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Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

agelesslinux.org

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Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#491

Post by enoint »

20after4 wrote: post #457
anon_shill wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read it? It does neither of those things. It establishes that Meta is fighting to amend these regulatory bills to push onus onto operating systems and Discord isn’t named once in the OP.

Your username is appropriate. From rfk: “Rep. Kim Carver (R-Bossier City), the sponsor of Louisiana's HB-570, publicly confirmed that a Meta lobbyist brought the legislative language directly to her. “ That’s more than fighting to amend. I’m not sure where I got the discord connection but I thought it was from that link. I’ve read a few things on this subject recently so I may have mixed up two different sources.

Obviously Discord is related. I can simultaneously support age constraints and also *not want my child’s 18th birthday leaked under any circumstances*.

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#492

Post by PurpleRamen »

nextos wrote: 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.

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

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"?

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#493

Post by iamnothere »

muyuu wrote: post #396
drivebyhooting wrote: post #115

I wonder if we can get a popular referendum to sentence Meta to capital punishment. There would be great rejoicing.

unironically those pushing for blatantly unconstitutional laws should be charged for sedition and moved to a death penalty state 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/…

> 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

Good news, this is already happening, with pushback against foreign attempts to meddle domestically. Look up Wyoming’s GRANITE Act which is spreading to other states.

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#494

Post by techjamie »

usef- wrote: post #167
brightball wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not if you’ve paid attention to political trends for the last 15 years. Everything is happening at the same time in every country. It’s clearly being coordinated.

Btw, it doesn't need to be actively coordinated for this to happen. 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 fie…

> Similar monoculture of global thought is happening in all fields.

Thereby removing yet more interesting things to see in the world through the spread of hyper-optimized inoffensive blandness. In the same way that restaurants are slowly turning into the same set of grey boxes with little of note distinguishing each.

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#495

Post by Jolter »

tim333 wrote: post #487
Jolter wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think the mechanisms required by this law, as described in the linked article, constitute ”good parental control”?

Nothing's perfect but being able to tell the os the user is say 5 and then not have sites etc. show porn seem better than nothing?

If you're trusting a 5-year-old with a computer (connected to the internet, no less) and then letting them use it unsupervised, then you would already be putting a lot of trust in sites implementing age controls correctly (or at all). And if there's anything we know about the Internet, it's that web sites can be trusted, right? :-D Keep in mind, whatever law California passes, there will be web sites outside of Cali jurisdiction.

What's worse (and the point of the linked article), a kid who's not 5 but 10 would be very able to bypass this particular requirement, making it utterly useless. It's about as effective as the "parental controls" on Leisure Suit Larry. I'd argue that this is worse than nothing, because now the parent believes they have a working parental control mechanism when they actually don't. Which means you now have a 10 year old online without parental controls AND possibly without parental supervision.

What works:

- Talk to your children about what they can be finding online.

- Don't let children as young as 5 onto the internet unsupervised.

- Build trust with your child. Try to make sure your child trusts you enough to come to you if they encounter material they're not comfortable with.

- If you don't have that relation of trust, your child will hide their online "failures" from you. They are then more likely to be victimized by online predators by blackmail etc.

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#496

Post by lambda »

quectophoton wrote: post #312
lambda wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not legislating specific APIs. They are legislating that an API has to be provided, just like other laws legislate that you have to provide accessibility APIs, but the details of the APIs are left up to the companies. I work in aviation, a highly regulated field. And that's a good thing. It does take some work to regulate well; there has been a migration in aviation to more prescriptive regulation about how…

Years later: "The current measures are a step in the right direction, but we have found them insufficient. We are now requiring the use of this specific proprietary binary blob for any action related to the verification process. It will conveniently run as a daemon so its exposed API will be accessible to any application that needs to query it, and it will automatically update itself so you don't have to worry about…

Slippery slope fallacy.

We shouldn't object to a reasonable law just becasue it might, theoretically, pave the way to an unreasonable law.

