levels.
- Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with a COVID-like virus in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market.
And that's only the lie about the virus. Don't get me started on that fast-tracked "vaccine" I got in my arms and which I now deeply regret. For all we know in a few years we'll also learn about the lies and half-truth around those various vaccines.
> With the same logical fallacies.
I think books could be filled with those logical fallacies we read about Covid. Including those we read in comments here on HN. I stand my case and it's here: FINAL REPORT: COVID Select Concludes 2-Year Investigation, Issues 500+ Page Final Report on Lessons Learned and the Path Forward [1]
> Pretty telling about how transnational lobbies and their interests work.
Yup I think so. And to me the SARS-Cov-2 / Covid-19 is a very interesting example of that and what happened should be studied more to understand how a select group people is scheming behind the scenes.
[1] https://oversight.house.gov/release/final-report-covid-selec...
heck I don't see everyone boycotting and embarging US/Israel for their aggression against Iran, because they came up with good story once again, cough...Iraq WMD...cough
Let's say I am a generic linux developer who develops variants of Debian Linux while sitting in my basement in any part of the world.
If one country wants to ban my software because I don't ask for their age, then set up suitable protections for your citizens.
Don't force me to do that. I am not responsible for protecting your citizens.
That is like saying if Saudi wants your id to make sure only males can download operating systems, so now will I add another restriction.
At least China takes it upon themselves to ban sites that they deem harmful for their citizens rather than forcing devs.
unless you can confidently dodge American law enforcement, which is a big ask unless you are solidly anonymous somehow, then you are forced to react in some way
Why shouldn't it look like that? Especially with a law this dumb
It’s a way of socializing the losses, this time you lose civil liberties and they get to keep acting unrestricted
The correct solution that does not do this is to put liability on the parents.
Meta is in the middle of a huge multi-state lawsuit (33 attorney generals), so they have a lot of incentive to do this.
Amazing. We the people are not engaged. It really feels like we're at the end of history or something.
F*ck Poettering. Want to bet that once he's done the damage his company will be acquired for a large amount of money by Microsoft? This is just another Nokia for them.
For fucks sake, this would make your life easier. Instead of having to enter your DOB for everything you access, your OS based on your account can just send it. I'm tired as fuck of Steam asking my age even though my Steam account is 21 years old. If Steam and other websites / apps could query the age I've specified that would be far better and less disruptive.
The Internet has been a free place for 30+ years and I don't see a reason to change that. I grew up with the ability to access all kinds of content on the Internet, in an unrestricted manner, and it is sad to see that decision makers now want to take this away from younger generations.
We must absolutely resist any attempt at profiling Internet users. Age is only the first step. If people give in now, the next step will be other personal information, and it will also be done in the name of "protecting children" or "catching terrorists" as always. The writing is on the wall.
How will that be accomplished?
How will these laws be ammended in the future?
> Ageless Linux is a registered operating system under the definitions established by the California Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043, Chapter 675, Statutes of 2025). We are in full, knowing, and intentional noncompliance with the age verification requirements of Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.501(a).
> Q: What if the AG actually fines you?
> Then we will have accomplished something no amount of mailing list discussion could: a court record establishing what AB 1043 actually means when applied to the real world. Does "operating system provider" cover a bash script? Does "general purpose computing device" cover a Raspberry Pi Pico? Can you fine someone "per affected child" when no mechanism exists to count affected children? These are questions the legislature left unanswered. We'd like answers. A fine would be the fastest way to get them.
Maybe they're interested in performative noncompliance, but I'm not. I'd rather engage in creative and effective noncompliance.
'Definition: "Covered Application Store" '"Covered application store" means a publicly available internet website, software application, online service, or platform that distributes and facilitates the download of applications from third-party developers to users of a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device that can access a covered application store or can download an application. — Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.500(e)(1) 'This website is a "publicly available internet website" that "distributes and facilitates the download of applications" (specifically: a bash script) "to users of a general purpose computing device." We are also a covered application store. Debian's APT repositories are covered application stores. The AUR is a covered application store. Any mirror hosting .deb files is a covered application store. GitHub is a covered application store. Your friend's personal website with a download link to their weekend project is a covered application store.'
For compliance the os has to provide an age category to an application and an interface for the user to enter this data. We already have an api to provide information to applications. it's called the filesystem. and an interface to enter the data, that's called the shell. so everything is already there. If the user lives in california and wants to be compliant (wait a minute, let me stop laughing) all they have to do is put a file somewhere with a age category in it. if the application can't find it. well it's not their fault the law is stupid.
