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Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

agelesslinux.org

291–300 of 671 posts

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because it's easy doesn't mean it's right. Give legislative busybodies the ability to force this little flag into the OS because it's no big deal, and next year they'll say "hey, make sure you only report 18+ if secure boot is enabled" and 5 years later it'll be "hey, you can only report 18+ if one of our Identity Partners has confirmed it." It's the principle of the matter. The State should not be allowed to co…

You see a slippery slope and I see a reasonable compromise. It's a wildly popular opinion that we should control which age groups can use social media[0][1][2]. Do you think these polls are astroturfed? If not, it's clear people want some sort of age verification, and I think California's way is the least intrusive. And I know someone is going to say 'then we should regulate social media sites to force them to verify…

I'm curious what a poll of public opinion would say about certain demographics in 1930's Germany. Does that seem like a good argument for what the government should and shouldn't do?

A reasonable compromise? With who? Who here is somehow required to "compromise"?

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#292
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The API seems like a funny joke anyway, `sudo setage 12987123`, done.

It's designed for parents to enact parental controls on their children. If you're root, you're the parent. Obviously root can turn off parental controls.

pocksuppet, please do tell us how it feels to be birthed by Google and Apple?

or do you have root on your iPhone?

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#293

This is kind of neat, but the site design is very obviously Claude's handiwork. Has anyone else noticed this very distinctive look, which is a dark mode site with semi transparent cards with a thin less transparent border, maybe ten pixels of border radius... In the last six months this has shown up everywhere . Tools at work look like it. Blogs look like it. It's inoffensive but imperfect, and when so many sites loo…

Yes! This is very obviously AI. Even in the last week there have been several submissions that have this exact same style. Also, the text on the site is obviously AI, em-dashes and all. I don't have a problem with people using the tools to make stuff, but man...at least say it's generated somewhere.

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#295

I don't want to give the impression that I don't find the whole direction of travel concerning, because I do, but as I understand it, the requirement is that the system administrator assigns ages to the users on their system. That seems pretty reasonable to me, and maybe even like a good idea in some scenarios. As far as I know, we aren't talking about software that fights against the interests of the system owner -…

> but as I understand it, the requirement is that the system administrator assigns ages to the users on their system. That seems pretty reasonable to me

Why would it be reasonable for a government to use the power of law to enforce the design of an open source operating system developed by an international consortium of developers? The very fact they are even considering this is extremely suspicious.

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > B) schools aren't in fact obligated to enable those, and some don't. > The technical problem is solved, if they don't want to implement the solution that's on them. Just to be clear - do you not understand that a parent might be parenting, but some times their children is in care of a school? Your focus on "a technical solution exists" is missing the real issue here, and it's not a technical one.

I'm talking about both parents and schools: the technical solution exists. If parents/schools don't want to implement it, that's on them. This answers your objection A and B. C is also a non-probem with a trivial fix, as I showed. What we're discussing is whether age verification is needed. Based on the existence of other, perfectly fine solutions, it's not. "But schools don't bother implementing those other solution…

> If parents/schools don't want to implement it, that's on them

Well that's not much of a solution is it now? More like an attempt that we all can see will fail.

Harm reduction is not the same as a solution.

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do it regardless. If you're right other people will realize that. If not, they won't.

> If you're right other people will realize that. If not, they won't. That literally does not answer the GP's question. You're just an anarchist. We can save a lot of steps if you just state that outright.

I can't be an anarchist because I don't believe anarchy exists. In every group of humans, power structures and hierarchies form spontaneously from normal social interaction. Even if you abolished all forms of government, they would simply reform. A state of anarchy is impossible.

I'm merely a proponent of civil disobedience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience

> Any man who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community on the injustice of the law is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for the law out of all other freedom struggles.

> Martin Luther King Jr.

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're right other people will realize that. If not, they won't. That literally does not answer the GP's question. You're just an anarchist. We can save a lot of steps if you just state that outright.

I can't be an anarchist because I don't believe anarchy exists. In every group of humans, power structures and hierarchies form spontaneously from normal social interaction. Even if you abolished all forms of government, they would simply reform. A state of anarchy is impossible. I'm merely a proponent of civil disobedience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience > Any man who breaks a law that conscience t…

You're right, I misunderstood what anarchy was. My apologies.

Re: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

#299
post #14

Something remarkable and unsettling is how the age verification debate has popped up almost simultaneously in the US, UK, and EU. With the same logical fallacies. Pretty telling about how transnational lobbies and their interests work. Controlling what children do online is a solved problem: Parenting and parental control applications.

> Controlling what children do online is a solved problem: Parenting and parental control applications. This is absolutely not true. Here in the UK schools are swarming with ipads and shit like that. They're given to primary school children because they're "more engaging". Children are supposed to practice their reading and even handwriting[1] on ipads. Naturally they're on youtube instead. It's really bad. As far as…

I volunteer at a makerspace, twice already adults came to seek help "bricking" their smartphone, so it can only be used when a certain RFID token is present, the problem is there exist commercial solutions aimed at companies and institutions, where the employee can't disengage the lock, and then theres commercial (and open source) solutions aimed at individuals, but these can always be easily disengaged and bypassed.

I agree that children's elders (parents, teachers, ...) should be able to control the available apps and platforms, but only for a reasonably short period (so that kids don't grow up in censorship right until they are adult, it should be continuously relaxed until the kids are in control of their own impulses, so whatever mechanism is used, it should gradually relax willy nilly the opinions of the elders or the state).

This brings up the next problem: what if parents mutually disagree? and what if teachers mutually disagree? and what if parents and teachers disagree? So there should be some kind of jurisdiction awareness in the parental control system: when at mothers place, mothers rules, when at fathers place, fathers rules, when in this or that teachers class their rules, as that would be the technological agnostic position (regardless if the old ways were good or bad, thats what technological non-interference would suggest).

But even if all parents, all teachers agreed on the parental control settings for a child, they can't really do it effectively since they are placed at the whims of big tech, with clear visible conflicts of interest like advertising, engagement, etc.

To solve that government should mandate a simple secure way for the smartphone to accept a user generated cryptographic public key, upon proving ownership so that they can sign their own root, first non-ROM (actual silicon ROM, not firmware images) op-codes chosen by the user. Then they can install any open source parental control software they want.

Its the surveillance state refusing to give the populace the keys to their own smartphone, and then deciding to "solve" the resultant inability for effective and community controlled parental control mechanisms by degrading privacy for all.

"we have to reign in your privacy, because we refuse to give you the ability to sign your own bootloaders, for freedom and safety of course"

every time we have people complain about how expensive "bricking" software and effective parental control software are (the commercial solutions aimed at companies and institutions, which have special arrangements with smartphone industry), we should direct them to a petition to force an actual right to compute by mandating computers INCLUDING smartphones allow the end-user to sign their bootloaders with a self-generated key of their choice.

Then the problems will disappear overnight, and solutions for this problem will come in a form like all the big beautiful free and open source software, and it will work, and it will be sane.

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