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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

#281

Post by [deleted] »

quotemstr wrote: post #190
xp84 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the law? It actually imposes very (in my humble opinion) good rules on the content providers, specifically social media. We know why social media is addictive - the personalized feeds are highly optimized to extend usage time, with no amount of time being "good enough." Social media sites would be banned from using this type of feed, limiting it to feeds of content you've subscribed to or requested only.…

Controlling my information consumption is not a legitimate function of the state. If algorithmic feeds get a lot of use, it's because people like them . Is that so hard to comprehend? That your preferences are not universal? And that you shouldn't use the government to bludgeon people into accepting the kind of information feed you, personally, would prefer for them? What gives you the right to do so? What you callin…

[deleted]

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

#282

Post by lrvick »

wkrsz wrote: post #240
lrvick wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I could probably play games like this, but I outright do not believe this law is constitutionally valid, and believe it must be challenged by anyone they try to wield it against.

I would refuse to even give the appearance of compliance in hope to motivate others to do the same.

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

#284

Post by JoshTriplett »

terribleperson wrote: post #229
JoshTriplett wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really don't think we're in a position of choosing between no age-based access mechanism, and age-based access mechanism. It is impossible to win a battle you stop fighting.

But it's possible to lose a battle you were never going to win in the first place, and end up in a worse place. I think that if these types of laws (illinois, california) don't hit a critical mass, we're going to see ID verification become the dominant method of age verification. Most websites will use it, and it'll become global because it's easier to just demand an ID and a photo for every user through some third p…

> I think that if these types of laws (illinois, california) don't hit a critical mass, we're going to see ID verification become the dominant method of age verification.

You are assuming that age verification must necessarily happen. It needs to be destroyed at every possible juncture.

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

#285

Post by otterley »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #280
otterley wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You first!

With all due respect I sense that you might be neglecting the big picture. Unjust laws, slopped out illegal orders and an extreme activist court are all in play.

Those are valid opinions. However, I also see a lot of bluster here about going to prison for their beliefs from people who wouldn't last a minute behind bars.

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

#286

Post by lrvick »

otterley wrote: post #158
lrvick wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The concern here is probably with the shipping of the product (i.e. the binary artifacts), not the code itself. I can imagine a situation in which you could continue to make the code available, but could not produce a shippable artifact from it that Illinoians could access.

If they are successful at doing so, then those distribution methods were too brittle.

I expect in response one of the maintainers outside US jurisdiction of their own volition publishes via bittorrent, tor hidden services, and embedding blobs in public blockchains with no help from me.

Then the problem the legislators sought to solve just got a lot worse, while calling a lot of attention to how little power they actually have to control decentralized FOSS software projects.

Of course another point of the project is building the entire thing from source code with deterministic results only takes a few hours. For many, this would be faster than downloading artifacts.

It is not needed for maintainers to publish binaries at all. Publishing signatures on the expected hashes would suffice at worst.

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

#287

Post by [deleted] »

xp84 wrote: post #263
marak830 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue the reason is so people can make arguments like yours. Step 1: get easily passed, simple looking laws passed to 'protect the children' Step 2: 'oh look at all these people bypassing the law. It's so simple for a child to watch porn with this.' Step 3: increase the requirements bit by bit on the verification By letting something simple pass, they can claim it's not thst bad, and anyone who argues against…

Can you back that up? > Step 2: 'oh look at all these people bypassing the law. It's so simple for a child to watch porn with this.' This would be a demonstrably stupid argument. A parent who simply opens the box and does 5 minutes of setup before giving their child a new $300-2000 device, and maintains the most basic awareness of any rogue devices (i.e. ask questions if a new phone appears) is all it takes to make s…

[deleted]

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

#289

Post by kccqzy »

cogman10 wrote: post #20
tomrod wrote: post #4

I'm surprised we're not seeing heaps of lawsuits here. Age verification in general violates privacy.

You don't have a right to privacy. It should be covered under the 9th amendment, but the supreme court generally just ignores that amendment. Edit: I see people don't like this comment, so here's an article about it from Wex law [1] (read under "Roe's Overturning"). The part of the Dobbs decision was removing a right to privacy and promising that it could be revisited in overturning other cases like Griswald. The 9th…

I don’t think the Supreme Court as a whole wanted to overturn Griswold. At best, specific justices like Clarence Thomas wrote in a concurrence that he would want to overturn it, but that’s still far from the opinion of the court. Given the character of Thomas, it’s safe to say that most of his opinions don’t become opinion of the court.

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

#290

Post by xp84 »

Jtsummers wrote: post #241
xp84 wrote: post #136

Serious question: This is a out-of-box "ask for age" requirement. No one is "verifying" anything. Why are we using this misleading headline? Face scans, ID cards, all that stuff that makes everyone nervous, are specifically not a part of this. To imply that it is verification is propaganda. As a parent, I'd be very happy with this "age declaration" method, as I also don't think the 'verification' others push for is a…

Step 1: Shift the burden from service providers to OS providers (on devices owned by individuals). Step 2: Recognize that the system is trivially bypassed by a kid who sets up their own device without their parents' oversight or parents who just think this is a stupid law and lying for their kids. Or bypassed by anyone using open source operating systems which are (for a feature like this) going to be trivial to amen…

Your Step 2 assumes complete idiot parents. Parents who hand their kids a new device without adding any parental controls (A) are already in the minority today - I know a lot of parents and none of us would do that, and (B) can't be helped anyway under any scheme other than invasive identity "verification" (which this law isn't).

> bypassed by anyone using open source operating systems

You know what? If millions of tweens develop a keen interest in building Linux and Firefox from source just to get "the good TikTok" I'm fine with that. In reality 99% of them use iOS and Android nearly exclusively, so Linux is irrelevant to the conversation.

> The service provider is responsible

We tried that. That's the status quo. There are only two options I know for this, both stupid. 1. (the current model) Just trust the user. Talk about 'trivially bypassed'! 2. Invasive ID checks - with the camera, identity documents, and government databases.

If parents want to go out of their way to irresponsibly give their kids unmonitored access to content that is bad for them that's on the parents. If you try to make service providers "responsible" for it, they WILL build invasive, corporate-controlled systems to cover their asses. Basically option 3 but controlled by shitty companies that get hacked, instead of even a theoretically accountable government that will get hacked. Note that I am not saying your option 3 would be acceptable, just that a private version of it would be even grosser.

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