I don’t like to shill for companies, but I’m glad System76 made a statement. The addendum does feel like their legal team made them add it though:
> Some of these laws impose requirements on System76 and Linux distributions in general. The California law, and Colorado law modeled after it, were agreed in concert with major operating system providers. Should this method of age attestation become the standard, apps and websites will not assume liability when a signal is not provided and assume the lowest age bracket. Any Linux distribution that does not provide an age bracket signal will result in a nerfed internet for their users.
> We are accustomed to adding operating system features to comply with laws. Accessibility features for ADA, and power efficiency settings for Energy Star regulations are two examples. We are a part of this world and we believe in the rule of law. We still hope these laws will be recognized for the folly they are and removed from the books or found unconstitutional.
Anyways, it feels like all sides of the political spectrum are trying to strip away any semblance of anonymity or privacy online both in the US and abroad. No one should have to provide any personal details to use any general computing device. Otherwise, given the pervasive tracking done by corporations and the rise of constant surveillance outdoors, there will be nowhere for people to safely gather and express themselves freely and privately.
> No one should have to provide any personal details to use any general computing device
I agree. I also agree with S76 that some laws regarding how an operating system intended for wide use should function are acceptable. How would you react to this law if the requirement was only that the operating system had to ask the user what age bracket it should report to sites? You get to pick it, it isn't mandatory that it be checked, and it doesn't need to be a date, just the bucket. Is that still too onerous?
I ask because I feel like if we don't do something, the trajectory is that ~every website and app is going to either voluntarily or compulsorily do face scans, AI behavior analysis, and ID checks for their users, and I really don't want to live in that world.
> if we don't do something, the trajectory is that ~every website and app is going to either voluntarily or compulsorily do face scans, AI behavior analysis, and ID checks for their users
You're going to get that, anyway. Platforms want to sell their userbases as real monetizable humans. Governments want to know who says and reads what online. AI companies want your face to train their systems they sell to the government, and they want to the be the gatekeepers that rank internet content for age appropriateness and use that content as free training material.
Age verification across platforms is already implemented as AI face and ID scans. This is where we're already at.
What makes you think this is going to stave off that world? More likely you'll get both, since I doubt this API is going to satisfy other states' age verification requirements.
The problem is that the comparison falls flat. ADA does not sniff for birth date and surrender that data to others. One has to look at things at a cohesive unit, e. g. insecure bootloaders by Microsoft surrendering data to others. It seems as if they try to make computers spy-devices. That in itself is suspicious. Why should we support any such move? Some laws are clearly written by lobbyists.
> Anyways, it feels like all sides of the political spectrum are trying to strip away any semblance of anonymity or privacy online both in the US and abroad.
It's not this or that political party, your neighbors simply don't share your values. Maybe you don't agree with their values either — like to what degree we should be ceding privacy in favor of fighting child exploitation on the internet. Child protection arguments work because it is a compass to the true feelings of your neighbors.
The problem with this argument is that everyone agrees with protecting children.
"Think of the children" arguments are the legislator's fallacy: Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do this.
In reality there are alternative means to accomplish any given goal, and the debate is about what should be done, because no one benefits from using methods that cost more than they're worth.
Well, almost no one. The opportunists who drape themselves in the cloak of "safety" when they want to have the government mandate the use of their services or use it as an excuse to monopolize markets or establish a chokepoint for surveillance and censorship do benefit from the things that allow them to screw the majority of the population. But the majority of the population doesn't.
It is as Aristotle said, the average person is a natural born slave (to their emotions, and thus to the rhetoriticians most skilled in changing them). That is why democracy always fails in the end. Americans just had such good geographic and historic luck to delay this reckoning by a century or two.
If you see politics through this lens then the 'democratic backsliding' that has been universal across the world for the past two decades is entirely unsurprising.
Makes sense, these laws are great for the establishment. Difficult to adhere to for newcomers or smaller parties. Compliance to this madness eats away a much larger proportion of thin profits.
> Throwing them into the deep end when they’re 16 or 18 is too late.
I saw this a lot in college. Kids that didn’t have any freedom or autonomy while living at home went wild in college. They had no idea how to self-regulate. A lot of them failed out. Those who didn’t had some rough years. Sheltering kids for too long seems to do more harm than good. At least if they run into issues while still children, their parents can be there to help them through it so they can better navigate on their own once they move out.
12 is the magic number when things start going to shit. I'm sorry for what happened to you but maybe you should start a counselling service for clueless parents and tell them what should they do and what they shouldn't to correctly shelter the children. Because sheltering is an art. I think about it all the time. I always wish some one would take a bit of money but tell me how to guide or not guide my child to be independent in the rough world and to take decisions independently
I can't fathom all the rage and confusion here about these laws. It's been a well-known effect since forever that when a government deems that something needs to be done, they'll go for the first "something-shaped" solution.
This all could've been avoided. Governments all over the world have been ringing the alarm bells about lack of self-regulation in tech and social media. And instead of doing even a minimum of regulation, anything to calm or assuage the governments, the entire industry went balls-to-the-wall "line go up" mode. We, collectively, only have ourselves to blame, and now it's too late.
If you look back, it didn't have to be this way:
- Governments told game publishers to find a system to handle age rating or else. The industry developed the ESRB (and other local systems), and no "or else" happened.
- Governments told phone and smart device manufacturers to collectively standardize on a charging standard, almost everyone agreed on USB-C and only many years later did the government step in and force the lone outlier to play ball. If that one hadn't been stubborn, there wouldn't have been a law.
The industry had a chance to do something practical, the industry chose not to, and now something impractical (but you better find a way anyway, or else) will be forced upon them. And I won't shed a tear for the poor companies finally having to do something.
> We, collectively, only have ourselves to blame, and now it's too late.
