Curious how OpenBSD or Haiku will comply.
By adding a simple birthdate field to your account info and a system API of some sort for retrieving the account owner's age range, same as everyone else.
Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill
41–50 of 473 posts
Re: Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one who matters uses HN or cares about HN. The handful of us on HN who are in or near a position to affect change are basically here due to habit or $#itposting until we get banned. So they are right in that sense - commenting on HN is cathartic but ultimately useless. And the people who matter and are against this also don't use HN because they view this platform as toxic and reactionary.
There are software engineers who directly work for the platforms lobbying for this whom post here.
ICs don't matter. I can fire one and hire 5, and increasingly, the demographics on HN don't align with those who work in those organizations.
HN is basically slashdot now.
Re: Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill
#43Why suddenly are all of the blue states doing this BS? What is going on and what control is this affording the government?
Blue states: paternalism over your property, liberty for your body Red states: paternalism over your body, liberty for your property
except for during covid, where there was a weird reversal.
Re: Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill
#44This coordinated state level attack on the legislative process is crazy. These people can't seem to be bothered to do the basics of governing, but they always find time to do this cross-state nightmare fuel.
Re: Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill
#45I don't like this whole thing, but compared to what I was fearing would happen, this idea is nowhere near as bad. What I expected was that we'd end up with the OS vendors actually being mandated to really do age verification, and then submitting that using Web Credentials and Secure Attestation so that the far end could trust the whole thing, locking open-source OS's out of the mix and creating more of a walled garde…
Websites can send down a single header indicating adult content. The device, the parent setup to indicate the users age, can respect that. Legitimate adult websites will not show the content. There is no need for any verification beyond that or it's just government mandated surveillance.
> There is no need for any verification beyond that or it's just government mandated surveillance.
There is no verification beyond that in these sorts of bills (CA, CO, IL). It's the parent's responsibility to watch their kids when they set up an account.
> Legitimate adult websites will not show the content.
This is a big problem (that won't necessarily be solved by this particular legislation, granted). There are already voluntary rating HTML tags websites can add to indicate parental control software should block them, but they're voluntary and non-standardized. Websites can choose not to comply with no real-world consequences. And I don't think platforms like Reddit or X, which are ostensibly all-ages social media but also have an abundance of adult content, are properly set up to serve tags like that on NSFW posts but not other ones.
It's a tricky problem to solve, and, imo, it's one the tech industry has demonstrated it doesn't have any desire to solve itself, hence legislation starting to get involved.
> Websites can send down a single header indicating adult content.
It sounds at first glance like a no-brainer that websites shouldn't have access to any information and the enforcement should be done at a local level (like the current voluntary HTML tags that locally installed parental control software can sometimes read). But some websites might want to display alternate content to minors-- e.g. a Wikipedia article with some images withheld, or Reddit sending a user back to an all-ages subreddit instead of just fully breaking or failing to load when the user stumbles upon something 18+. For anything like that, the website will need to know in some form that the user isn't able to see 18+ content.
Re: Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill
#46It's kinda convenient because every service needs to ask you for the age now because they can't serve under 13s in a lot of cases. Having it be a simple API would be a decent convenience, no?
If you connect it with a permission system where you can choose whether to provide this information (e.g. >13 as a bool or age as an integer or the birthday as a date) that can't be too bad I guess?
I haven't read the whole thing of course.
Re: Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill
#47I don't like this whole thing, but compared to what I was fearing would happen, this idea is nowhere near as bad. What I expected was that we'd end up with the OS vendors actually being mandated to really do age verification, and then submitting that using Web Credentials and Secure Attestation so that the far end could trust the whole thing, locking open-source OS's out of the mix and creating more of a walled garde…
> Can someone tell me whether I am being a fool by actually being a bit relieved it's going this way? You're being a fool by actually being a bit relieved it's going this way. These bills are meant to nudge the overton window[0] of digital politics in the direction of mandating realtime identity verification for all forms of computing. Advertisers want it, governments want it, _bad people and bad governments want it_…
You shouldn't be downvoted for this, the problem is exactly as you described.
Re: Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill
#48this is completely insane. we need some kind of constitutional amendment to get rid of all this kind legislation forever.
it's entirely possible such nonsense is all show, and wouldn't be passed, however. i'm from illinois, worked in california, and no longer live in either. from afar, it seems that whatever california bureaucrats propose, after a short delay, gets proposed by their little sibling bureaucrats in illinois.
This. IL and MA follow whatever CA does with a few year lag. Considerations of sanity never enter into the discussion.
Re: Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill
#49If I’m not mistaken, Meta has been lobbying heavily for all of these age-verification bills lately. It seems their strategy is to externalize their responsibility to verify age themselves, and thus reduce their exposure to liabilities when child protection acts like COPPA are violated.
How should they do it? Surely they don't have a responsibility to do something that nobody knows how to do?
There have been numerous cases in history where governments have attempted to legislate the outcome they want without regard to how that might be done or if it was possible in the first place. Obviously it can never deliver the results they want.
It would be like passing a law to say every company must operate an office on the moon, and then saying that companies lobbying for an advanced NASA space program is them externalising their responsibility.
Re: Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill
#50this is completely insane. we need some kind of constitutional amendment to get rid of all this kind legislation forever.
constitutional amendment to criminalise corporate lobbying with severe penalties - including capital punishment and confiscation of entire corporation.