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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

#371
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post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then I can configure my kids' devices to disallow that C'mon. We all know parents are far more likely to tap "OK" for "Allow personalized social feeds?" than they are to knowingly falsify their kids' age. The kids will be begging them to and saying "It's just to personalize it, Dad! There's nothing scary or bad on Tiktok - all my friends are using the personalized feed and mine is BORING!" > The decision should be…

> We all know parents are far more likely to tap "OK" for "Allow personalized social feeds?" than they are to knowingly falsify their kids' age. I know lots of parents and lots of kids, and I don't think this is accurate. In my experience the breakdown is parents who care what their kids are doing online, and parents who assume it will all turn out fine because they had AOL or even Facebook as teenagers and didn't ge…

Yeah.

And there is also the group of parents that at the moment have decided no device is safe enough to be given to a child or adolescent.

They are a good litmus test of the bill; would they be happy to provide devices if there was age verification built in?

I am in this group and I wouldn't.

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

#372
post #84
post #58

I feel like all of these laws are being designed backwards. 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. Requiring my kids' devices to advertise their age (or their age "bucket", as if that was a meaningful difference) to protect them is not doing me or my kids any favors.

Having the ability to identify who is watching or saying what on the internet would be immensely useful to the government; the justifications are really meaningless. Anti-money-laundering is a comparable field, as all the AML regulations and laws are ineffective at identifying money launderers, but they're wonderful for verifying (auditing and prosecuting) tax compliance.

> Having the ability to identify who is watching or saying what on the internet would be immensely useful to the government

This sounds unconstitutional.

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

#373
These laws are so short-sited and willfully ignorant of the unintended consequences. The constitution provides rights and protections, and the government cannot compel speech. This will be appealed on consititional grounds and reversed. If not, I'd ban any Illinois resident from being able to use the site and redirect them to their local government representation. Compelled speech is just one attack the law is open to.

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

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 larg…

That’s always been the case for things distributed on the internet. It’s irrelevant in terms of evaluating one’s personal compliance with the law.

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

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How has this fatalism been working out for your society?

It sucks for sure. But how is it going for yours or any other country? I can't even get the politician of my city to reply to me in email because of his arrogant persona. How am I suppose to change something when I can't even get the local politician to listen? Cash would; but I'm stripped for that. You have any?

The UK is relatively small and I see surveys suggesting 70-80% of the population think the country is on the wrong track. Perhaps you should have a national strike or something, make the politicians come crawling to you instead of the other way around.

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

#376
post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anyone is distributing it within Illinois jurisdiction (or maybe even distributing it elsewhere while maintaining a business presence in Illinois), they could be at risk of qualifying as an operating system provider under Illinois law.

How does that work with data on a server outside of the jurisdiction, that’s freely available to download and re-upload? The ‘local legal presence’ thing might work, but then what if they only distribute it on (say) a thumb drive, sent outside the jurisdiction, which is then uploaded by a third party? This whole thing seems unenforceable (or worse, arbitrarily enforceable).

A court will care about what you do in the jurisdictions where it has power over you. What anyone else does is their problem, not yours.

Some oddball Linux distro really has no relevance to the larger picture that lawmakers are trying to accomplish though. The vast majority of kids are using iphone/android/mac/chromebook/windows. Basically zero are using esoteric container images to access TikTok.

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

#377
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC systemd already started implementing some hooks for age verification API

how would it work in the age of everything virtual, from containers to VMs, even an OS instance running in a browser, with OS/kernels being spanned in sub-seconds and existing even for just one call with no user interaction. Are they going to inherit age bracket from supervisor/parent process? Which of course wouldn't work for AWS/GCP, and many other cases. It looks to me like it would require something similar to se…

Simple. If unconfigured, user birthdate should default to 1970-01-01

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

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but most of y’all wouldn’t accept the imprisonment willingly.

Who is "most of y'all"? Sounds like a generalization to me and a poor attempt at an appeal to character in order to undermine the perspective I've shared. Have you been to prison? I've been incarcerated before already after having my rights violated. Let's not go there. Make less assumptions.

Incarcerated temporarily (e.g. awaiting trial or a prosecution decision), or actually convicted and sentenced to imprisonment? These two things are not the same.

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

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"another country" is drafting this same law right now.

There are 189 active legislative bodies to choose from; it's hard to imagine, but yes in the worst case they all fall in lockstep on this issue and none of them provide this kind of freedom. The obvious next step is to buy a remote island (better yet: some foreign body in Space) and form "Freedom (tm) Republic".

Remember that "pirate" guy buying an oil rig and building "freedom" crypto / torrent "country" there, with Datacenter running on the rig? That did not end well. Another case is Kim DotCom. And just look at the "success" of UK's freedom. TBH, we all are f...d.

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

#380

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.

"Distributing" is doing a lot of work here.

A file hosted on foreign server might functionally be a system to "distribute" that file, but it is doubtful if a US state could prevent it from existing.

They could theoretically order US ISP's to cease providing access to said file, but that's a rabbit hole I'm not sure that Illinois or any other state really wants to go down.

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