20 ms·

this is completely insane. we need some kind of constitutional amendment to get rid of all this kind legislation forever.

chronic20001 7mo ago
[flagged]
- prophesi 7mo ago
  > For the record, I don’t care enough about age verification. Whether the law passes or not, I don’t really care. Sounds like there actually would be some benefit commenting about it on HN.
  - alephnerd 7mo ago
    No one who matters uses HN or cares about HN. The handful of us on HN who are in or near a position to affect change are basically here due to habit or $#itposting until we get banned. So they are right in that sense - commenting on HN is cathartic but ultimately useless. And the people who matter and are against this also don't use HN because they view this platform as toxic and reactionary.
    - prophesi 7mo ago
      There are software engineers who directly work for the platforms lobbying for this whom post here.
      - alephnerd 7mo ago
        ICs don't matter. I can fire one and hire 5, and increasingly, the demographics on HN don't align with those who work in those organizations. HN is basically slashdot now.
        prophesi 7mo ago
        > and increasingly, the demographics on HN don't align with those who work in those organizations. People have been worried about that on HN for years, but I still see the same culture. There do seem to be more bots and astroturfing, but that's a systemic issue with all social media platforms today.
        alephnerd 7mo ago
        > People have been worried about that on HN for years, but I still see the same culture... And that's the crux of the issue - the industry and people have changed, but HN hasn't changed discourse wise and is growing increasingly disconnected demographically speaking. A large portion of HNers are men in their late 30s to 50s, and no longer located in the Bay Area or NYC. No one's who matters is having these kinds of conversations on HN - they're meeting IRL with Luma invites or in signal/imessage/discord group chats.
        prophesi 7mo ago
        And what I'm saying is that the people who actually matter are posting here. Because it's a trusted social platform. We want to talk to fellow experts of varied expertise, and I truly appreciate the discussions I have here. Feel free to have discussions of similar value on platforms with smaller, focused communities; I do the same for the tech I know. I do agree bots/astroturfing are prevalent here. But I've had https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com as my homepage for ages for a reason, as opposed to literally any other forum. I hope this doesn't become what reddit is now. Did "hacker news" lose its stallman flavor in favor of venture capital investors? Yes, at the get-go; but that doesn't mean people have sold out their morals. We're all frustrated. We live in a society. At least in the US, you'll just call a representative who's getting paid by lobbyists letting your message fall on deaf ears. But I have seen so many great comments here by people with beautiful minds and good intentions; and sometimes I can even debate with them and get my ass handed to me, because they're much more brilliant than I. edit: was curious on Luma. Is it basically meetup/radius/partiful/apple invites but for crypto bros?
jjtheblunt 7mo ago
it's entirely possible such nonsense is all show, and wouldn't be passed, however. i'm from illinois, worked in california, and no longer live in either. from afar, it seems that whatever california bureaucrats propose, after a short delay, gets proposed by their little sibling bureaucrats in illinois.
- dmitrygr 7mo ago
  This. IL and MA follow whatever CA does with a few year lag. Considerations of sanity never enter into the discussion.
  - MarsIronPI 7mo ago
    As an Illinoisan, this kind of stuff makes me want to leave and get somewhere sane. Anybody have recommendations? What places don't have this kind of insanity?
    - jjtheblunt 7mo ago
      As an Illinoisan who left 23 years ago for work in California, worked a summer in Massachusetts, now in Arizona, i think the answer is Antarctica.
    - dmitrygr 7mo ago
      Answers will be provided after adequate proof that you will not bring the voting record that made illinois what it is with you.
    - stutstev 7mo ago
      There's some hope in New Hampshire. Our legislature just struck down our equivalent bill[1] while it was in committee. And within the last decade, privacy was enshrined in our state constitution[2], providing us with more legal teeth, on top of our free speech protections, to defeat digital age verification within the state. [1] https://legiscan.com/NH/bill/HB1658/2026 https://legiscan.com/NH/bill/HB1658/2026 [2] https://www.nh.gov/glance/state-constitution/bill-rights https://www.nh.gov/glance/state-constitution/bill-rights
varispeed 7mo ago
constitutional amendment to criminalise corporate lobbying with severe penalties - including capital punishment and confiscation of entire corporation.
Aunche 7mo ago
People are making way too big a deal of this IMO. This is basically the OS equivalent of that checkbox you click to enter a porn website that gets exposed to Meta, so they can claim that they did what they all the they could to protect children if they get sued by parents. Any determined kid would figure out a way around this, but I can see it stopping younger and less determined kids, and it's a useful tool for parents.
- zardo 7mo ago
  Wouldn't a some kind of technical standard proposal be a more sensible way to do this than trying to pass OS laws state by state?
  - ezfe 7mo ago
    iOS (for example) already has that technical standard in place and usable.
- 0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
  It does not stop at the check box. Someone is going to sue Google/Apple when a 13 year old gets on a porn site. Then Google/Apple will introduce "verification" that requires linking your identity to your device, and attesting this to the "operator" (porn site). Then every person using any OS is tracked, on every website and app, all the time, by law. And Linux becomes illegal without it. This is not a theory. Laws requiring this are going through the state and federal level right now.
- acuozzo 7mo ago
  How would this work for e.g. RTOS or even TempleOS?! Does the hidden Minix installation on every Intel CPU with the Intel Management Engine count?
- davorak 7mo ago
  Unlike the California law, I seemed to be in the minority in this opinion, this one does seem to require programs like grep to ask for a users age bracket. > (b) An operator shall request a signal with respect to a particular user from an operating system provider or a covered application store when the application is downloaded and launched. Unlike the California law I do not see anything that restricts this to child accounts only. So let say I have a program: print("Hello, World!") and I want to publish it to say npm or nixos, or some linux distribution. Not with out violating this law. This application needs to request the users age brackets at least at 'downloaded and launched' optimistically that means once on first launch, but potentially needs to be requested on each launch of the application. So lets fix the program import ageBracket ageBracket.get() print("Hello, World!") There we go, now the code is compliant with my imagined ageBracket module.
ActorNightly 7mo ago
I actually see the golden lining here >"Operating system provider" means a person or entity that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system software on a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device. I.e Linux will most likely to be immune, since its not tied to a particular computer. Which just means Linux stay winning. It already made big headway in the video game space, so its prime to take over personal computing too.
- tokai 7mo ago
  All the distros are the providers here. The Linux kernel is not an operating system.
  - 1718627440 7mo ago
    Since GNU(or other)/Linux OSes allow the sysadmin to compose the OS out of parts and change them, the final OS is created by the sysadmin. That's what makes distributing binary software so annoying for maintainers, every installation can be it's own snowflake OS.
- jmye 7mo ago
  > since its not tied to a particular computer. That's a really weird and nonsensical reading of "operating system software on a computer".
- karmakaze 7mo ago
  Wouldn't that include using it on any cloud service that let's you pick it?
burnt-resistor 7mo ago
Unfortunately, a rhetorical knee-jerk response that it needs universal, specific counter legislation for a "permanent fix" is panacea, magical thinking. The root cause is a corrupt government doing the bidding of a few rich people and other countries. Fixing that will be very difficult but is nonetheless necessary and possible to largely thwart legislators from working against their own ostensible constituency.

