Now this is what open source development should look like. I cannot believe a few days ago I was thumbing through an email thread on freedesktop.org about how they could implement the mandatory government API in dbus. Can they not read their own domain name?
The API seems like a funny joke anyway, `sudo setage 12987123`, done.
Oh nice! I’ve been wanting to ask someone of your age, how was the Middle Miocene Climate Optimum?
The climate was optimal. Everything else was kinda mid tbh.
It being Linux those would obviously be seconds so they are roughly half a year old.
Unless it represents seconds since the epoch which would make it a birthday - May 31st 1970.
It's designed for parents to enact parental controls on their children. If you're root, you're the parent. Obviously root can turn off parental controls.
I wouldn't be so sure, I think the ultimate goal is to link your network activity to your government id, just like the way it's done in China. So the only root left is the government basically.
The whole point of the California/Colorado laws is to provide an alternative to that. The whole point is that it provides a privacy preserving way to provide a signal about whether someone is in a particular age bracket, without requiring any kind of third party ID verification.
I am so puzzled by everyone who objects so strongly to these operating system based opt in systems; all it does is provide for a way for a parent to indicate the age of a child's account, and an API for apps and browsers to get that information. If you're the owner/admin of a system, you get to set that information however you want, and it's required that it only provides ranges and not specific birthdays in order to be privacy preserving.
I had the same reaction as you this entire time until half an hour ago when I saw the second link in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47382650
Meta being behind all of these efforts makes it incredibly suspicious, especially given the New York law is ridiculously more invasive than the California one. It sure makes it seem like there's likely a larger plan here that this is merely facilitating.
So I don't think I can still buy it at face value that California's version is a good-faith attempt to balance privacy and child safety, even if that's what it is in the eyes of the legislature, given who's actually behind it and what else they've been pushing for.
The larger plan is probably to avoid banning social media for under-18s
Or get another source of demographic data and suppress smaller competitors who can't comply with onerous regulation.
I don't see how this regulation is onerous or hard to comply with.
Having age verification in every operating system? I think it is onerous. Imagine you need to update every embedded system because your wise lawmakers made it a crime to run any code that does not include age verification API.
Probably both.
Just because Facebook supports it doesn't mean it's bad. They may not support it for the same reasons, they probably just don't want the cost and liability of doing identify verification themselves and so want to make sure all of the cost and liability is on the OS vendor.
Yes, the New York proposed law is far worse, and we absolutely should be pushing back against that. And Facebook doesn't care, because they only care about moving the liability onto the OS vendor, not on actual privacy.
But still, just because this was supported by Facebook doesn't make it bad. Sure, Facebook doesn't care about privacy, but they do care about not being liable for this, and in this case, they're right, it is actually much more efficient to centralize this function in the OS, and it happens that that way it can be done in a privacy preserving way as California's law shows.
> Just because Facebook supports it doesn't mean it's bad.
I didn't say just because Facebook supports a law that it makes it bad.
I said the fact that Facebook has been lobbying for such legislation across a ton of jurisdictions, that makes it suspicious.
I stand by that. This is suspicious, whether it's ultimately bad or good.
It doesn't make sense to move this function to the OS because so long as the OS remains under the user's control, any signal from the OS has no value because the OS reports whatever the user wants it to report.
At any rate, why legislate operating systems when all of the harm comes not from computers themselves but rather from certain websites? And there are already mature solutions for controlling access to specific websites. Client-side parental controls for internet access have existed for decades, dating back to Surfwatch from the Win95 era. A credit card requirement would also effectively impose an age filter.
The law acknowledges that. It doesn't require actual verification. That's why people are saying it's just a parental controls law and not an ID verification law.
> Just because Facebook supports it doesn't mean it's bad.
It definitely makes it more deserving of a closer look. I think that's undeniable.
> I am so puzzled by everyone who objects so strongly to these operating system based opt in systems
The government legislating APIs is an uncomfortable precedent given the culture wars that are raging right now. There seems little reason to expect this will stop here.
