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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

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Given your comment history, I suspect that you are sympathetic to these laws and you’re trying to prevent people from opposing them, using your “friendly advice” as cover.

Believe it or not, there are plenty of people in the US willing to go to jail (or worse) for their beliefs. It’s kind of the founding mythology of the nation.

US history is full of people who successfully challenged violations of their rights and government overreach. Success isn’t guaranteed, sure. It never is. But cowering in fear because the tyrants might put you behind bars is downright un-American.

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

#342
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, let's legalize recreational fentanyl too, since 'whatever people seem to like' is good for society. In this case, unless you're a child, nobody's trying to control what content you consume. And if you are a parent and want to make sure your children can continue to consume the most addictive possible social media, by all means lie about their age. The law does nothing to stop you from doing so. By contrast, ha…

> By contrast, having zero mechanism for the rest of the parents to control this, as is the current case, does impose your "do whatever feels good" values on the rest of the world. Parental controls? They take 5mins to setup.

I use them. First of all, they're still absolute dogshit (but Apple promises good changes in next OS?). And the choice is to either allow social media in its current, extremely toxic form, or ban it entirely. There's no "Allow Instagram but only let them see the content their actual friends post." No "Allow TikTok but let me allow-list the influencers that show up in For You." The peer pressure on kids to be on those platforms is intense though, and many parents seem to be allowing it.

I think the theory behind the law is that experimenting on children to optimize (without any ceiling) for increasing watch hours, which 100% of the social media sites are doing at all times and have been for over a decade, is unethical and should be illegal.

If adults want to subject themselves to that, it's their business, but for children, we restrict all kinds of things from even being marketed towards children. Things (especially addictive ones) that are very obviously bad for humans, like cigarettes and liquor. Why? Because otherwise there's a huge incentive for the makers of those things to do so, because of how naïve kids are.

A wildcard here is how if at all to address careless, negligent parents of course. For the things so obviously harmful like drugs, it becomes criminal to give those to your kids. But perhaps social media falls into about the same category as R-rated movies, where we just say "it's bad parenting to take a 6-year-old to one, but not illegal." Another area where we have 'censored' things for children for decades - without any kind of scary police-state regime materializing and forcing biometrics and recordkeeping at the box office.

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

#343
post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"most liked" won't work. has to be chronological, and manually curated. the way fediverse works. when you make an account somewhere, you can choose to see the local people, or the entire network, but it's all chronological. There's things like hashtag searches and whatnot, but none of it is algorithms; in the sense we understand it to mean, here, these are not manipulative algorithms designed to keep people on a site…

There's a "trending" feed on nearly every implementation including the official Mastodon one (hashtags have their own "trending" too), and chronological definitely fits "an algorithm" imo - it has all the hallmark problems of one, such as encouraging bad behavior (frequent spamming is the most effective strategy to be seen). Lemmy is even further down this path, with "hot", "controversial", "active", etc, and default…

chronological feed nuisances can be blocked or not followed in the first place. It is absolutely not an algorithm by the definition we're all using here.

It is an algorithm on a data structure, but it is not an algorithm to drive ad impressions.

do you see the difference?

this is why people say "Algo" when talking about the latter, and "Algorithm" when talking with other like-minded people about data structures and algorithms.

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

#344
post #269
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Content providers, like MPAA films, should have to identify what sort of content they are providing. Then I can give my kids a device configured to allow some or all of that at my discretion. If the intent were to actually protect children, then this would be what was done. "Protect the children" is just a subterfuge to get electorate support for voting for the foundation for a "1984 thought crime" style monitoring…

Do folks realize how many people would need to be a part of this conspiracy to get these laws passed at the state level? Maybe some people actually want to do good and are just misguided. And responding to those people as if they are evil government stooges certainly isn’t going to help them find the light.

On the other hand, I don't know a single person or have even heard of people or organizations who are advocating to pass these laws. They want the war in Iran to stop and for costs to go down. How is there so much political willpower for the former and almost none for the latter?

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

#345
post #89

Linux distro founder here (stagex) I will never be compelled to implement this, and would never merge it. Every release requires quorum signatures by an international maintainer team, and the distro is designed to work offline-first, with some variants not even supporting network drivers in the kernel, so Illinois legislators can eat shit.

RedHat/IBM does have an Illinois presence so will likely be compelled to add it to their distro, and will likely do it through systemd. So to avoid it getting into any consumer distro you'd have to ship a patch to remove it from systemd. This is probably all completely irrelevant to StageX since it's a distro designed to be used in containers, AFAICT.

Fortunately patching out such nonsense is as easy as running a few commands.

Project tracking these laws and providing patches as needed: https://agelesslinux.org/

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

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope i can find this comment in a few years. Also children can "come upon" devices, so this is still completely pointless unless there's a way to ban devices that don't have this ability. and the only way to do that is to ban devices that cannot verify the user's age. since a device can't really verify an ID, some third party (ideally meta, but also the government works) needs to verify id and age, write something…

>Also children can "come upon" devices Yes, this mechanism isn't perfect, but is a substantial improvement over the status quo. >and now that's stuck with the verified age set. This inference is nonsensical. >If "just let someone report the age" worked, pornhub wouldn't be blocked in TX. Also nonsense

How do you propose that a child's device will remember their age in a "legally distinct" way for the life of the device? You ought understand what i am asking here, as it directly follows what i said before. You have a child, somehow the device knows how old the child is. An adult sets it? great. What if the device wasn't set up by a responsible adult?

