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Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

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Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#51

Post by uyzstvqs »

People need to understand the difference between age indication and age verification. Two very different things. Age indication is a completely private and realistically as-effective alternative to the invasive age verification.

Age _indication_ means that when you set up your device or create a user account, you enter a date of birth for the user. The OS then provides a native API to return a user's age bracket (not full date-of-birth). If the user is a minor, the OS will require parental authentication in some way to modify the setting again. This can all be done completely offline. It works because parents almost always buy the devices used by children, and can enter the correct date-of-birth during setup.

Age _verification_ means that some online service has to verify your age, and collects a bunch of (meta)data in the process. This is highly problematic for privacy, security, and the open internet.

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#52

Post by hypeatei »

Aurornis wrote: post #26
ekr____ wrote: post #9

OP is certainly right that a lot of this legislation is written in ways that are hard to interpret and that often seem like they would have undesirable side effects even under the assumption that the basic idea is good (whether that's actually true is a whole different question). In the specific case of CA AB1043: (1) Systems are required to ask the user for their age and just trust whatever they say (2) Applications…

I think this legislation is as dumb as everyone else does, but it also seems like the cheapest way for everyone to agree that we did something about the moral panic without actually giving up anything. It doesn’t do anything with ID or privacy or even actual verification. There’s no complicated auth dance to do with government services to verify our age tokens or whatever the latest Rube Goldberg machine “zero knowle…

I disagree with your overall sentiment that this is benign because it's ineffectual in its current state. If anything, this is going to warm people up to the idea of government mandated prompts gathering personal information in their OS, and legislators in 2030 (or whenever) are going to say: "this isn't working, lets build on top of that prompt we already have and make it verify IDs"

In other words, I think this first bit of legislation had to be watered down to not receive too much backlash. This is the governments first plunge into mandating things on the frontend.

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#53

Post by bityard »

kmeisthax wrote: post #42
Aurornis wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this legislation is as dumb as everyone else does, but it also seems like the cheapest way for everyone to agree that we did something about the moral panic without actually giving up anything. It doesn’t do anything with ID or privacy or even actual verification. There’s no complicated auth dance to do with government services to verify our age tokens or whatever the latest Rube Goldberg machine “zero knowle…

You're on the right path, but the "something" politicians want to do is specifically "regulate Facebook's patent harms to children". Facebook's counter-argument is: "we don't have a legally ironclad way to check user age, it should be Apple and Google's job". So the politicians want to write a law to make it Apple and Google's job to check age. In other words, all of these age verification laws are here predominantly…

No, we can also be mad at the systemd guys for their very mid attempt at complying with an idiotic and unenforceable law, when the default of doing nothing was objectively the best option for them AND their end users.

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#54

Post by ekr____ »

uyzstvqs wrote: post #51

People need to understand the difference between age indication and age verification . Two very different things. Age indication is a completely private and realistically as-effective alternative to the invasive age verification . Age _indication_ means that when you set up your device or create a user account, you enter a date of birth for the user. The OS then provides a native API to return a user's age bracket (n…

I like the term "age indication". Thank you.

If I may nitpick, the conventional term for systems which attempt to determine the user's age is "age assurance". This covers a variety of techniques, which are typically broken down into:

* Age estimation, which is based on statistical models of some physical characteristic (e.g., facial age estimation).

* Age verification, which uses identity documents such as driver's licenses.

* Age inference, which tries to determine the user's age range from some identifier, e.g., by using your email address to see how old your account is.

These distinctions aren't perfect by any means, and it's not uncommon to see "age verification" used for all three of these together but more typically people are using "age assurance".

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#55

Post by razingeden »

jjmarr wrote: post #50
gizmo686 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source is driven by contributions. Most of the time, if someone wants a feature, implements the feature, and submits a reasonable PR to a project, that project will have the feature. In this case, the PR appears to have been written by someone who is not a regular SystemD contributor, and (through a bit of Googling) works for a FinTech company with no obvious interest. I can't comment on why that individual want…

> No one is going to not buy something because it is kosher. But if paying a thousand dollars a year to put a small circle-u symbol on the back of your box can increase sales by 1% among observant Jews, most companies are going to do it. Contrary to perceived politics, many Muslims will eat kosher food because it's a superset of halal rules (excl. alcohol). It's a globally consolidated certification through organizat…

I hope everyone’s bank knows how old they are— what with all the documentation we have to cough up to keep us safe from Terrorism , patriot act, 9/11, never forget, etc

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#56

Post by EmbarrassedHelp »

uyzstvqs wrote: post #51

People need to understand the difference between age indication and age verification . Two very different things. Age indication is a completely private and realistically as-effective alternative to the invasive age verification . Age _indication_ means that when you set up your device or create a user account, you enter a date of birth for the user. The OS then provides a native API to return a user's age bracket (n…

The issue though with "age indication" is that it creates an additional flag that can be used to fingerprint users. But it is infinitely preferable to any sort of age verification or age assurance.

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#57

Post by nout »

awesome_dude wrote: post #20
nout wrote: post #6

It's interesting that the package managers become choke points that can be used for government overreach. Luckily Linux is open source so I expect there will be options that just don't do this from principle. Otherwise my Intel NUC server with Debian is 2 years old, so I expect the honest age would be 2 years? I may have parts for some old PCs to put together that could get adult software I guess...

For me, the big issue is going to be mobile devices (phones, and tablets to a lesser degree) I've already had it up to my back teeth with Google arbitrarily updating things such that the on/off button was hijacked, preventing me from switch the device off, instead triggering an interaction with freaking Gemini (what sort of IDIOT thought doing that to a device was a good idea) I'm seriously trying to find a way to no…

I think more folks are now interested in the "Linux" or "Graphene" market and since the phone hardware development is not as rapid as it used to be (from 1yr cycle to more than 2yr cycle), I think this gives more stability and wiggle room for folks to do Linux and/or Graphene. I'm patiently waiting for what happens with the Motorola + Graphene integration/plan. If they provide good hardware + preinstalled Graphene, I'd buy it.

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#58

Post by Cyph0n »

ChocolateGod wrote: post #11
Shank wrote: post #7

It seems incredibly silly to me that this is being rushed into systemd and other linux components. I understand Apple making changes, and even Canonical, but systemd is not run by one corporation and there is no reason to adhere to a badly written law. Why play along with the charade? If root is root, the "age verification" field does not make any sense. Why are these changes being made on a worldwide basis when the…

IIRC all that's been done is a field has been added to store the user date of birth and a protocol that can be used to retrieve said date. That's it.

Okay, but why do this now? If it’s such an important feature and unrelated to the barrage of legislation, why was this not implemented a few months or years ago?

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#60

Post by Cyph0n »

tombert wrote: post #21

I've been running NixOS for awhile, which is very firmly integrated with systemd. I wonder if it's time to try something like sixos or Guix SD.

Setting aside the ridiculous nature of this move towards OS-level verification, NixOS (and Guix) is the last distro to worry about when it comes to age verification.

Why? Given the nature of how NixOS works (config-driven), the maintainers have plausible deniability: if push comes to shove, they can shift the burden to users and have them enable the age verification service as part of their NixOS config.

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