In fact, this is put in place as an alternative to the kind of law being enacted elsewhere, right now, which is much worse; the ones requiring ID based verification for accessing many online services. This one provides an alternative solution, which is far more privacy preserving, and leaves all of the actual power in the hands of the owner of the computer.

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#497

Post by lambda »

dataflow wrote: post #135
lambda wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of the California/Colorado laws is to provide an alternative to that. The whole point is that it provides a privacy preserving way to provide a signal about whether someone is in a particular age bracket, without requiring any kind of third party ID verification. I am so puzzled by everyone who objects so strongly to these operating system based opt in systems; all it does is provide for a way for a p…

I had the same reaction as you this entire time until half an hour ago when I saw the second link in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47382650 Meta being behind all of these efforts makes it incredibly suspicious, especially given the New York law is ridiculously more invasive than the California one. It sure makes it seem like there's likely a larger plan here that this is merely facilitating. So I…

Just because Facebook supports it doesn't mean it's bad. They may not support it for the same reasons, they probably just don't want the cost and liability of doing identify verification themselves and so want to make sure all of the cost and liability is on the OS vendor.

Yes, the New York proposed law is far worse, and we absolutely should be pushing back against that. And Facebook doesn't care, because they only care about moving the liability onto the OS vendor, not on actual privacy.

But still, just because this was supported by Facebook doesn't make it bad. Sure, Facebook doesn't care about privacy, but they do care about not being liable for this, and in this case, they're right, it is actually much more efficient to centralize this function in the OS, and it happens that that way it can be done in a privacy preserving way as California's law shows.

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#498

Post by martin-t »

crummy wrote: post #379
martin-t wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because people don't have real power, it's all indirect through politicians who are manipulated or paid by professionals. 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.

People want age restrictions on social media; this seems like politicians enacting the will of their constituents

That begs 2 questions:

1) Do they really? I honestly don't know, are there independent polls about this?

2) What makes them think they have any right to decide for other people's children? I would be OK with them genuinely thinking they need to surveil their own children but if 1) is true then there is this underlying need of people to control others and I am not OK with that. This is how minorities are suppressed and harassed - same mechanism, different target.

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#499

Post by freedomben »

givinguflac wrote: post #489
karlgkk wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Obviously, it's not for protecting children 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.

> There's a lot of well intentioned people writing these laws and pushing for them. No, there absolutely are not. There are Meta et al and their international lobbyists, pushing copy-paste bills. Anyone pearl clutching for the kids is an idiot, or is paid off.

If it makes you feel better to turn people who disagree with you into cartoon villains, then more power to you. But you'll lose the debate because you will only engage in strawman arguments. There are real arguments in favor of this that should not be dismissed, but should be embraced and we should explain why those arguments are weaker than ours.

I feel extremely strongly that this is a Trojan horse that will expand surveillance and control by governments and giant corporations, and ultimately be used to lock us out of our own devices. I think many people supporting this are well-meaning but extremely naive. Meta is not naive of course, they expect to come out on the top of this as a giant corporation. But there are millions upon millions of people who do support this that are not going to come out on top. Those are also the people we need to convince. We're not going to change meta's mind, but we might be able to change others minds.

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#500

Post by freedomben »

duxup wrote: post #368
microtonal wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Controlling what children do online is a solved problem: Parenting and parental control applications. 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-appropria…

It’s not a parental controls / software problem. It’s a parents showing self control / parenting and monitoring their children in person thing.

How many kids do you have? What software do you use for this continuous monitoring? How do you balance spending 18 hours a day continuously monitoring your children, with also working full-time and being a human yourself? Please elaborate on your personal system because I think you could help out a lot of people.

I am strongly against this age verification, I think this is an absolutely, catastrophically terrible idea. However, I'm also a parent who has been in the trenches. This is a damn hard problem, and we will lose our access to computing and a relatively free internet if we just sit back and say that it's on parents and parents are stupid if they don't know how to solve this problem.

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