They are not legislating specific APIs. They are legislating that an API has to be provided, just like other laws legislate that you have to provide accessibility APIs, but the details of the APIs are left up to the companies.
I work in aviation, a highly regulated field. And that's a good thing. It does take some work to regulate well; there has been a migration in aviation to more prescriptive regulation about how things need to be, to less prescriptive like what the ultimate performance needs to be. But yeah, the aviation regulations aren't that you have to implement something a specific way, but that you have to be able to show that your aircraft has no more than a certain probability of catastrophic failure (where the probability varies base on certain things like the size and type of aircraft).
For this age verification law, all that is required is that there is an API provided for this purpose, and there is a way for the owner of the machine to set up user accounts with age information indicated, and that the APIs need to provide several rough age ranges, not specific birthdays.
Years later: "The current measures are a step in the right direction, but we have found them insufficient. We are now requiring the use of this specific proprietary binary blob for any action related to the verification process. It will conveniently run as a daemon so its exposed API will be accessible to any application that needs to query it, and it will automatically update itself so you don't have to worry about it, just set it up once and forget about it."
It might also include some additional text like "we have decided to collaborate with systemd to integrate this proprietary binary blob, to maximize the reach and eliminating any pains in the setup process caused by the vibrant ecosystem of package managers, while at the same time avoiding disrupting the development process of the Linux kernel".
Slippery slope fallacy.
We shouldn't object to a reasonable law just becasue it might, theoretically, pave the way to an unreasonable law.
In fact, this is put in place as an alternative to the kind of law being enacted elsewhere, right now, which is much worse; the ones requiring ID based verification for accessing many online services. This one provides an alternative solution, which is far more privacy preserving, and leaves all of the actual power in the hands of the owner of the computer.
Shit like this is why I run Gentoo on the desktop, OpenBSD on the server.
If you were a real one you would run BSD on the desktop and Gentoo on the server
Linux runs faster and has recent GPU drivers. OpenBSD is reliable and has useful server stuff in base.
What does "the government legislating APIs" mean? The ADA means every OS has to support screen readers.
BS. Does TempleOS support it? What about Plan9? MenuetOS?
Are these illegal operating systems?
Either you or someone else mentioned this talking point the other day, I asked for even a single example of an OS maker being sued over this successfully, and I got nothing.
I believe those are illegal because they violate the ADA.
I'm confused. What's the age definition of child? 12, 15, 18? Does this mean its against the law for children to install an operating system? What is the penalty for a child doing this and putting the wrong age or just doing it at all? What is the penalty for a parent or guardian of the child that does this? What happens to the parent or child if the child circumvents this control? Will child services be involved? Criminal penalties? Of course the only way to know an adult is the administrator is to tie the users government I'd to the account. Could this be done in some zero knowledge anonymous way? Sure, but I don't think it's likely. This seems to be the thin end of yet another wedge. The trend seems to be to be that we should be identified and survield every moment of our lives. The question is who does this surveillance serve? How much access do you have to your government or employer's data or advertisers or educators or ...? How does their access serve you?
Here's the law: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
It requires that operating systems provide a way, at account setup, to specify the age or birthdate of a user, and provides an API for indicating which age range the user falls in (under 13, 13 to 16, 16 to 18, or over 18) to an application, so the application can use that information to comply with any laws or regulations relating to the age of the user.
It doesn't make any requirement that the parent actually truthfully put that information in. It doesn't require that anyone verify the information. It doesnt provide for any requirement that a child not set up a user themselves. It explicitly calls out that there is no liability on any of the parties if one user uses a computer under another user's account.
So all it's doing is saying that there must be a reasonably accessible mechanism for a parent to indicate a child's age so that rough information about which age range the child is in can be provided.
Now, is it perfect? No.
