16 ms·

System76 on Age Verification Laws

• purplehat_ 8mo ago
  I'm surprised zero-knowledge proofs have not been mentioned. This is a technique where (for example) the government signs your digital license, then you can present a proof that you are over 18 to a site without revealing anything else about yourself. ZKPassport exists, Privacy Pass is an implementation being standardized by the IETF, and Google is working on a similar implementation. Granted, these are not yet widely used, but I'd be very interested in hearing HN's thoughts on this. Let's try to figure out what a good policy solution looks like: - entities with harmful or adult content must require proof of the user being over 18 - entities cannot ask for, store, or process more detailed information without explicit business needs (this should be phrased in a way that disallows Instagram from asking for your birth year, for example) - entities cannot share this data with other sites, to avoid privacy leaks, unless there is an explicit business need (this is tricky to get right; someone might try to set up a centralized non-anonymous age-verification service, erasing many benefits) - entities must in general not store or process information about the user that is not strictly relevant to their function - there ought to be different treatment for anonymous users (which ideally these protocols will allow, just submit proof of work plus a ZKP that you are a human and authorized to access the resource) compared to pseudonymous and non-anonymous users, who are more at risk of being censored or tracked. There's some loopholes here, but if the government can enact good policy on this I personally think it's feasible. Please share your thoughts, if you have a minute to do so. There's also an interesting political split to note among the opposition here. I see a lot of people vehemently against this, and as far as I can see this is largely for concerns regarding one of 1) privacy abuses, 2) censorship, or 3) restriction of general computing. Still, there is a problem with harmful content and platforms on the web. (Not just for minors, I don't think we should pretend it doesn't harm adults too.) The privacy crowd seems to be distinctly different from the computing-freedom crowd; the most obvious example is in attitudes towards iOS. As I personally generally align more towards what I perceive as the privacy-focused side, I'm very interested in what people more focused on software freedom think about zero-knowledge proofs as a politically workable solution here.
  • wao0uuno 8mo ago
    Sounds cool but do you believe it's really about protecting children? Since when do politicians care about this so much? I have not heard of any protests or public calls for better child protection online. It's really all about control and elimination of freedom of speech and information. They want to set up a legal framework and get people more comfortable with the idea of closed and controlled internet. Then they'll argue that age verification alone is ineffective because its too easy to circumvent so they'll start rolling out less "private" solutions that will benefit them and their sponsors greatly.
    • purplehat_ 8mo ago
      I'm not sure anyone is being this explicitly malicious. Parents' groups, child safety organizations, and researchers have been at this for years, and while I agree with you that the solutions are very misguided, I think it does our own priorities a disservice to stick our fingers in our ears with regards to their concerns. Can you give an example of how less private solutions will benefit them and their sponsors? I could see big tech / adtech and government surveillance benefitting but I don't think they're the ones behind this push. As another example, consider the "small web" community, say at Bear Blog, which is a group of technically sophisticated people who routinely complain about the harms of traditional social media. I doubt most of them would support this particular implementation, but they show that there is popular support for solving the ills of at least one of the targets of this legislation. So to answer your question, yes, I do see this as an attempt to protect people. The restriction of free speech is in my opinion a side effect of this legislation opening the way to worse-designed laws in the future.
• arjie 8mo ago
  tl;dr they don't like them and don't want them in place but will comply
• akersten 8mo ago
  Aaaaand to throw it all away at the end with "well when the rubber meets the road we'll comply anyway, thanks for inhaling my hot air." Take a damn stand and dare them to sue the hacker known as Linux or whatever.
  • sahilkerkar 8mo ago
    I'd say that anger is better directed towards the legislators in charge of creating these absurd policies, not the folks at System76. It's not reasonable to expect a company to sacrifice its entire business on a moral battlefield.
    • jrm4 8mo ago
      Right, but in turn it is absolutely reasonable and good for consumers to threaten a company with (legal) harm or extinction on a moral battlefield.
  • bitwize 8mo ago
    Age attestation (edited) is the law now in California. Noncompliance can mean stiff penalties. If you don't like it, write your Congressman.
    • rockskon 8mo ago
      *attestation, not verification
      • gzread 7mo ago
        Which means an OS must have a parental controls API, and that's all if means.
        • rockskon 7mo ago
          No it doesn't. It might lead to that someday, but it isn't that far yet.
• scroogedhard 8mo ago
  [dead]
• Tyrubias 8mo ago
  I don’t like to shill for companies, but I’m glad System76 made a statement. The addendum does feel like their legal team made them add it though: > Some of these laws impose requirements on System76 and Linux distributions in general. The California law, and Colorado law modeled after it, were agreed in concert with major operating system providers. Should this method of age attestation become the standard, apps and websites will not assume liability when a signal is not provided and assume the lowest age bracket. Any Linux distribution that does not provide an age bracket signal will result in a nerfed internet for their users. > We are accustomed to adding operating system features to comply with laws. Accessibility features for ADA, and power efficiency settings for Energy Star regulations are two examples. We are a part of this world and we believe in the rule of law. We still hope these laws will be recognized for the folly they are and removed from the books or found unconstitutional. Anyways, it feels like all sides of the political spectrum are trying to strip away any semblance of anonymity or privacy online both in the US and abroad. No one should have to provide any personal details to use any general computing device. Otherwise, given the pervasive tracking done by corporations and the rise of constant surveillance outdoors, there will be nowhere for people to safely gather and express themselves freely and privately.
  • panja 8mo ago
    Gotta find a way to profitability I suppose
  • threatofrain 8mo ago
    > Anyways, it feels like all sides of the political spectrum are trying to strip away any semblance of anonymity or privacy online both in the US and abroad. It's not this or that political party, your neighbors simply don't share your values. Maybe you don't agree with their values either — like to what degree we should be ceding privacy in favor of fighting child exploitation on the internet. Child protection arguments work because it is a compass to the true feelings of your neighbors.
    • ls612 8mo ago
      It is as Aristotle said, the average person is a natural born slave (to their emotions, and thus to the rhetoriticians most skilled in changing them). That is why democracy always fails in the end. Americans just had such good geographic and historic luck to delay this reckoning by a century or two. If you see politics through this lens then the 'democratic backsliding' that has been universal across the world for the past two decades is entirely unsurprising. Vae Victus.
• piraccini 8mo ago
  I love Pop!_OS (and Cosmic) but if they start with this bullshit I need to switch to other Linux distributions. Worst case, will build my own...
  • byproxy 8mo ago
    What constitutes "this bullshit"?
  • winrid 8mo ago
    Your ISP will require it.
    • whywhywhywhy 7mo ago
      Crazy how few can see where this is heading and don't realize locked down OS with age verification is now the norm, iOS has it.
• hellojesus 8mo ago
  Are these laws not 1A violations due to code being speech and the gov not being allowed to compel speech?
  • dragonwriter 8mo ago
    To the extent code is functional rather than expressive it is not speech, and when the government seeks to compel code, it generally seeks to compel function not expressive content. (That doesn’t mean it is not a bad idea, and even perhaps unconstitutional for other reasons.)
    • arcfour 8mo ago
      Code is speech, though, and is protected by the first amendment: see Bernstein v. United States. I don't think a cryptographic algorithm is "expressive" any more than it is purely functional; indeed, the 9th circuit evaluated and rejected the expressive/functional distinction for source code in the above case. Regardless - code is speech, and the government cannot compel or prevent speech except in very narrow circumstances.
      • johncolanduoni 8mo ago
        Very narrow circumstances like the DMCA? I don’t think the jurisprudence is as simple as you’re making it out to be.
      • LoganDark 8mo ago
        Code may be speech, but the functional characteristics of systems that happen to rely on code may not always also be speech.
        • arcfour 8mo ago
          I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but if you are suggesting that writing an "API", as is legally required in AB1043, can be done without writing code I would be interested to know how!
• cyberax 8mo ago
  The age verification laws are awesome! I mean... How else would you educate children about computers and evading stupid restrictions?
• jrm4 8mo ago
  I mean, genuine question, is Linux Mint or MX Linux endangered by this? Unless I'm missing something, I have zero concern for companies who sell out by complying. The code was "free as in freedom" when you decided to build your company on it; and while you're not legally obligated to defend that freedom, and I, and hopefully other consumers, find that you are morally obligated to.
  • pgn674 8mo ago
    I think this is the way that Linux desktop distributions are endangered, quoting from the article: "... apps and websites will not assume liability when a signal is not provided and assume the lowest age bracket. Any Linux distribution that does not provide an age bracket signal will result in a nerfed internet for their users."
