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Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification

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Re: Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification

#151

Post by xp84 »

kej wrote: post #58

I feel like all of these laws are being designed backwards. Content providers, like MPAA films, should have to identify what sort of content they are providing. Then I can give my kids a device configured to allow some or all of that at my discretion. Requiring my kids' devices to advertise their age (or their age "bucket", as if that was a meaningful difference) to protect them is not doing me or my kids any favors.

Did you read the law? It actually imposes very (in my humble opinion) good rules on the content providers, specifically social media. We know why social media is addictive - the personalized feeds are highly optimized to extend usage time, with no amount of time being "good enough." Social media sites would be banned from using this type of feed, limiting it to feeds of content you've subscribed to or requested only. Instead of seeing mainly influencers and viral videos, people might even start seeing their friends' own content.

> Requiring my kids' devices to advertise their age ... to protect them is not doing me or my kids any favors.

Idk about you, but it'd be doing me favors because my kids will not be physically able to use the most addictive platforms that exist today in their current form. It would be a major disruption to the behavioral manipulation that Meta, TikTok, and X do.

Re: Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification

#152

Post by avianlyric »

nickff wrote: post #84
kej wrote: post #58

I feel like all of these laws are being designed backwards. Content providers, like MPAA films, should have to identify what sort of content they are providing. Then I can give my kids a device configured to allow some or all of that at my discretion. Requiring my kids' devices to advertise their age (or their age "bucket", as if that was a meaningful difference) to protect them is not doing me or my kids any favors.

Having the ability to identify who is watching or saying what on the internet would be immensely useful to the government; the justifications are really meaningless. Anti-money-laundering is a comparable field, as all the AML regulations and laws are ineffective at identifying money launderers, but they're wonderful for verifying (auditing and prosecuting) tax compliance.

> Anti-money-laundering is a comparable field, as all the AML regulations and laws are ineffective at identifying money launderers, but they're wonderful for verifying (auditing and prosecuting) tax compliance.

As someone who’s implemented AML, KYC, and tax reporting functions in a bank. I think you would be very surprised at how shit they are for tax auditing at scale. Unless the tax man is specifically auditing you, and basically requesting all your transaction details, the reporting that banks do would only allow tax agencies to catch the most brazen and incompetent tax dodgers.

All of the tools however do make much harder to perform money laundering, forcing criminals to recruit and pay huge numbers of naive bank customers to allow criminals to launder money via their personal accounts, using them as money mules. Which then gets flagged and shutdown pretty quick by banks because the behaviour is generally pretty obvious.

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective) banks can’t/don’t coordinate on identified money mules or know launderers, so criminals just move on to other banks and repeat.

Re: Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification

#153

Post by terribleperson »

mosura wrote: post #53
Aurornis wrote: post #24

Not that I'm condoning it, but this law requires self-declaration, not verification. It might sound pedantic but the practical difference is huge. Self-declaration means that the system asks the user to declare if they are a minor. Nothing is verified. Age verification typically means a system which checks ID or has other enforcement measures to try to verify age.

It is a technical ratchet. Once you accept part of the implementation it will never be undone, more will be added.

I don't think this is a safe assumption.

As a counter, actual age verification is being rolled out in other places. I really don't think we're in a position of choosing between no age-based access mechanism, and age-based access mechanism. Between the anti-porn types and public demand for some kind of regulations on social media, regulation of some kind is inevitable.

Our actual choice may only be what type of restriction we can live with, and I much prefer this type to the kind that requires websites to demand my id and photos of my face. Especially since some implementations of this concept (the California one, I think) declare that websites aren't legally required to look deeper than the attested age, which is a very nice feature.

Mind you, I don't know why the legislators are bothering mandating OS support for these features. It would be much easier to mandate that websites support the feature, make it clear to them that supporting the feature appropriately will free them from liability for children accessing content, and then wait as users demand that their OS support the feature.

Re: Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification

#154

Post by lrvick »

imhoguy wrote: post #138
lrvick wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it will be wiped immediately as usual, so sure whatever.