You don't foresee a black market of "no-age-audit" devices? How do you prevent that? Well, one way is to use the secure enclave and write the birthday in it so that it cannot be tampered with. How is that written? who writes it? Who verifies the ID?

TX passed a law stating that adult sites like pornhub must verify age. I hope you understand what "verify" means in this context. It isn't "i promise i am over 21 or 18 or whatever" - because if that worked, TX lawmakers wouldn't have made the law say "verify" https://journals.law.unc.edu/firstamendmentlawreview/screeni...

In the future, casual dismissals are viewed negatively.

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

#347
post #338
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or alternatively - you could recognize that normal people are getting more and more pissed off by the fact that social media companies are force-feeding garbage into their kids eyeballs 16 hours a day. We could give them a reasonable solution that demonstrably preserves privacy and doesn't inconvenience anyone else (Suppose you want to see all the uncensored everything, you open your new PC or phone and say your DOB…

I actually agree with you, but you have an optimism about the ability for open source maintainers to have achievable political aims, in a way that I haven't seen happen for decades. What your happier future looks like requires both a technical solution, but more importantly political wins to sell that solution as the better one. The current operating systems weighted by users, are entirely under the control of three…

> given the number of stories of parents who seem to hand their children their credit card, then complain about them racking up thousands of dollars on Roblox or whatever

Sure, but you hear about those because of how shocking they are to all sensible people. Actually I bet a lot more kids rack up those charges using cards they stole from mom's purse. Same kids will start trying to sneak mom's old iPhone out of the desk drawer to install "Adult TikTok" on. But again, this is not more concerning than the way my generation rooted around on the top shelf of Dad's closet to find the old Penthouse magazines.

I just don't accept the absolutist idea that if anything can be gotten around by any means, that means it can't still be sensible policy. Which seems to be the attitude taken by two separate groups -

1. Your and my common enemy -- the ones who are eager to enact "Show ID to access this site (trust us!)" verification schemes

2. And the freedom-loving hackers I've been arguing with today, who also detest those schemes but also don't want to see any scheme of any kind.

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

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what could they be compelled to stop doing here? Mechanically speaking, I mean. I can imagine fines or contempt of court, etc But how would you remove an international distro from "the marketplace" if it's free and not operating a business?

It's not that complicated. If there's a law that says "Anyone who distributes X must also Y" and you can't figure out a way to continue distributing X while also doing Y, the way you comply with the law is that you stop distributing X.

None of this answers the question: even if @Irvick stops distributing or participating in any way with this "stagex" distro, that "stagex" distro continues its life outside of the jurisdiction, at most you start treating it like contraband drugs within your jurisdiction.

With LLM's anyone will be able to disengage such "default wars" in popular software, so there isn't really any border control when LLM's form a large surface area of the border.

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

#349
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Great, let's legalize recreational fentanyl too, since 'whatever people seem to like' is good for society. In this case, unless you're a child, nobody's trying to control what content you consume. And if you are a parent and want to make sure your children can continue to consume the most addictive possible social media, by all means lie about their age. The law does nothing to stop you from doing so. By contrast, ha…

Information that enters the mind through the eyes and ears is nothing like a drug that alters consciousness at a low level. Words are just words. You don't get to control the words people choose to hear.

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

#350
post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a "trending" feed on nearly every implementation including the official Mastodon one (hashtags have their own "trending" too), and chronological definitely fits "an algorithm" imo - it has all the hallmark problems of one, such as encouraging bad behavior (frequent spamming is the most effective strategy to be seen). Lemmy is even further down this path, with "hot", "controversial", "active", etc, and default…

chronological feed nuisances can be blocked or not followed in the first place. It is absolutely not an algorithm by the definition we're all using here. It is an algorithm on a data structure , but it is not an algorithm to drive ad impressions. do you see the difference? this is why people say "Algo" when talking about the latter, and "Algorithm" when talking with other like-minded people about data structures and…

Someone chose "most recent" when implementing "most recent", and then that decision automatically controls what is shown next. They could have chosen "most recently liked" or "most liked" or "minimum MD5 checksum" or "alphabetical" or "most liked in past 24h" or "likes / hours * followers / followee_ratio * poster_birthdate_days_diff(admin_birthday) * tfidf_rank_matching_books_published_in_1885" - all of those would be algorithmic sorts in my book. "Most recent" is just one (among multiple) of the simplest ones to predict the behavior of.

A fully human-curated feed would not be "algorithmic", in contrast. Print newspapers do this, and sometimes online ones to varying degrees, and most blogs. You could even let people build their own (e.g. "boost to my popular feed [at position X/newest/oldest]"). Essentially none do this though, they all choose algorithmic ones of varying complexity - it doesn't make them non-algorithmic to choose a simpler one.

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