It does seem a bit over broad as there are lots of things which be classified as computers uner this, like routers, smart TVs, graphing calculators, cars, etc. Having to provide account setup with age and an API to accesss it in all of these environments could be a bit of a lift in the time frame given. And it doesn't leave a lot of time for something like standardization of Unix APIs between operatings systems, so for systems not running graphical environments I'm sure we're going to get a bunch of different solutions from different OSes as everyone sticks it in a different place and provides a different way to access it. And this would need to be a new feature added into long-term supported maintenance releases operating systems.
So yeah, could it have been done better? Yes. Is it likely that they are actually going to fine OpenWRT developers if they don't implement this? I doubt it; it's pretty clear that the legislative intent is desktop and phone OSes, and other mass market consumer oriented devices that might offer app stores.
So yeah, I see some issues, but overall this seems like the right way to do things; just provide a way for parents to set an age on their children's account, and then provide that to any apps that might need to do age verification. That's it.
You put a lot of effort into understanding it. Will Docker images need API passthrough? Will Debian need to solve its location for the purposes of deciding its legal exposure?
I don’t see why we should burden OSes this way. An App Store does all that better.
That's a very long list of questions, most of which you wouldn't need to ask if you spent ten minutes reading the law. And the rhetorical point you seem to be working toward is much less effective when more than half of those questions evaporate.
> I am so puzzled by ...
Because it's inverted. If it's opt in on the parent's part anyway then there's no reason to send additional information along with the request. The service should rather send additional information about content categorization alongside the response.
So what reasons can you imagine for it to be designed in such an obviously unnecessary way?
That design would require websites to have separate sections per age bracket.
No more or less than sending age information or registering an ID does. In all cases they must track content classification at some granularity (individual resource, single page, subdomain, some other scheme) and act on that information. The only thing that varies is how they act.
Yes, when it's client-sent they can hide classified parts of the page. When it's server-sent you either mark the whole website 18+ or you hide 18+ content for everyone.
You're just making things up. There's no technical reason a header based solution can't be granular. It could also specify alternative resources similar to how multiple image resolutions are handled today. It all depends on what is standardized.
Right now the only one I'm aware of is RTA which theoretically applies on a per-request basis although I expect that approximately all present usage is uniform site wide.
If you can redirect based on over18 every site will do that to learn the same information as if the client just sent it, but slower.
If such a feature were specified then a site would merely have the option of providing alternatives. In the event that it did, whether or not to follow such redirects would be entirely up to the client.
Such a system is clearly the technically superior solution. It regulates the provider as opposed to the client, forcing the market to provide a workable solution for concerned parties while the client maintains complete control over how things are handled. It further steers well clear of any slippery slopes by not mandating the broadcast or collection of personal information.
Perhaps important from a liability perspective, it places the onus on the client as opposed to these latest attempts to shift it squarely onto the service provider. Right now the legality of serving content across jurisdictional boundaries is extremely convoluted. With ID or age reporting laws it clearly becomes the service provider's responsibility. In contrast, a mandatory metadata standard for classification would create a situation in which it is clear that the legal responsibility (if any) to appropriately configure filters falls to the client.
Of course such a solution would be of no help to the anti-porn and pro-surveillance lobbies. That's the entire point.
So we're back to every website having a link to the over18 version of itself
This holds true until you pass to the next age bracket for the first time.
Well I think the goal is to link it with hackernews account such that ycombinator can accuratly measure how many of their startups you're interacting with.
Are we talking about what actually happened, or are we talking about doomsday fantasies?
we are talking about doomsday fantasies and equating them to doomsday fantasies about what is supposedly happening in china
pocksuppet, please do tell us how it feels to be birthed by Google and Apple?
or do you have root on your iPhone?
Associating open source with projects that brazenly violate the law is not what open source should look like.
Sorry, was I too punk rock on hacker news?
Unjust laws should be violated.
Who decides if a law is unjust?
We do. Using our consciences.
What if two people's consciences disagree?
Do it regardless. If you're right other people will realize that. If not, they won't.
