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Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age
- prmoustache 2mo agoWouldn't it have the opposite effect as intended? Making kids easier to target and undermine their safety?
- lern_too_spel 2mo agohttps://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/rules/childrens-online-privacy-protection-rule-coppa https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/rules/childrens-onl...
- orionblastar 2mo agoThis is censorship; it is like saying you can't eat a steak because a baby can't chew it. They will try to ban Linux or fine Linux developers unless it reports the user's age.
- drnick1 2mo agoHow? Linux developers don't live in Illinois or even in the USA for the most part.
- charcircuit 2mo agoThey sell the OS to Illinois residents.
- NordStreamYacht 2mo agoI have paid for Redhat just once. Since then ubuntu FTW
- charcircuit 2mo agoIt's possible for Ubuntu too. Dell sells Ubuntu laptops to Illinois.
- zahlman 2mo agoI don't see how that implies they won't try. From everything I've seen before, the neither lawyers nor judges tend to have a solid understanding of technology (lawyers might know the parts that will be helpful to them in their current cases).
- rascul 2mo agoThere's a number of Linux developers living in the USA. I wouldn't be surprised if any live in the Chicago area.
- OroPla 2mo agoLast I checked, systemd already has age verification built in and most of Linux uses systemd.
- orionblastar 2mo agoWhat about Linux that doesn't use SystemD?
- OroPla 2mo agoHaven't heard this being implemented outside of systemd. Recently switched a media PC to Void and so far I like it. Might just move everything to Void Linux.
- deckiedan 2mo agoFrom reading the article, it sounds like an enforced standardisation? Like, asking for account age bracket and then having a standard API to ask for it would be easy, right? Just write it to a root owned `~/.age-bracket` for each user or something (obviously something better). It's a feature many apps implement in all kinds of ways already, especially games and social media stuff, so this, in theory, just makes it easier and consistent? I'm against leaking our kids ages, and all the privacy and other concerns as much as anyone, but are we just getting overly angry too quickly on this one? I get that it's a slippery slope too.
- ares623 2mo agoIt passes responsibility and accountability from the large platforms to the open-source communities and to parents who are most likely tech illiterate. Facebook, etc. can wash their hands when they "accidentally" serve gambling ads (or whatever) to children and say "well it's not our fault the parent has the laptop misconfigured" It's classic blaming the victim.
- ronsor 2mo agoI disagree. The parents are the ones who should be supervising. The work should not be pushed off to OSS devs or random website operators. Facebook is bad, but I'd rather deal with one Facebook than kill 1000 normal sites with bad legislation.
- defrost 2mo ago> The parents are the ones who should be supervising. Ok. When Alice & Bob come home from school what steps should every parent take to supervise A&B's phone and device usage over the past 48 hours? Internet history, of course - for all the browsers, including those hidden away? But what if the logs are wiped or the second BraveFoxChrome installation isn't obvious? Must every parent have an IT degree? What if the parents are very good plumbers and car mechanics, should they also be expert in software design and installation?
- seanhunter 2mo ago[flagged]
- wincy 2mo agoI’m not looking forward to updating my array of 3D printer controllers with Raspbian in them and having them suddenly ask me for some sort of age attestation. Why would I be glad about this? My kids just aren’t allowed to use social media and have super locked down devices, so even the alleged advantage doesn’t help me.
- inigyou 2mo agoYou would just put in any random number if that happened because it would be irrelevant to your use of Raspbian as a 3D printer controller. It wouldn't affect anything at all.
- rendaw 2mo ago> The law also stipulates that all transmitted digital signals have to be encrypted. I'm hoping there's nuance, but I'm surprised the article didn't go deeper on this too. ARP? ICMP? DHCP? I can't actually load the bill to read it ATM.
- nerdsniper 2mo agotry: https://ilga.gov/Legislation/BillStatus/FullText?GAID=18&DocNum=5511&DocTypeID=HB&LegId=167486&SessionID=114 https://ilga.gov/Legislation/BillStatus/FullText?GAID=18&Doc... It only requires the encryption of the specific age-bracket signals mandated by Section 10 of the bill. What you're looking for is here: Section 10. Age assurance requirements. ... (d) All digital signals transmitted in accordance with this Section shall be encrypted to ensure data integrity and security.