Why would we have to be blamed for a law written by some lobbyists? That makes no sense at all. There are of course some folks that are in favour of this because "of the children" but their rationale does not apply to me nor to many other people. Why should they be able to force people to surrender their data, with the operating system becoming a sniffer giving out private data to everyone else? That makes no sense.
> We, collectively, only have ourselves to blame, and now it's too late.
Can't believe I'm reading this. I don't want age verification at all, whether it's self-imposed or not. I should be free to use whatever tools I want however I want.
> The industry had a chance to do something practical, the industry chose not to
Wrong. There was no choice. Any type of identification technology causes more problems than it solves. The right choice is to look for different approaches than identification technology for solving the problems. And as the article points out, the problems are best tackled with education and not with tech.
I'm probably missing something, but when I read the California statute I didn't understand it to be anything like "computers enforcing age" - more like, when you create an account it needs to ask your age, and then provide a system API by which apps can ask what bracket the account holder is in. This seems better than the current solution of every app asking independently?
Again, I'm probably missing something but it strikes me as pretty trivial to comply with?
Being "trivial to comply with" is completely disjunct and not at all an argument against "this type of law is fundamentally at odds with the liberty and self-determination that open source projects require and should protect." It's a shot across the bow to open-source, it's literally the government telling you what code your computer has to run. It is gesturing in the direction of existential threat for Free software and I am not exaggerating. It's purposefully "trivial" so you don't notice or protest too much that this is the first time the State is forcing you to include something purely of their own disturbed ideation in your creative work.
The government really shouldn't be telling us how/what we can compute at all.
But on this specific point - It's a bellwether. They're doing this to lay the groundwork and test the waters for compulsory identification and/or age verification. Getting MacOS and Windows and Linux and etc to implement this WILL be used as evidence that compulsory identity verification for computer use is legally workable.
>We, collectively, only have ourselves to blame, and now it's too late.
No, "we" really don't. I wrote software. It's free. You're welcome to use it, or not. Nobody is forcing my software on you. You are not allowed to tell me that the software I wrote, for free, and gave to you, for free, needs to have features that I don't care about.
You have an LLM now. I'm obsolete now, right? Do it. Build your nerfed distro, and make it popular. Oh, yeah... there isn't a single solitary disto built by an LLM, is there? Not even one. Wow. I wonder why...
So much for freedom and democracy lectured by Americans and westerners to the rest of the world. This is just censorship of every form of freedom of speech. This got nothing to do with children or youth. They will eventually censor and track everyone.
Don't see how anyone is gonna make me do anything. Just evade anything like this through various means and opt out of things that reduce your quality of life (by destroying your freedom and making you a slave)
To the extent code is functional rather than expressive it is not speech, and when the government seeks to compel code, it generally seeks to compel function not expressive content.
(That doesn’t mean it is not a bad idea, and even perhaps unconstitutional for other reasons.)
Code is speech, though, and is protected by the first amendment: see Bernstein v. United States.
I don't think a cryptographic algorithm is "expressive" any more than it is purely functional; indeed, the 9th circuit evaluated and rejected the expressive/functional distinction for source code in the above case.
Regardless - code is speech, and the government cannot compel or prevent speech except in very narrow circumstances.
> Code is speech, though, and is protected by the first amendment: see Bernstein v. United States.
That is very much overstating the holding in the case [0], the most relevant part of which seems to be:
“encryption software, in its source code form and as employed by those in the field of cryptography, must be viewed as expressive for First Amendment purposes”
The ruling spends a key bit of analysis discussing the expressive function of source code in this field as distinct from the function of object code in controlling a computer.
A law compelling providing functionality which it is merely most convenient to comply with by creating source code as part of the process is not directing speech, any more than an law delivery of physical goods where the most convenient method of doing so involves interacting by speech with the person who physically holds them on your behalf is.
> In the government's view, by targeting this unique functional aspect of source code, rather than the content of the ideas that may be expressed therein, the export regulations manage to skirt entirely the concerns of the First Amendment. This argument is flawed for at least two reasons...
I think you should read it a bit more closely. The court threw out the "functional/expressive" argument for source code, like I said in my original comment.
Secondly, what are you talking about that source code is the most "convenient" way to implement this? It's the literal, only possible way to present an interface to a user, ask them a question, and "signal" to other applications if the user is a minor or not. You're being completely nonsensical there. There's no other way to do that: someone must write some code. The bill specifically says "an API"!
I think you should read a bit more closely, both to the decision, and to the post you are responding to (which addresses that), and to the context of what is being discussed in the thread (which is not "source code").
That's forced labor. I'm not required to write a line of code to please anyone. It's free software with no warranty. They have LLMs, let's see them build it. :)
Well, that's a 13th Amendment issue not a 1st Amendment one, but, in any case, its not forced if it doesn't direct who does the work to create the functionality, only requires you to have the functionality provided if you are doing some other activity, it is more of an in-kind tax. [0] (Now, if you want to make an argument that when the activity it is conditioned on is expressive that that makes it a 1A violation as a content-based regulation when the condition is tied to the content of the expressive act, that is a better 1A argument, that might actually have some merit against many of the real uses of, say, age verification laws; but “if I am doing this activity, I must either create or acquire and use software that has a specified function” is not, in general, a 1A violation.)
[0] It's not really that other than metaphorically, either, any more than every regulation of any kind is an “in-kind tax”, but its far closer to that than “forced labor”.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but if you are suggesting that writing an "API", as is legally required in AB1043, can be done without writing code I would be interested to know how!
Providing an API is required if you do some other thing, but you are not required to do that other thing. Requirements that are triggered by engaging in some other activity are not compulsions if the activity they are triggered by is not compulsory. (Now, whether restricting the thing that triggers the requirement by adding the requirement is permissible is a legitimate question, but that is not the question that is addressed when you ignore the thing triggering the requirement and treat the requirement as a free-standing mandate.)
> Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a
particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time
application programming interface that identifies, at a minimum, which of
the following categories pertains to the user...
I wonder who is behind this sudden push for these age verification laws. This wasn't an issue until recently and suddenly there are not just laws in California and Colorado, but also New York and Brazil.
Just a reminder of what liability the CA age verification law imposes upon developers and providers.
It's not enough to adhere to the OS age signal:
> (3) (A) Except as provided in subparagraph (B), a developer shall treat a signal received pursuant to this title as the primary indicator of a user’s age range for purposes of determining the user’s age.
> (B) If a developer has internal clear and convincing information that a user’s age is different than the age indicated by a signal received pursuant to this title, the developer shall use that information as the primary indicator of the user’s age.
Developers are still burdened with additional liability if they have reason to believe users are underage, even if their age flag says otherwise.
The only way to mitigate this liability is to confirm your users are of age with facial and ID scans, as it is implemented across platforms already. Not doing so opens you up to liability if someone ever writes "im 12 lol" on your app/platform.
> if they have reason to believe users are underage
The law requires "clear and convincing information", not merely "reason to believe". And since the law requires developers to rely on the provide age signal as the primary indicator of the user's age, developers are not incentivized to create a system that uses sophisticated data mining to derive an estimated age. If someone posts a comment on a YouTube video saying "I'm twelve years old and what is this?", that would absolutely not require YouTube to immediately start treating that account as an under-13 account.
That would have to be litigated in court, and the easiest and cheapest way to avoid litigation is to just scan faces and IDs so you're sure your users won't upload or say anything that can bankrupt you while you sleep.
It would be at least as valid a strategy to avoid collecting any unnecessary personal information about your users, so that you don't have to worry about whether the information you've amassed adds up to "internal clear and convincing information".
Remember, only the state AG can bring a suit under this law, and the penalty is limited to $2500 per child for negligent violations. It's probably cheaper to get insurance against such a judgement than to implement an invasive ID-scanning age verification system (and assume the risks of handling such highly-sensitive personal information).
No platform is going to forgo analytics and and using demographic information for advertising, that's their bread and butter.
I'd also argue it's clear and convincing if a kid changes their profile picture to a selfie of themselves, says they're 12, says they're in grade school, etc. Any reasonable person would take that at face value.
> implement an invasive ID-scanning age verification system (and assume the risks of handling such highly-sensitive personal information)
It's already implemented as face and ID scans by all the major platforms as it is. The systems area already there and they're already deployed.
Apps and platforms already integrate with 3rd party age verification platforms who handle the face and ID data, nothing ever has to touch your servers.
> I'd also argue it's clear and convincing if a kid changes their profile picture to a selfie of themselves, says they're 12, says they're in grade school, etc. Any reasonable person would take that at face value.
That's so fragile, and it's not like they're making those claims to the site, it's natural language posting.
And someone who knows what they're doing would never take "I'm twelve years old and what is this?" at face value.
Do you want to go to court to find out where the line is? That's expensive, risky and time consuming. It's easier to just scan faces and IDs to make sure your users are of age and not take on that liability.
These lawd prove one thing: the politicians know nothing about the subject matter.
What is almost more disturbing: at least some of the politicians will have been advised by consultants or lobbyists who know what they're advocating for. What's their game?
I could see them eventually going far enough to bypass all of that and either requiring age verification at the point of the internet uplink on the ISP side or making it a crime similar to using a fake ID to buy alcohol if you try to bypass it. And then also punish companies that happen to be serving underage/non verified users.
I don't really see a problem where there is a standard api (or even syscall!) to rethrieve a persons age bracket and for various apps being able to easily implement it. But please make it fucking optional.
Make it optional and assume an adult otherwise, it's a good idea if it's optional and doesn't have dumb fines, you could have fines for not enforcing it / not using the api [porn sites] that already exists [and it doesn't work since 1 button is not age verification].
I see this as a good way for parents and institutions to set up their phones, school laptops etc and would pretty much solve the large majority of these issues while having a fraction of the invasiveness.
I was gifted my first computer, running Windows 95, at 11 years of age. By age 13 I was probably within the five people who better understood how to do stuff on a computer in my town. By age 16 I was making Pokemon hackroms, flash animations for newgrounds and translating manga for pirate sites in photoshop. By then I knew my entire life would be tied to computers somehow.
Now some 50-60yo politician who has never even created a folder in their desktop without help wants to dictate how I should have used my device?
Their attempts of a "solution" are quite interesting. One other user
suggested that GUI tools ask for the age of the user.
Well ... I have a very strong opinion here. I have been using Linux
since over 20 years and I will not ever give any information about
my personal data to the computer devices I own and control. So any
GUI asking for this specifically would betray me - and I will remove
it. (Granted, it is easier to patch out the offending betrayal code
and recompile the thing; I do this with KDE where Nate added the
pester-donation daemon. Don't complain about this on reddit #kde, he
will ban you. KDE needs more money! That's the new KDE. I prefer
oldschool KDE but I digress so back to the topic of age "verification").
The whole discussion about age "verification" appears to be to force
everyone into giving data to the government. I don't buy for a moment
that this is about "protecting children". And, even IF it were, I could
not care any less about the government's strategy. Even more so as I am
not in the country that decided this in the first place, so why would I
be forced to comply with it when it ends up with GUI tools wanting to
sniff my information and then give it to others? For similar reasons,
one reason I use ublock origin is to give as few information to outside
entities when I browse the web (I am not 100% consistent here, because
I mostly use ublock origin to re-define the user interface, which includes
blocking annoying popups and what not; that is the primary use case, but
to lessen the information my browser gives to anyone else, is also a good
thing. I fail to see why I would want to surrender my private data, unless
there is really no alternative, e. g. online financial transactions.)
