An attestation-like system to detect humanity at time of post is absolutely for useful online spaces in the era of AI slop. The writing style of the author is very annoying.
Until people hit "attest" and then copy the text from ChatGPT.
Online age verification is the hill to die on
201–210 of 750 posts
Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on
#202The one and only method I will participate in is server operators setting a RTA header [1] for URL's that may contain adult or user-generated or user-contributed content and the clients having the option to detect that header and trigger parental controls if they are enabled by the device owner. That should suffice to protect most small children. Teens will always get around anything anyone implements as they are alr…
This doesn't address the wider array of age-verification related problems that people want to solve, like social media where age verification is needed to police interactions between users.
Such censorship shouldn't exist in the first place.
Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back in the late 90s or so, there was a proposal to have sites voluntarily set an age header, so parents/employers/etc could use to block the site if they wish. People said it would never work, because adult sites had a financial incentive not to opt in to reduce their own traffic.
What, in the same way movie studios wouldn't comply with the Hayes Code, or comic book publishers wouldn't comply with the CCA, or games publishers wouldn't comply with the ESRB? The financial incentive is to police yourself, because government policing is much, much worse.
Sure but the government doesn't police corporations in the US anymore. The Hayes code was before neoliberalism.
Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back in the late 90s or so, there was a proposal to have sites voluntarily set an age header, so parents/employers/etc could use to block the site if they wish. People said it would never work, because adult sites had a financial incentive not to opt in to reduce their own traffic.
You’d think that one could simply block sites that don’t have the age header set on child computers. This may block kids from hobbyist sites that don’t bother to set their headers as kid-friendly, but commercial sites would surely set their headers properly. Over time sending proper rating headers would become more normalized if they were in common use. This still isn’t perfect, as it creates an incentive for legisla…
Yes, that's how parental filters already work. They use a combination of rta tags and external data to block pages. Even works with Google safe search, firewall devices, etc. The rta ecosystem is already built out and viable.
Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on
#205>age verification requires identity verification. Identity verification requires digital IDs. Digital IDs require everyone — not just children — to prove who they are before they can speak... Not if it's done in a half arsed way. I'm in the UK and so far my age verification has involved doing a selfie with the webcam for Reddit. That's it. No one needing my name, ID number etc. (Apart from banks of course). Really th…
Whether it can be done this way is besides the point. It is about how regimes like ours in the US that have demonstrated an interest in spying on their subjects choose to regulate this over time.
Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on
#206I agree. I don't call it "age verification" though - it is age sniffing. And it has nothing to do with children - that is the lie.
What is fascinating is to see how governments ALL fall for it. There is zero resistance. This is fascinating to me. It shows how little real effort is necessary once you have the lobbyists in place. Kind of scary to witness too.
It is an apartheid system. All apartheid slavery systems will eventually die, so age sniffing will die too. But it will most likely be a long fight as more and more money will be invested by crazy corporations such as Palantir and others.
The whole "debate" is already not logical by the way. Let's for a moment assume the "but but but the kids!" is a real argument rather than a strawman argument, which it is. Ok so ... I am a "concerned parent", for the sake of discussion. I have three young kids. I am not a tech nerd. The kids see "unfitting content" on the antisocial media such as facebook and what not. So, what do I do? Well ... they have a smartphone? Aha, so ... I am not so concerned? Having no smartphone is no option? Ok so ... I say they can have a smartphone, but they may not use antisocial media. Ok. First - in any free society, is it acceptable that this kind of censorship is done on ALL kids? What if I, as a parent, do not agree with this? Well, tough luck - the laws force you into the age sniffing routine suddenly. But, even those parents who want the state to act as totalitarian: why would I want to hand over control to ANY politician for that matter? That makes no sense to me. I am aware that some parents may think differently, but do all parents think like that, even IF they buy into the "we protect the children" lie? I don't want ANY information from ANY of my computers to go into private hands here. So the whole argument already makes zero sense from the get go.
Of course those who know how things work, they know that this is the build up towards identifying everyone on the world wide web at all times AND to make access to information conditional, e. g. if the state does not know you, you can not access information. Aka a passport system for the www. Built right into the operating system too. Windows already complied. MacOSX too. The battle for Linux will be interesting; it may be some hybrid situation, like systemd. And the systemd distributions will all succumb to age sniffing, courtesy of Poettering "this is really harmless if we store your age in the database, just trust me".
Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on
#207Just requiring it for social media companies is probably enough of a win to not have to pursue any further. We require age verification for sports betting and things like that, I'm not sure why we wouldn't do the same or some variation of that for other massively addicting products that we know as a matter of scientific study have a very bad impact on some number of kids.
Indeed, social media companies seem to big proponents of the US legislation.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/13/california-advances...
Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
What, in the same way movie studios wouldn't comply with the Hayes Code, or comic book publishers wouldn't comply with the CCA, or games publishers wouldn't comply with the ESRB? The financial incentive is to police yourself, because government policing is much, much worse.
Sure but the government doesn't police corporations in the US anymore. The Hayes code was before neoliberalism.
Quite true. The US corporations act like a giant global rabid dog. Fake legislation appears in the USA - lo and behold, it is copy/pasted into the EU. At the least lobbyists are getting rich right now.
Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would it read?
Holy crap, I only just saw your license agreement. Oh no. We've argued on here before, although this time we're in agreement. Please don't use this hidden license to dox me! (It's an unenforceable joke, right? There's no way I'm bound by anything here other than maybe the site ToS.)
Lol, who knows. I don't give legal advice. Wanna find out? ;)
Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on
#210The one and only method I will participate in is server operators setting a RTA header [1] for URL's that may contain adult or user-generated or user-contributed content and the clients having the option to detect that header and trigger parental controls if they are enabled by the device owner. That should suffice to protect most small children. Teens will always get around anything anyone implements as they are alr…
Servers can then infer user’s ages by whether or not the client renders pages given those headers or not no? See if secondary page requests (e.g images, scripts) are made or not from a client? A bad actor could use this to glean age information from the client and see whether the person viewing the page is a small child. That should be scary