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Arizona Bill Requires Age Verification for All Apps

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Re: Arizona Bill Requires Age Verification for All Apps

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My plan to buy a TV is to get one that can be kept offline, or one that can be made able to stay offline through flashing or dismantling into its very core elements. Dismantling it would probably ensure it's ugly af, but maybe if you try to go for one of those TV-in-a-frame things it might not look hideous.

Not sure how common it is now, but based on repair manuals my TV's wifi is provided by a standard m.2 wifi module and can be trivially removed. That wouldn't stop them from changing the TV's OS to nag or otherwise disable itself afterwards but the hardware change is about as trivial as it could be. Now why the disable wifi option isn't available on the TV when it appears in the user manual is another matter...

>Not sure how common it is now, but based on repair manuals my TV's wifi is provided by a standard m.2 wifi module and can be trivially removed

Or just do egress filtering[0] on your router and block the device from communicating with the Internet. No disassembly required.

I block all access to/from my "smart" TV at my firewall/router and it works just fine.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egress_filtering

Re: Arizona Bill Requires Age Verification for All Apps

#162

Serious question: why can't Meta, Google, and friends just decide not to serve Arizona? I get logistically it would be tough, but if they built that capability, they would have a very robust lever to pull anytime a government pulls this schtick. I would imagine the backlash from the people would fix this pretty quickly. This seems like one of those "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" situations. I'd fully support bi…

>Serious question: why can't Meta, Google, and friends just decide not to serve Arizona?

I'll answer your serious question with one of my own. What incentive would Meta, Google and friends have to "decide not to serve Arizona"?

What is the business model of these companies? To make you view ads and charge advertisers more for "targeted" ads. Having age (which ends up being ID) verification gives them more tools to "target" ads and thus can charge more for the ad space they sell.

I'd say that these folks would be among the last to fight against something like this.

And so I'll reiterate my question: What incentives do these corporations have for opposing such legislation?

I'd say zero. In fact, I'd argue that their business models incentivize them to support such legislation.

Re: Arizona Bill Requires Age Verification for All Apps

#163
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But that is happening today with anonymity It would happen a lot more often without anonymity.

No it wouldn't. Accounts would be identified right so you would know that some account is a China bot farm or Russian military or whatever. And then when Jane down the street starts talking about the need to kill "insert group here" well you know who they are and you can go down and have a talking to them or tell their employer, or whatever. If you say crazy stuff maybe there should be repercussions. Today there are…

> And then when Jane down the street starts talking about the need to kill "insert group here" well you know who they are and you can go down and have a talking to them or tell their employer, or whatever.

This works the other way too. You tell others online "hey maybe we should stop killing X people" or maybe expose that X people are being killed without the public knowing and the people in favor of killing X people can and will ruin your life.

We in fact saw more of this happening in the past few years than the opposite.

Re: Arizona Bill Requires Age Verification for All Apps

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's right wing censorship plain and simple. Unfashionable to state this.

You weren’t around when Tipper Gore was raising the alarm about Ice T’s “Cop Killer” (now “ICE Killer” since he has been playing a cop on TV for a quarter century) or NWA and “F%%% the Police”

I caught the tail end of the civil rights movement and I've never been fussed about white folks whining about black music. It's just what they do.

Re: Arizona Bill Requires Age Verification for All Apps

#165
post #92
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it isn't trade-off. You're supporting a systematic chilling effect on legal free speech.

> it isn't trade-off. Yes it is. > You're supporting a systematic chilling effect on free speech. No I'm not. ~~~~~~ There's no point in free speech if the only free speech is from bots and propagandists. Social media platforms aren't free speech platforms either, you're subject to their terms and conditions.

Are you a Russian bot seeking to destroy free speech, one of the foundations of Western democracy and civilization? How are we supposed to know?

Show us your passport and one piece of recent utility bill to prove your hard earned right to post shit on the Internet.

Re: Arizona Bill Requires Age Verification for All Apps

#166

Serious question: why can't Meta, Google, and friends just decide not to serve Arizona? I get logistically it would be tough, but if they built that capability, they would have a very robust lever to pull anytime a government pulls this schtick. I would imagine the backlash from the people would fix this pretty quickly. This seems like one of those "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" situations. I'd fully support bi…

Laws as such favor big tech more than others, despite their proponent often selling them as "anti big tech." Big tech has more resource to comply with the said regulations than, say, some teenager with a Minecraft server in his basement. Big tech can also absorb the downsides of identity verification — if your choice is between giving out your ID or losing access to your entire gmail account forever, I imagine 95% of the people will just cave. So big tech does not lose much from complying either.

If big tech just withdraw from any market that tries to stop them, the logical conclusion is for these markets to seek alternative products. This gives the alternatives the investment and network effect they need to become more capable competitors of existing big tech products.

Re: Arizona Bill Requires Age Verification for All Apps

#167
post #22

It's clear these "age verification" bills will just keep coming and it's a losing battle to try and oppose each individually. Instead (or rather in addition to) activism we should go at it from the other end and request the introduction of a verifiably independent authority and zero knowledge protocol that will deliver a cryptographically secure boolean bit (isOver18) with no way to correlate from either end the ID o…

Solutions based on zero-knowledge-proofs would solve the privacy aspect at the massive cost of killing general purpose computing as we know it today, by mandating the use of remote device attestation (as that is the only way to guarantee an otherwise fully anonymous token is not being sniffed and passed onto someone else). That would be in my opinion significantly more dystopian than every service having a copy of my…

In the farthest along systems, such as the one the EU has been working on for a few years and is now field testing, you only need to have one secure device to store your digital ID, which in the first version will be a smart phone. If you want to use a site that requires proof of age from some other device like a desktop computer or a public computer in a library you can do the age verification on your phone.

Re: Arizona Bill Requires Age Verification for All Apps

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You weren’t around when Tipper Gore was raising the alarm about Ice T’s “Cop Killer” (now “ICE Killer” since he has been playing a cop on TV for a quarter century) or NWA and “F%%% the Police”

I caught the tail end of the civil rights movement and I've never been fussed about white folks whining about black music. It's just what they do.

I am 51 and my still living parents grew up in the Jim Crow South and they witnessed the “Albany Movement” (my home town) first hand.

But to be fair, it’s also generational thing. My parents were just as put off by the rap music of the day.

Re: Arizona Bill Requires Age Verification for All Apps

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think this idea that social media companies are free speech platforms or should be treated as such, is incorrect and it's leading to bad outcomes. They are product companies selling you an experience of "being connected" and engaging with them is a matter of terms of service Yes I wholeheartedly agree with Macron's quote, and basically agree with your interpretation of it. Maybe you can see we have some common gr…

>The point is that the moral hazard created by sec 230 is precisely what has allowed the centralized social media industry to grow to the point it has. That's exactly the opposite of what Section 230 has done. Section 230 doesn't stop anyone from suing folks who defame or otherwise break the law. Rather, it specifies that those who say such things are the proper target, not the platforms that host such third-party sp…

I understand the mechanism.

I agree that removing section 230 today would have an even more centralizing effect. We've already got huge tech companies that would happily shoulder such liability, and lots of small sites that would find themselves in an uncomfortable position.

My point was that if we never had section 230 to begin with, then we would have kept the strong incentive against setting up sites revolving around centralizing speech in the first place. There would have been more emphasis on protocols, and keeping communication under the control of the person speaking.

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