I also don't think we should call this age "verification" law. This is very
clearly written by a lobbiyst or several lobbyists who want to sniff more
data off of people. The very underlying idea here is wrong - I would not
accept Linux to become a spy-tool for the government. I am not interested
in how a government tries to reason about this betrayal - none of those
attempts of "explanation" apply in my case. It is simply not the job of the
government to sniff after all people at all times. This would normally
require a warrant/reasonable suspicion of a crime. Why would people surrender
their rights here? Why is a government sniffing after people suddenly? These
are important questions. That law suddenly emerging but not in the last +25
years is super-suspicious.
I have been saying this all along. You can't prevent kids from getting around restrictions. All you can do is try to help them understand what they find on the other side and what some options are. Age-gating is just a way to push forward a surveillance agenda. The fact thats happening everywhere all at once proves my point.
It's pushed both by those with surveillance agendas and AI companies like Anthropic, who donated millions to PACs and politicians that are pushing online age verification and surveillance laws[1].
The goal for the AI side is that they get to be censors and gatekeepers of all user-generated content on the internet, their models will rank/grade/censor content for age-appropriateness and they will have the pleasure of being paid to train on all new content uploaded to the internet in real-time, in perpetuity.
> What you're saying is we should allow kids to buy tobacco, to gamble, to purchase Meth and Heroine because Kids get around restrictions anyway
This is false equivalence. All of the above are vices that objectively carry more harm than good. There's no inherent harm in using a computer, there's a subset of ways in which using a computer can be harmful, which kids can be taught how to avoid or navigate, there's no subset of meth use that isn't harmful
Good words, glad to see more companies taking a principled stance on these important matters. That leading quote is great for sharing with non-technical friends. We have 365d 23h of non-voting time to take direct action to make our world better.
This is the one thing that truly scares me. I've decided I'm not going to verify my age anywhere or use facial recognition apps to login anywhere. And this is a much bigger fear for my job than AI.
At the moment only some countries banning porn, social media and gambling. But how soon will I have to do it for a work app? And will I lose my job then if I refuse?
I mean, genuine question, is Linux Mint or MX Linux endangered by this?
Unless I'm missing something, I have zero concern for companies who sell out by complying.
The code was "free as in freedom" when you decided to build your company on it; and while you're not legally obligated to defend that freedom, and I, and hopefully other consumers, find that you are morally obligated to.
I think this is the way that Linux desktop distributions are endangered, quoting from the article: "... apps and websites will not assume liability when a signal is not provided and assume the lowest age bracket. Any Linux distribution that does not provide an age bracket signal will result in a nerfed internet for their users."
I don't think the argument that children might bypass parental controls therefore devices should not have parental controls.
>Limiting a child’s ability to explore what they can do with a computer limits their future.
Parents don't want to limit their children from writing software. Saying that limiting minors from accessing porn will limit their future is another argument I doing think many will agree with.
The prostitutes pushing for this do not deserve words. They deserve ridicule, public humiliation, and worse. The computer is a tool. Whoever would encumber it is an obvious shill for the corporations (google/apple/microsoft) who would like to attach an identity (i.e. tolls and controls) to actions prior generations could do freely and without surcharge. It is a modern-day enclosure movement. Its proponents should be juicily spat upon.
Aaaaand to throw it all away at the end with "well when the rubber meets the road we'll comply anyway, thanks for inhaling my hot air." Take a damn stand and dare them to sue the hacker known as Linux or whatever.
I'd say that anger is better directed towards the legislators in charge of creating these absurd policies, not the folks at System76. It's not reasonable to expect a company to sacrifice its entire business on a moral battlefield.
I don’t like to shill for companies, but I’m glad System76 made a statement. The addendum does feel like their legal team made them add it though:
> Some of these laws impose requirements on System76 and Linux distributions in general. The California law, and Colorado law modeled after it, were agreed in concert with major operating system providers. Should this method of age attestation become the standard, apps and websites will not assume liability when a signal is not provided and assume the lowest age bracket. Any Linux distribution that does not provide an age bracket signal will result in a nerfed internet for their users.
> We are accustomed to adding operating system features to comply with laws. Accessibility features for ADA, and power efficiency settings for Energy Star regulations are two examples. We are a part of this world and we believe in the rule of law. We still hope these laws will be recognized for the folly they are and removed from the books or found unconstitutional.
Anyways, it feels like all sides of the political spectrum are trying to strip away any semblance of anonymity or privacy online both in the US and abroad. No one should have to provide any personal details to use any general computing device. Otherwise, given the pervasive tracking done by corporations and the rise of constant surveillance outdoors, there will be nowhere for people to safely gather and express themselves freely and privately.
> No one should have to provide any personal details to use any general computing device
I agree. I also agree with S76 that some laws regarding how an operating system intended for wide use should function are acceptable. How would you react to this law if the requirement was only that the operating system had to ask the user what age bracket it should report to sites? You get to pick it, it isn't mandatory that it be checked, and it doesn't need to be a date, just the bucket. Is that still too onerous?
I ask because I feel like if we don't do something, the trajectory is that ~every website and app is going to either voluntarily or compulsorily do face scans, AI behavior analysis, and ID checks for their users, and I really don't want to live in that world.
> if we don't do something, the trajectory is that ~every website and app is going to either voluntarily or compulsorily do face scans, AI behavior analysis, and ID checks for their users
You're going to get that, anyway. Platforms want to sell their userbases as real monetizable humans. Governments want to know who says and reads what online. AI companies want your face to train their systems they sell to the government, and they want to the be the gatekeepers that rank internet content for age appropriateness and use that content as free training material.
Age verification across platforms is already implemented as AI face and ID scans. This is where we're already at.