  • gzread 7mo ago
    Not by the California law, since that law poses no danger.
• k310 8mo ago
  I have to wonder A. If end users will mod their distros to send a "signal" (TBD?) to websites. B. If end users will just grab a pirate OS with apps compiled to not care about age. Hopefully the latest TAILS I downloaded is free of Big (over 18) Brother. And (A) Or just compile, Gentoo and LFS style. C. If pirates just take care of all this for friends and neighbors. D. When, not if, this unconstitutional coercion is challenged in court and cancelled via petition. Remember Proposition 8?
  • armadyl 8mo ago
    I could see them eventually going far enough to bypass all of that and either requiring age verification at the point of the internet uplink on the ISP side or making it a crime similar to using a fake ID to buy alcohol if you try to bypass it. And then also punish companies that happen to be serving underage/non verified users.
    • akersten 8mo ago
      There is already age verification at the ISP level. They only sell Internet service to adults. What the adults choose to do with it or with whom they share it with should be of zero concern to the government. Of course, that's an ineffective argument, because the long-term goal of these laws (in the sense of, "the goal of the system is what it does") was never going to be about keeping kids off the Internet.
  • deno 8mo ago
    Yes, it will be ineffective, so then they will point at all those examples, but will they decide the law is stupid? Of course not. The computers are not secure and they should only be able to run “verified” operating systems using attestation mechanisms. This was always where this was ultimately going. The idea has been fermenting since the DVD players had copy protections. It’s the planet destroying asteroid. We know the trajectory, we always knew it was coming for us. But once you can see with the naked eye it’s too late to do anything.
  • gzread 7mo ago
    Why do you have to mod your distro when you could simply go to the settings program and set "age bracket" to "18+"?
• al_borland 8mo ago
  > Throwing them into the deep end when they’re 16 or 18 is too late. I saw this a lot in college. Kids that didn’t have any freedom or autonomy while living at home went wild in college. They had no idea how to self-regulate. A lot of them failed out. Those who didn’t had some rough years. Sheltering kids for too long seems to do more harm than good. At least if they run into issues while still children, their parents can be there to help them through it so they can better navigate on their own once they move out.
  • FuckButtons 8mo ago
    Counterpoint, my parents didn’t shelter me from shit and my life went off the rails at 12.
    • Guestmodinfo 8mo ago
      12 is the magic number when things start going to shit. I'm sorry for what happened to you but maybe you should start a counselling service for clueless parents and tell them what should they do and what they shouldn't to correctly shelter the children. Because sheltering is an art. I think about it all the time. I always wish some one would take a bit of money but tell me how to guide or not guide my child to be independent in the rough world and to take decisions independently
      • discardable_dan 8mo ago
        I watched an older sibling go off the rails. That is what kept me from doing it.
    • ball_of_lint 8mo ago
      There needs to be both things - the opportunity to make mistakes, and the support to make it okay after mistakes are made. Sounds like you got the first but not the second, which must have been tough. Hope you're doing better now.
    • Dylan16807 8mo ago
      That's not a counterpoint. The inverse of "shelter too long" is "shelter less long", not "zero shelter ever". (And the proper way to do "less long" is to slowly loosen up over time.)
• trinsic2 8mo ago
  I have been saying this all along. You can't prevent kids from getting around restrictions. All you can do is try to help them understand what they find on the other side and what some options are. Age-gating is just a way to push forward a surveillance agenda. The fact thats happening everywhere all at once proves my point.
  • dylan604 8mo ago
    >You can prevent kids from getting around restrictions I'm guessing you meant can't
    • trinsic2 8mo ago
      Yes. Fixed
  • heavyset_go 8mo ago
    It's pushed both by those with surveillance agendas and AI companies like Anthropic, who donated millions to PACs and politicians that are pushing online age verification and surveillance laws[1]. The goal for the AI side is that they get to be censors and gatekeepers of all user-generated content on the internet, their models will rank/grade/censor content for age-appropriateness and they will have the pleasure of being paid to train on all new content uploaded to the internet in real-time, in perpetuity. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47162956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47162956
  • bruceb 8mo ago
    You can. Most children are not going to end up on HN when they are older. The stories you read here about hacking system at 11 are outliers.
    • leni536 8mo ago
      And the outliers brag about them, then help out their classmates.
      • 7mo ago
• ArchieScrivener 8mo ago
  California and Colorado do not get to govern out of state residence, thats interstate commerce and its federal domain, period. The time is coming where we will unseat legislative traitors who use EU/Old World manipulations in the USA. An unjust law is no law at all. That is the exception the rule of law requires to remain moral.
• heavyset_go 8mo ago
  Just a reminder of what liability the CA age verification law imposes upon developers and providers. It's not enough to adhere to the OS age signal: > (3) (A) Except as provided in subparagraph (B), a developer shall treat a signal received pursuant to this title as the primary indicator of a user’s age range for purposes of determining the user’s age. > (B) If a developer has internal clear and convincing information that a user’s age is different than the age indicated by a signal received pursuant to this title, the developer shall use that information as the primary indicator of the user’s age. Developers are still burdened with additional liability if they have reason to believe users are underage, even if their age flag says otherwise. The only way to mitigate this liability is to confirm your users are of age with facial and ID scans, as it is implemented across platforms already. Not doing so opens you up to liability if someone ever writes "im 12 lol" on your app/platform.
  • stephbook 8mo ago
    How do you know all this before any court decided upon it?
    • heavyset_go 8mo ago
      Do you want to go to court to find out where the line is? That's expensive, risky and time consuming. It's easier to just scan faces and IDs to make sure your users are of age and not take on that liability.
  • wtallis 8mo ago
    > if they have reason to believe users are underage The law requires "clear and convincing information", not merely "reason to believe". And since the law requires developers to rely on the provide age signal as the primary indicator of the user's age, developers are not incentivized to create a system that uses sophisticated data mining to derive an estimated age. If someone posts a comment on a YouTube video saying "I'm twelve years old and what is this?", that would absolutely not require YouTube to immediately start treating that account as an under-13 account.
    • 8mo ago
• choonway 8mo ago
  this is how and adult sounds like in a room full of children.
  • 06867457397658 7mo ago
    [dead]
• charcircuit 8mo ago
  I don't think the argument that children might bypass parental controls therefore devices should not have parental controls. >Limiting a child’s ability to explore what they can do with a computer limits their future. Parents don't want to limit their children from writing software. Saying that limiting minors from accessing porn will limit their future is another argument I doing think many will agree with.
• bradley13 8mo ago
  These lawd prove one thing: the politicians know nothing about the subject matter. What is almost more disturbing: at least some of the politicians will have been advised by consultants or lobbyists who know what they're advocating for. What's their game?
  • gzread 7mo ago
    Can you elaborate what you know that the writers of the California law don't know?
• DoctorMckay101 8mo ago
  I was gifted my first computer, running Windows 95, at 11 years of age. By age 13 I was probably within the five people who better understood how to do stuff on a computer in my town. By age 16 I was making Pokemon hackroms, flash animations for newgrounds and translating manga for pirate sites in photoshop. By then I knew my entire life would be tied to computers somehow. Now some 50-60yo politician who has never even created a folder in their desktop without help wants to dictate how I should have used my device? Fuck'em
  • colinmarc 8mo ago
    There are obviously certain harms we are comfortable (trying to) prevent 13yos from having access to. So it's a matter of degree. The internet you describe has been gone for a long time. The internet that replaced it is several degrees more harmful, to adults and children alike.
    • wao0uuno 8mo ago
      So maybe instead of trying to control the people we could try controlling the corporations responsible for this problem? Bring back the old internet. Make addictive services and algorithmic recommendations illegal. Make commercial entities more responsible for the services they offer.
      • colinmarc 8mo ago
        I would absolutely be in favor of those measures.
  • gzread 7mo ago
    No, they want your parents to have the optional option to dictate how you use your device.
• bradley13 8mo ago
  Let's be clear: this is a first step. The obvious next step is to require proof of age. This ties in nicely with the international movement to require ID to use social media. Why is this an international movement? Suddenly, simultaneously, all over the Western world? It's enough to make on believe in conspiracies...
