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A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

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Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

#111

Post by maemre »

monday_ wrote: post #49

One could cope that this regulation can not apply to Linux or other OSS operating systems. But this is only true unless the bootloaders on consumer devices are mandated to be closed next. We already have Secure Boot, the infrastructure is in place. It is currently optional, but a law like this can change that.

The law is written so broadly, I think it applies to them already: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

> (c) “Application” means a software application that may be run or directed by a user on a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device that can access a covered application store or download an application.

This is basically any program.

> (e) (1) “Covered application store” means a publicly available internet website, software application, online service, or platform that distributes and facilitates the download of applications from third-party developers to users of a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing that can access a covered application store or can download an application.

This would include any package manager like dnf/apt/pacman/etc. They facilitate download of applications from third parties.

> (g) “Operating system provider” means a person or entity that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system software on a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.

This sounds to me like it would include distro maintainers. They develop and/or control the OS. Also, would this include the kernel devs? How would they be responsible for the myriad of package managers.

The overall law reeks of politicians not knowing what they're legislating.

Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

#112

Post by autoexec »

general1465 wrote: post #30
frshgts wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The definitions of the terms are completely bananas The language is so broad it seems to cover all software that exists and is accessible via the internet, and every install of an operating system on any kind of machine > (c) “Application” means a software application that may be run or directed by a user on a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device that can access a covered applicati…

> “Covered application store” means a publicly available internet website, Client side JavaScript can be considered an application, and then ad business would need to first verify that I am over 18 in order to allow me to see their ads. Ultimate ad blocker.

This law means that your operating system has to collect your age and make it avilable to every website/application so ad businesses can just get that data from our OS automatically and go right on serving ads without having to verify anything themselves.

Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

#113

Post by kgwxd »

gustavus wrote: post #5
wasmainiac wrote: post #4

Does not require verification, no biggie, this is essentially a parental control system.

No but then the next step is "well we need a way to enforce it because people are just lying about their age". I guess let me show a slope I found over here, just past the boiling frogs, watch your footing though, it's recently been greased and is quite steep.

I was just at some .gov site from another HN post. It asked are you Over 18, I clicked No out of curiosity. Showed Access Denied, but the buttons stayed. I clicked Yes, and got in. I don't attribute to stupidity that which is clear malice. They'd don't actually give a flying fuck about what "kids" can get to, they only care about controlling everyone, of every age, as much as they possibly can.

Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

#114

Post by almosthere »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #107
almosthere wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Death threats mainly. Personally I think it would be easier if they just made it so that platforms ran a tiny LLM against the content that will be posted - determined if it is a death threat, then require them to be identified before it's posted, then it would solve a lot of these problems. TLDR: Evil people be doxxed internally not everyone.

a "tiny large language model"? lol

Yeah, a small one that is cheaper because they'll be processing billions of messages per year.

Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

#115

Post by SllX »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #87
fangpenlin wrote: post #67

There's an obvious theme with lawmakers in California—they pass laws to regulate things they have zero clue about, add them to their achievement page, cheer for themselves, and declare, "There! I've made the world a better place." There are just too many examples. For instance: - Microstamping requirements for guns—printing a unique barcode on every bullet casing (Glock gen3 cannot be retired, thus, the auto-mode swi…

> There's an obvious theme with lawmakers in California You can remove the in California

Yeah but let’s not and say we didn’t.

Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

#116

Post by hn_acc1 »

beej71 wrote: post #52
crumpled wrote: post #35

Is Github an application store? Is npm? apt? yum? If not, why not? You need age verification before you even create an account.

Is `ls` an application? Is `cat`? This thing is so broadly-written, the only thing saving you from needing to give you age to your toaster is that it's not a "general-purpose" computing device. Never mind that it can run DOOM...

Do you download `ls` from anything resembling an "app store"?

Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

#117

Post by tzs »

9x39 wrote: post #80
fangpenlin wrote: post #67

There's an obvious theme with lawmakers in California—they pass laws to regulate things they have zero clue about, add them to their achievement page, cheer for themselves, and declare, "There! I've made the world a better place." There are just too many examples. For instance: - Microstamping requirements for guns—printing a unique barcode on every bullet casing (Glock gen3 cannot be retired, thus, the auto-mode swi…

I’m more curious in the genesis of these laws, whether their sponsors received written suggestions or ghostwritten bills, etc. as a form of parallel construction. It seems all at once, everywhere that many groups that have a vested interest in forcing precedent and compliance of non-anonymous access across the computer world. It smacks of something less-than-organic.

This law doesn't do anything that prevents non-anonymous access. Here's how you would access things anonymously if you bought a new computer that implemented this.

1. When you set up your account and it asks for your birthdate, make up any date you want that is at least far enough in the past to indicate an age older that what any site you might use that checks age requires.

2. Access things the way you've always done. All that has changed is that things that care about age checks find out you claim to be old enough.

The only people it actually materially affects on your new computer are people who cannot set up their own accounts, such as children if you have set up permissions so they have to get you to make their accounts.

Then if you want you can enter a birthdate that gives an age that says non-adult, so sites that check age will block them.

From a privacy and anonymity perspective this is essentially equivalent to sites that ask "Are you 18+?" and let you in if you click "yes" and block you if you click "no". It is just doing the asking locally and caching the result.

Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

#118

Post by asyx »

leptons wrote: post #95
adastra22 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies like OpenAI are advocating for this because it shifts the burden of responsibility off them. They don’t have to age verifying Microsoft is handling that for them.

As a startup owner, if there has to be age verification, then I'm all for doing that at the OS level. As a human with privacy concerns, I'll continue using Linux.

I think doing this on an OS level might be the most privacy focused way to do this but the issue is that this is not going to be the way this is implemented.

Like, I’m not American and in Germany we have ID cards that actually have your age encoded on an NFC chip in the card and an ID number that encodes the age. Like, age is part of the ID number and checksum.

You could totally do all of this age verification offline on device and just expose an API that offers the age of the user to applications. You’d never need to talk to the internet for this, the API just says if you are a minor or adult, the browser can pass that to websites who don’t need to collect personal data and everything is fine.

But that’s not going to happen. It’s gonna be some AI facial recognition kinda garbage that is gonna send your face in every angle to Apple or Microsoft or another third party.

As is common these days they are going to try really hard to absolve you as the user of any responsibility for the sake of protecting kids so they can’t let this be a simple offline thing where your personal information never ever have to leave the device because what if kids find a way around it? Well the obvious answer is don’t let your kids just use a computer without supervision but if people would do that we’d not be in need of this garbage anyway.

Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

#120

Post by lovich »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #103
leptons wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a startup owner, if there has to be age verification, then I'm all for doing that at the OS level. As a human with privacy concerns, I'll continue using Linux.

So basically, you have no morals? Weird thing to admit online, but whatever.

You’re on hacker news, a double digit percentage of posters think that doing whatever you can get away with is moral.

Look at the thread on Block’s layoffs while they are profitable.

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