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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

#521

Post by xp84 »

eterm wrote: post #383
xp84 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> given the number of stories of parents who seem to hand their children their credit card, then complain about them racking up thousands of dollars on Roblox or whatever Sure, but you hear about those because of how shocking they are to all sensible people. Actually I bet a lot more kids rack up those charges using cards they stole from mom's purse. Same kids will start trying to sneak mom's old iPhone out of the de…

> I just don't accept the absolutist idea that if anything can be gotten around by any means, that means it can't still be sensible policy Now on that I agree strongly, there is a crowd on here that believe that technical weaknesses defeat political strengths, and focus all their effort into proving a technical workaround only for the political juggernauts to continue crushing their freedoms. These are arguments whic…

Hear, hear. I could even argue that the dearth of "skilled political operators" and "passionate orators" - at least excluding the ones that seem to be under exclusive contract to the Devil himself - is maybe the worst part of our current era. And it's widespread, and on multiple continents. We haven't seen the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, or FDR, or even JFK or LBJ, in a whole generation. Even a comparison to Richard Nixon, by any measure, makes every presidential candidate and congressional leader in the past 20 years look like buffoons and fools. Terms like "Debate" have become redefined as "Insulting and ranting past your opponents to get cheers out of your fans." No wonder we can't pass any policy that makes any sense with these jackasses in charge.

And in case anyone wonders, on my list of skilled politicians above, I'm only old enough to have witnessed Nixon, so this is not a "back in my day" rant. It's a "it hasn't been ok since way before my day."

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

#522

Post by xp84 »

kej wrote: post #318
xp84 wrote: 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…

How is it a punishment to that first group? If you like the status quo, there's no impact to you if you just set the DOB to 1/1/1999.

Or are you waiting for some science-fiction proposal that will be completely perfect, which you know will never happen.

> The uninvolved parents won't even be in the room when the age question comes up.

We agree that idiot parents (and therefore their kids) can't be helped. So let's just not even consider them in deciding what to do.

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

#523

Post by xp84 »

kikoreis wrote: post #371
kej wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> if there was age verification built in?

well, actual verification isn't even on the table in Illinois so that's quite a hypothetical.

But anyway, since you'll always retain the right to not give a device (which, btw I cheer and support that decision with or without the age declaration law existing) why does your lack of trusting devices with kids have to do with anything? This scheme can exist and not affect you at all, and will benefit the many "moderate" parents who do give carefully-supervised devices, and don't carelessly just throw brand-new devices at the kids.

If I'm that parent who did decide to start giving access because this bill came to be, I'd still be limiting "the internet" to a small allow-list of sites whose compliance, and exact manner of compliance, I was satisfied with.

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

#524

Post by xp84 »

weakened_malloc wrote: post #395
xp84 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use them. First of all, they're still absolute dogshit (but Apple promises good changes in next OS?). And the choice is to either allow social media in its current, extremely toxic form, or ban it entirely. There's no "Allow Instagram but only let them see the content their actual friends post." No "Allow TikTok but let me allow-list the influencers that show up in For You." The peer pressure on kids to be on those…

The difference is that those other things in the past didn't really place an undue burden on everybody else. Whether a child is allowed to watch an R rated movie or go to a pub has no effect on how I conduct myself, age-gating computers or the internet does affect how I use things. > I think the theory behind the law is that experimenting on children to optimize (without any ceiling) for increasing watch hours, which…

How exactly would this bill, as written, affect you? Would you indicate that you're a child when you set up your device? If not, you're arguing with a strawman version of the bill, I'm guessing one that imposes verification (which isn't in there, and which I oppose too). The slippery slope argument is nonsense. Windows XP asked me to type my full name to make a user account in 2001 and that didn't become a driver's license scan even 25 years later. Some things aren't conspiracies against you, and if we don't trust politicians not to pass the bad version of the law later, we should throw them out on their ear now.

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

#525

Post by hnlmorg »

lrvick wrote: post #513
otterley wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you really suggesting that armed conflict would be a better option here? Of course not. I'm simply refuting your assertion that "mockery is...the best weapon against authoritarianism." > If mockery weren’t an effective weapon, political cartoons and political satire (and establishment attacks on them) wouldn’t exist. Mockery can be effective in inspiring others to topple authoritarian regimes or amass public su…

Given my comments were in the top ten highest voted of the day, it encourages me that a -lot- of people think this law is dumb and ideally some subset of them will fight it with me. Some of us with mockery, and hopefully some with legal and political talent behind the scenes. I am just a mascot pointing and laughing at a stupid unenforceable law with scary intentions. The real fight is likely to be fought by legal pr…

> Given my comments were in the top ten highest voted of the day, it encourages me that a -lot- of people think this law is dumb and ideally some subset of them will fight it with me.