  • azangru 8mo ago
    > Why is this an international movement? Suddenly, simultaneously, all over the Western world? Sometimes kids hurt themselves through the use of the internet. And their parents lash out to blame someone [0]. And mainstream media pick up these stories. And the worry spreads. And more and more adults of voting age say that yeah, it's only reasonable to protect the kids from that internet monster, because kids are trusting and vulnerable, and won't somebody please think of the children. And they do not push back against age restriction campaigns. And so it goes... As for the Western world, it generally moves in lockstep, doesn't it? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0024x58 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0024x58
    • wao0uuno 8mo ago
      So where are those big protests and public calls for online age verification? It all seems to be coming from the very top. I have not heard of anyone that actually want any of this. The fact that politicians are to be excluded from European regulations is only a proof that it's all a scheme to kill what remains of privacy and freedom of speech online.
      • gzread 7mo ago
        First, this isn't age verification. At least the California one isn't. Second, where are the protests to keep kids out of bars?
  • fruitworks 8mo ago
    Why are all of these attempts at controlling the web coinciding at the same time now? I don't think it is a coincidence that this is happening at the same time that the younger generation wakes up to our greatest ally.
• vasco 8mo ago
  This is the one thing that truly scares me. I've decided I'm not going to verify my age anywhere or use facial recognition apps to login anywhere. And this is a much bigger fear for my job than AI. At the moment only some countries banning porn, social media and gambling. But how soon will I have to do it for a work app? And will I lose my job then if I refuse?
• krautburglar 8mo ago
  The prostitutes pushing for this do not deserve words. They deserve ridicule, public humiliation, and worse. The computer is a tool. Whoever would encumber it is an obvious shill for the corporations (google/apple/microsoft) who would like to attach an identity (i.e. tolls and controls) to actions prior generations could do freely and without surcharge. It is a modern-day enclosure movement. Its proponents should be juicily spat upon.
  • vladms 8mo ago
    Is this the free speech we are trying to protect? I do not think the proposal is smart or that will it work, but I am more worried that some people seem to think they hold the absolute truth (on any side of the a debate).
    • krautburglar 7mo ago
      This is not a “free speech” issue. This is an assault upon the citizenry. This is the rich and the powerful trying to put everyone’s ass on the plantation. Some want it to extract wealth from you (thievery). Others want it to control you (slavery). They are begging for the guillotines.
• hananova 8mo ago
  I can't fathom all the rage and confusion here about these laws. It's been a well-known effect since forever that when a government deems that something needs to be done, they'll go for the first "something-shaped" solution. This all could've been avoided. Governments all over the world have been ringing the alarm bells about lack of self-regulation in tech and social media. And instead of doing even a minimum of regulation, anything to calm or assuage the governments, the entire industry went balls-to-the-wall "line go up" mode. We, collectively, only have ourselves to blame, and now it's too late. If you look back, it didn't have to be this way: - Governments told game publishers to find a system to handle age rating or else. The industry developed the ESRB (and other local systems), and no "or else" happened. - Governments told phone and smart device manufacturers to collectively standardize on a charging standard, almost everyone agreed on USB-C and only many years later did the government step in and force the lone outlier to play ball. If that one hadn't been stubborn, there wouldn't have been a law. The industry had a chance to do something practical, the industry chose not to, and now something impractical (but you better find a way anyway, or else) will be forced upon them. And I won't shed a tear for the poor companies finally having to do something.
  • shevy-java 8mo ago
    > We, collectively, only have ourselves to blame, and now it's too late. Why would we have to be blamed for a law written by some lobbyists? That makes no sense at all. There are of course some folks that are in favour of this because "of the children" but their rationale does not apply to me nor to many other people. Why should they be able to force people to surrender their data, with the operating system becoming a sniffer giving out private data to everyone else? That makes no sense.
    • pear01 8mo ago
      The invocation of "lobbyists" in this context is meaningless. People lobby for all kinds of things. Doesn't really matter once it becomes a law anyway. If people could just say I don't agree with this law, it "makes no sense" and it's written by "lobbyists" and the government should not "be able to force" me to comply then we don't have a society anymore. You had better come up with some better arguments otherwise it just seems like the typical sad case of the losing side suddenly griping about the referee's monopoly of force when it's no longer going their way... The comment you replied to rightly pointed out one way of getting ahead of said monopoly of force is addressing problems with the status quo before the state takes an interest. It didn't happen, and now you will probably get some heavy handed intervention. But ignoring this basic point to ask why oh why suggests an ignorance of the very nature of the society that is and has been constantly regulating you. If you only happened to notice now you should consider yourself a rather lucky specimen in the long line of human history, full of those remarking "this makes no sense" as they are nonetheless compelled to comply.
• shevy-java 8mo ago
  So this has recently also affected Ubuntu. One developer began a discussion: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2026-March/043510.html https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2026-March/04... Their attempts of a "solution" are quite interesting. One other user suggested that GUI tools ask for the age of the user. Well ... I have a very strong opinion here. I have been using Linux since over 20 years and I will not ever give any information about my personal data to the computer devices I own and control. So any GUI asking for this specifically would betray me - and I will remove it. (Granted, it is easier to patch out the offending betrayal code and recompile the thing; I do this with KDE where Nate added the pester-donation daemon. Don't complain about this on reddit #kde, he will ban you. KDE needs more money! That's the new KDE. I prefer oldschool KDE but I digress so back to the topic of age "verification"). The whole discussion about age "verification" appears to be to force everyone into giving data to the government. I don't buy for a moment that this is about "protecting children". And, even IF it were, I could not care any less about the government's strategy. Even more so as I am not in the country that decided this in the first place, so why would I be forced to comply with it when it ends up with GUI tools wanting to sniff my information and then give it to others? For similar reasons, one reason I use ublock origin is to give as few information to outside entities when I browse the web (I am not 100% consistent here, because I mostly use ublock origin to re-define the user interface, which includes blocking annoying popups and what not; that is the primary use case, but to lessen the information my browser gives to anyone else, is also a good thing. I fail to see why I would want to surrender my private data, unless there is really no alternative, e. g. online financial transactions.) I also don't think we should call this age "verification" law. This is very clearly written by a lobbiyst or several lobbyists who want to sniff more data off of people. The very underlying idea here is wrong - I would not accept Linux to become a spy-tool for the government. I am not interested in how a government tries to reason about this betrayal - none of those attempts of "explanation" apply in my case. It is simply not the job of the government to sniff after all people at all times. This would normally require a warrant/reasonable suspicion of a crime. Why would people surrender their rights here? Why is a government sniffing after people suddenly? These are important questions. That law suddenly emerging but not in the last +25 years is super-suspicious.
  • senfiaj 8mo ago
• verdverm 8mo ago
  Good words, glad to see more companies taking a principled stance on these important matters. That leading quote is great for sharing with non-technical friends. We have 365d 23h of non-voting time to take direct action to make our world better.
• himata4113 8mo ago
  I don't really see a problem where there is a standard api (or even syscall!) to rethrieve a persons age bracket and for various apps being able to easily implement it. But please make it fucking optional. Make it optional and assume an adult otherwise, it's a good idea if it's optional and doesn't have dumb fines, you could have fines for not enforcing it / not using the api [porn sites] that already exists [and it doesn't work since 1 button is not age verification]. I see this as a good way for parents and institutions to set up their phones, school laptops etc and would pretty much solve the large majority of these issues while having a fraction of the invasiveness.
  • gzread 7mo ago
    The law says it must ask for age when creating an account other than the first one. So that's mandated. But there's no verification of the age you enter, and in fact, it's forbidden to verify it. It's really just to give parents the option to set up child accounts.
    • VLM 7mo ago
      "The law" There is no "The law" there are multiple levels of government implementing multiple solutions all different and somewhat incompatible. Honestly, probably by intention. Its sort of a SLAPP attack on the entire world population.
      • gzread 7mo ago
        I'm talking about the one in California and Colorado, which is the most recent outrage wave.
• _slih 8mo ago
  requiring the OS to broadcast an age bracket to every app and website is building a new tracking vector and calling it child safety lol
  • winrid 8mo ago
    None of these people actually care about children.
  • gzread 7mo ago
    Is it worse than Accept-Language? It's got less bits of entropy.
    • Aachen 7mo ago
      Is that still higher entropy when you already (necessarily) have the IP address? 225.12.3.11 sends two requests, both with accept-language nl_BE 226.4.5.244 sends two requests, one with age bracket 13–15 and one with bracket 18+ Which group is easier to track people within a (NAT) household..
      • gzread 7mo ago
        One is also using a phone and one is using a laptop.
