I completely agree with the federal judge's rationale and the decision
Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge
171–180 of 263 posts
Re: Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not quite that simple. Laws legitimise and stabilise those in power. If enough people stop believing in the law, it really threatens those in power. There are other means to gaining power, of course.
> If enough people stop believing in the law, it really threatens those in power. I think this is why the thing judges hate the most is people admitting when the law gives them an unfair advantage. A rule that unjustly benefits someone is fine as long as they don't break kayfabe. Big Brother loves you, that's why you can't install apps on your phone, it's to protect you from harm. The incidental monopolization, censo…
FWIW, laws aren't merely abstract tools of oppression, they're what binds groups larger than ~100 people into societies. And the true fabric laws are made of, is one of mutually-recursive belief, everyone's expectation that everyone else expects they're subject to them. Threaten that belief, the system stops working. The system stops working, everyone starves, or worse.
Re: Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
For those curious about the "consistent principle of law" here - SCOTUS wrestled with nearly exactly this question in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton earlier this year, and effectively emboldened more of these laws. Previously the Fifth Circuit had relied heavily on Ginsberg v. New York (1968) to justify rational basis review. But Ginsberg was a narrow scope - it held that minors don't have the same First Amendment r…
Law is a strange and possibly the only aspect in human societies where people are by default assumed to know, understand and follow it to the letter when everybody acknowledges that law is open to interpretation. You cannot in most cases claim ignorance as it can be abused by criminals. But there is whole industry of education, profession, journals, blogs, podcasts and videos trying to teach, interpret and explain th…
Occam's Razor - this complexity arises from the human nature to try and build consistent abstractions over complex situations. It's exactly what we do in software too. To an outsider it's going to look nonsensical.
I want to share a thought experiment with you - atop an ancient Roman legal case I recall from Gregory Aldrete - The Barbershop Murder.
Suppose a man sends his slave to a barbershop to get a shave. The barbershop is adjacent to an athletic field where two men are throwing a ball back and forth. One throws the ball badly, the other fails to catch it, and the ball flies into the barbershop, hits the barber's hand mid-shave, and cuts the slave's throat-killing him.
The legal question is posed: Who is liable under Roman law?
- Athlete 1 who threw the ball badly
- Athlete 2 who failed to catch it
- The barber who actually cut the throat
- The slave's owner for sending his slave to a barbershop next to a playing field
- The Roman state for zoning a barbershop adjacent to an athletic field
Q: What legal abstractions are required to apply consistent remedies to this case amongst others?
Opinion: You'd need a theory of negligence. A definition of proximate cause. Standards for foreseeability. Rules about contributory fault. A framework for when the state bears regulatory responsibility. Each of those needs edge cases handled, and those edge cases need to be consistent with rulings in other domains.
Now watch these edge cases compound, before long you've got something that looks absurdly complex. But it's actually just a hacky minimum viable solution to the problem space. That doesn't make it fair that citizens bear the burden of navigating it - but the alternative is inequal application of the law
Re: Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Law is a strange and possibly the only aspect in human societies where people are by default assumed to know, understand and follow it to the letter when everybody acknowledges that law is open to interpretation. You cannot in most cases claim ignorance as it can be abused by criminals. But there is whole industry of education, profession, journals, blogs, podcasts and videos trying to teach, interpret and explain th…
Strange and destructive. I believe comprehensible law is a human right that is critically underacknowledged. Like, up there with the right to speech and a fair trial. If you cannot understand the law as it applies to you, you cannot possibly be free under that law, because your actions will always be constrained by your uncertainty.
Seems to be less of an issue in practice, as the level of detail is pretty clear unless you're operating at the "bleeding edge" of legal understanding, in which case I imagine you can afford to hire someone to figure out the details to you.
Perfect understanding of every law and its consequence is not possible anyway, because laws are meant to be contextual and interpreted by humans, to allow for exceptions in unusual cases (contrast that with the monumentally stupid idea of "law as code", which, if implemented, would grind us all under the gears).
In vast majority of cases, people don't need more certainty than they have or can trivially get, because variance of outcome is low. E.g. you don't need to know the exact amount of dollars where shoplifting turns from misdemeanor into a felony - it's usually enough to know that you shouldn't do it, and that stealing some bread once to feed your kids will probably not land you in jail for long, but stealing a TV just might. And by "low variance" in outcomes I mean, there's obvious proportionality and continuity; it's not the case that if you steal bread brand A, you get a fine, but if you steal bread brand B, you go straight to supermax, right away.
