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A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

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Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

#191

Post by Hammershaft »

SunshineTheCat wrote: post #185
fangpenlin wrote: post #67

There's an obvious theme with lawmakers in California—they pass laws to regulate things they have zero clue about, add them to their achievement page, cheer for themselves, and declare, "There! I've made the world a better place." There are just too many examples. For instance: - Microstamping requirements for guns—printing a unique barcode on every bullet casing (Glock gen3 cannot be retired, thus, the auto-mode swi…

> they pass laws to regulate things they have zero clue about While you are correct with this statement in this context, I would say it applies to most things in government in general. The vast majority of lawmakers have zero experience solving any real world problems and are content spending everyone else's money to play pretend at doing so. The reality is, most government "solutions" cause more problems than they s…

It's true, and yet there are real market failures that even a very ineffective government can improve on dramatically, like innovation & research output via basic science.

Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

#192

Post by singron »

frshgts wrote: post #66
davorak wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which seems like a silly accidental overreach of the law. If that is the way it applies. The literal reading of the law says this only required when a child is the primary user of the device. > (b) (1) A developer shall request a signal with respect to a particular user from an operating system provider or a covered application store when the application is downloaded and launched. but 'user' here is: > (i) “User” me…

How else but the signal could it determine whether the user is an adult or not?

The whole point of the bill is to create a cause of action for the Attorney General to sue companies. In the bill, they say the damages are up to $2,500 per negligently affected child ($7,500 if intentional), so it doesn't matter how many non-children it affects. E.g. if the OS/appstore/accounts/application is in the context of a workplace that only employs adults, none of this matters.

Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

#193

Post by rpdillon »

bitwize wrote: post #82
bananamogul wrote: post #61

I really hate this new world where one jurisdiction - California, Europe, wherever - makes a law and suddenly every other jurisdiction has to comply because the law-making jurisdiction is big enough that tech companies can't abandon it. And since it doesn't make sense to have dozens of different versions of their apps, they write to the strictest jurisdiction's laws. If everyone has the power to make laws that apply…

Beige PCs. Made to comply with German workplace-equipment laws. Yes, the Bundestag legislated the color of office equipment. That has always been the way of fhe world.

Wow, TIL. Thanks for mentioning this. I ran across this as I was researching the background:

> The "beige box" era was largely the result of strict German workplace ergonomics standards (specifically the TUV and DIN standards) that became the de facto rules for the entire global industry. The law didn't explicitly say "thou shalt use beige," but the regulations were so specific about light reflectivity and eye strain that beige (or "computer gray") was essentially the only compliant option.

Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

#195

Post by bawolff »

idle_zealot wrote: post #190
fangpenlin wrote: post #67

There's an obvious theme with lawmakers in California—they pass laws to regulate things they have zero clue about, add them to their achievement page, cheer for themselves, and declare, "There! I've made the world a better place." There are just too many examples. For instance: - Microstamping requirements for guns—printing a unique barcode on every bullet casing (Glock gen3 cannot be retired, thus, the auto-mode swi…

What I'm reading of this law is that it requires OS developers to require users select their age (really their age bracket) when making a user account, and an interface for applications/websites to read that user-provided field. I.e. not age verification, but just a standard way to identify if a user is on a child account. If that understanding is correct, how is this bad at all ? It's a way to put to rest people's c…

All the better to do targeted advertisments and underdeveloped minds!

Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

#196

Post by SllX »

roenxi wrote: post #162
SllX wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The incentives are all wrong. You can serve up to 6 two-year terms in the Assembly or up to 3 four-year terms in the Senate, but regardless of which combination you do, nobody in the California legislature can serve more than 12 years combined across both Houses of the legislature. So we don’t have professional legislatures with long-term electability incentives or leadership goals, we have a resumé-building exercise…

> So we don’t have professional legislatures with long-term electability incentives or leadership goals Raises an interesting question of who is less popular, the Californian government or the US Senate. The experiments with long-term professional legislatures have generally not been very promising - rather than statesmen it tends to be people with a certain limpet-like staying power and a limpet-like ability to lear…

Bold of you to assume any aspect of the California State legislature is visible enough to be more or less popular. People at least pay attention to what the US Senate does, and you know that no matter how the next election goes, the US Senate as one body is unlikely to go very far off the deep end in one direction or the other.

Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

#197

Post by general1465 »

autoexec wrote: post #112
general1465 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “Covered application store” means a publicly available internet website, Client side JavaScript can be considered an application, and then ad business would need to first verify that I am over 18 in order to allow me to see their ads. Ultimate ad blocker.

This law means that your operating system has to collect your age and make it avilable to every website/application so ad businesses can just get that data from our OS automatically and go right on serving ads without having to verify anything themselves.

Yes, the presence of such mandatory kill switch is what makes it ultimate adblocker.

Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

#199

Post by SllX »

zdragnar wrote: post #148
SllX wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The incentives are all wrong. You can serve up to 6 two-year terms in the Assembly or up to 3 four-year terms in the Senate, but regardless of which combination you do, nobody in the California legislature can serve more than 12 years combined across both Houses of the legislature. So we don’t have professional legislatures with long-term electability incentives or leadership goals, we have a resumé-building exercise…

And yet, term limits are something many people want in the hopes that it will solve some of the problems in Washington DC. There, the professional legislators can't get anything right either. Do you think there's a middle ground of increasing the term limits to, say, 18 or 20 years?

> And yet, term limits are something many people want in the hopes that it will solve some of the problems in Washington DC.

Plenty of shitty ideas are popular based on a hope and a prayer. That’s why you don’t give in to populism. If we’re to impose any kind of limits on Congress, it has to be more intelligent than term limits.

Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

#200

Post by packetlost »

Veserv wrote: post #166
zeta0134 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to understand how this is even a bad thing. Where is the privacy invading verification? Surely a given OS can implement the API response however it wants? If you're root, tell me your age. If you're not, (a child account), the admin (their parent) sets the age. Seems fine?

Even ignoring everything else, at a minimum it is backwards. There is no reason to tell the application, and by extension their developers, how old the user is. The application should tell the user what bracket it is appropriate for and then the operating system could filter appropriately without any of the user’s identifying information leaving their system. This is also technically superior because it moves the log…

It's a lot easier to add an API that's opt-in for an application that needs it. What's the appropriate way an OS should handle an application that doesn't declare this new property? Fail open? Fail closed? It would quickly turn into a mess. IMO it's better to do it this way because the applications that need it (browsers, chat clients, etc.) will use it to provide legal shielding. This isn't a technical problem they're trying to solve, it's a legal liability one. I generally like this approach, but I think there's no reason to mandate that an application use the API, just mandate that if they do they are considered to have real knowledge of the age range of the user in question. If you provide the API, the incentive to use it is already there for the applications it's needed for the most.
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