• saltysalt 8mo ago
  It's sad to see such big brother crap in Linux, which sees like the exact opposite of the hacker ethos it was originally built upon.
  • onetokeoverthe 8mo ago
    [dead]
  • gzread 7mo ago
    Mandating the existence of a parental control setting that's completely optional to use is hardly Big Brother.
    • saltysalt 7mo ago
      When did we get to vote on this?
      • gzread 7mo ago
        Big Brother isn't just when you don't vote for things, or else every design decision in every commercial product would be it.
        • saltysalt 7mo ago
          This is not a design decision, it's legislation.
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
• sp1rit 8mo ago
  I wonder who is behind this sudden push for these age verification laws. This wasn't an issue until recently and suddenly there are not just laws in California and Colorado, but also New York and Brazil.
  • merlindru 8mo ago
    ...and Australia, and New Zealand, and the UK, and Norway, and Spain, and France, and the EU
    • Aldipower 8mo ago
      Social media age verification is absolutely not the same as age verification at OS login level. Do not mix the things up.
      • ycombinator_acc 8mo ago
        They are initiated by the same people - the government - and pursue the same goal - mass surveillance. They should 100% be fought against and grouped together.
  • ycombinator_acc 8mo ago
    I got the impression they were kick-started by Anglo countries (the Five Eyes, whatever you wanna call them), then gradually picked up by the rest.
  • irusensei 8mo ago
    There is a nascent industry of AI backed surveillance now so you can be 200% sure a lot of lobbying happened in closed rooms. And then there are the desperate attempts to cover actual pedophilia from the people in power. I'll never look at a politician or a so called member of the elites the same way again.
• globemaster99 8mo ago
  So much for freedom and democracy lectured by Americans and westerners to the rest of the world. This is just censorship of every form of freedom of speech. This got nothing to do with children or youth. They will eventually censor and track everyone.
  • wao0uuno 8mo ago
    I feel the same way. Looks like online "privacy" and "anonymity" will cease to exist within our lifetime. It's already starting with those "privacy respecting" solutions like zero trust age verification but that will quickly be deemed insufficient and because the legal framework will be already present it will very quickly and smoothly turn into full blown surveillance and censorship. Time to setup I2P on my server and donate some bandwidth but I'm sure they'll make that illegal too.
    • globemaster99 7mo ago
      True.Like many other nefarious things British started this with child protection act, which got nothing to do with children, considering their long history of pedophiles. Slowly all the other governments using the same pretext and template. Time to use pigeons and own peer to peer communication.
  • user3939382 8mo ago
    Next step coming soon is “well we need a license scan if you tell the OS you’re over 18”. macOS already requires a 6 step process to “trust” regular programs not from their app store. So this is just end to end control of our machines.
    • hellojesus 7mo ago
      Yes. Soon ISPs will require hardware based remote attlestations to prove you haven't modified any software that wants to send or receive packets through them.
    • Aachen 7mo ago
      You mean a dedicated license that proves the holder is over 18, separate from your identity such that it's not usable for tracking or identity theft when the verification platform gets hacked?
• 7777332215 8mo ago
  Don't see how anyone is gonna make me do anything. Just evade anything like this through various means and opt out of things that reduce your quality of life (by destroying your freedom and making you a slave)
• akersten 8mo ago
  We should collectively make sure that any PRs trying to land these changes are very well reviewed. We wouldn't want any security holes to slip by. I think a couple dozen rounds of reviews should suffice. I've heard great things about how productive AI can be at generating very thorough code quality assessments. After all, we should only ship it once it's perfect. To be more direct - if you're in any editorial position where something that smells like this might require your approval, please give it the scrutiny it deserves. That is, the same scrutiny that a malicious actor submitting a PR that introduces a PII-leaking security hole would receive. As an industry we need to civil disobedience the fuck out of this.
  • EmbarrassedHelp 7mo ago
    The PRs should only be allowed if they only create a flag when the user is underage. Otherwise its just another point of data that makes fingerprinting easier.
• cassonmars 8mo ago
  It's simple. Don't comply. Software engineers, despite not having the same requirement of mechanical engineers, should uphold the ethical obligations of their craft. This law is harmful. Given the requirement of compelled speech, given code has been _proven_ to be such, Do. Not. Comply.
  • chickensong 8mo ago
    Never considered it! Unless strong encryption is banned, this will never work. P.S. Is your handle a reference to Cats on Mars by Seatbelts? Yoko Kanno <3
    • cassonmars 8mo ago
      Yes!
      • chickensong 7mo ago
        Hah nice! I saw your name and immediately heard the song :)
• drnick1 8mo ago
  California may be able to target companies like System76, but it will be completely powerless against modular and decentralized distros like Debian and Arch.
  • Aldipower 8mo ago
    Yeah, living in Europe it simply makes me scratching my head how this law could affect me. It won't. No Californian law will tell me what I should do.
    • muyuu 7mo ago
      these things are insidious once vendors are forced to put on hooks to some enforced age verification system, it will creep everywhere like cookie banners which you cannot escape even in Antarctica
      • Aldipower 7mo ago
        Maybe, I get what you mean. But I think there is still a difference between what I install on _my own_ computer and opening some _others_ website.
        • muyuu 7mo ago
          i reckon the push will get to the point that us Europeans will end up actually installing it because all major OS's will enforce it
      • drnick1 7mo ago
        When it comes to free software, I don't see what prevents anyone from patching out such undesired "features." This is why free software is more important than ever. Official distributors like System76 may have to comply, in CA at least, but I won't.
        • muyuu 7mo ago
          technically yes, but if those features have to come, for instance, in all kernel distributions, how many people would you expect to patch and compile their own kernels manually? let's say no distros would do it because of risk of exposure to massive fines, and you'd have to get patches from dodgy places because regulators keep stamping them out of the mainstream with threats of prosecution
• LunicLynx 8mo ago
  It’s simple you can’t go drinking under age, you can’t drive a car under age. And the harm that can come from the internet is well above this so it makes sense to also ask for id. I agree though that it needs a system to protect information. It’s not about the system being always fail safe it’s about the general rule that by default what is happening is not legal to protect and not put the burden on every parent or family. „But Jonas parents allow him to do that“ in reality Jonas parents should not have a say in this.
  • tuetuopay 8mo ago
    The harm is well above (even that is arguable), but the probability of getting harmed is so much lower it's not even comparable. Alcohol? Yeah one or two too many drinks and you're in the hospital getting your stomach vacuumed. Driving? Blink and you run over a kid. Internet? You can spend evening and nights over there and not be harmed in any way. We have full generations of kids that can now be studied about the effects of the internet, starting with millenials. I won't pretend the Internet is a better place now than it was when I was a teen, but it appears to me the "dangerous" things are more focused and concentrated (at least for kids): social networks. It's still a minefield, but with leagues between two mines. Porn has always been the topic touted for children safety, because it's scary and resonates with conservatives and religious people. Access to is is roughly the same today than it was then, and arguably less dangerous today because the dirty stuff is hidden deeper, thus less likely to stumble upon. But other than porn, the thing that changed the most is social networks. Addiction, bullying, etc. Facebook 15 years ago was a not serious place. The equivalent today is the best place to get roasted by fellow kids and bullied 24/7 while not being able to get off the hook. The damage is psychological, which is insidious, but not systematic. Not every kid will get bullied, not every kid will be addicted to the algorithm(tm), etc. In the end, education plays a bigger role than simple age verification. Stimulate your kids, give them things to do other than doomscrolling, and get them on the dark corners of the internet to give them curiosity about the world and un-sanitized stuff (hacking in all forms, etc).
    • gzread 7mo ago
      I don't think the probability is low. What percentage of children are brainrotted by TikTok?
• morissette 8mo ago
  Definitely started exploring at 8/9 writing Perl and CGI
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• colinmarc 8mo ago
  I'm surprised by the complete lack of dissent or even nuance in the discussion here. I'm much more ambivalent on this: the historical record for prohibition is not good, but instagram and the like are uniquely and disastrously harmful and the companies pushing them on children are powerful in a way that has no real historical precedent. In the balance, anything the reduces the power those companies have over our lives (and our politics) has to be at least considered. In other words, I don't think this is necessarily the right measure - but I'm desperate. Didn't regulating cigarettes kind of work?
