301–310 of 768 posts
It's funny that more and more Chinese style laws are being passed in the West. What's next? Chinese style social credit? You’ll need 800 points to run a sudo command? Free society? Mass surveillance. The West is becoming more of a nanny state like China every year.
Why is this "news" today? Am I missing something?
Ignoring all the tedious 'no, you're a bad person for having different priorities and beliefs to me' comments that this will inevitably inspire, I have to ask: why does the operating system need to be involved in this? The intended target of the regulation seems to be app stores. Someone has fallen victim to Politician's Logic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vidzkYnaf6Y
There are essentially two desktop operating systems, Windows and macOS. Linux is a decimal point and too fractured to worry about.
There are essentially two mobile operating systems, Android and iOS. And while Android is fractured, Google still has reasonable control they can exert.
This is (weirdly) the smart way to do this type of law.
Make the consumer OS providers add an age signal. That property can be bound to an account with the inability to change it.
Behold, "universal enough" parental controls which will require only a handful of lawsuits to litigate.
There'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…
> - Microstamping requirements for guns—printing a unique barcode on every bullet casing (Glock gen3 cannot be retired, thus, the auto-mode switch bug cannot be patched...) I don't know much about guns, but I assume that would be on the hammer? Couldn't you remove that "microstamping" by lightly filing down the hammer or just using it a bunch and causing some wear?
There’s a concerted global effort to push this legislation. It’s also been proposed in Colorado and, some version of it’s been passed in the UK and Australia.
Really? Can you expand on the version of Australian legislation that requires an OS to have age verification?
The AU legislation I'm aware of requires various social media sites to verify that users of those sites are not under some age, 16 or so.
That is not a constraint on the OS or on potential users, that's a legal requirement for Social Service providers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
most government "solutions" cause more problems than they solve Zero basis in fact. We’re in the wealthiest nation on the planet. Most of us live better than any previous generation. To claim all that success is completely in spite of government is ridiculous.
Are you under the impression that the government created all that wealth?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fo…
Sending all the "bad" data to the client and hoping the client does the right thing outs a lot of complexity on the client. A lot easier to know things are working if the bad data doesn't ever get sent to the client - it can't display what it didn't get.