This is not to deny the ideal, but rather to point out that practical reality is much more mundane than picking apart unique court cases makes one think.
Re: Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also recommend that podcast but I would suggest balancing it with '5-4' podcast or 'strict scrutiny'. Sara and David do a very good job explaining both sides and the law but there are times I think advisory opinions could spend more time on the arguments made by the other side or the weaker portions of their supported view.
Strict scrutiny is fantastic
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Re: Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they don't provide an easy opt-out link then why not just block the sender and move on? Unlike the less legal operations I wouldn't expect a legitimate business to rotate domains or otherwise attempt to evade blocks.
Why block when you can report to Spamhaus?
I prefer to only report genuinely malicious behavior. As long as there's no active attempt at block evasion I figure reporting it is just increasing noise and generally making things worse for everyone. It's the active block evasion crowd that make any and every network communication protocol a pain in the ass to use at scale. It wasn't simpletons using a single static IP address that triggered such widespread adoption of Anubis overnight.
Re: Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Is the act of shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater protected speech?" Strawman. That is not speech in the same way that yelling or crying is not free speech. The first one is the same strawman. Making the word milk a trigger mustn't milk illegal.
Shouting fire in a crowded theater was never literal, it was an analogy for speech that runs counter to the government's desires, namely protesting the draft to fight in some pointless inhuman European meat grinder, thousands of miles from home. Anti-war protests were what was meant by "shouting fire in a theater". That's what our government was trying to ban.
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Re: Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would largely depend on the implementation details I think. Both those of the ID check itself as well as the precise nature of the tokens. Consider a somewhat extreme example. A preprinted paper ticket with nothing more than a serial number on it. The clerk only visually inspects the ID document then enters the serial number into a web portal and hands it to you. When you go to "redeem" it the service relays the…
How would I know the Clerk wasn't instructed to record the name from my ID? Also this runs into the same problems as voter ID laws, not everyone has an ID that they can show at a liquor store.
Because you're standing there watching him. Have you ever witnessed him record your name or anything else when you purchase alcohol? Given the (admittedly rather restrictive and unlikely) implementation I described this quickly approaches the level of paranoid conspiracy.
Yeah, it runs into the same socioeconomic problems. Not just voter ID but also tobacco, alcohol, most weapons, and in many places other than the US medical care just to name a few. So it's already a well established problem that people keep and eye out for and at least try to address.
Consider that the alternatives are the continued normalized unfettered access of brainrot by young children or else requiring an ID check in a manner that blatantly compromises privacy. On the whole the liquor store approach seems like a good solution to me.
To be fair there is another alternative that for some reason seems widely unpopular. Make headers indicating age restricted content a requirement and legally require the OEM configuration of devices to support parental controls based on such headers. That would be a slightly less efficacious solution but would involve noticeably less ID checking.
Re: Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
And which movies, when broadcast on TV (i.e. viewed inside people's homes), verify the age of everyone watching before continuing? Your analogy is just as flawed.
When movies are broadcast on TV, they must first be censored according to the FCC's rules. Of course this only applies to broadcast, not cable, but cable doesn't get broadcast into people's houses without them signing up for it.
> cable doesn't get broadcast into people's houses without them signing up for it
Neither do apps, so it seems apps over an ISP are more equivalent to adult content on cable tv, which do not require age verification to watch.
Re: Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed! Great idea. I'll save others the click: "The insistence on perfect age verification requires ending anonymity. Age verification to the level of buying cigarettes or booze does not. Flash a driver's license at a liquor store to buy a single-use token, good for one year, and access your favorite social media trash. Anonymity is maintained, and most kids are locked out. In the same way that kids occasionally obt…
This does nothing to protect anonymity as you are still assigned a unique code that has been tied to your ID at the liquor store.
I've never had my ID recorded at any liquor store in my life. I've bought alcohol in multiple countries. If that happens where you live I'd fight to have that practice banned legally for alcohol and tobacco purchases. Stores are definitely selling it to insurance companies.
Also after I had a certain number of birthdays, clerks have stopped demanding my ID. So my purchases are pretty much anonymous.
The card should be issued by a private company, or ideally, multiple companies. And it should be a scratch-off card with a unique code, so that codes can't be tied to transactions.