  • xyzal 8mo ago
    Online discourse is sadly doomed. And if not yet, then tomorrow surely. https://arxiv.org/html/2506.06299v4 https://arxiv.org/html/2506.06299v4
  • jgtrosh 8mo ago
    To my surprise, this graph [0] shows that even when taking into account vaping, it seems that smoking has truly gone down in the US. [0]: https://ecigone.com/featured/vaping-statistics/ https://ecigone.com/featured/vaping-statistics/
  • olsondv 8mo ago
    Sure, age restrictions played a part. But the larger reasons are the increased awareness of direct health effects, banning it in public spaces, and taxing the hell out of tobacco. I’d bet if they restricted app usage in specific locations, that alone would break the habit for some people. And imagine if you charged them each time they logged on.
  • junofan 8mo ago
    > Didn't regulating cigarettes kind of work? That’s commerce. The regulatory target in the case is speech. We don’t do that here.
  • StingyJelly 8mo ago
    >instagram and the like are uniquely and disastrously harmful -to both adults and children. What kind of worked for cigarettes was the huge tax so why not create a "mental health tax" based on the number of users x some addictiveness score and let meta either fix instagram, pay their users a therapy or pass the cost to them. Instead this "protecting children" by giving them "degraded" experience will only motivate them to bypass the age verification and destroy the statistical evidence of the harm those platforms cause.
• kraf 8mo ago
  Comparing today's internet to the 90s is hardly fair. It has become extremely predatory, and most places youth gravitate towards are controlled by algorithms with the goal of getting them hooked on the platforms to make them available for manipulation by the platform's customers. Of course, there will be stories of smart kids doing amazing things with access to vast troves of information, but the average story is much sadder. The EU is working on a type of digital ID that an age-restricted platform would ask for, which only gives the platform the age information and no further PII. Companies (not talking about system76) amazingly always find the shittyest interpretations of their obligations to make sure to destroy the regulations intention as much as they can. The cookie popups should have been an option in the browser asking the user whether they want to be tracked and platforms were meant to respect this flag. Not every site asking individually, not all this dark pattern annoyance. It's mind-blowing that that was tanked so hard.
  • mendyberger 8mo ago
    > Comparing today's internet to the 90s is hardly fair. It has become extremely predatory... I think you're missing the point they're trying to make. It's not that the problem isn't real, it's that the solution won't work. Kids will find a way around. They have a lot more free time than us.
    • gzread 7mo ago
      If you're geeky enough to install a virtual machine and know that will break the restrictions, you're probably mature enough to not need them. Banning pubs from selling to minors doesn't work, but we should still do it, right?
      • hellojesus 7mo ago
        Physical is different from digital. Sure, today many kids don't know or care about VMs, but they certainly will know and care tomorrow when this regulation hits. And that info will spread like wildfire all over social and blog posts. About a week after the policy goes live it won't just be the geeks that know, it'll be everyone in the 4th grade.
• dbdr 8mo ago
  This law feels like a battle in The Coming War on General Computation, as Cory Doctorow put it: > I can see that there will be programs that run on general purpose computers and peripherals that will even freak me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general purpose computers will find receptive audience for their positions. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, or protocols, or messages, will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy; and as we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits; all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship, which is why all this stuff matters. Full talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
  • muyuu 7mo ago
    > all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship, which is why all this stuff matters it really boils down to this sadly, and it should be pretty obvious shouldn't it? i'm finding it befuddling that even technical audiences seem to resist connecting those dots, but strong motivated reasoning is at play: these are audiences that will often feel it will be them who will be in control, and they're also emotionally nudged by the idea of child safety
• utopiah 8mo ago
  On using VMs I suggested something similar earlier https://lemmy.ml/post/43994511/24315514 https://lemmy.ml/post/43994511/24315514 so it's clearly not a deep or original ideas. It will be figured out quickly. In fact any kid reading that article or those comments is probably already researching about this topic and chatting about their successes and failures with friends. No way it can hold.
• 0xbadcafebee 8mo ago
  "Age verification" is such a politician's way to label this. It doesn't actually verify your age. What it does do is set the groundwork to argue that none of us should use any software on any computer that an App Store with Age Verification doesn't allow us to. But there's a bigger issue than just what software you're allowed to run on your own computer. What's really insidious is the combination of the corporate and government interest. If every server tracks how old you are, it's a short step to tracking more information. Eventually it's a mandatory collection of metadata on everyone that uses a computer (which is every human). Something both corporations and governments would love. You were worried about a national ID? No need. We'll have national metadata. Just sign in with your Apple Store/Google Store credentials. Don't worry about not having it, you can't use a computer without it. Now that we have your national login, the government can track everything you do on a computer (as all that friendly "telemetry" will be sent to the corporate servers). Hope you didn't visit an anti-Republican forum, or you might get an unfortunate audit.
  • convivialdingo 7mo ago
    Or anti-Democrat forum? Let's not pretend this isn't a California law, or a bipartisan political power grab.
• r2vcap 8mo ago
  Fxxk off, to all political actors pretending this is about child protection. Protecting children is not the job of the OS, the device manufacturer, or the internet service provider. It is the parent’s job. If you cannot supervise, monitor, and discipline your child’s internet use, that is your failure, not theirs. They can provide tools, sure. But restricting adults because some parents fail at parenting is insane. That is how a totalitarian state grows: by demanding the power to monitor and control every individual. If you cannot control your children, that is your fault. And if that is the case, you should think twice before having kids.
  • mihaic 8mo ago
    In general, I argue for less state control on anything. But your argument seems flawed from its core. If someone is a bad parent, should we simply ignore it and let the children turn out idiots as well? And the line is often blurry, so that's why we designed schools that should compensate even for dumb parents. And, just to be clear on this topic, I think these age restriction laws are mostly bullshit, but I'm deeply against the concept of putting all the responsabiliy of raising children onto the parents.
    • therobopsych 8mo ago
      If not parents then the school or the local council - you can’t parent from the government down
      • merlindru 8mo ago
        what about children being fed unhealthy things? childhood obesity is dangerous and also affects their mental and physical health. let's install cameras in all supermarkets that ensure parents cannot buy unhealthy things for their children. of course, adults can continue to purchase anything they want for "themselves". but the facial scanning in supermarkets is imperative for child safety!
        • array_key_first 7mo ago
• egorfine 8mo ago
  None of the facts he states are unknown or new to the authors of the mentioned bills.
• dataflow 8mo ago
  > A parent that creates a non-admin account on a computer, sets the age for a child account they create, and hands the computer over is in no different state. The child can install a virtual machine, create an account on the virtual machine and set the age to 18 or over. Er, how does a child install a VM from a non-admin account? > Or the child can simply re-install the OS and not tell their parents. It's gonna be pretty easy to detect when the parent finds programs are missing/reset or the adult account they created can't log in with their password. The California law seems entirely tame and sane, whereas the New York bill seems pretty heavy-handed and authoritarian. They are in no way similar to each other.
  • hellojesus 7mo ago
    The law necessarily exists for parents that aren't tech literate, since we already have the ability to monitor and lock kids out from adult content. Do we really think parents will notice that a kid has installed a specific executable? The purpose of this law is to allow parents to outsource caring out which executables are safe, so there is no reason they would check. Plus a kid can just live boot from a USB if the parent doesn't lock the bios, which would give them an ephemeral session to do whatever they want without the parent knowing unless caught-in-the-act.
• 5o1ecist 8mo ago
  [dead]
• ibizaman 8mo ago
  > The challenges we face are neither technical nor legal. The only solution is to educate our children about life with digital abundance. Throwing them into the deep end when they’re 16 or 18 is too late. It’s a wonderful and weird world. Yes, there are dark corners. There always will be. We have to teach our children what to do when they encounter them and we have to trust them. This resonates so much with me. I don’t want to control my kids. I will never be able to protect them from everything. I hope I won’t be able because I want to die before them. I want them to be able to navigate in the world and have all the cognitive tools necessary to avoid being fooled. I want to rest in peace knowing they can in turn educate their own children. I want to trust them and be relieved that I can focus on some tasks of my own without needing to constantly worry about them.
• OutOfHere 8mo ago
  As a resident of New York, I am disturbed to see Democrat representatives introduce such horrific bills. I guess I will not be voting Democrat again!
