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A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

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Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

#511

Post by abustamam »

ajnin wrote: post #351
SllX wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The incentives are all wrong. You can serve up to 6 two-year terms in the Assembly or up to 3 four-year terms in the Senate, but regardless of which combination you do, nobody in the California legislature can serve more than 12 years combined across both Houses of the legislature. So we don’t have professional legislatures with long-term electability incentives or leadership goals, we have a resumé-building exercise…

That's a non sequitur. Creating long-term professional politicians is not going to create legislators competent in the various domains they legislate on. It's going to create politicians competent at being elected long term, whatever the means.

Yeah we need not look further than the 70 year old men in the United States senate/congress who have been in their seats for longer than I've been alive, making laws on technology they don't understand.

I don't know what the solution is for California, but I don't think it's that.

Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

#512

Post by abustamam »

DrJokepu wrote: post #498
aldonius wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting idea and I do agree that contiguous is OK but total is not. I think I'd suggest a more generous Senate term limit. Three terms (18 years) would allow for someone to see out a complete Presidential super-cycle, for example. The word Senate is etymologically related to "senior", it's a place where you _want_ people to be able to develop a lot of institutional experience.

>The word Senate is etymologically related to "senior", it's a place where you _want_ people to be able to develop a lot of institutional experience. I’m not disagreeing with the rest of your comment, but I’m going to challenge the notion that this etymological connection carries meaning. The word comes from Roman Senate, and in that context in Latin “senior” really meant people with higher status rather than age. La…

Yeah, many words are literally divorced from their etymological root. Literally ;)

Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

#513

Post by dataflow »

roywiggins wrote: post #503
dataflow wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how would this even work with embedded systems that have no UI to input this data? Doesn't the bill explain all this pretty clearly? https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm... >> An operating system provider shall [...] provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user [...] >> “Operating system provider” means…

> general-purpose computing device This term doesn't seem defined in the law at all. How general is general? Graphing calculators that support apps and Python? Of course, they don't usually have "accounts" either. But to a technologist it's a "general purpose computer" insofar as it can run new code that the user loads into it, it can definitely run games that it didn't come from the factory with, etc. It's a tiny mu…

Does your pocket calculator with Python have an account setup process?

Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

#516

Post by nakedpwr »

juris wrote: post #502
flenserboy wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

vague laws are put in place so that they can be used selectively to punish particular victims while letting friends through the nets

until you root out their friends and maliciously develop app stores for their products, then install them multiple billions of times on a docker and let them rack up charges ;) doom can run on -anything-

But would Mark Zuckerberg have stopped there?? Nay. I think you could still weaponize it for profit if we only dream hard enough. Lol

Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

#517

Post by SllX »

skissane wrote: post #505
SllX wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The incentives are all wrong. You can serve up to 6 two-year terms in the Assembly or up to 3 four-year terms in the Senate, but regardless of which combination you do, nobody in the California legislature can serve more than 12 years combined across both Houses of the legislature. So we don’t have professional legislatures with long-term electability incentives or leadership goals, we have a resumé-building exercise…

It is interesting that this is a mainstream existing thing in the US (at the state level), but more of a fringe proposal in the rest of the English-speaking world. I think the answer may be that the difference in political systems (parliamentary vs presidential) and party systems (less two-party but with greater party discipline) solves many of the problems term limits are intended to solve in completely different wa…

> Maybe a better answer would be for US states to adopt the parliamentary system?

Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t think it would change outcomes as much as people would think, but to scope limit this back to California again because electoral law discussions just fucking spiral anytime there’s no geographic constraint, the root of California’s lawmaking problems is that the legislature is both poorly structured and poorly balanced against the direct democratic approach we have taken for so much of our lawmaking. I don’t think that’s inherent to the non-parliamentary system we have in place, but a result of incremental rule changes stemming from decades of ballot propositions that are supposed to solve a problem, but don’t and tend to have negative knock-on effects that fly under the radar.

Or put another way: the legislature is for legislating. It doesn’t need a competing power structure, and it doesn’t need to be balanced by anything other than a good functional Executive power and a good functional independent Judiciary. If you have that as your starting point, then maybe there’s room to discuss if there are any real advantages of a Parliamentary system instead.

Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

#518

Post by SilentM68 »

Mr. AI analyzed the wording in the link and said:

California Assembly Bill 1043 requires OS providers (including Linux) to add age verification at account setup, prompting users for birth date/age to signal age brackets to apps in covered stores. It may violate privacy by enabling data collection/misuse beyond age checks, similar to UK/Discord issues; no explicit civil rights violations noted, but could restrict access for adults/minors if misapplied. Benefits: Enables age-appropriate app content, protecting minors. Drawbacks: Privacy risks, enforcement hurdles (e.g., Linux disclaimers like "not for California use"), aligns with global trends amplifying concerns.

An updated deep dive by Mr. AI returned the following analysis:

Official link: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm... Revised pros: Enhances child safety via non-PII age brackets for app compliance; data minimization limits info shared; anticompetitive prohibitions prevent misuse; good faith shields from liability. Revised cons: Setup requires age input, risking misuse despite safeguards; enforcement challenges for open-source OS like Linux; increased developer liability for signals; potential access restrictions from errors or misreports. No clear privacy/civil rights violations for adults/minors, but implementation costs and global trend concerns persist.

My thoughts: California lawmakers keep turning the screw more and more to the left with AB 1043 being introduced by Democrat Buffy Wicks. Though it has bipartisan co-authors (8 Democrats, 3 Republicans) and passed the Assembly unanimously (58-0), it still feels a bit authoritarian to me. The California Assembly political divide is very left leaning with Democrats controlling 60 seats and Republicans 20 for a total of 80 with Democrats controlling a supermajority.

What's to stop someone from building their own Distro using LinuxFromScratch to bypass this new restriction? Nothing, in my view!

Which I had money cause, Florida looking good about now.

Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

#519

Post by gsnedders »

EmbarrassedHelp wrote: post #257
ohhnoodont wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I feel the flow of having browsers send some flag to sites is the most privacy-preserving approach to this whole topic. The system owner creates a “child” account that has the flag set by the OS and prevents the execution of unsanctioned software. This puts the responsibility back on parents to do the bare minimum required in moderating their child’s activities.

If browsers are going to send flags, they should only send a flag if its a minor. Otherwise is another point of tracking data that can be used for fingerprinting.

If you send a flag ever, then absence of a flag is also fingerprinting surface.

If you imagine a world where you have a header, Accepts-Adult-Content, which takes a boolean value: you essentially have three possibilities: ?0, ?1, and absent.

How useful of a tracking signal those three options provide depends on what else is being sent —

For example, if someone is stuffing a huge amount of fingerprinting data into the User-Agent string, then this header probably doesn’t actually change anything of the posture.

As another example, if you’re in a regular browser with much of the UA string frozen, and ignoring all other headers for now, then it depends on how likely the users with that UA string to have each option: if all users of that browser always send ?0 (if they indicate themselves to be a minor) or ?1 (if they indicate themselves to be an adult or decline to indicate anything), then a request with that UA and it absent is significantly more noteworthy — because the browser wouldn’t send it — and more likely to be meaningful fingerprinting surface.

That said, adding any of this as passive fingerprinting surface seems like an idea unlikely to be worthwhile.

If you want even a weak signal, it would be much better to require user interaction for it.

Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

#520

Post by JodieBenitez »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #342

I seem to be doing more and more illegal things as time passes, whilst not changing my behavior at all. Curious.

I couldn't have said it better myself. My loved ones don't share my opinion, which makes me wonder if I'm sane or if they're not exercising their freedom.
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