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Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

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Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#131

Post by user3939382 »

gzread wrote: post #113
user3939382 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

First they say they need your age, then they say they need proof. We already have a huge sudden trend of online services requiring your license, so your absurd comparison is a ridiculous non-sequitur.

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#133

Post by jcgl »

Cyph0n wrote: post #58
ChocolateGod wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC all that's been done is a field has been added to store the user date of birth and a protocol that can be used to retrieve said date. That's it.

Okay, but why do this now ? If it’s such an important feature and unrelated to the barrage of legislation, why was this not implemented a few months or years ago?

Because someone came with a pull request for this; this additional field was meant to support a feature in something else they were working on (an xdg portal). It was a simple PR that addressed a need that the programmer had. And it was accepted.

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#134

Post by jcgl »

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.

Look up systemd-userdb (the systemd component that added this field). Like the sibling comment said, this is basically equivalent to adding a GECOS field. A totally optional field.

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#136

Post by AnthonyMouse »

gzread wrote: post #115
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

> This is classic programmer stupidity attempting to read the law in the stupidest possible way.

Except you're the one missing the context. What they're trying to do with that provision is force everybody to check if someone is designated as a minor so they can't claim that they didn't know. If they let you choose whether to check then you choosing not to check could make it harder to punish you when there is a dispute about whether something should have been shown to a minor, so they wrote it in a way that lets them punish you more easily if you check and also punish you more easily (for not checking) if you don't.

The problem then follows that everyone is stupidly required to check even when it's totally unambiguous there is nothing to be done with the information, because of the risk of someone trying to punish anyone who doesn't check in order to prevent the precedent that some people aren't required to and correspondingly can't be assumed to have knowledge of someone's age.

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#138

Post by dzikimarian »

ddtaylor wrote: post #126
dzikimarian wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? A lot of parents uses Family Link and similar solutions, which are way more invasive than that.

Those are examples of software people choose to use voluntarily. The context here is government removing that choice and forcing you to use something under the conditions they set. I'm sure there are parental controls for many that go too far or not far enough. A reminder of why the government trying to solve parenting problems is likely to fail like most of their other attempts, such as failing to stop people from g…

I agree to some extent, but who should make parental controls reasonable then? What corporations deliver is both invasive and ineffective.

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#139

Post by PinkSheep »

vaylian wrote: post #93
stephbook wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how?

It establishes that operating systems have the necessary infrastructure to reveal information about their users in a standardized way to other systems on the internet. Once that is established, it is easier for politicians to push for newer laws that add more features to reveal even more information. Politicians can propose any unrealistic law they want. But it is much easier for them, to convince a necessary majorit…

This forewarning is underestimated. Russia had begun it's path to Internet censorship through "think of the children" and to fight piracy. Started off as simple DNS and IP blocks, mandatory for all B2C ISPs. Now every egress international connection is being analyzed by DPI, VPNs, SSH are broken: the traffic inspection and interception (TCP RST among other things) has to be circumvented. Major messenger apps are blocked: WhatsApp, Telegram (intermittent connectivity), Viber etc. to force people to use the unencrypted local app (an FB Messenger equivalent, called "Max" by VK).

There are now plans to expand the traffic analysis systems' aggregate bandwidth to nearly 1 petabits/s (sic) by 2030 with the expected total budget of 59B Roubles (470M USD).

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#140

Post by pyuser583 »

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…

Had this problem with my kid - social media caused serious mental health issues. Toxic content in kids areas.

But taking it away was worse.

Once “not using it” isn’t an option, government intervention becomes reasonable.

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