A lot of people are not stupid. Age verification is a backdoor for control. I read and did not even bother to comment, it's like yay, that horrendous thing they were trying to do now it's not applied to everyone. I'm also sorry for California, such a beautiful place and full of wonderful people. I hope it will recover one day.
A lot of people are stupid though. The law had zero age verification in it for example, but tons of breathless conspiracy theorists are claiming that's what it is about.
Hope you all are excited for the most important parts of the internet to be completely unusable by default on Linux in a few years.
This. This literally makes it illegal for social media sites to serve Linux clients. The previous bill (the one that propagandists call "age verification") was actually really good, and this one is really bad.
Good, I will be sure to use only illegal social media sites from now on
I think you're misreading it. It doesn't ban Linux from providing age collection and verification. It makes it a choice, rather than mandatory. I would expect that Linux users want access to age-verified apps just as much as other users, so such a signal will be available. Also, you're being overly pedantic on the language used. It transfers liability away from the service, more easily allowing operation in about hal…
Age verification implies that age is verified, which is a complete and total lie
Nobody cares about the distinction except pro-age gating activists. I don’t want any law that requires specific behavior from the OS, whether it’s verification, attestation, or something else.
So someone said something I think sarcastically that deserves a fresh comment. "From now on all kids will become linux natives. The decade of the linux desktop is coming!" I teach technology K-8. So I have a front row seat to observing how the next generation navigates this new digital wasteland. Due to the aggressive censorship and locked nature of their computing experience at school, think Go Guardian, they have b…
I somewhat agree and somewhat disagree. If your students haven’t completely disabled GoGuardian, they are only working within the system. At least when I was a student working on this problem, I spent some time writing some software that would selectively disable and enable GoGuardian features, but my peers were not. I’d imagine similar exists today, a “good enough” approach beats out a technically sound one. “Unblocked” games or websites rely on a brute-force “what are they going to do about it” ideology that doesn’t work when the person you are disagreeing with isn’t a 50 year old man that lacks motivation. If it can’t be explained in a minute, it’s probably unlikely any more than one in one hundred actually do it. As hopeful as I’d like to be about this, I’d doubt the next generation gets adept at anything more than lying about their age online.
As for the bill itself, it's one of those that gets passed because it is non invasive to the typical person, it's voluntary, and it should help some. There is no downside at all. But 2 years from now a baseline has been established where the need to know your age when using a computer is taken for granted, and it's revealed that self-reporting isn't working and gasp there was this one kid in the news about something…
The baseline is already being established. In the majority of US states now you have to send your photo ID to a 3rd party to access "adult content". The conspiracy theories around the California and Illinois laws are senseless given the speed run the rest of the country is doing to ending privacy online. We get threads with hundreds of comments about California "fighting against privacy" and basically silence on the…
I agree, it's just a different vector to entry based on content. California is stepping it up to computing as a whole. Combine the two. Then the next step is actual ID, not an ID clearinghouse. But we're all paranoid for suggesting such things, just as people were paranoid that we'd get this far.
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.
I’m sure there will be a package available on day 1 that will tell all sites you’re 30+ and should be allowed in. Probably even just a Firefox add-on, not a full OS package.
We 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.
will that include other FB services like whatsapp and Insta? Given how unethical FB is it highly likely they will try to ban those services too in hope for stirring discontent.
If they’re American, guns are just part of our education system.
They aren't but they should be. Many lives could be saved by making gun safety a mandatory class for all US students. If every kid had to learn the basic rules of gun safety, a significant number of accidental deaths could be prevented, and even many not so "accidental" deaths could be prevented because people would immediately recognize when someone else is being unsafe with guns. And gun safety rules are good thing…
You think that kind of scenario cannot exist? That is your reasoning for dismissing it? You’ll hafta do better than that.
The true version of the trolley problem requires perfect knowledge of the future. This can't exist in the real world.
So you’re being pedantic? Future forecasts and estimates can’t mesh with the trolly problem? If that’s your stance sure, you are correct. I do feel like you missed the whole point of the exercise though, and are hiding behind an absolute that is never achievable.