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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

#351

Post by EvanAnderson »

slg wrote: post #269
pwg wrote: 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.

The adtech companies need human verification so they can keep selling ads. Age verification is a way to get that under the radar because normal people are pissed off about "the children" and "the social media". You've also got cultural warriors who would love to censor speech on the Internet championing it, too.

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

#353

Post by polski-g »

lrvick wrote: post #104
otterley wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're in the USA or plan to visit someday, I would recommend you speak with your attorney before making such commitments.

I am in the USA, but I literally cannot comply because by design it is not possible for me to ship changes without the international maintainer team agreeing to them. And Illinois legislators have no power over them. Also, we are not a company. We are an independent community owned project. Our code is free speech and I will burn the world down to defend that right. Truly I dare someone to try to take me to court ove…

If you're in the ninth circuit you're safe because of Bernstein v DoJ.

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

#354

Post by akersten »

Marsymars wrote: post #54
LPisGood wrote: post #2

What does that mean, practically? The person who installed linux on that particular device is liable? >no algorithmic feeds for minors by default Any choice of what content to display is an algorithm. Maybe they want a simple or easily explainable algorithm?

> Any choice of what content to display is an algorithm. You could argue about the language and the meaning of "algorithm", but for practical purposes I'd consider a manually-curated feed to be non-algorithmic.

sure, if we can make words mean whatever we like, yeah

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

#355

Post by JoshTriplett »

tzs wrote: post #324
JoshTriplett wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that if these types of laws (illinois, california) don't hit a critical mass, we're going to see ID verification become the dominant method of age verification. You are assuming that age verification must necessarily happen. It needs to be destroyed at every possible juncture.

What is your objection to the California law? A summary for those not familiar with it: • Operating systems on devices whose primary user is a child must provide a way for the parent to provide age bracket information about the child. • They must also provide an API that apps and app stores can use to find out that age range if they need to have limits on what children can do with them. • They amended it to not apply…

Among many other things, privacy. If you know an age range that's more information about the user than you should have, and you can use it for marketing. And if you can ask for an age range, then in practice you know a birthday; just keep asking until the range changes and record when you saw it change.

It's also the wrong way around: apps shouldn't ask for an age range, apps should provide one and the OS should do the checking.

I also object to it because it's a foot in the door for demanding that websites and apps care about that age range.

And most importantly, devices already provide parental controls in practice, and this law doesn't make those any better, it just unnecessarily cements one aspect of them into law. You can, already, on many devices, say "don't allow installing apps without permission", or "don't allow installing apps except those with this rating".

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

#356

Post by an0malous »

buran77 wrote: post #142
bryanlarsen wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary in my experience once a legislature passes a bill to "fix" a particular problem they consider it fixed and don't update it for at least 20 years.

Unless there is a big lobby behind getting more "fixes".

Who's the lobby?

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

#357

Post by JoshTriplett »

kube-system wrote: post #337
dooglius wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a reason why lawyers generally advise their clients to remain silent. Most people prioritize their finances (and non-imprisonment) over their rights, and attorneys will optimize for that expressed preference. GP has clearly indicated his priorities are different. That has nothing to do with intelligence. Someone having a different set of values than you does not constitute unintelligence on his part.

GP said they wanted to take it to court. I presume that means they wanted to win, in which case the best strategy is to discuss the issue in private with an attorney before making public statements that could undermine your ability to win. If the actual priority here is advocacy, with no real desire to litigate, then I'd buy that.

Exactly. More power to anyone who wants to fight this. But if the goal is to win that fight, do a better job of fighting, rather than acting like "oh, I have a structure that prevents me from complying" will somehow magically make a court go "eh, nothing we can do".

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

#358

Post by s3p »

otterley wrote: post #115
lrvick wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in the USA, but I literally cannot comply because by design it is not possible for me to ship changes without the international maintainer team agreeing to them. And Illinois legislators have no power over them. Also, we are not a company. We are an independent community owned project. Our code is free speech and I will burn the world down to defend that right. Truly I dare someone to try to take me to court ove…

There are a lot of remedies available to a court with respect to a recalcitrant party, ranging from an injunction to remove your product from the market to fines and imprisonment. Again, speak with your attorney. Do not try to "hack the law" yourself; many who have tried have regretted it later.

I'd trust the judgement on an open source maintainer on how to best maintain their code. Your comment seems like it was made out of genuine concern but I think you need a lawyer too before you can argue this with certainty

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

#359

Post by matheusmoreira »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #125
lrvick wrote: 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.

Maintaining forks is pretty trivial now with AI.

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

#360

Post by pixl97 »

EA-3167 wrote: post #325
lrvick wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact people are scared, or scared for me, is in and of itself a problem. But lets all wait for nothing at all to happen. Then confidence can grow over time that this is unenforceable in any effective way. They should go back to trying to police piracy via bittorrent (lol).

I think the issue here is that while the people here are aware of the history and "utility" of laws like the one above, most people aren't and right now "regulate social media, the internet, and what my kid does with computers" is having quite a day. Inevitably all of this is framed in terms of keeping children safe, whereas piracy is at most a misdemeanor of very little consequence. Although I have no doubt that cou…

Ya, I think op needs to study the history of civil rights in the US on how to do these things. Quite often the people that were getting arrested and challenging the state were specifically chosen because they didn't have any kind of dirt to dig up. The state is perfectly fine with playing dirty inside and outside the courtroom. The state would love the person brining a constitutional challenge to suddenly be marred in the eyes of the public as some kind of deviant.
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