Live data from Hacker News

Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

agelesslinux.org

401–410 of 671 posts

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

I want to agree with you, but if it's my system and my browser reporting my bracket, wouldn't it be trivially easy to inject an http-header with the age I want to report? And by "trivially easy" I mean "somebody already posted how-to for windows to stackoverflow"

The problem is not that it's hard to cheat (it's easy), the problem is it makes you officially a liar and liable for "illegal app use".

It might not be a problem for you, but some underage kid, who lied about their age, gets addicted to a game with in-game purchases and gets into financial trouble now has no recourse against the company who made the addicting game.

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#402
To those who don't get it: this law is like the "Yes I'm 18+" button on porn sites.

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).

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#403
post #359
post #14

Something remarkable and unsettling is how the age verification debate has popped up almost simultaneously in the US, UK, and EU. 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.

To be clear, I don't agree with these laws and think they are very much the wrong way to try to solve the problem. 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.

It's a solved problem with a slightly flawed implementation on the end devices.

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

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liability? You want to make give parents fines for their children accessing Facebook at a young age?

No, I am just saying what policy will allow the legislators to achieve their goals. So if your goal is for the state to decide what is good or bad for children, then yes, giving parents fines when their children access 18+ content will motivate those parents to parent their children. That will be an effective way to achieve your goal. Other policies have issues with externalities (ignoring the inherent externalities…

> No, I am just saying what policy will allow the legislators to achieve their goals.

I guess we made a mistake in not consulting the oracle of all legal matters. Very sorry, we will consult you on all future proposals.

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#405
post #14

Something remarkable and unsettling is how the age verification debate has popped up almost simultaneously in the US, UK, and EU. 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.

Because it's manufactured consent and propaganda driven by deep pockets and ideologues. It was rammed through by the elites.

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#406

I don't want to give the impression that I don't find the whole direction of travel concerning, because I do, but as I understand it, the requirement is that the system administrator assigns ages to the users on their system. That seems pretty reasonable to me, and maybe even like a good idea in some scenarios. As far as I know, we aren't talking about software that fights against the interests of the system owner -…

Imagine your kid not being able to click "Im over 18" on a porn site, because Chrome read /etc/age and ratted the children's account out.

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.

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can distinguish these two things, right? One is that people tell women it's good to work for a corporation, some of them believe that to be true and choose to do it, the others retain and exercise the option to do something else. The other is that we set up an artificial scarcity treadmill so that if some families have two incomes, they outbid the ones that don't on life necessities and then women have to take a j…

Well the first naturally led to the other. So you can distinguish them, but they are not separate.

In order to get from the first to the second, you need the artificial scarcity laws, and we ought not to keep those.

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We The People are simply no longer represented. Do the math on historic representation ratios and you'll quickly see the first consolidation (long before corporate or bureaucratic) was Representation. We are about 6500 Reps shy of an actual Democratic Republic.

Relevant: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/last-rights

>not less than 40,000

It was originally 30,000 but was changed, your author is using the updated version.

Additionally, there is another way to change it. The Texas State Legislature. Texas is the only state with Congressional pre-approval to break up into 4 more states. 5 total without the need for congresses approval. Texas breaks up, then California and New York are heavily outnumbered in the Senate as each state gets 2 Senators. Other states will follow and so too will calls to expand the House.

There is a path without state amendment process or congress.

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#409

I may be missing something obvious but, what happens if people just lie about their age en masse?

That's not the problem this is meant to solve.

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.

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#410
post #14

Something remarkable and unsettling is how the age verification debate has popped up almost simultaneously in the US, UK, and EU. 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'm completely baffled why anyone still engages with the "official" framing around this. Obviously, it's not for protecting children. Obviously, it's a technocratic trojan horse for increasing surveillance capabilities on digital systems. This is so cynically anti-democratic that they obfuscate the real purpose, don't even bother to make it plausible, and everyone is left talking about how "awful it is" that it's alr…

>I'm completely baffled why anyone still engages with the "official" framing around this.

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.

Post reply on HN