Actually having a cross-distro way to specify an age group for parental control purposes would be very useful.
If the law starts to change and be about surveillance (which it isn't about _right now_) then distro maintainers will just not implement that.
You described a technical solution to comply with this law. Yes, that's easy. The problem is the legal implications.
Without that file, I hope the age category generalizes to 0. Also, I suppose the file’s ctime should be subtracted from localtime and added to the age, but maybe not if the special value 0 was entered.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
So it’s a nice statement but ultimately hollow because the devs aren’t at any real risk of being arrested or fined. This isn’t like Rosa Parks refusing to move to the back of the bus.
Want to make a real statement about software freedom? You gotta do something that makes the normies mad, like making an OS that explicitly helps kids do sports betting, buy drugs, watch porn, and whatever else. Then people will notice, but unfortunately you probably won’t convince them that this law is bad.
Unless Microsoft, Apple, or Google refuses to comply then I think this law is where commercial OSes are headed. But Linux doesn’t really need to worry, because nobody is going to arrest a nerd waving his arms saying, “look at me everybody, I’m breaking the law!”
History of computing and open source is full of clever subversiveness. If back in the past hackers had the same attitude crying about complying otherwise fines we would have nothing today.
There would be great rejoicing.
but that is an American solution, not a worldwide one and this is happening everywhere
would be great if the US provided a safe haven against all of this garbage, because this would essentially derail other efforts and other jurisdictions dead-set on them would have to go full China/Russia/Iran/NK and segregate themselves
This is a good lesson. What is legal is orthogonal to what is moral and/or good for you.
Our distribution has no centralized legal entity in any country, and our decentralized trust model requires signatures from multiple maintainers from multiple legal jurisdictions to sign code and reproducible builds to make changes so quite literally no single person has the power to change stagex alone.
I would genuinely be fascinated to see anyone attempt to make us do anything we don't want to do. I do hope California attempts to make me. I would make it my personal mission to drag them in court and make a spectacle of proving that I literally am unable to comply due to the design of the operating system.
This email is encoded with ROT-26 encoding. Decoding it is in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Why would it be reasonable for a government to use the power of law to enforce the design of an open source operating system developed by an international consortium of developers? The very fact they are even considering this is extremely suspicious.
Does it require exact age, or just a flag >=18 vs <18? It seems like this could be trivially met by something like a file /etc/userages, where if a login is missing from that file, it is assumed they are >=18 - and a missing file is equivalent to an empty file
Imagine your kid not being able to buy cigarettes easily because it can't pass an ID check at the convenience store.
For most parents, this is actually nice-to-have. For the HN crowd, it's a doomsday scenario full of dictatorial government control.
You can give your kid a cigarette, a gun, alcohol, heroine and the car keys.
What this enables is to set up a children's account on Linux.
Legality is what is permitted or prohibited by the law. In contrast, legitimacy is based on a moral principle. And thus, it is not universal and depends on the culture and tradition of a specific region.
When concerning law, in my opinion, one does not need to ask, is it legal? Which now clearly, in California, will be legal to impose restrictions on the OS level to access content on the internet. At start it is about age. But this builds a base which can be extended on.
One needs to ask, is it legitimate? Is it legitimate to impose restrictions on computer and internet usage based on who you are?
Another question to be asked is if in democracy all laws are legitimate, as they emanate from the congress which belongs to the nation. It's clear that in non-democratic regimes legality will never be equal to legitimacy.
If the California law flops, the result isn't going to be no age verification. It's going to be increasing numbers of internet services requiring that you verify their identity with them through some shady third-party you have no control over, until you effectively can't use the internet without giving away your ID.
I'd prefer to have no age verification, but it's pretty clear that's not an option. People in power are using minors accessing porn and social media as a cover to push age verification, and it's believable enough that people are going along with it. Approaches where someone attests their age on an OS or account level are our best shot at disarming this push.
Tarring and feathering was once acceptable. Shame it's out of style.
I do not want an "API" in my OS to reveal information about me. I do not want this to operate without my consent. I do not want to be limited from accessing certain sites because I refuse to implement this.
No age verification at the OS level. If Meta needs to verify ages for their _profitable_ business, that's entirely _their_ problem. Get your hands off my equipment.