Everyone on HN agrees this law is stupid, myself included. What we are refuting is that big words on an anonymous forum count as any form of protest. Because they don’t.

If it were that easy then I could cure cancer just be willing it via message boards. Or end the Iran war just by complaining about it online. Unfortunately actual change requires actual effort.

You can’t even change our opinion on this very small point and you have our attention and we are likely otherwise likeminded. So to argue that your words will have any effect to laws passed by completely different personally types who don’t even frequent HN is beyond absurd.

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

#526

Post by hnlmorg »

iamnothere wrote: post #504
otterley wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you really suggesting that armed conflict would be a better option here? Of course not. I'm simply refuting your assertion that "mockery is...the best weapon against authoritarianism." > If mockery weren’t an effective weapon, political cartoons and political satire (and establishment attacks on them) wouldn’t exist. Mockery can be effective in inspiring others to topple authoritarian regimes or amass public su…

You’re just being pedantic about the definition of “weapon”. Without a groundswell of public support, it’s not possible to enact change. The finishing blow is just one link in the causal chain. We actually live in an authoritarian or “managed” democracy, where technocratic leadership increasingly ignores or even openly mocks the demands and needs of the people. Insider trading and blatant market manipulation is rampa…

You point is easily debunked by the fact that all those late night talk shows (Stephen Colbert, Jon Oliver, Jon Stewart, Seth and so on) haven’t changed a thing in US politics.

Mockery is a great medium for spreading a message. But words don’t make change by themselves. Ergo mockery is not an effective a weapon for change.

What mockery does do, and online petitions too, is placate lazy but opinionated citizens into thinking they’re part of a movement while they can sit in their comfy chair and do a grant total of nothing to actually further their ideologies.

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

#527

Post by DoctorOetker »

kube-system wrote: post #493
DoctorOetker wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s irrelevant in terms of evaluating one’s personal compliance with the law. That's precisely what I discussed: the case where this person fully complies and ceases distribution (but the distro doesn't cease being distributed by others).

So what? That's how all laws work. What if I don't rob my local convenience store, but someone else does? Don't make the mistake of logically getting caught up on the idea of laws "preventing crime". They never have, and they never will. The deter crime by providing for penalties when someone breaks the law .

But they don't deter crime when people outside of the jurisdiction, or anyone inside the jurisdiction can provide for themselves with the help of LLM's.

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

#528

Post by normalaccess »

metal696heart wrote: post #279
normalaccess wrote: post #135

Thankfully for now this dragon is a hydra. Too many paths to block for now . The whole TPM fiasco with windows is preparation to put the genie back in the bottle. Soon, much sooner than I would like you will need a Global ID to access the internet, which will require an "internet safe operating system". It's only a matter of time. Get your sneakers ready folks.

How about a second internet ?

My Opinion on that: It would be branded as unsafe and something only terrorists and extremists use. Aside from the propaganda campaigns that would run 24/7 to influence public opinion it would (and will) be outlawed to run an unmonitored personal compute system. I'll bet they will use the fact that open models can generate c-sam materials.

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

#529

Post by hellojesus »

kube-system wrote: post #494
hellojesus wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But wouldn't this type of law drive youth to using more exotic distributions to get around the issue? It's not far fetched to think that kids will just live boot from tails or another distro to visit socials and circumvent this rule. Plus with unlocked pixel bootloaders it would be trivial for them to petition their parents for a pixel, hard reset it, unlock the bootloader, install grapheneos via the web installer, a…

What is this bill blocking that kids want so bad that they'd go through the trouble to do that... and lose blue bubbles with their friends? The ability to receive specifically unsolicited DMs from adult strangers? Opting in to behavioral tracking? This bill doesn't block social media for kids... I expect their response to be simply that they keep using social media on their phone the way they already do.

Perhaps I'm just too old and don't use mainstream socials outside of HN, but when I was growing up the very act of knowing I was on a "child" account was reason to break out of it alone. I broke a lot of operating systems that way but also got good at repairing them. Jailbreaking was normal. War driving was normal. Breaking WEP just because you could was normal. Later, watching your neighbors go crazy over the fence as you deauthed their devices from their network was normal. It was just part of being a kid and having fun learning about the world.

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

#530

Post by hnlmorg »

lrvick wrote: post #399
otterley wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hoping you are never forced to add code to a project you do not want to add You keep saying that, but that's not the realistic outcome. The realistic outcome isn't an injunction forcing you to add code. It'd be to force you to pull it out of circulation.

They cannot force me to do either. But it would be a fascinating case study to watch them try. I feel it would only help prove the decentralized censorship-resistant tactics of the project work as intended. Government overreach should be in the threat model of every FOSS project.

There are already case studies that demonstrate governments can do exactly what the GP lawyer claimed could happen. You’re not treading any new and untested ground here.
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