• dagss 8mo ago
  Not commenting on this specific law, but I do believe the premise that children should be exposed to everything is wrong, and that the overall view on humans in this post is naive. These days, exposing an immature brain to the raw internet is basically just handing the brain and personality over to be molded by large corporations and algorithms. And humans have never been rational, self-contained actors that self-educate perfectly when exposed to information, converging on an objectively good and constructive worldview. Quite the opposite. Humans develop in relation to one another, increasingly in relation to algorithms, and sometimes become messed up, and sometimes those mess-ups would have been avoidable had relations or exposure been different. In fact I would say you as a parent is not doing your job if you are not trying to make sure a 12 year old isn't pulled into, say, an anorexia rabbit hole. Whether that is best done through making sure exposure doesn't happen, or through exposure and education, will depend on the child and parent (and society) in question. What worked best for a highly rational self-reliant geek teen may simply be a disaster for another human. And what worked for an upper class highly educated family may not work for a poor family with alcoholized parents or working 18 hours a day to make ends meet. And parents are not perfect -- if all parents were perfect, there also would be no alcoholics and drug addicts or poverty or war. But people are imperfect, and it's natural to make laws to mitigate at least the worst effects of that. (Again, haven't read this specific law proposal, but found the worldview of OP a bit naive.)
  • thunfischtoast 8mo ago
    > These days, exposing an immature brain to the raw internet is basically just handing the brain and personality over to be molded by large corporations and algorithms. You make the case of todays internet being insuitable for young children. But has this been different, ever, maybe apart from the very first days of the internet? While access through phones has reshaped the internet fundamentally, I'd propose that it has always been dangerous. When I was 12, a single wrong click could destroy your machine, or lead to a physical bill being sent to my parents home (which has happened), or lead to most disturbing pictures and videos. So I think it's not the case that we should allow kids completeley unsupervised access (like it always has been), but it's also naive to think that we can regulate our way out of this (on state or household-level, like it always has been).
• badpenny 8mo ago
  Remember when it was the parents' responsibility to raise their children?
  • gzread 7mo ago
    It still is. The California law insists that parents should be given the features they need to raise their children.
    • 06867457397658 7mo ago
      [dead]
• whywhywhywhy 8mo ago
  Linux distributions could do a lot of good geo blocking California right now.
  • senfiaj 7mo ago
    What if 1/3 of US states and some EU countries joins them? Will they block so many users? Also blocking is easier for smaller distros, not so much for Valve, Red Hat and Ubuntu.
    • whywhywhywhy 7mo ago
      We’re heading to needed ID verification to even run code on a computer so why should I care if a few people can’t download Linux for a while, you need them to be inconvenienced to push back.
• defraudbah 8mo ago
  remember El Mencho, it should have been a title!
• IndySun 8mo ago
  "Liberty has costs, but it’s worth it" The whole point. Very well worded post. I weep for the all digital future.
• moonlion_eth 8mo ago
  I was enrolled in the united states navy nuclear program at 17. we are just making kids dumb with this bullshit
• xtanx 8mo ago
  Organize and fight the policy. Do not take your frustration out on people and companies that just try to adjust to a law. Talk to your representatives. Create educational websites similar to fightchatcontrol.eu.
  • user3939382 8mo ago
    At least in the US check out the 2014 Princeton study on citizen preferences. Our Democracy is a sham, those mechanisms don’t actually have any power to change anything.
    • xtanx 7mo ago
      That's why we need to organize extra hard.
  • gzread 7mo ago
    But this is actually a really good policy? It just says every OS shall have a UI to turn parental controls on or off, and an API to check if they're turned on. That's a good thing. It satisfies the reasons people wanted age verification, without actually doing age verification.
    • nottorp 7mo ago
      Yes but the next step is forbidding open source OSes because they can be modified to lie on this API check.
      • gzread 7mo ago
        The next step after forbidding the serving of alcohol to minors is forbidding the serving of alcohol to everyone.
• ed_blackburn 8mo ago
  This is becoming a wedge issue. It should not be. As an industry, we can solve this. As an industry, we have too. If we don't, legislators will do it for us. And they'll make a bad job of it. And if you petition your local legislator wherever yiu are in the world, then that's cool, but if this is solved locally, we will see serious fragmentation. As an industry projecting ones politics isn't going to make much difference.
• motbus3 8mo ago
  If my parents blocked me from doing admin stuff (which was not even possible back then) I would certainly not started to code by myself when I was a tween More concerning than that is that it all doesn't seem because they care about teenagers and kids.
• b3lvedere 8mo ago
  I don’t really mind age verification, since we do it in real life (outside the internet) constantly for products and services that are meant for adults, like some-rated movies and alcohol. I do mind a lot of the data process. I do not want my id, personal preferences or any metadata of my self stored anywhere ever. And IF by some weird law some process has to store some data somewhere of me, i want to have very easy full access to it so i can delete it whenever i want. You can keep the process itself but anything else has to go. Yes, i have a passport. Yes, it was verified and validated. No you may not know or store the color of my eyes. I also do not want curious kids to be prosecuted for poking around. They should teach them and thank them for finding flaws.
  • gzread 7mo ago
    There's no age verification in this law...
• Traster 8mo ago
  I'm in two minds about this. I think that by and large We Have A Problem. And i don't mean a problem with children on the internet. We have a problem with people on the internet. There are so many examples of grown adults who have clearly become addled. I live in the UK, I work in London. I can go on X and look at what Elon Musk is posting about the UK and as a reasonable person I can quite reasonably say he's gone mental. The algorithm has broken that mans brain. And it's not just him, a whole slew of establishment women lost their absolute minds about the trans issue (and Graham Linehan). Mumsnet became a centre for radicalization. You know and some one who grew up on the internet at quite a sweet spot I'm very comfortable looking at that stuff and going "Oh yeah, you guys are being groomed by these algorithms and you're defenceless to it". There's a whole load of "How do we protect the children from this", but I don't think there's actually been much a reckoning with how grown adults are getting sucked into this vortex. The algorithms on the internet clearly have some trap doors that just absolutely funnel people into crazy places. All of which is to say: We have a serious problem that's effecting everyone not just kids, and I think we've got almost no answers for how to tackle it. The result is this- poorly thought through sweeping laws that aren't solving the problem, and have massive negative side effects. I think Jonathon Haidt has a lot to answer for in funnelling this complex issue affecting everyone into this reactionary "won't someone think of the children!" campaign for banning technology for kids.
  • gzread 7mo ago
    The problem is that putting restrictions on adults comes with a thousand times more outrage than putting restrictions on kids, and look how much outrage there already is about putting restrictions on kids at the discretion of their parents. If we can't even give parents the option to keep kids away from bad stuff, then mandatorily keeping adults away from bad stuff is a complete non-starter. They'd probably burn down Parliament.
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
  • nottorp 7mo ago
    > And i don't mean a problem with children on the internet. We have a problem with people on the internet. Yes. And having a fixed cut off from 'you can't see omg boobs! on the internet' to 'you can see snuff porn on the internet' won't help.
• txrx0000 8mo ago
  Rather than age verification, this is what we should be doing instead: Don't let phone manufacturers lock the bootloader on phones. Let the device owner lock it with a password if they decide to. Someone will make a child-friendly OS if there is demand. Tech-savvy parents should be able to install that on their kid's phone and then lock the bootloader. What about non-tech-savvy parents? There should be a toggle in the phone's settings to enable/disable app installation with a password, like sudo. This will let parents control what apps get installed/uninstalled on their kid's device. But what about apps or online services that adults also use? Apps and online services can add a password-protected toggle in their user account settings that enables child mode. Parents can take their child's phone, enable it, and set the password. ---- All it takes is some password-protected toggles. They will work better than every remote verification scheme. The only problem with this solution is that it does not help certain governments build their global mass surveillence and propaganda apparatus, and tech companies can't collect more of your personal info to sell, and they can't make your devices obsolete whenever they want.
  • gzread 7mo ago
    Why necessarily with a password - what's wrong with the option to say "only allow installation of apps suitable for under 13s"?
    • txrx0000 7mo ago
      The idea is to let parents decide which apps are suitable for their child, for each child. Password-gating app installation (just like sudo on Linux) is not only easier to implement and use, but also much more flexible and powerful than a fixed age-based rating system. It also prevents the legitimization of app store monopolies because no centralized authority is needed to create or enforce a rating system. And there will always be apps that don't comply with a rating system out of privacy concerns (it leaks the user's age, which is just an extra data point to track you with), and then they'll eventually try to ban non-compliant apps from running on the device completely. That's what enforcing an age-based standard would take. And even then it would still not fulfill its (claimed) purpose that well. Principle-wise, parenting should be the responsibility of parents, not governments or corporations. Those large organizations have their own agendas which are somewhat misaligned with the individual human being.
