341–350 of 369 posts
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No, they're funded by the work of net taxpayers.
And net tax payers are funded by exploiting the labor of lower tax payers
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We could e.g. try saying it's sufficient that the user makes ongoing credit cards payments as a proof of age. Or sure maybe you need to verify with every purchase, which is how e.g. alcohol works. Don't currently take payments for your business model? Probably what you're doing is anticompetitive and we shouldn't allow it anyway.
What about non businesses, like nonprofits, hobbyist groups, or individuals offering a service out of their own charity?
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> It leaves open to interpretation if it applies to all computers, or just general purpose ones. That's not even the worst part: > a person that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system Suppose you write a generic piece of code that some third party then includes in an operating system, but you're the only relevant person in the jurisdiction. Are you now an "operating system provider"? If the "operating s…
IMHO, the law tries to target the last entity which has practical control over the OS design and implementation aka the final developer/integrator. For example in the Linux world, it's the distributions. Where it gets murky is with Android (and to a lesser extent Windows). IMHO, the entities which should be responsible are Google and Microsoft. But since vendors, specially in the Android world, can heavily tweak the…
So let's say someone in e.g. South America publishes an Android ROM. >99% of the code was written by Google but the author isn't using Google Play or any form of Google service for updates, it's only using the base Android code with their own updater.
If someone in California uses this ROM and the person in the other jurisdiction made modifications so that it doesn't comply with this law, who is in trouble? It's pretty unreasonable to claim that it's Google, but then is it no one, since the party responsible is outside the jurisdiction?
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What about non businesses, like nonprofits, hobbyist groups, or individuals offering a service out of their own charity?
What service? The social media regulations I recall seeing have a size threshold, so hobbyists don't seem relevant. For something like porn, after having actually thought about it some, I don't really see how we've decided that anonymous porn isn't blatantly public indecency, so frankly I don't see how hobbyists openly sharing their work with anyone without knowing who they're giving it to wouldn't be committing a cr…
That one seems pretty obvious. The point of public indecency laws is so that your family can go to McDonald's and not encounter some couple fornicating on the table. Whereas if you go to a private house where someone lives with a reputation for not being very selective about who they take their clothes off in front of, that's not a public establishment.
A privately owned PC connecting to a privately owned server is a private connection, not a public place. It's something you get by going there. You're not required to go to the frat house.
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Sure, but this is only tenable as a technical position that aims to reduce all forms of centralized power. It completely fails as a political position applied to the nominal "government". Politically, pushing in this direction seems to only ever play out as reducing the power of governments over corporations, while often even increasing the power of government over individuals (spurred on by corporations looking to w…
Would you believe that I agree with what you wrote completely? I’m pretty much a pure anarchist in terms of principles, but I’m a pragmatist in practice. I’d describe my approach in politics as “What do you wish the government would stop doing? Let’s focus on making that happen.” You can’t change a culture by changing the political system, but my hope is that you can change a political system by changing the culture.…
Responding to what you've said, my unfortunate experience is that culture always ends up going sideways. As movements grow in mindshare they tend to attract people focused on power/expedience, only applying the initial precepts towards those ends. And gaining control over some existing centralized power structures is much more lucrative than a given person's share of the distributed wealth that would be created by successfully constraining them.
Which ties right into the problem I saw with your original comment. A statement like "Government should be so powerless as to be unattractive targets for corporate influence" lands in the political/partisan context by default. And while perhaps that's a symptom of how [unfortunately] inured in centralized politics we are, it's still a fact. So even though we can both take a step back and lay out the context where that can be an agreeable productive statement, the overwhelming use of similar statements is actually to attack individual liberty by getting people to overfocus on the nominal government while giving a pass to another primary contingent of the centralized power structure.
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And why? What's in it for Meta? [Edit: Never mind, others have explained elsewhere in the discussion. It's the lawsuits Facebook is losing for addicting kids. So rather than, you know, stopping doing that , they want to instead legally force us to alter every OS on the planet. Disgusting.]
Just answering with a possibility here, but they could be seeking freedom from liability for failure to moderate content or ensuring their service is "not harmful". If it's only for consenting adults, and every adult can be pinned down with an identity, whatever happens can have the blame assigned away from meta. edit: I took too long to write this :)
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What service? The social media regulations I recall seeing have a size threshold, so hobbyists don't seem relevant. For something like porn, after having actually thought about it some, I don't really see how we've decided that anonymous porn isn't blatantly public indecency, so frankly I don't see how hobbyists openly sharing their work with anyone without knowing who they're giving it to wouldn't be committing a cr…
> I don't really see how we've decided that anonymous porn isn't blatantly public indecency That one seems pretty obvious. The point of public indecency laws is so that your family can go to McDonald's and not encounter some couple fornicating on the table. Whereas if you go to a private house where someone lives with a reputation for not being very selective about who they take their clothes off in front of, that's…
It doesn't matter if you're not required to go to the frat house. It matters whether the frat house lets the public in while exhibiting their fornication, or has filters at the door.
“Parents Decide Act” What a crock! Parents actually getting to decide could be trivially accomplished by a first-boot date of birth prompt, at which time the device goes into ‘child mode’ until the date that birthdate becomes the age of majority. Undoing that (say to repurpose the device for an adult) should require the parent who set it up to also do the wiping, much as existing “iCloud Lock” etc requires the owner’…
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IMHO, the law tries to target the last entity which has practical control over the OS design and implementation aka the final developer/integrator. For example in the Linux world, it's the distributions. Where it gets murky is with Android (and to a lesser extent Windows). IMHO, the entities which should be responsible are Google and Microsoft. But since vendors, specially in the Android world, can heavily tweak the…
> IMHO, the entities which should be responsible are Google and Microsoft. So let's say someone in e.g. South America publishes an Android ROM. >99% of the code was written by Google but the author isn't using Google Play or any form of Google service for updates, it's only using the base Android code with their own updater. If someone in California uses this ROM and the person in the other jurisdiction made modifica…
I would argue it falls more on a case like the Linux distributions one and the guy in South America is responsible.
Google, in my opinion, can be held accountable for Android because they deeply control the ecosystem (App Store, APIs, Services) and de-facto prevents significant modifications, specially when they deal with Android security framework & mechanisms (if you modify this stuff too deeply, the Apps could break).
But if a distribution cuts ties with that, then it's the author or the entity behind it who is responsible, and if it's deemed illegal, downloading his ROM should be blocked in the US.
In truth, if I were a defender of this law (which I'm not), I would not worry too much about it. This text is here to force mainstream OS vendors to provide an API for age verification. The micro-subset of people flashing custom roms onto their phone or recompiling a piece of OSS software with some flag disabled is in practice so small that it's not really an issue.
While I do agree that this law could be better written, properly categorizing in it the cases of MS, Apple, Google and maybe entities like Linux Distribution honestly is kind of a nightmare.
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Microsoft just force-updated my operating system (despite declining every option and prompt) and the first thing I noticed working differently was it offering, in an OS popup, to "connect" the computer to "Facebook". These people have root access to all our webcams. I don't think we can tolerate these entities to continue to exist.
What can we do about it? The major tech firms have nearly all the power here, including quite obviously full capture of government (not just here but other countries as well).