I'm starting to warm up to this law. So many loopholes. Nothing to worry about. I think California's incompetence has finally progressed from "proposes bad laws" to "proposes and botches the implementation of bad laws"
What loopholes?
California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law
261–270 of 410 posts
Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law
#262All Android phones then too, right?
Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law
#263nobody is worried about about the arbitrarian aspects? What if you are interested in developing your own OS (a task that would have been monumental but may become trivial with LLMs in the future)? Why is the proper level the OS? Why not the browser or the hypervisor? Or perhaps manufacturer should remember your age? What if hardware is resold? We would need a hardware cadastre! A global hardware cadastre would unite…
The proper level is actually the device. The government doesn't care about how you arbitrarily divide the device software into components - only how they are non-arbitrarily provided by different people.
Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
on-device filtering is the right way to go, but it shouldn’t be a matter of sending metadata about the user to a service- instead services should provide standard metadata about the content to the device and the device can choose what, if anything, to display. This preserves privacy better by keeping more information about the user local, and gives people better tools to decide what metadata categories they want to f…
That's much harder to implement. If you ban advertising eg. online casinos to underge users, the service would have to send two different ads (one 18+ and one for younger people too), and the browser would have to decide which one to play. Same for eg searching on google, browsers would have to filter out every with adult content, meaning half the page would be empty, but with a browser "underage" flag, google could…
Plus, as soon as the user clicks on one of these optionally filtered elements, the service will know how exactly what browser is filtering.
Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law
#265We got into this mess because people wanted Facebook to have age verification, and MZ decided to push the responsibility on to OSes. The result looks to me like Facebook will ban access from non-approved OSes like Linux. Android will still be allowed, GrapheneOS probably not.
How do you ban access to a website based on the OS of the user?
According to the existing law, Facebook can't provide service to any user whose OS doesn't say they're old enough. According to this new law, Linux won't say that. So Linux users won't be allowed to use Facebook.
Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law
#266We got into this mess because people wanted Facebook to have age verification, and MZ decided to push the responsibility on to OSes. The result looks to me like Facebook will ban access from non-approved OSes like Linux. Android will still be allowed, GrapheneOS probably not.
TBH, OS based parental filters are the optimal solution here, especially if implemented in a proper way. Kids don't buy phones and computers, parents do. When setting up the account for the first time, the parents could set the account to be an "underage one", all the apps, browsers, etc., would get the USER_IS_UNDERAGE flag and filter content according to that. No need for every site to ask and verify the age, just…
Yes. It's extremely sensible and I believe opposition to it is a shill campaign by companies like Meta.
Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
TBH, OS based parental filters are the optimal solution here, especially if implemented in a proper way. Kids don't buy phones and computers, parents do. When setting up the account for the first time, the parents could set the account to be an "underage one", all the apps, browsers, etc., would get the USER_IS_UNDERAGE flag and filter content according to that. No need for every site to ask and verify the age, just…
on-device filtering is the right way to go, but it shouldn’t be a matter of sending metadata about the user to a service- instead services should provide standard metadata about the content to the device and the device can choose what, if anything, to display. This preserves privacy better by keeping more information about the user local, and gives people better tools to decide what metadata categories they want to f…
That solution doesn't actually work, and it angers me that people can't see why it doesn't work. That solution requires that the entire website must be child-safe or none of it. That solution requires that Tumblr must ban porn if Tumblr has any underage users. The alternative would be that Tumblr would randomly not load for underage users because some recommendation or ad would be over 18, and so it would rapidly have none.
Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
TBH, OS based parental filters are the optimal solution here, especially if implemented in a proper way. Kids don't buy phones and computers, parents do. When setting up the account for the first time, the parents could set the account to be an "underage one", all the apps, browsers, etc., would get the USER_IS_UNDERAGE flag and filter content according to that. No need for every site to ask and verify the age, just…
Exactly like GDPR shouldn't have mandated millions of websites to pop up a consent form, as a global browser setting could would have set consent as a user preference. But the objective of these regulations aren't what it says on the tin.
The objective is exactly what it says on the tin. The malicious compliance is someone else's objective.
Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law
#269We got into this mess because people wanted Facebook to have age verification, and MZ decided to push the responsibility on to OSes. The result looks to me like Facebook will ban access from non-approved OSes like Linux. Android will still be allowed, GrapheneOS probably not.
Facebook was the excuse (and there's a no zero chance Meta funded the initiative themselves). The government's worldwide jumped on it so quickly partially becsuse they've been trying to find aan excuse to control the internet for decades. Never dismiss how quick they are to push stuff like this but how slow they are to enact actual positive change for the people.
But California AB1043 is an anti-control law.
Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article says > These amendments redefine the term “operating system provider” to exclude any person or entity that distributes an OS or application “under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.” Any software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses satisfies that test, which removes the likes of Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and the BSD family from AB…
There is an open source version of Android released by Google (AOSP), but it's mostly permissively licensed (pretty much everything except the kernel), and the versions of Android that ship with nearly all devices (even Pixel devices) have modifications that are not open source. It's not just the app store, it's the actual services exposed as APIs. Thus, projects like Lineage and Graphene not being subject, but Googl…
On the other hand, this law doesn't require "age verification" beyond requiring users to supply their date of birth, and the Steam application already does this before displaying content only deemed appropriate for those over a certain age.
So the only thing that really changes in the Steam case is the timing of the question, and possibly how and where the (unverified) answer is recorded.