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Open source calculator firmware DB48X forbids CA/CO use due to age verification
- lokar 8mo agoDoes it run applications? The point of the law is to collect (and device setup) the age of the (I guess primary?) user, and communicate that (as a range?) to any applications it runs. So, if you don't run applications, does this matter? Also, enforcement is by the CA attorney general, so random people can't go after you.
- wrs 8mo agoWell, it’s a programmable calculator, so…how does the law define “applications”?
- meatmanek 8mo ago(c) “Application” means a software application that may be run or directed by a user on a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device that can access a covered application store or download an application.
- riskable 8mo agoThe calculator firmware is a "software application" that's run by a user on a mobile device but it can't access an application store or download applications. For that you need a PC. So github.com is the violator, here, since it's a software application that may be run by a user on a computer and can download applications (loads of them!).
- onionisafruit 8mo agoI've read through the CA law a couple of times and can't figure out what an application store is supposed to do. What part of the law would github violate?
- idle_zealot 8mo agoThe store is just supposed to be able to see the reported age bracket and use it to enforce its existing age restrictions. I'm not sure Github has any age restrictions though, so I think it's already in compliance by default.
- sgc 8mo agoOnly if its js initiates downloads (even if just injecting other js), in which case, I guess yes??? Or does that fall onto the browser??? Sounds simple to figure out. Maybe everybody will abandon the term webapp now.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- kmeisthax 8mo agoThe California bill basically says any OS with an app store needs to collect an age signal and provide age bucketing to an app store (presumably even third-party ones, but notably NOT extension stores) so it can forward that information onto developers in that store. There's no further elaboration on what age signals are preferred, so my assumption is that a DoB field in the user profile and a system service to request the age bucket is good enough. It's absolutely silly, but DB48X could implement that. There's a related question of who is actually liable under this law - it seems written to target just Apple, Google, and Microsoft; and it only makes sense in the context of consumer electronics. Like, how does this work with enterprise systems? Servers? Is IBM going to have to rush out a patch for z/VM to ask the system administrator what their date of birth is?
- fc417fc802 8mo ago> Like, how does this work with enterprise systems? You put the age of the owning company. If the company is under 18 then too bad for you.
- drnick1 8mo agoClickbait title, the legal notice explicitly states that an open source project cannot and will not implement age verification.
- hlieberman 8mo agoThere is no carve out in the law for open source. I don’t think it matters for this calculator’s firmware, because there’s no covered App Store, but it certainly would for most Linux distributions.
- drnick1 8mo agoThe law is irrelevant when it comes to open source. There is no one to turn to and bully for compliance. A government could presumably request that GitHub delete the repo, but the software will then simply move somewhere else, in a jurisdiction where these laws don't apply, or be distributed peer-to-peer. These attempts at curbing the freedom to write and distribute software are pathetic and will fail.
- mhurron 8mo ago> simply move somewhere else, in a jurisdiction where these laws don't apply, or be distributed peer-to-peer Each of these options lead software to become less and less discoverable leading to the fact that most people will never use anything that isn't complying with these laws. So the end result still hits the desired effect.
- rescbr 8mo agoEh... Prohibiting access to MSN Messenger on school computers was one of the catalysts to me being a highly paid professional today. Tell children they can't do X, some will find ways around it, tell their friends the workaround and maybe even get a profession out of it. Who knows, maybe one kid will find a text editor and a compiler laying around somewhere... Fuck, I even tried to learn Russian by myself just to understand those old hacking forums. At least I got proficient in Cyrillic. I don't have children, but definitely I'd direct them to learn reading Chinese.
- lacoolj 8mo agoI don't see a definition for "operating system" in this legislation (California). "Operating system provider" is defined, but that's kinda useless unless "operating system" is defined first.
- netsharc 8mo agoIt seems there's also a definition error: > 1798.500. For the purposes of this title: > (i) “User” means a child that is the primary user of the device. Child is defined: > (d) “Child” means a natural person who is under 18 years of age. But that means this is impossible: > (b) (4) Whether the user is at least 18 years of age.
- sgc 8mo agoif (user is null) is leaving me way up in my feelings. Ambiguous value error: 'too true' is not an approved response. Please consult your legislator and try again.