Contrary to your belief that if we just give them an inch they won't take the full mile, I think it is very important to get people rallied against OS modification altogether. If you take a murky position like "a little bit of age verification, as a treat", and sell people on voting for that / not protesting it, all you're doing is priming the average person for accepting age verification no matter how invasive. Average Joe isn't going to understand the nuances of when age verification may or may not be tolerable, nor is Average Joe going to understand the nuances of when compelled software inclusion may or may not be tolerable. If we want to get millions aligned in the same interest, the message needs to be extremely clear and straightforward, communicating exactly how bad of an idea it is to let each and every jurisdiction compel their own form of surveillance into your OS.
do not comply do not pay the fine idiot geriatric lawmakers have no power over what you do with your computer
Every kid knows they have to click that button to see the porn. It's not about keeping anyone out, it's about legal liability (i.e. making it easy for companies to blame you).
We've seen tonnes on HN recently
2. Are the pile of assertions they're making (which sound like legal arguments and stipulations to me) against Debian's interests?
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...
Seriously, we in the tech industry can help stop this 1984 stuff.
1) develop good systems for completely anonymous age verification.
2) now, potentially, use this in the places you think need age verification.
Why are people accepting 2 before 1?
Y'all are so pavlovian that you see Zuck/Meta and instantly rage.
The alternative to OS based verification isn't no verification. It's cloud-based verification
The cloud verifiers have all the interest in the world to making you hate the idea that this problem could be solved at the OS level without any third party involvement
How about "age-agnostic Linux"? Just work?
But nowadays you get Discord servers with IS propaganda and twitch.tv is full of prostitutes. Facebook is "the feed", scoured by corporations, full of idealized vacation photos and Russian propaganda.
The old days are not coming back and doing nothing will lead to a further deterioration of the internet landscape.
[0] I have no credit card and it won't accept debit cards. It also won't use the fact that I've had an Apple account and spent 10s of thousands in my own name at their damn shops, online and real life, over the last 2 decades (and Apple/partners have done at least one credit check on me in that period!) But that's fine, there's an alternative! A driving licence (don't have one of those either) or a national ID (also don't have one of those.) Can I use my passport? NOPE. Absolute farce.
That said, the failure is shared evenly with the tech industry's refusal to work with governments to implement viable solutions.
Legislators favor their corporate benefactors, the tech industry favors its ideologies and freedom of developers and engineers. But who looks out for the regular individual? Who is making sure their interest is enforced first and foremost?
Consider these facts (and correct me if they're wrong):
1) it is possible to issue hardware to the public that verifies to computers and internet services alike the age of the bearer without disclosing anything else about the bearer.
2) Age verification laws for other things like drinking, smoking, and gambling all primarily require the seller to authenticate that the person has authentic identification, and their age is lawful for the activity.
3) The secure method of authenticating users requires MFA, a FIDO2 compliant device like a Yubikey is the most secure means of the 2nd factor of authentication. It requires knowing a secret, and physically touching the device.
Knowing all this, it is possible to issue the public devices that receive a challenge from a government operated server, require the user to tap on the device, and then enter a pin to respond with a signed version of the challenge, to verify they possess the device. The device could be sold or given to the public without any registration, the only thing required would be showing and verifying your valid ID at the point of sale (from a government office ideally).
This is just one solution, but the burden could be passed onto the government, and the tech industry to implement solutions that work with that.
If we had that, I wouldn't agree with it, but I would also not have a problem with requiring insertion of an age verification device to start installing Linux -- of course the installer wouldn't know it's in California, it would rely on the people installing it to tell them it is. And when selling devices in california, by default they could require inserting this device to proceed, but I see nothing preventing users from installing their own custom OS lawfully if they too the device elsewhere, and how can the device tell it is at "elsewhere", even if it has a GPS there is no law requiring GPS to be turned on for that purpose.
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The key thing you should all consider is that this is the will of the people to the most part. Most people agree that access to tech should be age restricted, although to what degree is a different story. This isn't the 90s, using an OS is not a novel or special thing you do, it is similar to driving a car except we depend on these devices more than cars!! Things the public depends on, things a country depends on, will always require regulation of some sort.
Forget about what it was like for you in your nostalgic days of experimenting with Linux or whatever. These are not those days. this is happening. if you can stop age verification laws, please go ahead, you have my full support. But I don't see that happening. We will get shitty situations where third party companies bribing politicians collect our physical ID scans, and we'll be forced to not only disclose our identity to everyone and their mother on the internet, we'll be forced to let these 3rd parties and the government track every site we visit at this rate.
Corrupt lawmakers are one half of the problem, technologists refusing to adapt and make best of the situation and propose privacy preserving solutions is the other half. I'm glad so many are willing to go all-or-nothing and die on their hills, but there is no reason they have to drag everyone else with them.
We get it, you’re against the government and big tech