This will be implemented as a dropdown asking for your birthdate, which anyone can lie on, and everyone will move on
A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
711–720 of 768 posts
Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
#712Headline is wrong. There is no verification requirement. All this does is require the user to select a non-verified age bracket on first boot. You can lie, just like porn sites today. I thought HNers wanted parents to govern their children's use of technology with these kinds of mechanisms.
> You can lie, just like porn sites today. In the US maybe, but where I am you can't fap in peace without using a VPN or have some kind of age verification. Some of them being baroque. Example: "We analyze your email’s digital footprint (history and reputation) against trusted databases. This is often enough to confirm that you're of legal age."
Shh, don't give them more stupid ideas ;)
Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
#713There's an obvious theme with lawmakers in California—they pass laws to regulate things they have zero clue about, add them to their achievement page, cheer for themselves, and declare, "There! I've made the world a better place." There are just too many examples. For instance: - Microstamping requirements for guns—printing a unique barcode on every bullet casing (Glock gen3 cannot be retired, thus, the auto-mode swi…
The irony is that the only entities capable of complying are the large centralized platforms
Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
#714Earlier 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…
That's an interesting point, but I suspect the biggest barrier isn't constitutional, it's behavioral
Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
#715Ignoring all the tedious 'no, you're a bad person for having different priorities and beliefs to me' comments that this will inevitably inspire, I have to ask: why does the operating system need to be involved in this? The intended target of the regulation seems to be app stores. Someone has fallen victim to Politician's Logic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vidzkYnaf6Y
Probably because the OS is the only layer that's both upstream of the app store and (in some ecosystems) in a position to provide a standardized, system-level signal
Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
#716Reaction 1: how would this even work with embedded systems that have no UI to input this data? Reaction 2: it's open source, make the lawmakers do submit the changes. Reaction 3: how would this ever be enforced? Would they outlaw downloading distributions, or even older versions of distributions? When there's no exchange of money, a law like this is seems like it would be suppression of free speech. Reaction 4: Someo…
On the enforcement point, I suspect it won't be enforced against Linux in the abstract, but against companies with a legal and commercial presence in California
Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
#717A better law would have been to require the apps look for an RTA header. [1] If detected trigger parental control password prompt which would only be enabled if a parent enabled parental controls.
Server operators could add this header to anything adult or that may contain user-contibuted content in their sleep. App developers could add a snippet of code to look for the header in their sleep. Then have a law that requires parents with small children under 10 must enable parental controls on devices used by their children. Why under 10? No confrontation with teens. The small children will grow into the process. No PII shared. No asking for ID. No sharing ID. Not on the OS, not on a third party website. I don't like green eggs and ham, I don't like them Sam I am.
We all know that once this law has been complied to they will extend it to require ID be uploaded to whatever company gives the most kick-backs to Gavin and an API key will have to be saved on the OS per account. This data will be leaked in 3 ... 2 ...
Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
#718Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The solution is to get money out out of politics. Term limits are good for the exact reason you mentioned. For tech law, there should be some sort of tech committee that knows laws like this are idiotic.
Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
#719Another clueless politician coming up with a law that makes him feel as if he did something right.
Re: A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
#720Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should follow your own advice. Their definition of "app store" is a mile wide: "(e) (1) “Covered application store” means a publicly available internet website, software application, online service, or platform that distributes and facilitates the download of applications from third-party developers to users of a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing that can access a covered applicati…
GitHub isn’t an app stores associated with an operating system though . Your personal website is most likely not in scope. You have to put all the pieces together. Apt… yes is an App Store run by an operating system organization (Debian org). That feels pretty unsurprising. Debian’s parent organization (headquartered in the US) probably needs to comply with this.
Where in that definition does it say the app store must be associated with an OS?