- ziml77 8mo agoSo DB48X provides a covered application store? (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 application store or can download an application. Also, where does anything in the CA bill mandate age verification? It's saying the OS needs to prompt for age bracket info and allow the third party apps to query that. That is far different from verification.
- iamnothere 8mo ago> Also, where does anything in the CA bill mandate age verification? It's saying the OS needs to prompt for age bracket info and allow the third party apps to query that. That is far different from verification. Regardless of the technical details of the law(s), the devs are sensibly refusing to prompt for age on a fricking calculator. Hopefully Linux distros get on board with this and announce non-CA/CO compliance as policy.
- drnick1 8mo agoUltimately, it does not matter. This legal notice is just theater, as anyone from CA or CO can still download, build and use the program. Linux distributions will just do the same.
- goda90 8mo agoYou might say the bills themselves are theater. Respond to theater with theater.
- c3d 8mo agoExactly
- parasense 8mo agoCertainly. However, The developer seems to want to avoid the $2,500 per violation by any child who accesses the calculator, and might see a dick pic... because that calculator firmware does indeed allow for image viewing, and application development. It's more powerful than your PC back in the late 1990s.
- tliltocatl 8mo agoIANAL, but the whole thing feels quite problematic. Should we interpret the prohibition as a licensing condition "a resident using our IP is violating the contract" or as an informative note "we are not compliant and we are not ever going to be compliant so a resident using the IP is violating local laws"? I'd expect the intent to be the latter, but would it hold in front of a judge? If the notice is a licensing condition, the whole thing is problematic as hell: - Does such prohibition has any legal force at all? Does it do anything to prevent responsibility according to the bill? Wouldn't just saying "CA/CO have zero jurisdiction over us, get screwed" be a saner choice (of course it would be better if the project wouldn't host on M$'s servers). - The main project license is GPLv3. GPLv3 clearly has no provisions to introduce arbitrary prohibitions into the license without losing compatibility. But they still keep GPLv3 LICENSE.txt, which is problematic in itself - if LICENSE.txt says one thing and LEGAL-NOTICE.txt another, the conclusion might be that no license applies so no one may use the software at all! - If they are reusing any GPL software that they don't hold copyright on, they might be or might not be in violation (would need a real lawyer to say if that's the case or not). And on the actual matter of things, it's really sad to see California to be on the front line of this crap (this screams ageism). And, dear "adults", screw your parental authority so much. Whatever skills I've gained before the university I've done against an explicit parental prohibition. This is what I live off now. Screw you all.
- cosmic_cheese 8mo ago> And on the actual matter of things, it's really sad to see California to be on the front line of this crap (this screams ageism). And, dear "adults", screw your parental authority so much. Whatever skills I've gained before the university I've done against an explicit parental prohibition. This is what I live off now. Screw you all. It's yet another surface that totalitarian parental control has crept into, and it's a serious problem. Young people kept strictly within the iron grip of their guardians generally aren't the ones who become happy actualized all-star adults. Obviously there should be some limits on what teenagers and children can access, it shouldn't be entirely free reign, but robbing them of space to bend the rules severely limits their potential for growth and incurs a strong risk of extinguishing their spark.
- ronsor 8mo agoI think the winning move is just to ignore the legislation, and drag the government into an EFF or ACLU-funded First Amendment lawsuit if they try to enforce anything.
- dmitrygr 8mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- hotsalad 8mo ago*Formerly open source Seems to violate the open source definition paragraph 5, no?
- croes 8mo agoFrom the other post about this law. > That's likely no big deal for Windows, which already requires you to enter your date of birth during the Microsoft Account setup procedure This seems like an over reaction because of a simple date field
- conartist6 8mo agoWhy would I need a Microsoft account to use Windows.
- croes 8mo agoThe point is, it’s not about verification but a simple date field. Like those sites where you have to enter a birthdate before you can see the content
- red_admiral 8mo agoMicrosoft may in future permanently disable the local-account workarounds. Being able to hind behind "legal reasons" just makes it worse.
- vincent-manis 8mo agoPerformative indeed!