• cs02rm0 8mo ago
  I admire the attempt to make a logical argument against these laws taken at face value, but I can't help think that's giving them too much credit. These laws have spread like wildfire around the world with many countries and regions rolling out similar legislation within months of each other, despite the stereotypical lethargy of any and every legislature. That's not the work of some popular uprising of parents clamouring for age verification. I fear debating the merits of the argument is missing the point; they don't care. They don't care about children, they don't care about the argument, they just want the control.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 7mo ago
  Parents keep saying this is untenable and you guys keep telling them to just parent harder. I think that dismissing their concerns will lead to the most egregious worst of all worlds age verification. Never tell people that their problems aren't real.
• Aeolun 7mo ago
  I think all this shit is silly. If I could manage to figure out how the internet worked at 12, then so can my son. Or well, a bit younger, but it’s fine. He has at least one parent to guide him.
• 3A2D50 7mo ago
  I think there is an unspoken concern among policy makers about how sophisticated AI is becoming. I think they envision a scenario of swarms persuasive AI bots controlled by an adversary, pushing people to elect bad actors with bad policies. So the main objective isn't to protect the children it is to eliminate anonymity! At some point these age verification requirements will go from answering a simple question to providing your ID. I'll add that there is also an aligned interest with companies that rely on ad revenue as they don't want to serve ads to bots!
  • bill_joy_fanboy 7mo ago
    As if "policy makers" in the U.S. care about anything other than getting re-elected and continuing to deceive and scam the public.
• fredgrott 7mo ago
  I remember idiot lab staff telling me in early 1990s that I could not install the free version of Mozilla browser on university lab computers....my go to reply was can you effing read the damn TOS.....free was in the very first sentence....
• everdrive 7mo ago
  In addition to System76's thoughtful response here, does anyone have a good _personal_ plan for what to do? Possibilities I'm thinking about include: - Switch to a non-compliant distro. (could put me in a dead end down the line depending on what happens) - Find a browser that can block the API access and just use two browsers. - Have an "online accounts" computer and an "old fashioned" computer? - Switch to books and DVDs?
  • glitchc 7mo ago
    It's self attesting. Just set your year of birth to 1970.
    • senfiaj 7mo ago
      But if they see a weird distribution of birth dates, won't they come up with even more insane regulations?
      • hellojesus 7mo ago
        Wait until they learn about live booting, VMs, keyloggers, etc. The goal of this bill is to set precedent that this can be regulated by the gov. Five years down the line they will complain it's not working and move to require tpm-based remote attlestation to prove the software isn't altered in order the authenticate with an isp.
    • everdrive 7mo ago
      I think it depends. The OS provides an API signal -- presumably that websites can access. So if a site decides you're lying, what happens then? For instance, 100% of bots and malicious actors will lie, unless they think they can get what they need by being a child.
      • hellojesus 7mo ago
        And some adults will lie too, assuming they don't need adult content, to avoid being tracked for advertisements, if laws exist that prevent ad targetting on some demo, say <13 year Olds.
• agentultra 7mo ago
  What’s the plan when hardware manufacturers are legally required to add an age verification TPM-like module that only enables verified OS’s to boot? I hope things won’t go that way but I do think it’s likely they will.
  • EvanAnderson 7mo ago
    Individual ownership of networked general purpose computers, and the ability to organize dissent they create, are too dangerous for many powerful interests. It has always seemed inevitable to me that computers will be taken away from us.
• slicktux 7mo ago
  I wonder how this law affects Gentoo or LFS since one builds the OS..?
• markus_zhang 7mo ago
  The "Age verification" is simply an excuse to add tracking on system software. Very soon they are going to do the same to hardware too, I guess, so it is going to be very hard to find hardware that is truly safe from tampering. And modern hardware is so complex that it is impossible for individuals to build one by their own. We are no longer in the 8-bit/16-bit era. And considering the power of AI -- individuals pretty much mean nothing to the elites. I have never thought the Dystopian future to be so close -- I always thought it would be X years away. But legislation, the lawyers, are definitely very efficient on this kind of things.
• junto 7mo ago
  I’m tired of the U.S. nanny state with its pilgrim-religious historical backdrop of prudishness, infecting everyone outside its own borders. Their ideas are deeply unhealthy for children and worst of all, lazily shift the responsibility of parenting from the parents to the state. Many European countries have long had a culture of slowly increasingly responsibilities and freedoms to their children gradually, letting them slowly and safely test their boundaries. At least the proposed EU solution (for identity) tries to prevent overreach. The wholesale EU spying to “save the children”, which seems to be funded by the U.S. is a different topic and we need to continue to fight it tooth and nail. The insidiousness lies with major tech companies and their pursuit of eyeballs on screens. The Internet was supposed to be something we used to learn, gain knowledge and connect. They took the internet over, bastardized it and made deeply addictive apps and games to keep you watching ads regardless of age. These age checks are just for data collection and spying to sell the data to the highest bidder, which is likely governments in order to control and herd their populations. The reason for this is easy to understand in the context of AI. In the future the only valuable asset will be a data and the access to that data. In the future, any app will be built, replicated, deployed and maintained by AI. Apps, websites, especially B2B apps - their days are numbered. If my business needs a billing system tailored to my business in the future, I’ll describe it and have an AI built and maintain it. That is not that far away in relative terms. Our goal collectively (as technology advocates) is to make sure that this consolidation of personal data doesn’t happen. If personal AI is to be built, then the user should have full ownership and away from the spying eyes of groups like Palantir and the NSA. They cannot be trusted. The Jews learnt that catastrophically in Germany in the 1940’s putting their trust in a government that became authoritarian and evil. What is digital will never die and what is digitally given cannot be taken back.
  • luke727 7mo ago
    You should look into what's actually happening in other countries before blaming it on "the U.S. nanny state". The rest of the Anglosphere makes the United States look like a Libertarian utopia. I live in the United Kingdom, and brother - this is who they are. I assume Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are similar. There are real problems re: "think of the children" in the United States, but if you think "the U.S. nanny state" is bad then you have no fucking clue how bad things could be.
• mondainx 7mo ago
  If this stupid bullshit existed in 1982, He is 100% correct, I would have lied to use my Commodore 64 or Sinclair 1000.
• VLM 7mo ago
  Two meta observations about the comments: 1) The issue doesn't matter much. Corporate takeover of the internet caused severe damage, but overrunning social media with LLM generated content is a mortal wound. Roughly the same number of humans will be using social media in 2030 as currently use CB radio. Remember near a fifth of the population was using CB radio at the peak in the late 70s. Its too little, too late, closing the barn door after the horses have left is pointless. Like re-arranging deck chairs on the titanic after it hit the iceberg. Once the advertisers get wise to the scam that nobody is seeing their ads except bots, the problem will kind of fix itself. I think TPTB want to use "protecting kids from social media" as the public face of why social media will crash and burn soon to avoid discussion of how LLMs actually killed it, because authoritarians love LLMs and they're in charge (although seemingly everyone else hates LLMs, so I'm sure this will end well). 2) Most of the anti commentary reads a lot like addict speak IRL. Talk to a drunk about how it would be a great idea not to drink or a carb addict about how they should not eat donuts and you'll get absolutely rage blasted in return for threatening their addiction, which in the case of an addict, is their identity. "Well it would be the end of the world if people (me) were not drunk and other people (projection of me) will do anything to feed their addiction so obviously no effort should be made to limit addictions and it won't work anyway because other people (me) will even drink mouthwash or homebrew their own moonshine to get drunk" etc. Note I'm not completely against the anti's and they make some very good points that should be considered, but raging like an addict after their drug of choice is threatened is a VERY bad look and is not helping their case at all, if anything it strengthens the case against the anti's. What the pro's don't understand is you can't fix an addiction externally, addicts gotta addict and punishing them and making them miserable might help the pro's feel superior or at least thankful they're not addicted, but it never helped no one. Social media is "an ill of society" and should be treated as such including sensible regulation, protection of threatened groups, treatment for the addicts, and some compassion and acceptance of the addicts either returning to the real world or dying in the addicted world.
• a456463 7mo ago
  The laws should regulate Meta, Google, Apple, TikTok, Microsoft and closed source vendors. On the one hand they want monopoly, but the cost of that regulation is now on opensource individual people's speech?