chronic20001 7mo ago

[flagged]

prophesi 7mo ago
> For the record, I don’t care enough about age verification. Whether the law passes or not, I don’t really care. Sounds like there actually would be some benefit commenting about it on HN.
- alephnerd 7mo ago
  No one who matters uses HN or cares about HN. The handful of us on HN who are in or near a position to affect change are basically here due to habit or $#itposting until we get banned. So they are right in that sense - commenting on HN is cathartic but ultimately useless. And the people who matter and are against this also don't use HN because they view this platform as toxic and reactionary.
  - prophesi 7mo ago
    There are software engineers who directly work for the platforms lobbying for this whom post here.
    - alephnerd 7mo ago
      ICs don't matter. I can fire one and hire 5, and increasingly, the demographics on HN don't align with those who work in those organizations. HN is basically slashdot now.
      - prophesi 7mo ago
        > and increasingly, the demographics on HN don't align with those who work in those organizations. People have been worried about that on HN for years, but I still see the same culture. There do seem to be more bots and astroturfing, but that's a systemic issue with all social media platforms today.
        alephnerd 7mo ago
        > People have been worried about that on HN for years, but I still see the same culture... And that's the crux of the issue - the industry and people have changed, but HN hasn't changed discourse wise and is growing increasingly disconnected demographically speaking. A large portion of HNers are men in their late 30s to 50s, and no longer located in the Bay Area or NYC. No one's who matters is having these kinds of conversations on HN - they're meeting IRL with Luma invites or in signal/imessage/discord group chats.
        prophesi 7mo ago
        And what I'm saying is that the people who actually matter are posting here. Because it's a trusted social platform. We want to talk to fellow experts of varied expertise, and I truly appreciate the discussions I have here. Feel free to have discussions of similar value on platforms with smaller, focused communities; I do the same for the tech I know. I do agree bots/astroturfing are prevalent here. But I've had https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com as my homepage for ages for a reason, as opposed to literally any other forum. I hope this doesn't become what reddit is now. Did "hacker news" lose its stallman flavor in favor of venture capital investors? Yes, at the get-go; but that doesn't mean people have sold out their morals. We're all frustrated. We live in a society. At least in the US, you'll just call a representative who's getting paid by lobbyists letting your message fall on deaf ears. But I have seen so many great comments here by people with beautiful minds and good intentions; and sometimes I can even debate with them and get my ass handed to me, because they're much more brilliant than I. edit: was curious on Luma. Is it basically meetup/radius/partiful/apple invites but for crypto bros?

