Also this goalpost will move almost immediately. What if the parent doesn't understand why the OS is asking for a DOB and they type whatever? What if the parent doesn't log out and the kids use the adult account? What if the kid is really smart and bypasses the check (I think this could actually get bypassed easily)?

Rather than rolling back this rule they'll just go even further and say the OS must analyze every action and utilize every input (e.g. microphone, camera) to determine the age of the current user and that controls need to be at the hardware level and OSes need to get state certified, etc. Before long only Windows, Apple, Google, and maybe RedHat can comply. An entire community of Linux enthusiasts destroyed. And as some bills have stated, rather vaguely, this can apply to something as simple as a calculator!

I don't want the device I own to enforce laws that I don't get a say on.

Is it my device or am I renting it?

Should all cars have breathalyzers installed by default?

No, I don’t believe you’re actually this stupid, sealion

You are a sealion. “Factually correct” but still acting like a shitbird

Funny huh

correct. i am a gen x software engineer and I know for a fact my kid who is now 25 would always find ways around firewalls when he was 14 and horned up.

my point is that we have laws already that are perfectly appropriate to the “concern” stated, “child safety.”

any new laws will only give more access to important data to corporations who are known to do bad things with it.

that does not make it worth it. my opinion would change if there was a legit large inrush of charges using exiting laws that then did nothing to help, then one could argue we need more law. but thats just not the case today.

mlem is not showing me votes. so dunno what you are talking abt.

my point is that we have laws already that are perfectly appropriate to the “concern” stated, “child safety.”

any new laws will only give more access to important data to corporations who are known to do bad things with it.

that does not make it worth it. my opinion would change if there was a legit large inrush of charges using exiting laws that then did nothing to help, then one could argue we need more law. but thats just not the case today.

It doesnt make it easier for them down the road, if anything it makes it harder as there’s the ability to say “but we already have that”.

This is perfectly reasonable, but my feeling is that the real world isn't reasonable in this way.

Consider all the infractions of liberty that have been approved in the name of combating "terrorism." The no-fly lists. The universal warrant-less searches. All domestic communications recorded and archived for who-knows how long. The pervasive surveillance. The huge extension of CBP power to do things like raid Greyhound busses that aren't even crossing borders.

None of these steps were prevented with the argument "But we're already doing something about that issue." That argument never even came up, to any noteworthy degree, in the public discourse.

Look at it this way: All sorts of websites that aren't for kids already have banners requiring the visitor to affirm that they're legal adults. So, we're there: "We already have that." But no one is seriously making that argument. Because, of course, those banners do next to nothing: Visitors can just lie. So it will probably be for OS level age verification. Thus, in creating a system that doesn't work, the excuse for extending the system, to exert more control in the future, is built in from the start.

People who are interested in asserting more control over others are never content with the amount of control they have. They always want more. It is the gaining of more control that motivates them.

Having a gatekeeper behind what you can use on your own hardware is always bad.

Should all cars have breathalyzers installed by default?

Yes!

But should all cars have a reader for your government ID and drivers license and immediately log every use of your car to $authority?

“You gave us that previous bit of private information what’s a little bit more. You can trust us”

Also this goalpost will move almost immediately. What if the parent doesn't understand why the OS is asking for a DOB and they type whatever?

Which we have already seen with content ratings. Instead of using the rating to inform themselves on what content to allow their child, they basically relied on the retailers/theatres not selling access to people below the age.

Most people think the Nazis only locked up Jews. Some realise they also locked up minorities.

They started with the impoverished, queer, and disabled.

What I'm really confused about is how are we going to confirm at account creation that the age is correct? Or that the person using the computer is who the account is for?

To bring charges under those sorts of laws there's going to have to be some external evidence of harm. Either the kid is acting in a way that causes an agency sufficient concern that they investigate the family, or the government mandate much stricter monitoring of exactly who is doing what online. The former case is unlikely, but should probably be persued vigerously when it does hapoen, and the latter case is something I imagine we all very much want to avoid.

By providing a simple, privacy conscious, way of taking some of the burden of vigilence off of the parents (the child is less likely to stumble on inappropriate material) it makes it easier for them to provide actually beneficial guidance, and reduces the risk of law enforecement getting involved to investigate minor transgressions.

This is a bad idea for privacy: Slippery Slope. @VitoRobbles@lemmy.today has explained this perfectly.
It also gives you more data that you can use to fingerprint your users. 1 new data point that might enable better targeting and deanonymization

This is also a bad idea for security: The mere presence of this signal exists allows it to be used for nefarious purposes, such as giving u-18 or u-21 signal to enter "protected space".

