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California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

tomshardware.com

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Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

#321

Post by johnnyanmac »

andai wrote: post #172
johnnyanmac wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To use your metaphor, this is saying that a store needs to limit you to the kids section if it is told you are a kid at the door. The exemption here is because a park doesn't have doors to perform this check onto. (PS. I'd hope we were past trying to hamfist physical metaphors to describe the digital landscape. But alas).

Well, maybe cigarettes were a silly metaphor -- can my kids still get their porn at the Linux store? Are the gore websites gonna have to ask for ID now? What about 4chan? Or is the whole point to get rid of all that stuff and just get everyone using Facebook instead? (They're the ones who pushed these laws right?) I'm honestly trying to understand what the big picture is here.

Yes, your kids will still find that dirty magazine under the park bench that the older kids discarded. And you can't stop that unless you're willing to employ a hundred park rangers who monitor every corner of a park at every time. So no one bothers.

>Are the gore websites gonna have to ask for ID now? What about 4chan? Or is the whole point to get rid of all that stuff and just get everyone using Facebook instead? (They're the ones who pushed these laws right?)

The idea is that this closes a loophole which a bunch of websites already bypass from several other kinds of laws that punish companies for breaking age verification laws (like COPPA). The obvious defense is "well I didn't know they were 12, they clicked a button saying they were 18". So now here's a mechanism that gives them more information they have to implement.

For the range of who implements it, like always, probably goes top down. They won't cover every website under the sun, but getting the big websites will supposedly be good enough. Given how consolidated the internet is these day, maybe there is some kind of point there now.

Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

#322

Post by johnnyanmac »

inigyou wrote: post #269
johnnyanmac wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook was the excuse (and there's a no zero chance Meta funded the initiative themselves). The government's worldwide jumped on it so quickly partially becsuse they've been trying to find aan excuse to control the internet for decades. Never dismiss how quick they are to push stuff like this but how slow they are to enact actual positive change for the people.

But California AB1043 is an anti-control law.

It's one of the better implementations, but it's still ultimately a law made to give controlling bodies more information about a previously anonymous activity. It's still a foot in the door.

Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

#323

Post by layla5alive »

TheSkyHasEyes wrote: post #245
nirui wrote: post #221

Wow, you guys are really REALLY naive aren't you. They made it sound like it, but this is not a victory at all, this is a temporary strategic compromise to silence the most sensitive/foreseen privacy advocator for now. But they will not stop here, instead they'll keep advancing the mechanisms, opinions and laws, so one day when the pieces aligned, they can come back to turn this tap off while having people lied to th…

No need to comment with guns ablazin' :D California law don't represent the planet. That's their tax problem in their country. Now, if I am the naive one in this story please educate me. After all, this website is excellent at this and I learn so much from the commentary.

California making this law is but one domino, but if you can't or won't see the bigger picture of the cascade of dominos, then yes, you are the naive one. And there is a need to comment with guns ablazin', this is existential for humanity on a long enough time horizon.

Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

#324

Post by maccard »

inigyou wrote: post #274
maccard wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s 150 comments of back and forth on a change which doesn’t have a concrete reason, the maintainers aren’t in agreement on what the right approach is wrt the field’s behaviour, and the person who submitted it is bouncing between saying he’s keeping it on topic and then adding scope where he believes it should be added. I also personally disagree with the change, I think the OP has gone ahead and implemented what th…

That's the facebookisation or redditisation of open source. Open source used to mean when you got the software you got the source code, but now it means a platform for arguing. And there's no doubt in my mind when people say they can't switch their project from GitHub to Forgejo because they'd lose "contributions", they mean this.

I don’t think this is anything new. There’s been massive blow ups for as long as we’ve been doing this - NetBSD and OpenBSD was a massive, public falling out as was the gnome 3 release, or the python 3 release.

Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

#325

Post by wredcoll »

irishcoffee wrote: post #318
wredcoll wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "trolley problem" is literally never a valid argument for anything because it purports to create an analogy for a real world problem but does so by creating a scenario that cannot exist, hence any argument based on it is nonapplicable to "real" problems.

You think that kind of scenario cannot exist? That is your reasoning for dismissing it? You’ll hafta do better than that.

The true version of the trolley problem requires perfect knowledge of the future. This can't exist in the real world.

Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

#326

Post by ErroneousBosh »

ctjr wrote: post #145
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I think I know this one. It's because people who make their own guns are nerds. You know, like you or I, except in a different topic. I remember reading a couple of posts on R*dd*t where two folk were discussing fitting accessories to guns and one posted something like "No, you can fit that, all you do is mill a slot on top of the receiver and drill and tap a hole at the end and you can just about screw this thin…

> here you're allowed fully automatic weapons, if you keep them at a suitable shooting range and don't try to wander around town with them, and you're not oh maybe a convicted violent criminal for example I think you're overstating this. My understanding is that here in GB (unsure about NI) fully automatic firearms are absolutely prohibited with only limited exceptions that the general public are typically ineligible…

If you run a gun club where people can safely fire fully-auto weapons in a controlled environment, you are allowed to own them and supervise people firing them.

This is not an easy or inexpensive thing to set up.

I shot a documentary about a guy doing just that in NE Scotland, about 20 years ago, and while his range is still in business I don't think he has ever cleared the tape for redistribution - it was a "here's what you spent your money on" for the investors.

Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

#327

Post by ykonstant »

stephenlf wrote: post #239
huimang wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stub code that doesn't do anything sounds like a great candidate for removal.

This IS systemd we’re talking about.

Dead code? No, no. "That is not dead which can eternal lie..."

Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

#328

Post by greyface- »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #243
greyface- wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bill exempts: > a person or entity that distributes an operating system or application under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software which at least doesn't choose specific winners and losers among licenses. It does disfavor license-free and public domain software, which isn't great.

Sure, but of minimal practical impact. The Free and Open Source community has long discouraged releasing software into the public domain, as it has clear drawbacks compared to just using a permissive licence. The legal intricacies of the public domain vary between jurisdictions. Not all jurisdictions even allow copyrights to be surrendered in this way. [0] Licence-free isn't a concern. That isn't even close to Free a…

This is exactly what GP was talking about: entrenching a preference for one style of licensing over another. We all know what set of licenses the FOSS zealots would prefer for us to release code under, and those who release license-free or public domain software anyway typically do it with full knowledge of such arguments.

Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

#330

Post by AngryData »

tyre wrote: post #190
SiempreViernes wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the gunplay in Minecraft very limited, so I'm surprised that is how you got into Counterstrike ;)

If they’re American, guns are just part of our education system.

They aren't but they should be. Many lives could be saved by making gun safety a mandatory class for all US students. If every kid had to learn the basic rules of gun safety, a significant number of accidental deaths could be prevented, and even many not so "accidental" deaths could be prevented because people would immediately recognize when someone else is being unsafe with guns. And gun safety rules are good things to ingrained in peoples heads when they are young. Similar to other safety rules like don't run with scissors, or put your seatbelt on, or don't pull sharp objects towards your body, or look both ways when crossing a road. If you teach it to kids in a serious manner the safe actions become a reflex action.

And part of the problem is that our entertainment media (movies, shows, video games) pretty much trains anybody who has not been taught gun safety in real life to reflexively point a gun at somebody when it is picked up, often with their finger already on the trigger (although some movies are better about this now). People see a gun on the ground, may not even know its real and think its a toy, "Hey guys look what I found" and immediately aim down the sites at their friend.

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