How other people respond is largely unrelated to principled notions of justice -- it will mostly depend on what benefits them. Populism, in other words.
I can't see how that could ever go wrong.
Sounds like you're the type to lead a lynch mob. Do it regardless after all.
Nobody said anything about lynching anyone. I simply don't recognize idiotic laws bought and paid for by corporations as legitimate. Lobbying is just legalized corruption.
The learned helplessness of modern citizens of so called democracies is something to behold. No wonder we have people like Trump in power.
This. People seem to have forgotten their government works for them and exists only with their consent. They are not subservient to the government.
Found the anarchist
> If you're right other people will realize that. If not, they won't.
That literally does not answer the GP's question.
You're just an anarchist. We can save a lot of steps if you just state that outright.
I can't be an anarchist because I don't believe anarchy exists. In every group of humans, power structures and hierarchies form spontaneously from normal social interaction. Even if you abolished all forms of government, they would simply reform. A state of anarchy is impossible.
I'm merely a proponent of civil disobedience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience
> Any man who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community on the injustice of the law is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for the law out of all other freedom struggles.
> Martin Luther King Jr.
You're right, I misunderstood what anarchy was. My apologies.
Civil disobedience is wrong. Society has established ways to change the rules. Breaking rules instead of changing them is disrespectful to the society that has been built. Just because you quote someone, that does not mean what they are advocating for is just.
Society is wrong. It allows trillion dollar corporations to simply buy the laws that they want to impose on you while conveniently leaving loophopes for themselves. Why the hell would you want to "change" this rigged system through the system? That's mind boggling.
There is absolutely no reason at all to even so much as recognize these laws as legitimate. Society can go to hell if it thinks otherwise. They were supposed to be working for us, not the corporations. Since they aren't, we simply revoke their power over us. It really is that easy.
Power isn't something you have, it's loaned out to you, and it can be revoked. People give you power because they believe you'll act in their best interests and solve their problems for them. Once it becomes clear that's not happening, there is absolutely no reason at all to defer to some corrupt "authorities" who are doing nothing but enriching themselves at our expense.
> Society is wrong. It allows trillion dollar corporations to simply buy the laws that they want to impose on you while conveniently leaving loophopes for themselves. Why the hell would you want to "change" this rigged system through the system? That's mind boggling.
So much for "Resolving inconsistencies between my ideas is the entire reason why I come here to discuss them."[1] - you're just here to engage in propaganda.
(propaganda that, for the future record, isn't even true - corporations do not get votes and do not get to "buy the laws they want")
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47384481
>Why the hell would you want to "change" this rigged system through the system? That's mind boggling.
The current system allows for changing it if you have enough support. People who try to go around it because they do not have the needed support. If society was truly wrong we could easily dissolve it.
The book of Isaiah tells us to denounce unjust law. And the book of Matthew tells us to recognize Caesar’s secular authority. Anarchism is not the only explanation.
No need to hypothesize, just take a look around
This leads to anarchy or selective enforcement. Unjust laws should be removed.
In the US, the process of removing unjust laws generally involves violating them, so that courts have the opportunity to legislate from the bench.
Laws can be removed in the same exact way they are passed. It's just in the commit instead of adding lines, you remove them.
Correct, but in practice this is almost never done, because the way the US legislative system is set up it's almost always more convenient to have judges rewrite laws instead of legislators.
> Unjust laws should be removed.
Yeah, in an ideal world. Good luck with that.
We live in a deeply unjust world where laws are literally bought and paid for by corporations. This age verification nonsense is just the latest example. They aren't going to sit idle if we attack their lobbying efforts, they're going to come after us. God only knows what a surveillance company like Meta can do to you if they really hate your guts.
OK, so then you think the entire system is corrupt, and you should reform/replace it.
Selective rejection of laws based on your own personal morals is wrong in every circumstance.