- evan_a_a 2mo agoEncryption does not ensure data integrity, sigh...
- lern_too_spel 2mo agoIn practice, this means TLS, but there is no reason to write that into the law.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- user00005 2mo ago[dead]
- stevenalowe 2mo agoillogical hubris - no state can regulate the internet; no state can compel developers to write code. the court cases on this will be interesting
- forestrywat 2mo agoI think you'll find they don't have to compel you to write code. They can simply prevent you from doing something else if you don't meet an obligation. Many many industries have compliance obligations that compel speech. Therapists have to report certain things if they hear them. Managers have a duty to report. My restaurant time I was required to write temperature logs. The idea that code can't be compelled to fit a shape by the government is goofball nonsense.
- stevenalowe 2mo agoAll of your examples are state and local regulations that apply to people and corps in the state, not everyone everywhere And there’s no need to be insulting
- bell-cot 2mo agoI assume you've heard of New Mexico's DoJ winning a not-quite-$1B court case against Meta. Maybe Meta's lawyers will win on appeal, maybe they won't. "Think of the children!" pushes a lot of emotional buttons. But Mr. Zuck most certainly can decide that he doesn't like the legal bills and uncertainty, and order his developers to write code.
- stevenalowe 2mo agoZuck created a monster and tried to hide its harm - not the same thing at all
- inigyou 2mo agoIt's like a product safety law. No state can compel you to put a pressure relief valve on your boilers. But they can stop you selling boilers without pressure relief valves. They can also prosecute you if your boiler explodes and kills people.
- nl 2mo agoBackground: Meta/Facebook, Google and Apple all support age verification. It gives them legal cover and for their ad platforms gives better data. But Meta/FB have been strongly lobbying to make it required at the OS level, so they aren't responsible for it, whereas Google and Apple both want it to be an application responsibility. I think the CA version of this ended up with a carve-out for open source? I can't recall the details.
- isdononthephone 2mo ago> all support age verification No, they all support harvesting your data so they can continue doing what they do best: building shadow profiles and targeting ads. Nothing a signal of an age group tells them more than "send me more ads for XX year-olds". Why do you think it's always a question asked in online surveys?
- nl 2mo ago>> for their ad platforms gives better data > No, they all support harvesting your data so they can continue doing what they do best: building shadow profiles and targeting ads. I think we are agreeing adamantly here?
- lukeschlather 2mo agoYou said that Meta doesn't want to be responsible for age verification - they absolutely do, because that gives them every single user's identity. Forcing it at the OS level is not an attempt to put the responsibility on the OS, it's an attempt to drive a wedge into the OS where Apple can't hide users' identities.
- inigyou 2mo agoApple wouldn't give the identity to Facebook, only the age bracket.
- throwawayffffas 2mo agoNo, they are far more cunning than you give them credit, they want to have the information but bare no responsibility for both collecting and validating it themselves nor for when the kids circumvent it. So they are in the golden zone of maximum exploitation and plausible deniability. They will literally say: Of course, we showed that one teen 500 gambling and porn ads a day, Apple/Google/Microsoft told us he is 65, it's their fault! Sure every other word he posted was rizz, but how could we possibly know he was not 65.
- raincole 2mo agoThat's the correct way to do it. Age should be something reported by browser/os/hardware. Something similar to User-Agent. I really hope this will end the whole third party age verification farce.
- isdononthephone 2mo ago[flagged]
- raincole 2mo ago> Might as well have the children strap red rotating lights to their heads so the predators can more easily identify them in a crowd where they would otherwise blend in You... you think pedos can't identify children from their appearances alone? People really say the most random analogy for slightest chance to win online arguments...
- isdononthephone 2mo ago[flagged]
- __del__ 2mo agofive minutes? it took me two minutes to come up with a threat: someone will serve an innocuous page to adults, and some malicious honeypot trickery to children, all based on an http header. "you've won five billion robux! click allow [to a webcam permission] to be able to receive them into your account!"