This is also a bad idea for the non mega corps. It allows the platforms (like FB, YT, Twitch, etc.) to throw away their moderation teams and ask for OS level fixes because of the age reporting mechanism worked, then this would have never happened.

if they are claiming the new laws are for kid safety there must be existing already some external evidence of the need, no?

putting burden for safety on corps is not a healthy thing.

There's fairly clear evidence at a societal level that access to, for instance, hardcore pornigraphic material is harmful to children, but that is very different to having evidence that a particular child is currently being exposed to it.

The burden is still on the parents, but this would actually provide a useful tool for them to address that burden.

exactly. so why do we need more laws that also happen to provide massive leak able tracking to corporations and govs without warrants, etc?

have you seen any existing tools be so bulletproof that kids cant get around them?

It seems obvious to me that, invasive as it is - an OS-level "are you 18 yes/no" check at installation would not satisfy the "protect the children" crowd at all, nevermind too that immediately when/if it goes into action - every single user would suddenly have their OS downgraded to the kiddy-level unless they declare their age.

The effort from a Linux team here would amount to little more than a "are you 18 yes/no" and there's no way that would be considered good enough down the line if not now.

I actually used this same example further up. Yes the GWOT made some terrible legislation that has done real damage, but it wasnt a slippery slope. They didnt make laws a little bit invasive but generally ok before slowly nudging it further until it got to the point where it was able to be used for ill. They went in hard and fast with abusable legislation which could be criticised for what it actually was, not what it would lead to in further legislation down the line (and it was criticised at the time).

That’s one of the main things to me. The argument jumps directly to drivers license / DOB collection, but makes no conclusions about how it would protect children. It is OVERTLY, 100%, about feeding lists of targets to the pedophiles that run the biggest tech companies.

The issue in general is that there is no organization that can be trusted to verify the age, but not find a way to leverage that into gathering some info about the child and selling it.

That aside. Age is mostly meaningless. Everyone matures at different rates. The difference in rate between girls and boys results in effectively several years meaningful difference. Like a 10 year old female muturity is more similar to a 13 years old boy than a 10 year old boy. And 18 is just an arbitrary number that happens to coincide with finishing high school. And has no actual association to maturity. This is why car rental places won't rent to under 21s most of the time. Some hotels won't let you have a room until 25. So trying to decide what content should be available based on age is pointless. And they know that. So they aren't tryi g to protect anyone. They are trying to extract information they can sell.

On the one hand, it is a privacy nightmare.

On the other hand, those laws are so badly written, they will apply to things you would never consider an issue. E.g. a security camera, a router, a NAS. For each of them, the law applies, because they have an OS, they are attached to a network, and they have logins. Think about it, and it basically applies to any network enabled device.

So that means that kids can't buy computers?
Can't buy a cheap used raspberry pi or old laptop/desktop in order to set up as a server?

Yet, with the way the California bill is written, so long as that data was collected at account creation, it would be adaquate.

Show us your ID, then. Or even just your age. Now your children too.

Don't want to? That's why.

No, and this wouldn't be impossible to bypass either. I don't think the aim is 100% perfection, so much as harm reduction, and I don't think you'll get more than that no matter how onerous the law becomes. Most kids, most of the time, are not going to be trying to circumvent it, and it would still be up to the parents to look out for cases where they were.

The current proposal requires storing and transmitting a flag that can take one of four values (under 13, 13-16, 16-18, 18+), and prohibits sites using other means of age verification. It'll work adaquately to stop kids accidentally seeing pornography, and hopefully things like andrew tate, giving the parents some space to do their part to help their kids learn how to understand what they migjt be exposed to.

I'm not sure what you mean by "massive leak able tracking" in this case. It's literally a flag that indicates the user's age bracket, and means sites don't use the really invassive options.

...it wasnt a slippery slope. They didnt make laws a little bit invasive ... before slowly nudging it further

I disagree.

There was a certain (large) amount of government surveillance and eavesdropping going on before the GWOT, which was used as an excuse to massively expand it. There was already inspection and security and traveler record-keeping at airports before the GWOT, which was used as an excuse to expand those. CBP had long had the legislative authority to do all kinds of nastiness within 100 miles of a border before the GWOT, which was used as an excuse to step their activities up, to legal limits and beyond.