• youknownothing 7mo ago
  > The only solution is to educate our children about life with digital abundance. I stopped reading at this point, as this is utter non-sense. I mean, it's a beautiful idea, but any person with more than two neurones knows that real-life doesn't work like that. We have law enforcement and prisons because, despite our best efforts in education, some people do go off to become criminals due to a number of factors. I'm not saying that the present number of laws is adequate, but the solution is a different set of laws, not the complete lack of them. The idea of "simply educate children and we'll all be fine" is utterly moronic.
  • throwway120385 7mo ago
    I don't think there's a good legalistic solution to this other than to delegate the work of finding solutions to a regulator. No single law can be broad enough to cover everything. But empowering a regulatory body to research problems full time and to create solutions is probably the best approach.
• hm-nah 7mo ago
  Using a dead human’s likeness in jest is wack. Encouraging and rewarding a young person to perform this twisted act should not be normalized. —-system76 customer
  • twodave 7mo ago
    Why? They’re dead. They can’t be offended.
• hm-nah 7mo ago
  Using a deceased human’s likeness in jest like this is wack. Encouraging and rewarding a young person in this twisted act should not be normalized. —-system76 customer
• nickslaughter02 7mo ago
  Petition US Congress: Say no to bad internet bills https://www.badinternetbills.com/ https://www.badinternetbills.com/
• throwaway613746 7mo ago
  [dead]
• TYPE_FASTER 7mo ago
  > They know more than I could have ever dreamed at that age. This is so true.
• jajuuka 7mo ago
  This just seems like virtue signaling. It's not a plan or proposed actions. Just a puff piece about how great things used to be. Not sure who is making their opinions based on what System76 has to say, but I guess they can now.
• zerotolerance 7mo ago
  The children are a distraction. They're a secondary justification. Don't lose the plot. This law serves only one outcome: enablement of further authoritarianism.
• messh 7mo ago
  "The child can install a virtual machine, create an account on the virtual machine and set the age to 18 or over." No, the vm is for grownups over 18.
• Oleksa_dr 7mo ago
  I believe it is necessary to implement this at the OS level. This has been needed for a long time, because the “goodwill” approach never works. The introduction of age verification is something that was to be expected with the growth in the use of the web, rather than individual programs. But there are a bunch of ways to get around it, which you do, but no one will punish you. This way, you will have parental control and transfer it to the website, while facilitating control over minors' access to unwanted content. And this way, websites do not need to implement their own terrible age verification methods. And when people complain that this is a problem for parents, this is exactly what will help parents: once they set the age in parental controls, programs and websites will have to monitor access (following the law, not goodwill). This way, access can be controlled at the first level, i.e., at the OS level. There is a law, and there will be others to help improve it. In the same way, you can avoid the use of identifiers and, in general, face verification and a bunch of nonsense. Ultimately, the responsibility lies with parents who did not specify the user's age on the device. But there may be “products” that ignore information from the OS. Current parental controls do not solve the problem well, because you have to pay for a bunch of questionable products, sacrificing privacy. And it still does not protect against outdated black/white lists. Therefore, the requirement at the OS level to have such control and place responsibility on “products” is an excellent solution in my opinion. And quite an elegant one at that. Without involving any government identifiers or anything else. Combined with the widespread implementation of TPM, this will become even more feasible.
  • akersten 7mo ago
    I don't know how you can say this: > And quite an elegant one at that. Without involving any government identifiers or anything else. and this: > There is a law, and there will be others to help improve it. > Combined with the widespread implementation of TPM, this will become even more feasible. Without coming to the obvious conclusion that the next step will be even further down the road of tying your every action back to a real, verified, trackable identity.
    • Oleksa_dr 7mo ago
      Everyone misuses terms: obviously, understandably, 99%. And a bunch of other nonsense, both from supporters and opponents. And what will you achieve? Nothing. What is your decision: to put this on each program separately and let a bunch of scumbags have photos, ages, and other data about your children that can be used for persecution? Or to simplify parental control with a single simple mechanism based on the OS and protocol? And thus put control in the hands of parents and responsibility for content violations on content providers. Then there would be no need for any terrible checks with a bunch of data stored who knows where by who knows whom.
• teeray 7mo ago
  > Kids are smart and easily learn how to work around restrictions. Absolutely. I feel like adults frequently mistake kids’ lack of education for stupidity. Lack of education about something is a temporary condition, and kids have ridiculous amounts of time, energy, and motivation to quickly become expert about something they care about. Particularly in reaction to “you can’t do that.” One possibility: These laws forget that 18 year olds have kid siblings. The 18 year olds need money and like everyone else, enjoy the prospects of easy money. The 18-year-old has a phone bill to pay. These are the makings of a black market. Kid sibling acts as a broker for the older sibling’s services among the kid’s classmates and collect a commission.
• goldylochness 7mo ago
  This is a very sensible statement. The legislators are out of control, and are severely unfamiliar with anything related to technology. This is 100% about spying and information harvesting from users who deserve privacy, and would be better off managing their own children without the help of the government.
• kwar13 7mo ago
  The good old "child protection" and "anti-terrorism"... I have gotten numb to seeing either of these
• lacoolj 7mo ago
  Hopefully this has a domino affect across the industry and more companies do this. It really is just a parenting issue at its core.
• prmoustache 7mo ago
  If the problem was really kids safety, we would remove abductors and sex predators from the internets. Not kids.
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• thighbaugh 7mo ago
  Since these things can be made into forks with minor difference relatively easily, instead of playing along with this tech company + creepy government data grab because California says so So much for privacy I guess, hence pulling out this protecting children BS that I saw too many kids at my urban CA highschool get stabbed to fall for. The fact these tactics still work, where we limit our toothless privacy protections that the firms that don't comply the state might eventually sue when someone with more money than I presses the Attorney General, but then dial it back marketing it as protecting children and people still buy it? Absurd these same people work at such bleeding edge tech firms but then again LLMs can do that busy work they actually are doing better most of the time....
• sedatk 7mo ago
  > The only solution is to educate our children That’s correct, it’s been correct for decades, and parents just won’t do it, not the majority at least. Either they want the state to raise their kids for them, or the task is so complicated and costly that they’re not willing to do it. But the harms continue to happen, and we’re now left at the mercy of tech-illiterate lawmakers.
  • xmx98 7mo ago
    Schools could teach cybersecurity to all children. Scanning faces and real-life IDs will fail to solve crime on the internet and will only succeed in destroying our privacy.
    • sedatk 7mo ago
      > Schools could teach cybersecurity to all children Yes, but is it even possible to make majority of schools use a common curriculum in the US?
      • xmx98 7mo ago
        Maybe, if online safety education was pushed as hard as these age verification laws.
• melonpan7 7mo ago
  I'm out of the loop on this whole debacle but can't OS providers just say "Not for use in California" and be done with?
• batat 7mo ago
  So it’s neither "yes" nor "no", but some kind of philosophical note somewhere in-between a "Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS Released" and "CodeWeavers tests their ARM64 compatibility on System76" that isn’t even linked to noticeable on the main page. I mean Wikipedia hung some huge banners to raise awareness, the German wiki even had a "blackout" because of "Directive 2019/790", there was something similar on Reddit etc. I don't expect them to leave the US market or anything like that, but also I don’t even know what to say, as if everyone has already resigned.
• hananova 7mo ago
  So let’s do a little thought experiment. Which of the outcomes is more likely to happen: 1. People somehow, in big enough parts of the world to overcome the “Brussels Effect”, manage to avoid age verification laws getting passed. 2. Laws get passed, but because it was likely to be the case, the tech industry prepared and has an age verification system ready to go that’s “as good as possible” with regards to privacy. 3. Laws get passed, and because the tech industry spent more time fighting it than preparing for it, they’re now forced to implement something suboptimal. 4. Laws get passed, and the tech industry refuses to comply, then more laws get implemented stipulating exactly how the age verification system has to work, and it’s much worse than anything they could’ve come up with had they not been stubborn. Right now, I think option 1 is so unlikely as to be safe to ignore as an option. And from what dialogue I’m reading, 2 is unlikely as well because some tech bros still think that code can win over laws. I just hope that the stick gets extracted from some of the relevant asses before option 3 turns into option 4.
• rolandog 7mo ago
  It feels like "they're" pulling the ladder after building the surveillance state with our free tools. I wonder if "they're" trying to install a Nomenklatura-style [0] government. [0]: Alison "alimcforever" McIntyre, The Soviet "communist" elite was already a owning class. <https://youtu.be/QYRMgjKTy1s https://youtu.be/QYRMgjKTy1s>