What makes you think this is going to stave off that world? More likely you'll get both, since I doubt this API is going to satisfy other states' age verification requirements.
> Accessibility features for ADA
The problem is that the comparison falls flat. ADA does not sniff for birth date and surrender that data to others. One has to look at things at a cohesive unit, e. g. insecure bootloaders by Microsoft surrendering data to others. It seems as if they try to make computers spy-devices. That in itself is suspicious. Why should we support any such move? Some laws are clearly written by lobbyists.
> Anyways, it feels like all sides of the political spectrum are trying to strip away any semblance of anonymity or privacy online both in the US and abroad.
It's not this or that political party, your neighbors simply don't share your values. Maybe you don't agree with their values either — like to what degree we should be ceding privacy in favor of fighting child exploitation on the internet. Child protection arguments work because it is a compass to the true feelings of your neighbors.
> your neighbors simply don't share your values
The problem with this argument is that everyone agrees with protecting children.
"Think of the children" arguments are the legislator's fallacy: Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do this.
In reality there are alternative means to accomplish any given goal, and the debate is about what should be done, because no one benefits from using methods that cost more than they're worth.
Well, almost no one. The opportunists who drape themselves in the cloak of "safety" when they want to have the government mandate the use of their services or use it as an excuse to monopolize markets or establish a chokepoint for surveillance and censorship do benefit from the things that allow them to screw the majority of the population. But the majority of the population doesn't.
It is as Aristotle said, the average person is a natural born slave (to their emotions, and thus to the rhetoriticians most skilled in changing them). That is why democracy always fails in the end. Americans just had such good geographic and historic luck to delay this reckoning by a century or two.
If you see politics through this lens then the 'democratic backsliding' that has been universal across the world for the past two decades is entirely unsurprising.
Vae Victus.
Vae victo — Vae victis
> The California law, and Colorado law modeled after it, were agreed in concert with major operating system providers.
So it is Microsoft, Google and Apple pushing for this.
Makes sense, these laws are great for the establishment. Difficult to adhere to for newcomers or smaller parties. Compliance to this madness eats away a much larger proportion of thin profits.
Gotta find a way to profitability I suppose
> Throwing them into the deep end when they’re 16 or 18 is too late.
I saw this a lot in college. Kids that didn’t have any freedom or autonomy while living at home went wild in college. They had no idea how to self-regulate. A lot of them failed out. Those who didn’t had some rough years. Sheltering kids for too long seems to do more harm than good. At least if they run into issues while still children, their parents can be there to help them through it so they can better navigate on their own once they move out.
Counterpoint, my parents didn’t shelter me from shit and my life went off the rails at 12.
That's not a counterpoint. The inverse of "shelter too long" is "shelter less long", not "zero shelter ever".
(And the proper way to do "less long" is to slowly loosen up over time.)
12 is the magic number when things start going to shit. I'm sorry for what happened to you but maybe you should start a counselling service for clueless parents and tell them what should they do and what they shouldn't to correctly shelter the children. Because sheltering is an art. I think about it all the time. I always wish some one would take a bit of money but tell me how to guide or not guide my child to be independent in the rough world and to take decisions independently
I watched an older sibling go off the rails. That is what kept me from doing it.
There needs to be both things - the opportunity to make mistakes, and the support to make it okay after mistakes are made.
Sounds like you got the first but not the second, which must have been tough. Hope you're doing better now.
There's a balance to be struck, it shouldn't be all or nothing.
I can't fathom all the rage and confusion here about these laws. It's been a well-known effect since forever that when a government deems that something needs to be done, they'll go for the first "something-shaped" solution.
This all could've been avoided. Governments all over the world have been ringing the alarm bells about lack of self-regulation in tech and social media. And instead of doing even a minimum of regulation, anything to calm or assuage the governments, the entire industry went balls-to-the-wall "line go up" mode. We, collectively, only have ourselves to blame, and now it's too late.
If you look back, it didn't have to be this way: - Governments told game publishers to find a system to handle age rating or else. The industry developed the ESRB (and other local systems), and no "or else" happened. - Governments told phone and smart device manufacturers to collectively standardize on a charging standard, almost everyone agreed on USB-C and only many years later did the government step in and force the lone outlier to play ball. If that one hadn't been stubborn, there wouldn't have been a law.
The industry had a chance to do something practical, the industry chose not to, and now something impractical (but you better find a way anyway, or else) will be forced upon them. And I won't shed a tear for the poor companies finally having to do something.
> We, collectively, only have ourselves to blame, and now it's too late.
Why would we have to be blamed for a law written by some lobbyists? That makes no sense at all. There are of course some folks that are in favour of this because "of the children" but their rationale does not apply to me nor to many other people. Why should they be able to force people to surrender their data, with the operating system becoming a sniffer giving out private data to everyone else? That makes no sense.
> We, collectively, only have ourselves to blame, and now it's too late.
Can't believe I'm reading this. I don't want age verification at all, whether it's self-imposed or not. I should be free to use whatever tools I want however I want.
> The industry had a chance to do something practical, the industry chose not to
Wrong. There was no choice. Any type of identification technology causes more problems than it solves. The right choice is to look for different approaches than identification technology for solving the problems. And as the article points out, the problems are best tackled with education and not with tech.
Speak for yourself. This is impacting open source and is fundamentally against the open source ethos.
Governments demanding computers enforce age is as dumb as governments demanding books, pen, and paper enforce age.
This is unrelated to industry. This is idiots running the government.
I'm probably missing something, but when I read the California statute I didn't understand it to be anything like "computers enforcing age" - more like, when you create an account it needs to ask your age, and then provide a system API by which apps can ask what bracket the account holder is in. This seems better than the current solution of every app asking independently?