- inigyou 2mo agoAnd then, if they're an identifiable company and the problem is widespread, they'll go to jail
- csydas 2mo agoit's not age verification laws have little to do with protecting anyone, and social media companies are attempting to remove themselves from liability for their dangerous product by pushing for it social media in its current unregulated state is harmful as has been demonstrated repeatedly with (suppressed) studies, and the push for age verification instead of regulation on the actual harmful content age verification will always be a tool to censor whatever content certain interest groups want to censor and it is a wild violation of privacy as has been repeatedly demonstrated every time an identity verification firm gets hacked, they do not take this seriously at all, and all the while the actual harmful sites continue to do harm and have the ability to blame others for not 'protecting' people from the harm their product causes it's a complete farce and has nothing to do with protecting anyone except tech companies peddling a harmful product
- Glyptodon 2mo agoAre they expecting parents to be held responsible when their kid gets given a laptop and doesn't put in the right age? Or is it just a best effort thing that "parents who want to" can opt in to and which mostly serves as a shield for online platforms who wave the "but age API said" flag whenever something sketch happens?
- inigyou 2mo agoIt's opt in. You can say your kid was born in 1900 if you want an unrestricted internet.
- birksherty 2mo agoMeh. It's a trick by facebook and others to harvest data and blame people later saying people volunteered the data. Feels like hn is filled with these proxy accounts to support fb, google.
- inigyou 2mo agoBut they get less data because of this, not more. They're supporting this to offload liability, not to get more data.
- isdononthephone 2mo agoSeeing as this is Illinois we're talking about, it's probably less about protecting kids and more about extorting punitive fines from tech companies for non-compliance. > violations can cost up to $50,000 each I hear slot machine noises.
- imdsm 2mo agoit's a strange business model that works for the EU
- OKRainbowKid 2mo agoOccasionally holding trillion dollar corporations accountable to the law is not a business model. I reckon the societal damage these "social" media companies inflict is magnitudes larger than whatever puny fines they've had to cough up so far for breaking the law.
- touwer 2mo ago[flagged]
- antonvs 2mo agoThinking of everything as a business model: This is your brain on capitalism.
- dangbelows 2mo ago[dead]
- isdononthephone 2mo agoWhat's most shocking to me is the willingness to comply on display here and elsewhere. If the state proposes you stick a corncob up your rear, your initial response shouldn't be to ask if they prefer you use a rubber or wooden mallet to achieve compliance.
- yawpitch 2mo agoWooden. Definitely wooden.
- walrus01 2mo agoRectum? Damn near killed 'em!
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- inigyou 2mo agoIf the state proposed every OS must have parental controls activated via a checkbox would you say the same? Because that's what they actually did except the checkbox is a numeric text field.
- birksherty 2mo agoYes. Seems like accounts are made by fb/meta to support them in hn.
- inigyou 2mo agoReally? You oppose any form of parental controls existing in an OS and you think anyone who supports them is a Meta shill?
- Razengan 2mo ago> If the state proposes you stick a corncob up your rear, your initial response shouldn't be to ask if they prefer you use a rubber or wooden mallet to achieve compliance. Judging by the willingness to bend over shown here and on posts like "Everything You Do Is Being Recorded " https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49230477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49230477 you'd think the average HNer prefers it done by hand, with a repeating wavelike motion.
- hackinthebochs 2mo agoThe breathless fearmongering over an age field on account set up is just completely over-the-top. This is probably the least bad out of all possible ways to implement age checking. The benefit of this is that it can short-circuit support for more onerous age verification. The writing has been on the wall for some time now: the era of completely unrestricted internet is coming to an end. The question is how awful will the new normal be? Legislation like this is a win all around, a complete nothingburger. We should be celebrating it, not fighting it tooth and nail.
- CircuitSeuss 2mo ago> This is probably the least bad out of all possible ways to implement age checking. Less bad is still bad. Normalizing a gated, state controlled internet is bad.
- hackinthebochs 2mo agoThere's something to be said for realizing which way the winds are blowing and getting ahead of it. The fight against any and all age gating on the internet is already lost. The question is what will the system look like once it comes into being. This is something we have a lot of say over if we just stop being obstinate and start offering solutions. Sticking one's head in the sand will just result in a worse state of affairs in the end.
