Live data from Hacker News

California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash

tomshardware.com

401–410 of 525 posts

Re: California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash

#401
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the cookie banners have separate categories for strictly necessary, functional, performance and marketing, because those come from the law. The problem is that people generally want functional and often performance cookies, and then you end up with the stupid cookie banner regardless of marketing cookies.

Strictly necessary cookies don’t require explicit consent, and generally can’t be rejected. Functional cookies don’t require additional explicit consent if you actually use that function. “Performance” actually refers to analytics, probably rebranded because users did not want it. Making you think they had to ask for the reasonable cookies, too, is the whole trick being pulled here.

> Functional cookies don’t require additional explicit consent if you actually use that function.

To not be indistinguishable from "strictly necessary" there would have to be a case where the "functional cookie" actually required consent, right? What case is that and how would you solicit that consent other than some kind of cookie banner?

> “Performance” actually refers to analytics, probably rebranded because users did not want it.

It refers to statistics, but sometimes you do want that, e.g. so the site can tell you how long it took you to do something compared to the average user, or provide those analytics to you. And the fact that this is ambiguous is an obvious problem -- if you get access to the data they collect is that "analytics" or "functional"?

In the face of an ambiguity, most corporate bureaucrats are going to take the risk-averse option, which is to ask for consent in case it turns out to be adjudicated as required ex post facto. The result is quite predictable. If you pass a poorly drafted law, businesses have a general preference for doing something stupid/wasteful/annoying over something that could get them sued or fined.

Re: California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash

#402
post #249

As usual 95+% of people commenting have no idea what is actually in the California law, and so are commenting about things that have nothing to do with it. Different states, countries, and multi-country organizations that have legislated in this area or are working on legislating in this area have went with many different approaches. These differ in their scope, how age is verified (or even if age is actually verifie…

The age verification is coming from the Digital Age Assurance Act. this act is pushed by the NGO 501c3 called Common Sense Media, their donors include Bezos, zuckerberg, and other rich people. The same NGO also created a platform called Bandio that provides age verification services. How convenient. Legislate restrictionist policy today that manufactures demand for age verification service, and then rollout the solut…

Magic, Inc.

Re: California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash

#403
post #3

The only device mandates that should be taking place is for the default installations of web clients should be checking to see if parental controls are enabled. This only impacts the major browsers. An intern at each browser company could add this check in minutes. If they are enabled and the person logged in is on a regular account (not admin or power user of sorts) then the base installation of web clients must che…

This assumes that the goal is child protection, while the actual goal is user profiling and ad revenue.

Re: California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having the government burrow into your Linux install like North Korea is totally fine as long as the people doing it are competent and not corrupt!

telling Debian it should ask you during setup whether you're over 18 (which you're allowed to lie about) is the same as North Korea now?

"telling" is a really curious euphemism for forcing volunteer Debian developers at gun point or they'll get thrown in jail. People in recent history seem to have forgotten that this is how governments enforce laws. If it was not, why would anyone bother obeying the laws if they didn't like them?

Governments are dangerous monopolies on force and the use of that force shouldn't be casually tossed out like candy at a parade on crap like this. If it doesn't matter if you lie, what's the point of even doing this, to prove that we're insane? Or is it the pretext for requiring a remote server id carding service in the future under that guise? Keep driving down this road and you end up with an end game that looks a lot more like North Korea than a free society with limited government.

Re: California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash

#405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No such mandates should take place at all.

> No such mandates should take place at all How do you propose doing age restrictions for social media? These are broadly popular. (And the evidence supports them.) They are happening. So the question is how to do it best. The project for reversing the consensus isn’t worthless. But it’s a long-term project that will have to bear fruit after these restrictions go into effect, if ever.

>These are broadly popular

The idea is broadly popular but the second you start asking about implementation details (ie showing your ID to post on the web), the actual approval percentage tanks down to the single digits.

But you knew that which is why you construct this rhetorical motte-and-bailey about it being "broadly popular"

Re: California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash

#406
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bold of you to assume that lawmakers have any common sense when it comes to technology legislation. It could have taken 3 interns 3 hours at each browser company to implement a cookie consent standard 15 years ago, yet here we are in cookie banner hell.

Tech companies could have headed off this legislation 15 years ago by just solving the problem as Bender suggested. But they wanted to pretend they had no social responsibility to not deliver filth to children, and so now the legislators are involved and they get to deal with that. I have no sympathy.

[dead]

Re: California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation for this claim? Searching lands on this page without any citations and seems AI generated slop: https://captaincompliance.com/education/meta-is-spending-2-b...

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...

Yes, the source of these claims is AI slop from a new account with no history.

