Lol no.
A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
221–230 of 768 posts
Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
#222There'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…
Headline is wrong, and you didn't read the article. There is no verification requirement. You are a bad HN poster and should feel bad. All this does is require the user to select a non-verified age bracket on first boot. You can lie, just like porn sites today. I thought HNers wanted parents to govern their children's use of technology with these kinds of mechanisms. > There's an obvious theme with lawmakers in Calif…
> All this does is require the user to select a non-verified age bracket on first boot.
This is the age verification requirement which you rudely and incorrectly said doesn't exist. Nothing is done with the data (for now) but age is in fact verified on the assumption that the user doesn't lie.
Instead of lengthy condescending missives about the behavior of other users, you should instead write "I'm sorry for being negative and bringing down the quality of discussion."
Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'…
So a application that wants to filter will categorize their services privately and then write custom filtering logic, but will not just categorize their services publicly? That is nonsense.
And your point about fail open versus closed also makes no sense since if there are zero repercussions to not writing filtering logic then nobody would even bother. If there is liability, then obviously everybody will fail closed and every application developer needs to evaluate and change their application to only allow acceptable usage. This is much harder if they have to write custom filtering logic instead of just publishing their data categorization.
Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
#224There'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…
I see Massachusetts as sort of the non-insane liberal counterpoint to California.
Things work here and nobody seems to be passing the "oops my unintended side effects and clueless regulations messed things up horribly." Or, if they do, it is at something like 1/10th the level.
We didn't start warning label spam everywhere. We don't have weird propositions that are causing run-away housing prices. There aren't bar codes on our 3d printers, or cookie banner requirements on every website. Well, ok we do, but that nonsense all came in from other places.
We did pass laws to lower PFAS/PFOAS. That seems reasonable. Government can work.
Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
#225so my smart microwave will require some age verification?
Of course! Think of the dangers of an unsupervised child... (SHOCK WARNING) cooking... A gasp MEAL!
Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
#226What about: - servers living in datacenters - realtime operating systems in embedded devices - the Intel Management Engine - the OS on every smart chip in credit cards and debit cards - wireless cameras, roombas, smart TVs, smart fridges - cars. Those automotive systems have OSes too right? - all those IoT devices, including California’s traffic cameras What age signals should those devices send out? Is there an excl…
They will be "exempt" probably.
Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
#227Earlier 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…
The interesting middle ground might be to prohibit anyone from serving more than two contiguous terms in the Senate or four in the House. Then if you've done your two terms in the Senate, you can run for a House seat, do three terms there and then your old Senate seat is back up for reelection. Except your old Senate seat now has a new incumbent who is only on their first term and you're running as the challenger. Meanwhile there are more seats in the House than the Senate, so if you hit your limit in the House you could go work for an administrative agency or run for a state-level office for two years and then come back, but then you're the challenger again.
The result is that you can stay as long as people keep voting you back in, but you lose the incumbency advantage and end up with a higher turnover rate without ending up with a 100% turnover rate. And you make them learn how other parts of the government work. It wouldn't hurt a bit to see long-term members of Congress do a two-year stint in an administrative agency once in a while.
Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
This law doesn't do anything that prevents non-anonymous access. Here's how you would access things anonymously if you bought a new computer that implemented this. 1. When you set up your account and it asks for your birthdate, make up any date you want that is at least far enough in the past to indicate an age older that what any site you might use that checks age requires. 2. Access things the way you've always don…
I agree. I feel the flow of having browsers send some flag to sites is the most privacy-preserving approach to this whole topic. The system owner creates a “child” account that has the flag set by the OS and prevents the execution of unsanctioned software. This puts the responsibility back on parents to do the bare minimum required in moderating their child’s activities.
What would be even more privacy preserving would be to mandate sites to send age appropriateness headers (mainstream porn sites already do this voluntarily).
Possibly it could be further mandated that the OS collect relevant rating information for each account and provide APIs with which browsers and other software could implement filtering.
And possibly it could be further mandated that web browsers adopt support for this filtering standard.
And if you want a really crazy idea you could pass a law mandating that parents configure parental controls on devices of children under (say) 12 and attach civil penalties for repeated failure to do so.
There's never any need for information about the user to be sent off to third parties, nor should we adopt schemes that will inevitably provide ammo for those advocating attested digital platforms.
Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
#229> (g) This title does not impose liability on an operating system provider, a covered application store, or a developer that arises from the use of a device or application by a person who is not the user to whom a signal pertains. So, this makes desktop Linux illegal, but all the software-as-a-service like Microsoft Azure and OpenAI get off scott-free? Fantastic.
Free computers are too subversive. If left unchecked, they can wipe out entire sectors of the economy, and with cryptography they can defeat police, judges, spies, militaries.
They absolutely want to make it illegal.
Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
#230There'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…
I think they demonstrate a welcome and sophisticated understanding of technology. Their solution to age verification maximizes privacy by not sending any data off the computer besides a simple signal of age category (if I understand the design). They show more sophistication than the parent commment:
> 3D printers should have a magical algorithm to recognize all gun parts in their tiny embedded systems
Color scanners and printers have long had algorithms to recognize currency and prevent its reproduction, implemented with the technology of decades ago. It seems relatively simple to implement gun part recognition today, especially with the recent leap in image recognition capability.
(Rants and takedowns, IME, may entertain fellow believers, but signal a comment that's going to go well beyond any facts.)