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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

#181

Post by ericmay »

pibaker wrote: post #165
ericmay wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Ha. Well, you can read my post history. I routinely advocate that the United States go wipe out the Russian military in Ukraine and annihilate its capability to assault Ukraine and assert our hegemonic status. You might classify me as a Russia hawk.

I don't use social media besides I guess LinkedIn, but I don't think that platform is material here.

Given that I don't really use social media, in what way is my free speech destroyed? One of the fundamentally incorrect assumptions people make, as you are doing now, is that they assume that the mechanism (social media in this case) is what defines whether or not you are able to exercise free speech, but you will fail to produce a coherent argument when it comes to people such as myself who don't use the platforms.

I also enjoy watching folks turn themselves into a pickle defending the actions that the EU and UK are taking to curb free speech. These actions range from age verification, in, say Australia, to supposed hate speech curbs in the UK (you mentioned western civilization and defending free speech in that context, not me) to a number of actions taken by the EU or EU member states that also curb free speech. If you post something pro-Nazi in Germany on Facebook you'll go to jail. That's curbing your right to free speech.

The topic of this thread here is of course Arizona, but the US actually is far more permissive in speech than any other western country. Maybe you and others should spend more time focusing on other western nations, generally speaking.

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

When HN implements the feature, sure. For now I use my real name. How about you?

Re: Arizona Bill Requires Age Verification for All Apps

#182

Post by jerf »

vorpalhex wrote: post #147
jerf wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I recently observed [1], there is a lot more of this sort of coordination than people realize. I personally know of about three groups trying to get some cross-state initiatives implemented at the state level, and I'm not even particularly looking for such things. It is not a coincidence. It means there is some organization out there pushing these. In general, "organization" here applies very broadly; there are so…

Can you name the groups? (Assuming they are sufficiently public, corporate/political entities)

The "Sound Money Foundation" is trying to improve the ability to use gold and silver directly as currency at a state level, for example: https://soundmoneyfoundation.org/sound-money-movement-chalks...

There are definitely coordinated efforts to harmonize state gun laws, but I'm not sure exactly who is the central node, if there is one. (Some of it is expansion of rights in a way most of HN would hate, some of it is just harmonization of pointless-for-any-side differences.) The individual states credit different organizations for the specific laws if you look at them. I've seen some of the individual participants talk about their own efforts but not anyone who said there was a central org. There could conceivably not be in this case.

On a more HN-friendly note, the Right to Repair is being pushed at the state level: https://www.repair.org/blog/2025/2/24/ptkkw1yziw8xv7u9iwhooh... (and that site in general, but that seems a good recent overview) I know of that one through some HN posts.

I suspect the organization pushing the age verification is less interested in being public.

A running theme with these people is that while this is certainly a lot of work, it is also in a lot of ways easier than you think to get a lot of states to push a law through than it is to get the Federal government to do it. Whether this is a recruitment pitch that stretches the truth or the actual truth, I'll leave it to you to decide. I don't know enough myself to judge.

Re: Arizona Bill Requires Age Verification for All Apps

#183

Post by nobody9999 »

mindslight wrote: post #180
nobody9999 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Where did you get that idea? Section 230 never provided any preference or privilege to large organizations over small ones. In fact, it did exactly the opposite for reasons I discussed. You say that without Section 230: ...lots of…

You're still missing where I'm coming from. > Without Section 230, your aunt would take down her knitting pattern discussion website/chat room/mailing list/whatever within half a day, with whoever it was posting something objectionable (or just off topic) and when your aunt deletes it, file a lawsuit claiming censorship. I don't want "my aunt" to be running a knitting pattern discussion website! I want "my aunt" to o…

>There was the better part of the decade after the CDA passed that the tech community was still focused on protocols that worked this way.

Which protocols? I was designing and implementing networks throughout the 90s and aughts and I really don't know what you're talking about. Perhaps I wasn't in the right place at the right time?

Email mailing lists? IRC? Instant Messaging? NNTP? Those all would have been vulnerable to frivolous and malicious lawsuits without Section 230.

Honestly, I'm at a loss here. Please do enlighten me as to which protocols you're referring.

>I then want all of these messages stitched together to form a cohesive presentation on each person's computer, by software that represents their interests.

Sounds like you want personal ActivityPub platforms. I'm all for that. But nothing even approximating that existed in the 1990s. In fact, there's nothing like that now that a non-technical person can host for themselves.

Re: Arizona Bill Requires Age Verification for All Apps

#184

Post by ranger_danger »

mothballed wrote: post #175
15155 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adults can sell each other property with no ID and without the state getting involved, who knew. If you mean at a store, a regulated vendor, you are incorrect.

Yes private sales have no background check, obviously I was referring to the "correct" case since that is part of "all" sales and the headline here is "all" apps. Why would I be referring to the incorrect case? If you want to force a condition in which I'm wrong, in bad faith, then I can play that fuck fuck game with you too. I can walk into a "regulated" store and buy a perfectly functional and accurate 1889 Schmidt…

Why do you think it's acceptable to talk to people like this?