Again, I'm probably missing something but it strikes me as pretty trivial to comply with?
Being "trivial to comply with" is completely disjunct and not at all an argument against "this type of law is fundamentally at odds with the liberty and self-determination that open source projects require and should protect." It's a shot across the bow to open-source, it's literally the government telling you what code your computer has to run. It is gesturing in the direction of existential threat for Free software and I am not exaggerating. It's purposefully "trivial" so you don't notice or protest too much that this is the first time the State is forcing you to include something purely of their own disturbed ideation in your creative work.
The government really shouldn't be telling us how/what we can compute at all.
But on this specific point - It's a bellwether. They're doing this to lay the groundwork and test the waters for compulsory identification and/or age verification. Getting MacOS and Windows and Linux and etc to implement this WILL be used as evidence that compulsory identity verification for computer use is legally workable.
>We, collectively, only have ourselves to blame, and now it's too late.
No, "we" really don't. I wrote software. It's free. You're welcome to use it, or not. Nobody is forcing my software on you. You are not allowed to tell me that the software I wrote, for free, and gave to you, for free, needs to have features that I don't care about.
You have an LLM now. I'm obsolete now, right? Do it. Build your nerfed distro, and make it popular. Oh, yeah... there isn't a single solitary disto built by an LLM, is there? Not even one. Wow. I wonder why...
So much for freedom and democracy lectured by Americans and westerners to the rest of the world. This is just censorship of every form of freedom of speech. This got nothing to do with children or youth. They will eventually censor and track everyone.
Don't see how anyone is gonna make me do anything. Just evade anything like this through various means and opt out of things that reduce your quality of life (by destroying your freedom and making you a slave)
It's sad to see such big brother crap in Linux, which sees like the exact opposite of the hacker ethos it was originally built upon.
Are these laws not 1A violations due to code being speech and the gov not being allowed to compel speech?
To the extent code is functional rather than expressive it is not speech, and when the government seeks to compel code, it generally seeks to compel function not expressive content.
(That doesn’t mean it is not a bad idea, and even perhaps unconstitutional for other reasons.)
Code is speech, though, and is protected by the first amendment: see Bernstein v. United States.
I don't think a cryptographic algorithm is "expressive" any more than it is purely functional; indeed, the 9th circuit evaluated and rejected the expressive/functional distinction for source code in the above case.
Regardless - code is speech, and the government cannot compel or prevent speech except in very narrow circumstances.
> Code is speech, though, and is protected by the first amendment: see Bernstein v. United States.
That is very much overstating the holding in the case [0], the most relevant part of which seems to be:
“encryption software, in its source code form and as employed by those in the field of cryptography, must be viewed as expressive for First Amendment purposes”
The ruling spends a key bit of analysis discussing the expressive function of source code in this field as distinct from the function of object code in controlling a computer.
A law compelling providing functionality which it is merely most convenient to comply with by creating source code as part of the process is not directing speech, any more than an law delivery of physical goods where the most convenient method of doing so involves interacting by speech with the person who physically holds them on your behalf is.
[0] text here: https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F3/176/176.F3d...
> In the government's view, by targeting this unique functional aspect of source code, rather than the content of the ideas that may be expressed therein, the export regulations manage to skirt entirely the concerns of the First Amendment. This argument is flawed for at least two reasons...
I think you should read it a bit more closely. The court threw out the "functional/expressive" argument for source code, like I said in my original comment.
Secondly, what are you talking about that source code is the most "convenient" way to implement this? It's the literal, only possible way to present an interface to a user, ask them a question, and "signal" to other applications if the user is a minor or not. You're being completely nonsensical there. There's no other way to do that: someone must write some code. The bill specifically says "an API"!
I think you should read a bit more closely, both to the decision, and to the post you are responding to (which addresses that), and to the context of what is being discussed in the thread (which is not "source code").
I look forward to your blog post on how to implement "an API" without writing source code. It should be informative!
>A law compelling providing functionality
That's forced labor. I'm not required to write a line of code to please anyone. It's free software with no warranty. They have LLMs, let's see them build it. :)
> > A law compelling providing functionality
> That's forced labor.
Well, that's a 13th Amendment issue not a 1st Amendment one, but, in any case, its not forced if it doesn't direct who does the work to create the functionality, only requires you to have the functionality provided if you are doing some other activity, it is more of an in-kind tax. [0] (Now, if you want to make an argument that when the activity it is conditioned on is expressive that that makes it a 1A violation as a content-based regulation when the condition is tied to the content of the expressive act, that is a better 1A argument, that might actually have some merit against many of the real uses of, say, age verification laws; but “if I am doing this activity, I must either create or acquire and use software that has a specified function” is not, in general, a 1A violation.)
[0] It's not really that other than metaphorically, either, any more than every regulation of any kind is an “in-kind tax”, but its far closer to that than “forced labor”.
>its not forced if it doesn't direct who does the work
Good, because I'm not writing it, f\/ck them. Free software, no warranty. Use it if you want to. Otherwise, pound sand.
> Good
Don't you mean "bad"? Shouldn't you want it to be a violation of the constitution so it gets thrown out?
Very narrow circumstances like the DMCA? I don’t think the jurisprudence is as simple as you’re making it out to be.
Code may be speech, but the functional characteristics of systems that happen to rely on code may not always also be speech.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but if you are suggesting that writing an "API", as is legally required in AB1043, can be done without writing code I would be interested to know how!
Writing an API is not required by AB1043.
Providing an API is required if you do some other thing, but you are not required to do that other thing. Requirements that are triggered by engaging in some other activity are not compulsions if the activity they are triggered by is not compulsory. (Now, whether restricting the thing that triggers the requirement by adding the requirement is permissible is a legitimate question, but that is not the question that is addressed when you ignore the thing triggering the requirement and treat the requirement as a free-standing mandate.)
> Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies, at a minimum, which of the following categories pertains to the user...
requiring the OS to broadcast an age bracket to every app and website is building a new tracking vector and calling it child safety lol
None of these people actually care about children.
I wonder who is behind this sudden push for these age verification laws. This wasn't an issue until recently and suddenly there are not just laws in California and Colorado, but also New York and Brazil.
Just a reminder of what liability the CA age verification law imposes upon developers and providers.
It's not enough to adhere to the OS age signal:
> (3) (A) Except as provided in subparagraph (B), a developer shall treat a signal received pursuant to this title as the primary indicator of a user’s age range for purposes of determining the user’s age.
> (B) If a developer has internal clear and convincing information that a user’s age is different than the age indicated by a signal received pursuant to this title, the developer shall use that information as the primary indicator of the user’s age.
Developers are still burdened with additional liability if they have reason to believe users are underage, even if their age flag says otherwise.
The only way to mitigate this liability is to confirm your users are of age with facial and ID scans, as it is implemented across platforms already. Not doing so opens you up to liability if someone ever writes "im 12 lol" on your app/platform.
> if they have reason to believe users are underage
The law requires "clear and convincing information", not merely "reason to believe". And since the law requires developers to rely on the provide age signal as the primary indicator of the user's age, developers are not incentivized to create a system that uses sophisticated data mining to derive an estimated age. If someone posts a comment on a YouTube video saying "I'm twelve years old and what is this?", that would absolutely not require YouTube to immediately start treating that account as an under-13 account.
That would have to be litigated in court, and the easiest and cheapest way to avoid litigation is to just scan faces and IDs so you're sure your users won't upload or say anything that can bankrupt you while you sleep.
It would be at least as valid a strategy to avoid collecting any unnecessary personal information about your users, so that you don't have to worry about whether the information you've amassed adds up to "internal clear and convincing information".
Remember, only the state AG can bring a suit under this law, and the penalty is limited to $2500 per child for negligent violations. It's probably cheaper to get insurance against such a judgement than to implement an invasive ID-scanning age verification system (and assume the risks of handling such highly-sensitive personal information).
No platform is going to forgo analytics and and using demographic information for advertising, that's their bread and butter.
I'd also argue it's clear and convincing if a kid changes their profile picture to a selfie of themselves, says they're 12, says they're in grade school, etc. Any reasonable person would take that at face value.
> implement an invasive ID-scanning age verification system (and assume the risks of handling such highly-sensitive personal information)
It's already implemented as face and ID scans by all the major platforms as it is. The systems area already there and they're already deployed.
Apps and platforms already integrate with 3rd party age verification platforms who handle the face and ID data, nothing ever has to touch your servers.
> I'd also argue it's clear and convincing if a kid changes their profile picture to a selfie of themselves, says they're 12, says they're in grade school, etc. Any reasonable person would take that at face value.
That's so fragile, and it's not like they're making those claims to the site, it's natural language posting.
And someone who knows what they're doing would never take "I'm twelve years old and what is this?" at face value.
How do you know all this before any court decided upon it?
Do you want to go to court to find out where the line is? That's expensive, risky and time consuming. It's easier to just scan faces and IDs to make sure your users are of age and not take on that liability.
These lawd prove one thing: the politicians know nothing about the subject matter.
What is almost more disturbing: at least some of the politicians will have been advised by consultants or lobbyists who know what they're advocating for. What's their game?
I have to wonder
A. If end users will mod their distros to send a "signal" (TBD?) to websites.
B. If end users will just grab a pirate OS with apps compiled to not care about age.
Hopefully the latest TAILS I downloaded is free of Big (over 18) Brother. And (A)
Or just compile, Gentoo and LFS style.
C. If pirates just take care of all this for friends and neighbors.
D. When, not if, this unconstitutional coercion is challenged in court and cancelled via petition. Remember Proposition 8?
I could see them eventually going far enough to bypass all of that and either requiring age verification at the point of the internet uplink on the ISP side or making it a crime similar to using a fake ID to buy alcohol if you try to bypass it. And then also punish companies that happen to be serving underage/non verified users.
I don't really see a problem where there is a standard api (or even syscall!) to rethrieve a persons age bracket and for various apps being able to easily implement it. But please make it fucking optional.
Make it optional and assume an adult otherwise, it's a good idea if it's optional and doesn't have dumb fines, you could have fines for not enforcing it / not using the api [porn sites] that already exists [and it doesn't work since 1 button is not age verification].
I see this as a good way for parents and institutions to set up their phones, school laptops etc and would pretty much solve the large majority of these issues while having a fraction of the invasiveness.
I was gifted my first computer, running Windows 95, at 11 years of age. By age 13 I was probably within the five people who better understood how to do stuff on a computer in my town. By age 16 I was making Pokemon hackroms, flash animations for newgrounds and translating manga for pirate sites in photoshop. By then I knew my entire life would be tied to computers somehow.
Now some 50-60yo politician who has never even created a folder in their desktop without help wants to dictate how I should have used my device?
Fuck'em
So this has recently also affected Ubuntu.
One developer began a discussion:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2026-March/04...
Their attempts of a "solution" are quite interesting. One other user suggested that GUI tools ask for the age of the user.
Well ... I have a very strong opinion here. I have been using Linux since over 20 years and I will not ever give any information about my personal data to the computer devices I own and control. So any GUI asking for this specifically would betray me - and I will remove it. (Granted, it is easier to patch out the offending betrayal code and recompile the thing; I do this with KDE where Nate added the pester-donation daemon. Don't complain about this on reddit #kde, he will ban you. KDE needs more money! That's the new KDE. I prefer oldschool KDE but I digress so back to the topic of age "verification").