Or it will have some new TPM/SecureBoot guard rails to not let minors install unapproved systems. Think of children again ;)

I specialize in TPM security and know plenty of ways to bypass it with physical access to consumer laptop hardware, and would gladly make that easy for the public if needed.

But I hope they try this. It will be funny to watch the public humiliation of how hard it fails at scale.

Re: Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification

#155

Post by novafunc »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #143
bryanlarsen wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RedHat/IBM does have an Illinois presence so will likely be compelled to add it to their distro, and will likely do it through systemd. So to avoid it getting into any consumer distro you'd have to ship a patch to remove it from systemd. This is probably all completely irrelevant to StageX since it's a distro designed to be used in containers, AFAICT.

IIRC systemd already started implementing some hooks for age verification API

systemd added a field where users can add their date of birth. It's completely optional.

It's not implementing age implementation, but can be used as a place to store a DOB in an age verification system.

Re: Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification

#156

Post by pixl97 »

lrvick wrote: post #128
EA-3167 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respect your principled stance on one hand, while on the other I’m amazed that someone as successful as you hasn’t learned that logic doesn’t dictate how governments work. Don’t make a target of yourself, there are countless ways for a government to make your life miserable.

I will never show fear to tech-illiterate bullies trying to compromise constitutionally protected rights. That is how freedoms get quietly lost. Users need to see that the people in positions of influence in FOSS projects they trust are not afraid of this bullshit. I -hope- someone is stupid enough to take a case like this to court so we can establish some much needed case law here. These overreaches deserve to be co…

While they may take you to court over this, make sure you can survive sitting in jail at first if government decides to make an example of you.

And where code is speech, is a distribution speech? There's a lot of places for this to go sideways on you personally.

Re: Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification

#157

Post by Reason077 »

lrvick wrote: post #89

Linux distro founder here (stagex) I will never be compelled to implement this, and would never merge it. Every release requires quorum signatures by an international maintainer team, and the distro is designed to work offline-first, with some variants not even supporting network drivers in the kernel, so Illinois legislators can eat shit.

> ”Linux distro founder here (stagex)… designed to work offline-first, with some variants not even supporting network drivers”

If your OS doesn’t access the internet or isn’t intended to run browsers / social apps, then you are outside the scope of this legislation. That would be a bit like requiring a toaster to ask for your age before letting you operate it.

Re: Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification

#158

Post by otterley »

lrvick wrote: post #145
otterley wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of remedies available to a court with respect to a recalcitrant party, ranging from an injunction to remove your product from the market to fines and imprisonment. Again, speak with your attorney. Do not try to "hack the law" yourself; many who have tried have regretted it later.

No need to hack the law. Our FOSS code is constitutionally protected free speech and I would defend on those grounds. The technical design of the project just makes it so no one can force changes on the distro unwanted by the maintainer team regardless of any courtroom outcomes. Like, what if someone made a law that said Bitcoin nodes must KYC? They could make the law I guess, and the international network operators…

The concern here is probably with the shipping of the product (i.e. the binary artifacts), not the code itself. I can imagine a situation in which you could continue to make the code available, but could not produce a shippable artifact from it that Illinoians could access.

Re: Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification

#159

Post by cogman10 »

otterley wrote: post #107
monocasa wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legislating that all complex computing devices must give out your birthday (technically a "signal" of which bucket you're in, but sites are absolutely going to keep track of which bucket you where in, keep asking, and see when it changes). It's constitutional case law that there's an implicit right to privacy in the constitution. I don't see a law that you must wear a band with your birthday out in public passing mus…

> It's constitutional case law that there's an implicit right to privacy in the constitution. Constitutional scholar here! I mean, yes, that's true in a very general sense, but no court has held that age verification to gain access to a service, or even a device, is unlawful in practice.

Novice, but I'd argue that Dobbs has seriously eroded that case law. The right to privacy used to be pretty settled law, but now the foundation of that settled law is on sandy ground.
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