Either you believe the system is just and you follow all the rules (and work through the system to changes the individual rules you believe are unjust), or you believe that the system is fundamentally unjust and you take drastic action to fix it. If you don't, then you're a hypocrite - you don't really believe that the system is unjust, you're just using that as an excuse to selectively ignore laws you disagree with.
There are many unjust laws on the books, and that will always be true:
- some are backed by powerful interests
- some have become load-bearing and are too difficult to replace
- some just don't matter and aren't enforced
- even if you fix some, new ones will be passed, because people are not perfect
If I prove this to you, will you then take your own advice and "take drastic action" to replace the US government?
> There are many unjust laws on the books, and that will always be true:
> If I prove this to you, will you then take your own advice and "take drastic action" to replace the US government?
No. You didn't actually read my comments before responding, and you're fundamentally misunderstanding my position. That's not "my own advice".
Perhaps your comment didn't say what you believe, then.
It does. Read it again:
> Either you believe the system is just and you follow all the rules (and work through the system to changes the individual rules you believe are unjust) [...]
I believe the system is just. That does not change in the presence of those unjust rules that you listed above, because those laws can be changed and are changed regularly, and because they're not egregious enough to constitute a failure of the system.
I understood you perfectly, but you didn't understand me. You're trying to create a false binary between "follow every law as written, until it gets changed" and "drastic action." Nobody wants to take drastic action, so (you say) we should follow the laws.
You seem to agree that there are unjust laws, but you don't realize the scope of the problem. There are many unenforceable laws, with drastic consequences if they were enforced, which are not being fixed[0]. A just system would not perpetuate unjust laws indefinitely, and so under your framing, everyone who disagrees with these laws and is not willing to follow them should take "drastic action."
In fact, there's no such binary. We live under a flawed system which contains unenforceable laws; we can just ignore those laws (which law enforcement already does) even if they are not changed, without needing to overthrow the system, emigrate, or whatever it is you meant to imply by "drastic action."
[0]https://claude.ai/share/b5d93161-65f8-432e-b04e-af98d951038e
> There are many unenforceable laws, with drastic consequences if they were enforced, which are not being fixed
Irrelevant.
> A just system would not perpetuate unjust laws indefinitely
Can you point to laws that the majority of the population agrees are unjust that have existed since the beginning of the United States? If not, then there's zero unjust laws being perpetuated indefinitely, and so your conclusion is invalid by your own argument.
But, your own argument is wrong to begin with - the vast majority of humans will acknowledge a system as being essentially just even if it perpetuates some unjust/irrelevant/silly laws.
> In fact, there's no such binary.
That's true, you can "just ignore those laws" - and you'll be a hypocrite. The binary that I'm describing is clearly moral. I'm not saying that you physically must take one position or the other (as you're implying) - just that if you pick a value in the middle, you're a hypocrite, and your opinions are worthless, because you don't really believe them - you're just saying whatever is most convenient/advantageous for you at the moment.
>> There are many unenforceable laws, with drastic consequences if they were enforced, which are not being fixed > > Irrelevant.
While I don't see why "unenforceable laws" is being mentioned so many times, given the plethora of other laws, I possit that since one of the prior comments was that enforcing them would be damageous, perhaps the intended wording is "unenforced laws" (as distinct from laws which cannot be enforced). If so, then I suggest their relevance.
>> A just system would not perpetuate unjust laws indefinitely > > Can you point to laws that the majority of the population agrees are unjust that have existed since the beginning of the United States? If not, then there's zero unjust laws being perpetuated indefinitely, and so your conclusion is invalid by your own argument.
This the flaw that a law being perpetuated "indefinitely" (that is, without defined end) need not have existed since the beginning of the United States. Such law could have begun at any after, or indeed prior.
>> In fact, there's no such binary. > > That's true, you can "just ignore those laws" - and you'll be a hypocrite. The binary that I'm describing is clearly moral. I'm not saying that you physically must take one position or the other (as you're implying) - just that if you pick a value in the middle, you're a hypocrite, and your opinions are worthless, because you don't really believe them - you're just saying whatever is most convenient/advantageous for you at the moment.
