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California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash
201–210 of 525 posts
Re: California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is an admission from the writers that this law is unrelated to safety and people should very loudly and frequently point that out. If OSes that don't verify the age of their users are a genuinely unsafe for children, why should they be allowed just because they are open source? That doesn't seem to mitigate dangers associated with age in any away I can identify.
Have you considered that the writers typically have legislative but not technical skills and are just trying to placate upset voters, without really understanding what the optimal solution could be? Reading this and other threads you can see therea re plenty of highly technical people who struggle to articulate what kind of policy they want or what kind of parental controls they want to set up themselves? It's kind o…
> One can point out that such electoral pitches are dishonest bullshit until one is blue in the face, but the fact is they work on a lot of voters because most of them are not smart and don't have the energy or inclination to research every issue.
Democracy, like the free market, is viable only for informed participants. But once a certain large mass of participants are no longer informed - willfully or not - the system fails for all participants.
Re: California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Certainly parents can install parental control software, but what does this have to do with children's PII being shared with sites? The parent can block or just never approve all the sites that require PII. but it's not PII as usually regarded We will never agree here. All the companies I worked for financial considered any attribute of the person to be PII, even their IP address. We were audited very strictly on thi…
Thanks for your explanation. I understand what you're talking about, but this all just seems to be entirely orthogonal to age assurance mandates, which are largely about controlling which content and experiences minors engage with, in many cases regardless of what parents want. Again, this isn't an endorsement of these mandates; I'm just saying that what you're proposing here doesn't address the objectives that polic…
doesn't address the objectives that policymakers who are in favor of these mandates are trying to achieve.
Oh trust me, I get it. They and I will never align. I know I am beyond beating the dead horse. It's gone from bone dust to micronized dust to sub-atomic particles to sub-quantum particles at this point. That poor horse will never be forgotten. Perhaps it is an illness on my part but I will find a way to bring this up every time until the year 2150 after which point this will be the least of anyone's concerns.
Re: California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash
#204Patching inherently bad legislation doesn’t solve the problems it’ll cause.
Re: California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is correct. It is not the government's job to raise our children. The more we ask the gov't to do that we should do, the less power we actually have. Some will say this ship has sailed, well, I say it's not too late to sink it.
On the other hand, I know several "home-schooled" people [0] who literally can't even read and later married people more than twice their age or had other serious deficiencies in their life potential. The government can probably step in a little more here and there. [0] I also know home-schooled people whose parents are far better than any teacher I've ever had and whose education and achievements reflect that obviou…
Public education is extremely different from age checks in apps. Yes, homeschooled people are generally really dumb because humans are not born with the knowledge of the world or how to teach it. This is different from California telling Debian to ask for user ages.
Re: California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
No such mandates should take place at all.
This is correct. It is not the government's job to raise our children. The more we ask the gov't to do that we should do, the less power we actually have. Some will say this ship has sailed, well, I say it's not too late to sink it.
Earlier today there was a large thread on HN about the golden age of child rearing, from time immemorial to about two decades ago, when children started getting sent home and parents got a stern talking to from the police, just for owning a pocket knife or biking home alone.
We really can't have it both ways, that every failure of the child is blamed on the parent for lapsing in their almost totalitarian oversight, while also idealizing the idea that children must make their own mistakes and gradually growing into responsibilities and self-governance. Except having access to the Internet, apparently.
Taking a step back, this all smells like madeleines and a yearning for the good old days when everyone rode bikes and nobody owned smartphones. That's not really a productive stance on anything.
(If you would ask me, and I'm sure nobody would, I would think that there is a sort of trade-off here but with a clear answer: Make clear restrictions about buying cigarettes, alcohol, abusive content and extreme porn. But these restrictions aren't meant to be technically perfect. It's ok that some kids will learn to lift the limits and explore what is forbidden. At least then they would know that there is some reason society collectively considers these things off-limits, and that they soon will be in a mistake of their own making.)
Re: California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, no news sites for kids. Correct. Until parent or guardian puts in password next to the text that says "Approve this site, forever." You gave me an idea. Maybe there could be categories similar in concept to those that exist in corporate firewalls today that say things like: - News Category (Known to be SFW) - News Category (That may be NSFW) - Child friendly sites - Social media sites ... and so on. This could…
What is [N]SFW under your definition? I don't think anybody has a problem with children seeing an adult heterosexual couple kissing, but what about a teenage couple? A homosexual couple? A mixed-race couple? A couple with a 40 year age gap? Audible moaning? Groping under clothes? Implied but not explicit hands touching genitals? Dripping saliva and face licking? The problem with defining categories is that artists wi…
What is [N]SFW under your definition?
I do not have a proposal for that. I'm only covering the issue of sharing any personal attributes of a child or anyone with any corporations as they have proven time and time again they can not be trusted with it. If anything they have proven beyond any shadow of doubt they can not be trusted with anything.
I will leave the NSFW definitions to yourself and others. Since the W stands for Work I guess company management and HR get some say in it too. I don't know where they get their standards from.
Ages ago I worked for a company that hosted porn and their standards were uniquely liberal.
Re: California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash
#208A cynical person might suspect that the reason they are doing this is so that Linux developers don't have standing to challenge the law on 1st amendment grounds...
LEarn to take a win as a win. People who are unable to look at anything without seeing themselves being scammed are clinically paranoid.
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Re: California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
For (A) I guess you are right, we won't agree. I do like your username however. For (B) this is already a thing. Porn sites and already doing this. Instead of blocking a region I am proposing to stop blocking and instead the law permit them to just add a header. The only people I can imagine apposing this are commercial VPN providers.
> Porn sites and already doing this. I think a better example might be places like polymarket (not allowed to operate in us) or usatoday (serves an EU only version with no cookies). The technical limitations on those systems are both GeoIP as far as I'm aware, and that seem sufficient for regulators. What I find more interesting is that what you want is within the scope of this law. It's only required that the operat…
Are small children losing money on gambling sites already? If so I have not been paying attention. That really needs to be reigned in as they are likely using their parents credit cards without their permission. We need to break that habit before they reach the age of consent and that becomes a punishable crime. Our prison system already has too many young people. That's an awful way to start.
Re: California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash
#210Not just Linux. More specifically: “Operating system provider” does not mean a person or entity that distributes an operating system or application under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.
Yes, I wonder what false positives and false negatives will result from that definition. I suppose Microsoft permits corporate licensees to copy (to all their PCs and servers), redistribute (internally), and modify (by corporate software developers and also by sysadmins using group policy) the software.
Maybe it should say, the software 'code' - requiring open source code - and to do it all 'for free'.