Re: Arizona Bill Requires Age Verification for All Apps

#185

Post by mindslight »

nobody9999 wrote: post #183
mindslight wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're still missing where I'm coming from. > Without Section 230, your aunt would take down her knitting pattern discussion website/chat room/mailing list/whatever within half a day, with whoever it was posting something objectionable (or just off topic) and when your aunt deletes it, file a lawsuit claiming censorship. I don't want "my aunt" to be running a knitting pattern discussion website! I want "my aunt" to o…

>There was the better part of the decade after the CDA passed that the tech community was still focused on protocols that worked this way. Which protocols? I was designing and implementing networks throughout the 90s and aughts and I really don't know what you're talking about. Perhaps I wasn't in the right place at the right time? Email mailing lists? IRC? Instant Messaging? NNTP? Those all would have been vulnerabl…

I agree regarding listserv and NNTP. It's questionable whether IRC and IM would be treated as "publishers" without sec 230.

Perhaps your coming up was a little earlier than mine? My perspective included things like gnutella and edonkey. There was a general feeling of building new application protocols to support new types of applications. Hard problems that needed to be figured out, for sure. But also background baseline values of people running software they choose on their own computers.

For protocols, there was also websites themselves. Someone with something to say would host their own. And some rough solutions for distributed discovery there like webrings.

Then web 2.0 came along and swept that all away in favor of the old centralized-mainframe dumb-terminal model (3270->browser, rs232->http, 80x24->html).

> there's nothing like that now that a non-technical person can host for themselves.

Yes. All of the high-cost productization/advertising work to make software palatable to normies doesn't get done, because investment money heads towards technical architectures that are more capable of exfiltrating value from end users. So any software still based around representing the interests of its users gets relegated to developers scratching their own itch.

Re: Arizona Bill Requires Age Verification for All Apps

#186

Post by nobody9999 »

mindslight wrote: post #185
nobody9999 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There was the better part of the decade after the CDA passed that the tech community was still focused on protocols that worked this way. Which protocols? I was designing and implementing networks throughout the 90s and aughts and I really don't know what you're talking about. Perhaps I wasn't in the right place at the right time? Email mailing lists? IRC? Instant Messaging? NNTP? Those all would have been vulnerabl…

I agree regarding listserv and NNTP. It's questionable whether IRC and IM would be treated as "publishers" without sec 230. Perhaps your coming up was a little earlier than mine? My perspective included things like gnutella and edonkey. There was a general feeling of building new application protocols to support new types of applications. Hard problems that needed to be figured out, for sure. But also background base…

>I agree regarding listserv and NNTP. It's questionable whether IRC and IM would be treated as "publishers" without sec 230.

Firstly, the concept of "publisher" is irrelevant to Section 230, then and now. IRC and IM (at least chat rooms) require servers to host the back and forth. As such, the issues were exactly the same as with email or usenet. Section 230 protects the hosts of any platform that allows third-party content. Full stop. This whole "publisher vs. platform" thing is a canard and a malicious attempt to muddy the waters. The law itself does not make such a distinction, nor does the case law surrounding it.

>Perhaps your coming up was a little earlier than mine? My perspective included things like gnutella and edonkey. There was a general feeling of building new application protocols to support new types of applications. Hard problems that needed to be figured out, for sure. But also background baseline values of people running software they choose on their own computers.

Sure, I was aware of gnutella and edonkey and other peer to peer file sharing tools. And yes, you're correct that there was much discussion of peer to peer applications for, well, almost everything. And even before that, there was KA9Q[0] which I ran on my PC/XT back in 1990. But none of that really went anywhere once NCSA-Mosaic[1] was released and the web (as you mention below) was born.

>For protocols, there was also websites themselves. Someone with something to say would host their own. And some rough solutions for distributed discovery there like webrings.

Right, and Section 230 protected (and still does!) the hosts of those sites too, while Mark Zuckerberg was in middle school.

>Yes. All of the high-cost productization/advertising work to make software palatable to normies doesn't get done, because investment money heads towards technical architectures that are more capable of exfiltrating value from end users. So any software still based around representing the interests of its users gets relegated to developers scratching their own itch.

On that I kind of disagree. It's not so much that the normies aren't interested. They certainly would be if the could click to download and then follow an install script to set it up, and it just works.

Going all the way back to Diaspora[2], to pixelfed, mastodon and it's offshoots, etc., I've set up a variety of open source platforms that tried to fulfill that dream of personal ownership/possession of one's content.

As a technical person, most of them were installable with significant complexities, but none were simple to install for the non-technical user.

And that is/was because the developers didn't make it that way, not any sort of malicious conspiracy. In fact, I recall some discussion around Diaspora, with the developers saying they preferred to focus on functionality rather than ease of installation.

The developers of Fediverse projects have continued in that vein.

tl;dr, I think we're mostly in agreement here, but you seem to be a little confused about how Section 230 works/worked. No matter. It's all good. I certainly appreciate the discussion and your perspective. Thanks!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KA9Q

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCSA_Mosaic

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)

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