Re: California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash

#408
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly, this should be really simple as a foundation: by default the Internet is for adults. All of it. Where it's desirable for things to be available for kids, create the economic incentive and easy tools for parents to use and run on a white list, not a black list. I'd actually go somewhat further though and ask whether it's a good idea to even do this via web pages at all. We have a great potential system f…

A .kids domain is not a useful approach. The vast bulk of the internet is child neutral. For example my church a web site, the bakery down the road has one, the local pro sport team has one. They're not designed "for kids", but kids are welcome. Does StackOverflow need to register a .kids domain just so children might get answers to programing questions? If my-bakery.co.uk and my-bakery.co.au both want to be visible…

>A .kids domain is not a useful approach.

I surprisingly seriously disagree, and think you're perhaps missing a lot of the contention in this whole societal debate. The point is to give people workable tools with some level of agreed sane defaults they can make use of, tweak, or ignore entirely, without imposing any burden at all on the existing internet and its adult (or children with parents who wish it) users.

>The vast bulk of the internet is child neutral

First: by who's standards is one of the core questions! What's neutral to one parent may not be to another. You illustrate this with your very first example in fact, "For example my church a web site". There are religious parents (and no doubt atheist ones as well) who would quite strongly not want their young child to visit your church's website.

Second: there is a difference between simply wanting to be child friendly and taking on a legal obligation and liability to be child "safe" to some given standard. Parents would be perfectly free to whitelist whatever additional sites they liked, or to subscribe to lists that curated whitelists of various sorts, or to use other controls. But a politically significant number of parents clearly want assurance that their child will near-never (with actual enforcement mechanisms for failure) encounter something outside of bounds. Meeting that need requires either whitelists or the sort of restrictions that would wreck the current web (and probably still not work very well).

>Does StackOverflow need to register a .kids domain just so children might get answers to programing questions?

If the parents of said kids want it to, then yes? Why would that be a big deal? I'd be surprised if like most places SO doesn't already have piles of domains purely for defensive purposes, and as something nationally regulated I certainly envision such a domain registrar being dirt cheap (or even free, paid for by tax dollars) for domains. Given the context and that it'd be very much not open to all there isn't any need to worry about cost to dissuade scammers and such, they'd be prevented from ever registering in the first place. Rules around use of trademark, business names and so on could also be very strict.

>If my-bakery.co.uk and my-bakery.co.au both want to be visible to 16yo there needs to be at least kids.uk and kids.au.

Yes? DNS is not expensive. And again, parents don't need to make use of it. This would be for those who do, who are right now pushing for ID for everything. It's a safe default walled garden, but one with doors any parent can open.

>Does OpenSSL.org or OpenSSL.com get to be OpenSSL.kids?

Which one chooses to get accredited by a regulator or child protection organization with insurance and so on first? Why are you asserting either would even bother? Which one would be happy about having to verify ID of users right now?

>Sorry but duplicating the entire neutral internet domain space with yet another tld isn't a helpful approach.

Sorry but you haven't thought about this very clearly at all. This proposal is very explicitly a small subset of the entire neutral internet! Duplication is never something I suggested, rather the very opposite! The "entire neutral internet" is by default adult here, but parents would be able to allow children to browse it just as now. However, some are clearly unhappy with that, enough that we're seeing politicians respond with things that would be very bad.

Re: California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash

#409
post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Its like in some countries you put a sticker on the mail box "no advertisement, please" and its illegal tor postman to deliver you ad brochures. Same could have been possible with browsers, but oh no, now you have to go out to each postman ant tell him explicitly that you do not want ads, and postman has no memory, if you tel him that you don't want ads. He can come back ten minutes later and you have to tell…

Fun fact: in the US, the Supreme Court ruled that postal workers cannot filter out mail by the owner’s request. It makes a bit of sense, since the mailer had already paid, but the main justification (iirc; it was years ago that I read the opinion) was that a postal service should be neutral and trusted to deliver.

Sure, the ISP _should_ deliver the packets. No worries.

The user agent should... be an agent for the user, and be able to perform actions on their behalf.

(The legality of those actions is of course assumed by the user here... if I add an automated flamethrower to my mailbox and burn my bills, well the debt collectors may come regardless if I read them or not - we cannot shift blame to the USPS here).

Re: California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash

#410
post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Its like in some countries you put a sticker on the mail box "no advertisement, please" and its illegal tor postman to deliver you ad brochures. Same could have been possible with browsers, but oh no, now you have to go out to each postman ant tell him explicitly that you do not want ads, and postman has no memory, if you tel him that you don't want ads. He can come back ten minutes later and you have to tell…

Fun fact: in the US, the Supreme Court ruled that postal workers cannot filter out mail by the owner’s request. It makes a bit of sense, since the mailer had already paid, but the main justification (iirc; it was years ago that I read the opinion) was that a postal service should be neutral and trusted to deliver.

Not terribly persuasive because the first argument could just as well be seen as the postal service selling a service it can't deliver.

The second argument has the problem that for the whole thing to work the recipient must also have reason to trust the post office, but here their interests are not considered at all.

Post reply on HN