jjtheblunt 7mo ago

it's entirely possible such nonsense is all show, and wouldn't be passed, however. i'm from illinois, worked in california, and no longer live in either. from afar, it seems that whatever california bureaucrats propose, after a short delay, gets proposed by their little sibling bureaucrats in illinois.

dmitrygr 7mo ago
This. IL and MA follow whatever CA does with a few year lag. Considerations of sanity never enter into the discussion.
- MarsIronPI 7mo ago
  As an Illinoisan, this kind of stuff makes me want to leave and get somewhere sane. Anybody have recommendations? What places don't have this kind of insanity?
  - jjtheblunt 7mo ago
    As an Illinoisan who left 23 years ago for work in California, worked a summer in Massachusetts, now in Arizona, i think the answer is Antarctica.
  - dmitrygr 7mo ago
    Answers will be provided after adequate proof that you will not bring the voting record that made illinois what it is with you.
  - stutstev 7mo ago
    There's some hope in New Hampshire. Our legislature just struck down our equivalent bill[1] while it was in committee. And within the last decade, privacy was enshrined in our state constitution[2], providing us with more legal teeth, on top of our free speech protections, to defeat digital age verification within the state. [1] https://legiscan.com/NH/bill/HB1658/2026 https://legiscan.com/NH/bill/HB1658/2026 [2] https://www.nh.gov/glance/state-constitution/bill-rights https://www.nh.gov/glance/state-constitution/bill-rights

varispeed 7mo ago

constitutional amendment to criminalise corporate lobbying with severe penalties - including capital punishment and confiscation of entire corporation.

Aunche 7mo ago

People are making way too big a deal of this IMO. This is basically the OS equivalent of that checkbox you click to enter a porn website that gets exposed to Meta, so they can claim that they did what they all the they could to protect children if they get sued by parents. Any determined kid would figure out a way around this, but I can see it stopping younger and less determined kids, and it's a useful tool for parents.

zardo 7mo ago
Wouldn't a some kind of technical standard proposal be a more sensible way to do this than trying to pass OS laws state by state?
- ezfe 7mo ago
  iOS (for example) already has that technical standard in place and usable.
0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
It does not stop at the check box. Someone is going to sue Google/Apple when a 13 year old gets on a porn site. Then Google/Apple will introduce "verification" that requires linking your identity to your device, and attesting this to the "operator" (porn site). Then every person using any OS is tracked, on every website and app, all the time, by law. And Linux becomes illegal without it. This is not a theory. Laws requiring this are going through the state and federal level right now.
acuozzo 7mo ago
How would this work for e.g. RTOS or even TempleOS?! Does the hidden Minix installation on every Intel CPU with the Intel Management Engine count?
davorak 7mo ago
Unlike the California law, I seemed to be in the minority in this opinion, this one does seem to require programs like grep to ask for a users age bracket. > (b) An operator shall request a signal with respect to a particular user from an operating system provider or a covered application store when the application is downloaded and launched. Unlike the California law I do not see anything that restricts this to child accounts only. So let say I have a program: print("Hello, World!") and I want to publish it to say npm or nixos, or some linux distribution. Not with out violating this law. This application needs to request the users age brackets at least at 'downloaded and launched' optimistically that means once on first launch, but potentially needs to be requested on each launch of the application. So lets fix the program import ageBracket ageBracket.get() print("Hello, World!") There we go, now the code is compliant with my imagined ageBracket module.

ActorNightly 7mo ago

I actually see the golden lining here >"Operating system provider" means a person or entity that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system software on a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device. I.e Linux will most likely to be immune, since its not tied to a particular computer. Which just means Linux stay winning. It already made big headway in the video game space, so its prime to take over personal computing too.

tokai 7mo ago
All the distros are the providers here. The Linux kernel is not an operating system.
- 1718627440 7mo ago
  Since GNU(or other)/Linux OSes allow the sysadmin to compose the OS out of parts and change them, the final OS is created by the sysadmin. That's what makes distributing binary software so annoying for maintainers, every installation can be it's own snowflake OS.
jmye 7mo ago
> since its not tied to a particular computer. That's a really weird and nonsensical reading of "operating system software on a computer".
karmakaze 7mo ago
Wouldn't that include using it on any cloud service that let's you pick it?

burnt-resistor 7mo ago

Unfortunately, a rhetorical knee-jerk response that it needs universal, specific counter legislation for a "permanent fix" is panacea, magical thinking. The root cause is a corrupt government doing the bidding of a few rich people and other countries. Fixing that will be very difficult but is nonetheless necessary and possible to largely thwart legislators from working against their own ostensible constituency.