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?
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.
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...
Bigger distros will need to add the prompt, and the path of least resistance is to add it upstream.
Would be interesting to see though what would happen if e.g. the Debian project just said: "Naa, thanks, we are fine without". :-)
And I don’t see anyone in the firing line, except perhaps Californian citizens…
Which, what, Californians are gonna be IP/geo logged and blocked by distro websites from clicking the download button?
Oh no! Whatever will I do! torrents
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"?
Do you live in California?
Then my sincere condolences. But you will figure something out.
If not, just ignore this silly stuff.
What a stupid take, California is one of the largest economies in the world. what gets decided in california often leaks out to the rest of the world because companies don't want to have 2 separate products so even if you don't live there you are stuck with it anyway.
Even if it doesn't affect you in anyway you should still worry about it because other states and countries will soon follow if it is left unchallenged.
Shh this guy might figure out how the usa works in another 10 years. Perhaps he will see a movie about it, I have no ideas where those come from, magic freedom land right?
We were just talking not about the law itself or how commercial products are affected, but about personal hobby projects and small Linux distros.
And for those the effect is negligible (and the law also should be ignored by them, as this will be the most effective form of challenging it imho).
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.
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.
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.
sounds like people trying to make laws to regulate the internet, again, don't have the first damn clue what they're talking about
Always has been.
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.
The amount of bootlickers in here who are like "invading your privacy is good actually" are disgusting.
There is literally one comment in any way saying it is good and that is not even the person you pointlessly raged at, who said nothing remotely like that.
In all fairness, one comment saying this is good is one too many.
It certainly doesn't match this commenter's characterization, especially if you read it. This is a perfect example of the binary thinking that happens on Lemmy. If someone disagrees in any way then they are clearly an evil fuck with a string of horrifying views. This erases the ability to even talk about important issues and it makes everyone's life worse. Notably, the person raging at some idea that isn't even present gets all upset for nothing. No one in this thread believes privacy is a bad thing, but to hear them tell it, that's a very popular viewpoint. It's just idiocy.
Can we just make a verification for intelligence before having children and be done with it?
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.
I’m going to be the contrarian here and say the bill is… good? It seems sensibly lax: The OS is required to ask for age, without external proof or requirement to share, and then provide apps who request it an interface to verify your answer.
I think taking the responsibility to verify age out of whichever dodgy data broker asks for it and unto the operating system itself, and ultimately the user if they lied, is a far better solution to the “problem” of age verification, which I don’t believe is going anywhere any time soon.
If you disagree please don’t be mean, I only just read the draft bill
What is the age for a family computer in the living room that is used by multiple people without logging in and out?
I don't have to read the law to know it is stupid and worse than doing nothing at all. They could have made it so that parental controls were standardized and apps had to respect that, but instead they chose to make it shitty for everyobe.
Also makes sense for a parent setting up a device, they can enter the age once then not have to worry about a kid lying for every service they try and sign up for at a later date.
If you read the draft bill, you're probably more informed than most people in the thread, plus the article writer, and some of the people who voted on the bill.
My argument to that is the general slippery slope effect. Make incremental changes so devs are more willing to accept it. "Oh, you complied when we asked you to add a general age range question, so now why don't you make it more specific. Oh you've already made it more specific, why don't you just have them input their ID number so it can check it against a database. " and so on and so forth. That's not to say it will become that, but if you're willing to play the long game for your end goal, you can convince people they're okay with making those incremental changes.
I'd agree. The bill is the best attempt I've ever read by some politicians. It kinda tries to just mandate parental controls built into every operating system. Which is the way to go? I mean every other way enforces somthing, or there's third-party surveillance... Less so with this one.
Have you considered that age verification serves literally no purpose besides being a Trojan horse to kill anonymity on the Internet?
No it's not. Services requiring age verification can ask for your age if that's necessary. You can then decide if you want that service to have that information from there. Baking it into the OS with an API where anyone can just ask for and receive that information is asinine.
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.
Finally, a stock photo that captures exactly how I feel.
It's Linux, we can hack it.
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.
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.
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.
Won't need internet any more soon. Or a phone. Fucked up world is not worth living in.
So will Nintendo just stop selling the Switch 2 in California or actually pay someone to add a prompt and mark those systems specifically for California?
Doesn't the switch already ask for your date of birth on account creation? It seems one of the cases were they don't care, it's already there. I'm not going to factory reset a switch to test, but in don't think you can't even play without at least a local account, but I don't know for sure.
I don't know about the Switch 2, but I've been using my Switch offline since day one without issue. I think you do have to create a local "account", but I don't think it asks for age or anything, just a name and avatar.
I'll say this is a good idea the day Gavin Fucking Newsom sits down with me, follows the Gentoo Handbook installation process from black box shell prompt to full working KDE desktop environment with all the bells and whistles (email, browser, office suite, printer working, etc.), and then explain exactly at which Fucking step the age verification prompt should be at. Fuck.
Tech related news and discussion. Link to anything, it doesn't need to be a news article.
Let's keep the politics and business side of things to a minimum.
No memes