This formulation is not constructive of enlightened debate. Kindly sheath your daggers and reply without invectives. As written, that might easily be read both as personal attack and casual dismisal of entire person. For what is a person who has no opinions?
Now, if I understand your position correctly, you believe that all laws must be obeyed, and that disobeying any law is immoral. Do we each believe that some laws are, whether past or present, immoral? In the case that a law can be immoral, I must hold that the resultant moral obligations are to disobey that law to the fullest and to endeavour to best ability for its most expedient and most moral removal.
> you think the entire system is corrupt
I do.
> you should reform/replace it
This is a way to reform it. If nobody obeys a law, is it really illegal? It's more like a custom.
> Selective rejection of laws based on your own personal morals is wrong in every circumstance.
So if your so called authorities passed a law saying you're required to participate in some atrocity such as genocide, you'd do it with a clean conscience? Okay.
> you believe that the system is fundamentally unjust and you take drastic action to fix it
I don't have the power to do so. Also, people who try "drastic" actions are called terrorists.
[flagged]
This thread is devolving into insults and name calling, so I won't engage any further. Thanks for the discussion.
Before edit:
> You've started calling me names so I won't bother trying to engage any further. Thanks for the discussion.
A note to future readers of this thread: observe the inconsistency between the poster's stated positions and decide whether you believe that their words are genuine (and their positions/advocacy are worth taking into consideration) in light of that.
Resolving inconsistencies between my ideas is the entire reason why I come here to discuss them. I'm just not willing to do it while being accused of bad faith and of having no reading comprehension.
Factually, you do either have bad reading comprehension or are operating in bad faith, because otherwise you could not have made this statement:
> So if your so called authorities passed a law saying you're required to participate in some atrocity such as genocide, you'd do it with a clean conscience? Okay.
No need to respond. This is just documentation for future HN readers.
Please review how laws are created. Meta can't write a check to the US Treasury and add a new law. That's not how it works at all.
Of course. That would be too obvious. They write checks to lobbyists instead.
Lobbyists can't send a check to the government to buy a law either.
Lobbyists are quite literally people you pay to "influence" the lawmaking process. Through them you can essentially buy whatever laws you want. The exact methods they use are irrelevant, though I wouldn't discount the possibility that some politicians were corrupt enough to get literally bought with literal checks.
Nobody asked for this age verification nonsense. The entire child protection angle is just a way to manufacture outrage and cover up the real nature of this law. This is purely a political move from Meta against Apple and Google. Apple cut off their data via iOS privacy controls, now Meta is striking back.
Meta spent billions on lobbyists, then laws benefiting Meta and hurting its competitors were passed. If this is not evidence that you can buy laws, I don't know what is.
It’s exactly what FOSS should look like IMO. Keep fighting the system.
You have made a claim with zero rationale to back it up.
Why shouldn't it look like that? Especially with a law this dumb
It doesn't make strategic sense to make open source projects the enemy of the people. Incentivizing legislation that hurts open source software is not helpful for open source software to thrive.
>Especially with a law this dumb
Allow software to know if the user is an adult or a child seems like a useful signal to me and is not dumb.
It is when those laws were passed by totalitarian idiots.
Being passed by a "totalitarian idiot" does not mean that a law is not valid.
What a serf mindset.
Wanting society to be run effectively and not be blighted with rule breakers does not make me a serf. I have used my free will to decide that I want to live in and respect society.
That would be a lot easier to believe if this law in question actually, you know, helped society. Or did anything to affect how it runs, let alone “effectively.”
As it stands, it reads more like “I’ve used my free will to decide to suspend all critical thinking and accept that anything that anyone with authority decides should be a rule must be unquestioningly accepted.”
Don’t be so unkind to serfs, most of them were merely stuck in an impossible situation, and to my knowledge most were not eunuchs.