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California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

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Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting, you don't think the GPL should be enforced? That requires specific behavior.

Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

#382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why must an age rating apply to an entire website? As one example, the Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) (and to a lesser extent the prior Recreational Software Advisory Council (RSACi)) had a rating scheme that allowed sites to provide a default rating label that was then overridden for individual pages and resources using tags and RDF-based labels. For example, Tumblr could set a family-friendly default ra…

Because let's say you have a website like Reddit with a mixture of 18+ and 13+ stuff. Something that's 18+ but not explicit gets really popular. Pornhub will now livestream congressional debates, someone posts a link to this, and it gets fifty zillion upvotes as people can't resist commenting "wtf". Now you have a dilemma: do you show it on the front page or not? If you show this on the front page and it's 18+, it'll…

Haven't paid video streaming services solved that one already? Admittedly not with age verification, but you can set up child accounts. I presume Disney+ is ok here as they want to be in the family-friendly market but also offer content meant for young adults.

Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it is very bad that facebook won't be accessible from Linux.

It won't be only facebook in the long run. Once this works for facebook more and more sites will be pressured to use age verification by law. Once that works well enough it will probably come for all sites, even ones that don't really need it. Take a look at the cookie law and how people handled that to see a recent example.

I've spent a hot minute trying to summarise Mat Duggan and failing, so please forgive a link drop in service of not botching the cookie banner argument:

https://matduggan.com/you-know-gdpr-is-good-based-on-who-hat...

I hold values which lead to conflicting views and opinions, which i therefore hold lightly and attempt to balance. No action or inaction is a perfect solution to a wicked problem.

- yes, people should be free to do whatever they want with their computers - yes, people should have the freedom to exercise their independent choices - unfortunately, there is no such thing as independent choice (unless, maybe, you were already living as a hermit) - it is ostrichism to pretend that zuckerberg (to use him as shorthand) has not unilaterally and unaccountably engineered society to his own ends - society has shown considerable appetite to rein him (etc) in, for legitimate reasons - i do not, generally, support banning harmful things when stakeholders exist who favour those things - i also do not think that the existence of stakeholders who benefit should excuse all harm - therefore, this ugly compromise is approximately no worse than the least bad course of action or inaction

Things are shit. We are in shit. For all of history, we have always been in some or other grade of shit. We can sometimes choose between different piles of shit, but "not being in shit" is not an option. I find horseshit less objectionable than catshit, and so do many others; so here we are, actively jumping into horseshit.

Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

#385
post #17

Excellent. From now on all kids will become linux natives. The decade of the linux desktop is coming!

I credit Minecraft with getting an entire generation comfortable using command line statements.

This honestly is probably true, given when I help students write personal statements for applying to uni, the most common way they got into computer science is video games. I know for me 16 years ago that was true also.

Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

#386
post #62

So is anyone going to revert the commits that jumped the gun on this? E.g. systemd's birthdate field https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954

Why does birthdate trigger y'all so much, but physical location (literally the field right before it, that you can see in the diff context) doesn't? Shouldn't we be protesting even harder against systemd tracking our physical location?

Didn't physical location exist back when mainframes were a thing? Unix users would use it to find others IRL. Usually you wouldn't mind other users of the mainframe being able to visit you, that was the purpose of the field. But birth date? There are not really any genuine uses for that being at the system level. It's being used exclusively to add restrictions and lock things down, and that's exactly the kind of thing Free Software is not-for.

Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

#387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but of minimal practical impact. The Free and Open Source community has long discouraged releasing software into the public domain, as it has clear drawbacks compared to just using a permissive licence. The legal intricacies of the public domain vary between jurisdictions. Not all jurisdictions even allow copyrights to be surrendered in this way. [0] Licence-free isn't a concern. That isn't even close to Free a…

This is exactly what GP was talking about: entrenching a preference for one style of licensing over another. We all know what set of licenses the FOSS zealots would prefer for us to release code under, and those who release license-free or public domain software anyway typically do it with full knowledge of such arguments.

> entrenching a preference for one style of licensing over another.

Sure, that's true. The intent of the law is to give a special carve-out for, in essence, Free and Open Source software. It seems clear that it was deliberately written so as not to include proprietary freeware, say.

> We all know what set of licenses the FOSS zealots would prefer for us to release code under, and those who release license-free or public domain software anyway typically do it with full knowledge of such arguments.

Like what? Really, it's very rare for code to be released into the public domain like this. I've never seen a compelling argument for doing so. If your intention is to make the code available to all, to do with as they wish, the legal reality is that the best way to achieve this is to release the software under a permissive licence, rather than releasing it to the public domain.

If the exemption really doesn't cover public domain software, that presumably means that, as the copyrights on Free and Open Source software eventually expire and they enter the public domain, they will no longer be exempt. Again though this isn't of practical concern.

edit Come to think of it, publicly available software developed by the US federal government is released into the public domain, right? There doesn't seem to be much software like this though.

Direct link to the text of the bill: https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB1856/id/3456513

Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

#389
post #62

So is anyone going to revert the commits that jumped the gun on this? E.g. systemd's birthdate field https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954

Why does birthdate trigger y'all so much, but physical location (literally the field right before it, that you can see in the diff context) doesn't? Shouldn't we be protesting even harder against systemd tracking our physical location?

There’s no legislation coercing that field. systemd is doing what GECOS and chfn and .plan allow, but OS vendors are free to remove GECOS, chfn or .plan support.

Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

#390
This is not the way.

You can't legislate away gray area content to children, what you can legislate is algorithmic recommendation of such content.

Regulate algorithmic recommendation, revert back to chronological timeline of people / groups of interest and 99% of the problems will be solved. Won't be profitable for social media giants though

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