Unfortunately, a rhetorical knee-jerk response that it needs universal, specific counter legislation for a "permanent fix" is panacea, magical thinking.
The root cause is a corrupt government doing the bidding of a few rich people and other countries. Fixing that will be very difficult but is nonetheless necessary and possible to largely thwart legislators from working against their own ostensible constituency.
I don't like this whole thing, but compared to what I was fearing would happen, this idea is nowhere near as bad.
What I expected was that we'd end up with the OS vendors actually being mandated to really do age verification, and then submitting that using Web Credentials and Secure Attestation so that the far end could trust the whole thing, locking open-source OS's out of the mix and creating more of a walled garden online than we already have. I was guessing it would become a simple checkbox on e.g. Cloudflare - "[ ] allow adult users only" or whatever - and that it would end up with vast swathes of the internet going off limits for anyone not on closed-source systems.
Now, it looks like this is just a way for parents to tell the OS "this is a kid account" and have it flow through to websites so they can easily proactively block kids from connecting without having to implement any of that crap. Yes, it's much potentially easier for a child to circumvent; but any kid who can get around that sort of thing from within an OS could probably just wipe/reinstall anyway, so who cares?
As a parent whose kids are continually trying to see what trouble they can get into, I appreciate that I will get one more potential weapon in the fight.
Can someone tell me whether I am being a fool by actually being a bit relieved it's going this way?
If I’m not mistaken, Meta has been lobbying heavily for all of these age-verification bills lately.
It seems their strategy is to externalize their responsibility to verify age themselves, and thus reduce their exposure to liabilities when child protection acts like COPPA are violated.
What are they going to do to enforce this? Take down open source projects that "operate" in Illinois because a user downloaded the software there? Absolute joke and everyone should treat it that way; advanced compliance here means implicit support for the surveillance state.
I wonder how this will mix wit federal laws saying you aren't allowed to track users under the age of 13yo? Will this then be forced as a browser API/header passed to every server/request?
People here seem very against this, but I don't really see it. This only require to have a form asking about your age and provide an API to read it, right?
Surely I'm missing something? Is the backlash due to fear of a slippery slope?
The "one weird trick" that all government hates? Stop forcing OSes to function with accounts. "User account" is an artifact of UNIX. You don't need an account to start a car, send and email, nor boot an operating system. I know it's hard to grasp, but it's true.
This coordinated state level attack on the legislative process is crazy. These people can't seem to be bothered to do the basics of governing, but they always find time to do this cross-state nightmare fuel.
It is a fault in part in the government designed with bits and pieces of "honor system" and "well no one will ever do that!"; and the governed unable or unwilling to enact consequences.
It's kinda convenient because every service needs to ask you for the age now because they can't serve under 13s in a lot of cases. Having it be a simple API would be a decent convenience, no?
If you connect it with a permission system where you can choose whether to provide this information (e.g. >13 as a bool or age as an integer or the birthday as a date) that can't be too bad I guess?
The law as is written mainly targets social media platforms. For an OS to comply, all it needs to do is provide a field during account creation that records the user's date of birth as supplied by the user. There is no onus on the operator to confirm the veracity of this information, or even record it anywhere other than the local OS install itself. I think we're safe.
Even if open source operating systems comply and add such a feature, what's to stop individual people from removing this and blocking the API requests before they install the OS? Or providing dummy responses? They're open source, after all.
Is the government going to require some sort of automated checks that verify every person who connects to the internet has this API on their OS and go after individuals that aren't in compliance?
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 48.1 ms ] threadThe root cause is a corrupt government doing the bidding of a few rich people and other countries. Fixing that will be very difficult but is nonetheless necessary and possible to largely thwart legislators from working against their own ostensible constituency.
What I expected was that we'd end up with the OS vendors actually being mandated to really do age verification, and then submitting that using Web Credentials and Secure Attestation so that the far end could trust the whole thing, locking open-source OS's out of the mix and creating more of a walled garden online than we already have. I was guessing it would become a simple checkbox on e.g. Cloudflare - "[ ] allow adult users only" or whatever - and that it would end up with vast swathes of the internet going off limits for anyone not on closed-source systems.
Now, it looks like this is just a way for parents to tell the OS "this is a kid account" and have it flow through to websites so they can easily proactively block kids from connecting without having to implement any of that crap. Yes, it's much potentially easier for a child to circumvent; but any kid who can get around that sort of thing from within an OS could probably just wipe/reinstall anyway, so who cares?
As a parent whose kids are continually trying to see what trouble they can get into, I appreciate that I will get one more potential weapon in the fight.
Can someone tell me whether I am being a fool by actually being a bit relieved it's going this way?
It seems their strategy is to externalize their responsibility to verify age themselves, and thus reduce their exposure to liabilities when child protection acts like COPPA are violated.
Richard Stallman advised us about it long ago.
Thank god Plan9 got relicensed into GPL. 9front might not totally free, but it's a step in case GNU+Linux gets utterly broken.
And, yes, please, go try Trisquel (novice users), GUIX (experts) and Hyperbola (experts and protocol purists).
Avoid every Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Netflix service with nonfree JS.
Surely I'm missing something? Is the backlash due to fear of a slippery slope?
If you connect it with a permission system where you can choose whether to provide this information (e.g. >13 as a bool or age as an integer or the birthday as a date) that can't be too bad I guess?
I haven't read the whole thing of course.
Is the government going to require some sort of automated checks that verify every person who connects to the internet has this API on their OS and go after individuals that aren't in compliance?
1 10 0000
or even better
1 10 -2000
This will turn into most useless set of laws ever