- inigyou 2mo agoNote that we already support this exact thing when it's about cookies! Site says: "do you want to enable tracking?" and HN says "why should every site ask me? Can't this be a header or something?" Site says: "do you want to enable adult content?" and government says "why should every site ask you? Can't this be a header or something?" and HN says "OMG TOTALITARIANISM"
- watwut 2mo agoWe are on the path to gated monopoly controlled internet. So, goverment controlled is better then Musk, Zuckenberg and Altman controlled.
- CircuitSeuss 2mo agoAnother state requires identity verification and monitoring in order to use a computer…
- hahahaa 2mo agoWhat if you make your app refuse to load in Illinois just opens a banner saying why and who to lobby.
- vouaobrasil 2mo agoI think it depends on whether the app will make the developer significant extra money. And if so, then the money wins.
- inigyou 2mo agoThen your app would be rightfully decried as a whiny bitch and people would use other apps that aren't whiny bitches. It would be like making an app refuse to load in California because of Prop 65, or refused to load in NYC because of rent control. Totally irrelevant nonsense and the wrong political stand to take.
- clutter55561 2mo agoAt the end of the day, it is my job as a parent to steer my kids out of harm’s way, be it the alley where they will find the local dealer, the park where people are injecting at night, or not stuffing their faces with sugar, or social media. The “Bob and Alice are technically illiterate” defence doesn’t hold. I’m gun illiterate but I wouldn’t buy one for my kids. Do I feel bad for the kid that killed himself doing something stupid he say at TikTok? Yes. Do I feel bad the for parents that gave a phone with TikTok to an unsupervised 11 year old? Not really. Parents must take responsibility.
- pmontra 2mo agoI wonder how vim will handle age brackets. Send all text to a LLM on the cloud in real time and refuse to show keystrokes with unsafe content? And censor unsafe text read from disk? /s
- inigyou 2mo agoIt just won't because it isn't relevant to vim.
- thinkingemote 2mo agoAge verification is human verification at the time when the internet is getting very smart and dangerous bots. At least that's my optimistic view of this kind of paradigm shift!
- inigyou 2mo agoYeah and it's great. Because it wards off any verification that would actually be intrusive. You just need to add a birth date field to GECOS and you're done. It doesn't have to hold your actual birth date, as there's no penalties for lying. Viewing this as "age verification" is the wrong angle since nothing is verified - it's actually mandating that every OS must have parental controls. Don't think of it as "my birth date" - think of it as "apply parental controls that would be appropriate for someone born on this date". Actually I'm tempted to think everyone who calls it "age verification" is being deliberately dishonest about what the law is.
- jmclnx 2mo agoCurious how the various Linux distros and *BSD will handle this. I expect the Corporate distros (RHEL, SUSE, Ubuntu) will be happy to get that personal info from its users. The other US based distros, maybe ban its use in Illinois ? I expect one BSD OS will ignore it completely because they are outside of US jurisdiction. Not sure what the others can do. Of the others, one does have a decent amount of cash, the other ones are just squeaking by. So who knows what will happen with those.
- rickydroll 2mo agoIt's time to create a library: `lib-deny-age-verifiers'. Start putting it into every open-source package. Modify the license to prohibit removing this library from the package.
- Buttons840 2mo agoActually, yeah, advertisers might be about to hang themselves. Okay, so the OS in my own computer is responsible for reporting my age. Okay, okay... And some states are going to pass laws that advertisements can't be shown to minors. Seems good. I think I'm about to become a bit of a minor myself, at least when I'm using certain sites...
- kbelder 2mo agoCould a utility be written that would provide configurable age ranges, so you could set different ages to be reported to different apps or domains? That could be useful.
- yencabulator 2mo ago> Start putting it into every open-source package. Modify the license to prohibit removing this library from the package. I think you haven't understood what open source means.
- metalman 2mo agoexactly what is the definition of an "OS" and how many of them might there be, then. or, does Illinois know what a fork is? and can people just add "not legal for use in illinois" somewhere and go back to devoting 99.9999999999999 % of there attention to things other than Illinois?
- m463 2mo agoI liked reading this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill
- johannesrexx 2mo agoParents are responsible for their children's upbringing. Not the government. Let's not ruin it for everybody else with this so-called "age verification" BS. This is all about adding more information to what Meta and Google and Bing already know about Internet users. Information they monetize by selling ads and sharing it with authoritarian governments.