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Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

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Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#111

Post by user3939382 »

Havoc wrote: post #65
uyzstvqs wrote: post #51

People need to understand the difference between age indication and age verification . Two very different things. Age indication is a completely private and realistically as-effective alternative to the invasive age verification . Age _indication_ means that when you set up your device or create a user account, you enter a date of birth for the user. The OS then provides a native API to return a user's age bracket (n…

That's just setting things up for a smoother slippery slope... As appealing as the private part sounds I genuinely think it may make the situation worse here by facilitating the transition & muddying the waters

We all have opinions, mine is you’re just incredibly naïve if you don’t understand that these laws are a shim to establish an eventual chain that links TPM to your license to end anonymous Internet usage.

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#112

Post by gzread »

kelnos wrote: post #83
packetlost wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. I don’t see how that’s better in any real way. You can infer the exact same information as querying the range and it makes dynamic behavior based on age range (ex. access to age restricted chat rooms as an obvious example) completely impossible. 2. Is it meaningfully more identifying than User-Agent? There’s dozens of other datapoints for uniquely identifying a user. If we get a few high profile lawsuits because a…

> I don’t see how that’s better in any real way. It's so much better. In the one case, the OS is leaking age information (even if just an age range) to every service it talks to. In the other case, the OS isn't telling anyone anything, and is just responding to the age rating that the app/service advertises.

How would you implement a feed of mixed content? Say you're YouTube and some videos are about puppies and some videos are about guns? How would you hide only the gun videos from the homepage when the user is under 16?

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#113

Post by gzread »

user3939382 wrote: post #111
Havoc wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just setting things up for a smoother slippery slope... As appealing as the private part sounds I genuinely think it may make the situation worse here by facilitating the transition & muddying the waters

We all have opinions, mine is you’re just incredibly naïve if you don’t understand that these laws are a shim to establish an eventual chain that links TPM to your license to end anonymous Internet usage.

And you're incredibly naive if you think the TPM-linked internet usage isn't a shim to put a camera in your toilet bowl.

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#114

Post by gzread »

shevy-java wrote: post #97
uyzstvqs wrote: post #51

People need to understand the difference between age indication and age verification . Two very different things. Age indication is a completely private and realistically as-effective alternative to the invasive age verification . Age _indication_ means that when you set up your device or create a user account, you enter a date of birth for the user. The OS then provides a native API to return a user's age bracket (n…

In both cases the operating system stores information it has zero business with.

The operating system already stores your full name. Isn't that a problem?

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#115

Post by gzread »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #12
ekr____ wrote: post #9

OP is certainly right that a lot of this legislation is written in ways that are hard to interpret and that often seem like they would have undesirable side effects even under the assumption that the basic idea is good (whether that's actually true is a whole different question). In the specific case of CA AB1043: (1) Systems are required to ask the user for their age and just trust whatever they say (2) Applications…

> Systems are required to ask the user for their age and just trust whatever they say If you're going to do anything like this, this is the thing they actually get right. It removes the inconvenience, privacy invasion, forced use of corporate verifiers with perverse incentives, etc. Meanwhile if the user is actually a child then their age is set by their parent. > Applications are required to query the system for the…

> This is classic legislative stupidity. Applications are required to query the user's age range even if they contain no age-restricted content? Brilliant.

This is classic programmer stupidity attempting to read the law in the stupidest possible way. No - if the application needs to know the user's age because of a content restriction, it shall query the system for that, instead of getting it some other way. Unlike computer code, laws are understood by humans in a context.