- ConanRus 8mo ago[dead]
- mijoharas 8mo agoIgnoring the calculator side of things (fair enough if they don't wanna implement it) is this just requiring an age value for the user of the operating system? Because if so, that seems a lot more sensible than the online crap where you need to give ID or something. I remember someone suggesting requiring an `X-User-Age` header, and having adults responsible for having their children's account setup with their age, which this proposal seems to be more in line with. From some of the other responses people seem against this proposal, am I missing something? (I only briefly skimmed the links) Is there some kind of attestation/ID required when the age is input?
- iamnothere 8mo agoIt’s the camels nose into the tent of regulating how an OS should behave. This is anathema for FOSS operating systems. It will cause complete madness if different jurisdictions start regulating operating systems in their own way and could honestly kill FOSS OSes.
- cyanydeez 8mo agois it though? If you setup a PC for a 12 year old and prompts you something like [12~16] and thats reported to whatever, what exactly is the fear? You can scream slippery slope but these laws are just going to boil down to technical capability because enforcement isn't realistic. There's real harms by large businesses such as Meta. Should we pretend those arms don't exist?
- iamnothere 8mo agoIt is a slippery slope, and enforcement can quickly go from unrealistic to mandatory as we’re seeing in the UK. > There's real harms by large businesses such as Meta. Should we pretend those arms don't exist? Frankly I don’t care. Hands off my operating system. I will set up a guerilla sneakernet before I comply with something like this. Find another way to deal with it.
- tliltocatl 8mo agoThe fear is that being below 18 doesn't mean you have no right to privacy. It's not implementation that's the problem. The whole idea is stupid.
- creatonez 8mo ago> Colorado residents may no longer use DB48x after Jan 1st, 2028. This law hasn't even passed
- BHSPitMonkey 8mo agoAll the more reason to draw lots of attention to this issue now.
- m3kw9 8mo agoso they outlawed a calculator?
- adamtaylor_13 8mo agoWhat's with the recent push for age verification? This has been around forever but it seems like just recently a bunch of governments are pushing for this.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- rngfnby 8mo agoIt's a cloak for digital ID disguised as child safety. There are many way to make the internet safe for kids without removing anonymity. But the they wouldn't get what they want, would they?
- direwolf20 8mo agoA large number of entities are facing the same problem at the same time and coming to similar conclusions. There's also a cabal that wants surveillance, but since the California law doesn't require surveillance, this isn't that. The California law just mandates a parental control feature.
- hotsalad 8mo agoIf I'm reading the (L)GPL correctly (but I'm not a lawyer), this notice should be completely ignored: Section 7 says: All other non-permissive additional terms are considered “further restrictions” within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term. Section 10 says: You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License.
- Buttons840 8mo agoThe copyright holder isn't bound by their own license though. Although, if there are many contributors to the project, there may not be a clear copyright holder.
- hotsalad 8mo agoWouldn't they still need to switch to a license outside the GPL family in order to add those restrictions, even if they're the sole copyright holder? Otherwise it seems that upon receiving a copy of the software, the user can just remove the additional restrictions, as specified by Section 7.
- kelnos 8mo agoOf course, the copyright holder can license as they wish. But the quoted terms of the GPL are in the license that the author is distributing with the software, so we can also follow the terms of the GPL and remove the extra restriction they just added. The author is trying to do contradictory things: add extra restrictions, but release under the terms of a license that allow us to remove those extra restrictions. If they want to add that restriction, they cannot release it under the GPL; they need to pick another license, or modify the GPL to their liking and then call it something else (assuming the copyright terms of the GPL allow you to make a derived work of the license itself).
- Buttons840 8mo agoIf I have a license that says "you may use this, you may not use this", then can people use it? Honest question, I don't know how self-contradictory licenses work. Do people get to pick and choose what they want to follow, or does the whole thing become invalid?
- MangoCoffee 8mo agowhat a stupid law
- jgalt212 8mo agoAll these stupid unenforceable laws, like GDPR which is being watered down, only create strong incentives to lie on compliance officers.
- c3d 8mo agoDB48x author here. To be fair, the definitions of "operating system", "application" or "user" are so vague that I decided to 1. Not take any risk 2. Take a stand The point is more to draw attention