California's age verification law is proving controversial — here's what you need to know, and why some Linux distros are in the firing line

California's age verification law is proving controversial — here's what you need to know, and why some Linux distros are in the firing line
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www.techradar.com/computing/software/california…

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Give me a fucking break. So Cisco is going to release an age verification update to literally millions of devices? How do I install this age verification update on my Nintendo DS, Macintosh IIvx, or my Nokia 110? And who is going to go door to door to verify that all my devices with operating systems have been updated? Is there a bounty for reporting my neighbours or coworkers when they don’t update?

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This is definitely a case of just planting the seed, and then escalating from there. Go as broad as you can, then pair back requirements to get it passed. Once its in law, you complain that youre not able to police is properly to get more powers and have the law expanded. Repeat ad nauseum. Basically ending on full identification needed to do anything on any device.

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What I want to know is: in my own haphazard note-to-self text file cribbed from ArchWiki, is it before or after the disk partitioning step that I’m supposed to add an instruction to “email anthraxx my date of birth”?

Or better yet: at what point in the development of my ad hoc tasking system for an ESP32 do I need to stop and go “shit, guess I’d better add a keypad so 12 year olds can self-report their age and safely be prevented from using the ‘romance’ setting on this lightbulb”?

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Do you live in California?
Then my sincere condolences. But you will figure something out.
If not, just ignore this silly stuff.

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I don’t but I roleplayed for the bit.

If it weren’t completely, stupidly unenforceable, I might still worry about this idea being exported to the rest of the world though.

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I’m tired of arguing with people who don’t understand what the California law is trying to do so I’m going to try making this copy-pastable.

  1. That’s not how it would work. It’s a local setting in the OS.
  2. It’s actually a pretty good idea in theory to have a standardized way of communicating age category signals to websites and programs from the OS level. Device admin can set a user for their child and they won’t then be able to lie to say they’re older, eg to access 18+ content or buy mature games on steam.
  3. A California law is NOT the way to implement this, but the industry didn’t self regulate so this is what you get. The solution is not to yell about California but to work to find a privacy respecting method to meet this so that worse laws aren’t passed. The California law is really not bad in what it requires, but future laws could be.
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Thanks, honestly I had not actually read the bill before coming here to shitpost, and it seems like yeah it’s more well-intentioned than people are giving it credit for.

I still have serious reservations about the broadness, vagueness, and premise that mandatory age signals are a good idea at all – it’s a lateral move at best; weakly attempting to kerb the most overtly predatory parts of the whole “age verification” movement, without opposing the idea itself.

But you’re right, it’s not the blatant data-vacuuming law that I think some people imagine it to be.

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sounds like people trying to make laws to regulate the internet, again, don’t have the first damn clue what they’re talking about

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Let’s dispel with this fiction that they don’t know what they’re doing. They know exactly what they’re doing. They’re increasing surveillance.

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Relevant lines from the article:

If you look at the more niche Linux distros, they’re run by small teams of enthusiasts who simply don’t have the resources to tackle implementing the necessary systems and real-time API — it’s just not going to happen. In those cases, as Tom’s Hardware notes, their approach is likely to be labelling the OS as not intended for use in California.

And I don’t see anyone in the firing line, except perhaps Californian citizens…

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Bigger distros will need to add the prompt, and the path of least resistance is to add it upstream.

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Would be interesting to see though what would happen if e.g. the Debian project just said: “Naa, thanks, we are fine without”. :-)

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Can we just make a verification for intelligence before having children and be done with it?

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I don’t understand why “progressives” are suddenly attaching themselves to this regressive anti porn crusade all of a sudden.

Parent your own kids and leave mine alone. I care more about the worms in my garden than what your kids do on the Internet.

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the law is implemented to that it is useful for everyone to claim they are 3. It will be trivial for kids to change their age (via exploits that will spread like wildfire in schools), so it is useless for keeping kids from adult only content.

if you want a useful system you need cryptographic traceability to someone who leagally vouches for ages - this is a complex system that cannot be mades in a year.

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Did… d-did we just accidentally find an actual valid usecase for blockchain technology?

oh, nvm then

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Blockchain has some useful ideas, but it also has some ideas that fail my test. For starters the personevouching age needs to be identifiable so they face liability if a kid is found with an adult id. Real cryptographers will have a lot of work needed to get the idea workable.

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It’s Linux, we can hack it.

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Honestly, if this is the direction the world is hellbent on going - which it seems so -I think this is the most sensible implementation I’ve heard so far, as far as privacy and data-handling goes anyways.

Everything sensitive is handled locally on-device, and websites only get a token “proving” your age.

While it does put more onus onto developers, I would much rather this over the currently popular implementation.

I mean who actually thought that websites having you upload everything needed to steal your identity onto some fuckwit third-party’s server, who will inevitably retain that info much longer than actually required, just waiting to be leaked was a good idea when literally less than a decade ago every Western Government’s primary online advice was to NOT do that.

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They’re actually isn’t any good way to do this. This is not a better way because in order to enforce it you would have to change what Linux is fundamentally and that’s bad for everybody.

The solution to the problem of some people doing bad things in private is not to eliminate privacy. That actually can’t be considered as a component of the solution. I don’t know what the solution to that problem is but eliminating privacy is a bigger problem and won’t solve it.

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IMO the real solution to preventing kids getting into adult content is for Governments to agree on and enforce a universal set of parental controls that every program and website has to respect. Put the onus on parents to make sure their kids aren’t doing that stuff.

But that’s not the world we’re working with. Instead Governments have decided they’re going to play nanny, and it would appear nobody is taking no for an answer.

So from a practical perspective, if I’m going to have to play along, I’d much rather my own computer handle my sensitive data locally and prove my age for me, than multiple fuckwits’ servers off who-knows-where holding onto that data per website I want to visit.

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