The whole discussion about age "verification" appears to be to force everyone into giving data to the government. I don't buy for a moment that this is about "protecting children". And, even IF it were, I could not care any less about the government's strategy. Even more so as I am not in the country that decided this in the first place, so why would I be forced to comply with it when it ends up with GUI tools wanting to sniff my information and then give it to others? For similar reasons, one reason I use ublock origin is to give as few information to outside entities when I browse the web (I am not 100% consistent here, because I mostly use ublock origin to re-define the user interface, which includes blocking annoying popups and what not; that is the primary use case, but to lessen the information my browser gives to anyone else, is also a good thing. I fail to see why I would want to surrender my private data, unless there is really no alternative, e. g. online financial transactions.)
I also don't think we should call this age "verification" law. This is very clearly written by a lobbiyst or several lobbyists who want to sniff more data off of people. The very underlying idea here is wrong - I would not accept Linux to become a spy-tool for the government. I am not interested in how a government tries to reason about this betrayal - none of those attempts of "explanation" apply in my case. It is simply not the job of the government to sniff after all people at all times. This would normally require a warrant/reasonable suspicion of a crime. Why would people surrender their rights here? Why is a government sniffing after people suddenly? These are important questions. That law suddenly emerging but not in the last +25 years is super-suspicious.
I have been saying this all along. You can't prevent kids from getting around restrictions. All you can do is try to help them understand what they find on the other side and what some options are. Age-gating is just a way to push forward a surveillance agenda. The fact thats happening everywhere all at once proves my point.
It's pushed both by those with surveillance agendas and AI companies like Anthropic, who donated millions to PACs and politicians that are pushing online age verification and surveillance laws[1].
The goal for the AI side is that they get to be censors and gatekeepers of all user-generated content on the internet, their models will rank/grade/censor content for age-appropriateness and they will have the pleasure of being paid to train on all new content uploaded to the internet in real-time, in perpetuity.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47162956
What you're saying is we should allow kids to buy tobacco, to gamble, to purchase Meth and Heroine because Kids get around restrictions anyway
> What you're saying is we should allow kids to buy tobacco, to gamble, to purchase Meth and Heroine because Kids get around restrictions anyway
This is false equivalence. All of the above are vices that objectively carry more harm than good. There's no inherent harm in using a computer, there's a subset of ways in which using a computer can be harmful, which kids can be taught how to avoid or navigate, there's no subset of meth use that isn't harmful
You can. Most children are not going to end up on HN when they are older. The stories you read here about hacking system at 11 are outliers.
And the outliers brag about them, then help out their classmates.
>You can prevent kids from getting around restrictions
I'm guessing you meant can't
Yes. Fixed
Let's be clear: this is a first step. The obvious next step is to require proof of age.
This ties in nicely with the international movement to require ID to use social media.
Why is this an international movement? Suddenly, simultaneously, all over the Western world? It's enough to make on believe in conspiracies...
Good words, glad to see more companies taking a principled stance on these important matters. That leading quote is great for sharing with non-technical friends. We have 365d 23h of non-voting time to take direct action to make our world better.
this is how and adult sounds like in a room full of children.
This is the one thing that truly scares me. I've decided I'm not going to verify my age anywhere or use facial recognition apps to login anywhere. And this is a much bigger fear for my job than AI.
At the moment only some countries banning porn, social media and gambling. But how soon will I have to do it for a work app? And will I lose my job then if I refuse?
California and Colorado do not get to govern out of state residence, thats interstate commerce and its federal domain, period.
The time is coming where we will unseat legislative traitors who use EU/Old World manipulations in the USA.
An unjust law is no law at all. That is the exception the rule of law requires to remain moral.
I mean, genuine question, is Linux Mint or MX Linux endangered by this?
Unless I'm missing something, I have zero concern for companies who sell out by complying.
The code was "free as in freedom" when you decided to build your company on it; and while you're not legally obligated to defend that freedom, and I, and hopefully other consumers, find that you are morally obligated to.
I think this is the way that Linux desktop distributions are endangered, quoting from the article: "... apps and websites will not assume liability when a signal is not provided and assume the lowest age bracket. Any Linux distribution that does not provide an age bracket signal will result in a nerfed internet for their users."
I love Pop!_OS (and Cosmic) but if they start with this bullshit I need to switch to other Linux distributions. Worst case, will build my own...
Your ISP will require it.
What constitutes "this bullshit"?
I don't think the argument that children might bypass parental controls therefore devices should not have parental controls.
>Limiting a child’s ability to explore what they can do with a computer limits their future.
Parents don't want to limit their children from writing software. Saying that limiting minors from accessing porn will limit their future is another argument I doing think many will agree with.
The prostitutes pushing for this do not deserve words. They deserve ridicule, public humiliation, and worse. The computer is a tool. Whoever would encumber it is an obvious shill for the corporations (google/apple/microsoft) who would like to attach an identity (i.e. tolls and controls) to actions prior generations could do freely and without surcharge. It is a modern-day enclosure movement. Its proponents should be juicily spat upon.
Aaaaand to throw it all away at the end with "well when the rubber meets the road we'll comply anyway, thanks for inhaling my hot air." Take a damn stand and dare them to sue the hacker known as Linux or whatever.
I'd say that anger is better directed towards the legislators in charge of creating these absurd policies, not the folks at System76. It's not reasonable to expect a company to sacrifice its entire business on a moral battlefield.
Right, but in turn it is absolutely reasonable and good for consumers to threaten a company with (legal) harm or extinction on a moral battlefield.
Age attestation (edited) is the law now in California. Noncompliance can mean stiff penalties. If you don't like it, write your Congressman.
*attestation, not verification
The age verification laws are awesome!
I mean... How else would you educate children about computers and evading stupid restrictions?
tl;dr they don't like them and don't want them in place but will comply