In every case, an initial claim of urgent, exceptional authority was used to create both the physical infrastructure and the cultural permission required to make later, expanded claims of urgent, exceptional authority much easier to implement when an excuse presented itself. That is the slippery slope, we really slid way down it, it's a real phenomenon. It doesn't have to be smooth or gradual, it can happen in jerks and waves. It doesn't have to come as a result of a plot, a plan, a deliberate conspiracy, it can be an accretion of individually opportunistic acts.

Sure. For now. But in any case, aren't they legally viable if someone complains?

The issue with "children" local accounts (assuming they ever remained 100% local anyway) is that for it to be effective, you would have to control who install the OS for it to be effective.

I have been managing my own OS install since I was a teen, so I could have just created an adult account for me. But, okay, you could say that you could just regularly check your child hasn't reinstalled the machine.

Well, see, they could just install a Virtual Machine. There is plenty of Virtual Machine software out there, and then we're back at whoever installs it being responsible for filling in that information. And Virtual Machines are very useful for a bunch of things: from running software not made for your hardware (see Android emulators, WSL), to being safer around dodgy software.

You could counter that by not letting them install things with your permissions... but there are portable versions of software that people make for a bunch of reasons which don't recall an installation. And I am not talking about hypotheticals: back when I was in school people would carry portable versions of games in USB sticks to copy around school machines so they could play video games during IT class.

Never mind that it means that whenever they want to install something, they will poke you about it, and now you're on the hook for reviewing that. Which you should already be doing because you care about what your child does and they don't have the years of experience to not break their OS.

But if you are doing that, why not use proper parental control software that let's you have much finer-grained control over what they can see or not online, along with other controls around how much time they can spend on the machine and a few nicer things?

Because it has little to do with protecting anyone and is another gross violation of privacy to serve corporate interests.

Won't someone think of the poor bigots! They're getting banned without getting to defend their bigotry!

Ada is a fantastic admin and she does an incredible job keeping shitty people off of blahaj.zone. Sounds like you're mad you got banned for being shitty.

Its the principle for me

That's one bit that I do think could do with clarifying. As written resposibility seems to be split between the developer and the controller. From the rest of the bill, it seems like the developer is in the clear if the system functions, and it's down to the computer controller to ensure users are correctly set up.

I don't think there would be any difficulty with a kid setting up a computer, as in most juristictions the parents are responsible for their childrens' actions until they are adults themselves. So the oarents would still be responsible for what the kid did with the computer in the same way they often are now.

So these "os reporting age bands" laws are useless then.
Cause either the parents are being responsible, at which point there are many parental tools for network and device control.
Or they aren't being responsible, and the kid can easily bypass it or just buy their own device.

Because I don't give a shit what your kids do on the Internet, and there are already plenty of tools for you to curate the experience for them.

But between setting up the birthdate when creating my children’s local account on their computers, and having to send a copy of their ID to every platform under the sun, I’d easily chose the former.

That's your decision. The rest of us shouldn't be forced into it just because you're to lazy to watch what your kids are doing online. If a website thinks they need to my my age they can ask me and I'll decide if I want to provide it or not. I don't want my OS just handing it out to anyone who asks.

Right, so the law is pointless, since there is already a thousand different ways to control what children see on the Internet.

Because I should not have to. Im fine with them selling specially child computers that are listed as under 18 you can buy for your kids but I don't want that crap on mine.

So then the law is pointless as implemented, since parents can already do this. Which leads to the conclusion that there must be some other motivation

These age band laws basically work in the opposite way to the usual parental controls. Rather than having to install and maintain the control software and having the filtering at the client end of the connection, parents need only set a flag and filtering will occur at the source end of the connection.

Will these laws provide perfect protection that eliminates the need for parental oversight of childrens' internet access? No. Will they help stop kids accidentally stumbling into unsuitable content, reducing harm overall? Yes. As a parent, one of the things I worry about is my kids browsing sites such as youtube. Even if they're using it for research for school projects, I can never be certain it wont prompt them to watch an unsuitable video. With a simple "this user is a child, don't show them anything unsuitable" flag, I wouldn't have to spend so much energy monitoring everything and could spend more energy talking to them about what they're actually watching.

One of the key parts of the Californian law is that if the client machine sends the flag, the service must treat it as authoratative, and should not use other means of checking. That is good news, as it means there is no incentive for sites to integrate more intrusive measures such as third parties scanning givernment issued ID.

Oh fuck off. She never pointed to any comment or post of mine for the reason. And she kept being weasely as fuck about it. Probably because she knows I’m right.

Modlogs are public, and come with removal reasons