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#116

Post by amenhotep »

kelnos wrote: post #85
txrx0000 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the clarification. Regarding what to do with algorithmic feeds, instead of forcing platforms like Facebook to be less evil, we should give parents the ability to simply uninstall Facebook, and prevent it from being installed by the child. We could implement a password lock for app installation/updates at the OS-level that can be enabled in the phone's settings, that works like Linux's sudo. Every time you…

> instead of forcing platforms like Facebook to be less evil, we should give parents the ability to simply uninstall Facebook, and prevent it from being installed by the child. Isn't that how parental controls already work? There are problems, though: 1. The kids want to use Facebook. If parent A refuses to let their kid use Facebook, then kids B, C, D, E, F... all use Facebook and kid A becomes a social outcast. Thi…

It's possible to mandate effective parental controls and then say "it's illegal to give your child access to facebook" and then just see what happens. You don't have to jump straight to making it technologically guaranteed by construction, maybe it's enough to just give parents the tools and an excuse to say no.

We don't need DNA testing locks on cans of beer that won't let you drink from them unless you're an adult, do we? It's perfectly possible for a parent to buy their child all the beer they want, and there's nothing stopping the children from trying to peer pressure them into it, and in many countries it's not even generally illegal to let your child drink beer! And yet almost all parents are able to almost completely enforce a reasonable level of restricted access, simply because society frowns upon it.

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#117

Post by txrx0000 »

lloeki wrote: post #103
txrx0000 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. The current norm of social siloing apps was created by these tech companies in the first place. What regulators can do is discourage anti-competitive practices that lock users into specific software and hardware platforms. If there's plenty of competition for every kind of social app, and competition for OSes, and users could freely choose and move between them, then not having a particular app would not result in…

> Phone companies have decided you don't need that feature.Bu actually, they can easily implement a nice UI in the settings for the firewall and lock it behind a password, then parents would be able to use it to block individual websites. iOS: Settings > Screen Time > Content & Privacy Restrictions > Toggle on Then same area: - App Installations & Purchases: disallow all - App Store, Media, Web & Games > Web Content…

Apple is indeed better than most other companies on #2. But that's because it's the worst offender on #1. Its strategy is to appear to be the model company that cares about user rights and privacy, in hopes of capturing everyone in their closed-source walled garden that's already surveiling you at the OS level.

They're a part of the corp-gov surveillance complex [0]. This is the real threat behind the age verification push. The feds already have mass surveillance capabilities in iOS and macOS, and even Windows and most Android distros, but not on most open-source Linux distros, so they're starting to force it legally in the open. They're desperate because Linux is about to outcompete the enshittified Windows on desktops.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Revelations

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#118

Post by hypeatei »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #70
hypeatei wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with your overall sentiment that this is benign because it's ineffectual in its current state. If anything, this is going to warm people up to the idea of government mandated prompts gathering personal information in their OS, and legislators in 2030 (or whenever) are going to say: "this isn't working, lets build on top of that prompt we already have and make it verify IDs" In other words, I think this fir…

> This is the governments first plunge into mandating things on the frontend. ADA mandates computer accessibility, as frequently interpreted by courts. CCPA & GDPR mandate a whole bunch of stuff. Hardly the first plunge.

In the context of surveillance, yes it is. I know the EU is looking down the barrel of chat control, but I'm pretty sure this California law has already been passed and goes into effect January 2027.

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#119

Post by ben-schaaf »

petre wrote: post #87

This is stupid. The age should be in the passwd gecos field or somewhere else in the user's config directory. Not in systemd. Unix-ike systems are multiuser. Now I wonder what age to put in the root, adm or games accounts.

Systemd actually manages /etc/passwd, /etc/group, /etc/shadow, etc. using a json database called userdb. Adding a field to systemd's userdb is how you add a gecos field.

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#120

Post by kgwxd »

DrinkyBird wrote: post #17
pgt wrote: post #13

Fellow software engineers, what are we doing here? Why are we letting the EU / UK define the future of software?

1. The UK and EU are rather large markets that they don’t want to miss out on. 2. There are software engineers in the UK and EU. 3. This specific implementation by Apple is not actually required by any UK or EU law, to my knowledge. 4. This specifically is or will be required by the laws of some US states and other countries.

1 Since when is Linux about marketing? And who is "they"?

2 Devs for companies can start working with proprietary OSes for the businesses they sell their soul to.

3 Who cares what apple is doing.

4 And systemd should not be liable for upholding any of them.

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