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Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification

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Re: Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification

#231

Post by ethin »

buzzwords wrote: post #141

I love how everyone knows this has nothing to do with kids safety. However no one can or is willing to put up a fight. In the UK where I live its the same. Government does whatever they want and most of us just shrug our shoulders and say "that's messed up" and go on about our day.

The reason is ridiculously simple: people don't put up a fight because they don't want to be labelled as a peto or as someone not in favor of the protection of Children. This is primarily why this cudgel is brought out so often: it's very difficult to oppose because you risk getting shunned for it.

Re: Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification

#232

Post by xp84 »

eterm wrote: post #72
singpolyma3 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally a slippery slope argument

Sometimes when you see your opponents getting out a ramp and a barrel of lube, you can call it a slippery slope.

Or alternatively - you could recognize that normal people are getting more and more pissed off by the fact that social media companies are force-feeding garbage into their kids eyeballs 16 hours a day.

We could give them a reasonable solution that demonstrably preserves privacy and doesn't inconvenience anyone else (Suppose you want to see all the uncensored everything, you open your new PC or phone and say your DOB is 1/1/1900. Done. Status quo.)

Or we could be alarmist about that, torpedo that plan, and then in 2 more years when people are even MORE pissed, a horrifying new plan comes out, where the government scans your photo ID (with the help of some crappy private contractor of course) and both of them promise to probably not store the info and log your access. And that one manages to scrape by because people are at that point even more pissed and are determined to solve the problem somehow.

The actual 'bad guys' just wouldn't be able to get the public support for that second, shitty plan, if we basically solve the problem now with this very modest plan that's on the table now. Parents can handle this simple one-time out-of-box prompt and it makes sense. Device owner, the parent, that's the one who should make the call.

Re: Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification

#233

Post by lrvick »

pixl97 wrote: post #156
lrvick wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will never show fear to tech-illiterate bullies trying to compromise constitutionally protected rights. That is how freedoms get quietly lost. Users need to see that the people in positions of influence in FOSS projects they trust are not afraid of this bullshit. I -hope- someone is stupid enough to take a case like this to court so we can establish some much needed case law here. These overreaches deserve to be co…

While they may take you to court over this, make sure you can survive sitting in jail at first if government decides to make an example of you. And where code is speech, is a distribution speech? There's a lot of places for this to go sideways on you personally.

The fact people are scared, or scared for me, is in and of itself a problem.

But lets all wait for nothing at all to happen. Then confidence can grow over time that this is unenforceable in any effective way.

They should go back to trying to police piracy via bittorrent (lol).

Re: Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification

#234

Post by lrvick »

otterley wrote: post #170
misphrasing wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code is speech. Forcing someone to implement something is legally-compelled speech, assuming no complicating factor like commerce.

That argument has been going on for decades, and has had few victories in the court system. The DMCA, which prohibits trafficking in anticircumvention devices, even though there's a lot of code in them, is still alive and well.

And the DMCA has been rightfully weakened to the point that archive.org has every Nintendo Gamecube game ever made hosted for the public, for years, uncontested.

So too will these other silly laws go I expect.

Re: Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification

#235

Post by nemomarx »

kube-system wrote: post #194
greyface- wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being unable to comply is not a valid legal defense. Sure it is. Lawyers even have a pithy Latin maxim about it: lex non cogit ad impossibilia.

If you could stop doing that thing, it isn't an impossibility under lex non cogit ad impossibilia.

what could they be compelled to stop doing here? Mechanically speaking, I mean. I can imagine fines or contempt of court, etc

But how would you remove an international distro from "the marketplace" if it's free and not operating a business?

Re: Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification

#236

Post by otterley »

dooglius wrote: post #227
JoshTriplett wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I will never show fear "never show fear" and "never engage intelligence" are two different things. Understand what people will do in response to your actions, and act accordingly to achieve the outcomes you want. Please by all means fight the law, and do so intelligently in a way that will actually help.

Can you be specific in how you think he is behaving unintelligently, and what you think that people will do in response to his actions?

I'll bite. His statements in this very forum could he used against him as evidence of intent to violate the law, should he be prosecuted someday.

There's a reason why lawyers generally advise their clients to remain silent.

Re: Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification

#237

Post by genewitch »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #114
izzydata wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the sense that a website could just ask your OS if you are over a certain age and that age was self declared? That seems fine to me, but why can't the websites just ask me for my self declared age? That's how things used to be and that makes more sense in my opinion because an OS isn't the thing displaying content. It just run whatever it is told to run.

>but why can't the websites just ask me for my self declared age? Because children just click through the age gate when it suits them. With this legislation, a parent that purchases the device and creates an account for the child can set the age once and take the decision out of the kids hands. It's a huge improvement without any significant privacy issues. I can't fathom why the tech crowd is having a collective ane…

I hope i can find this comment in a few years.

Also children can "come upon" devices, so this is still completely pointless unless there's a way to ban devices that don't have this ability. and the only way to do that is to ban devices that cannot verify the user's age. since a device can't really verify an ID, some third party (ideally meta, but also the government works) needs to verify id and age, write something to the secure enclave of the device, and now that's stuck with the verified age set.

If "just let someone report the age" worked, pornhub wouldn't be blocked in TX.

Re: Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification

#238

Post by kyledrake »

Can someone tell me why all of the sudden everyone's totally cool with letting political hacks choke the internet to death?

We used to make fun people like Ted Stevens for calling the internet "a series of tubes" and now we're just totally cool with letting a failed, bankrupt state in the US dictate what code needs to go into voluntary open source software. We need to fight back, now.

Re: Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification

#239

Post by DennisP »

otterley wrote: post #201
DennisP wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless the PGP decision has been overturned, code as free speech is in fact a valid defense. If the government couldn't stop code they claimed were "munitions" from getting distributed, then it seems unlikely that they'll stop a Linux distro. Corporations do whatever seems most profitable. We can't base our understanding of constitutional rights on whether Meta decides to defend them.

There was no "PGP decision." You're making that up.

Maybe try google before making statements like that. The decision was Bernstein vs. US.

Prior to that, export controls prevented PGP source code from being exported from the US. Advocates printed it in books and exported those, which helped clarify the issue.

Bernstein was a math student who made his own encryption software. The government tried to make him register as an arms dealer, and he sued in 1996, with the backing of the EFF. The result was a landmark decision that established source code as free speech and basically destroyed export controls on cryptography.

In 2016, Apple cited the decision when the government tried to hack a suspect's phone, saying they couldn't be compelled to "speak" by writing code.

Re: Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification

#240

Post by wkrsz »

lrvick wrote: post #145
otterley wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of remedies available to a court with respect to a recalcitrant party, ranging from an injunction to remove your product from the market to fines and imprisonment. Again, speak with your attorney. Do not try to "hack the law" yourself; many who have tried have regretted it later.

No need to hack the law. Our FOSS code is constitutionally protected free speech and I would defend on those grounds. The technical design of the project just makes it so no one can force changes on the distro unwanted by the maintainer team regardless of any courtroom outcomes. Like, what if someone made a law that said Bitcoin nodes must KYC? They could make the law I guess, and the international network operators…

What if you "complied" and released your personal version/fork with age verification that no one would use?
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