alt Hacker NewsSystem76 on Age Verification Laws
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Fxxk off, to all political actors pretending this is about child protection. Protecting children is not the job of the OS, the device manufacturer, or the internet service provider. It is the parent’s job. If you cannot supervise, monitor, and discipline your child’s internet use, that is your failure, not theirs.
They can provide tools, sure. But restricting adults because some parents fail at parenting is insane. That is how a totalitarian state grows: by demanding the power to monitor and control every individual.
If you cannot control your children, that is your fault. And if that is the case, you should think twice before having kids.
> 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.
This law feels like a battle in The Coming War on General Computation, as Cory Doctorow put it:
> I can see that there will be programs that run on general purpose computers and peripherals that will even freak me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general purpose computers will find receptive audience for their positions. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, or protocols, or messages, will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy; and as we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits; all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship, which is why all this stuff matters.
Full talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
I’m tired of the U.S. nanny state with its pilgrim-religious historical backdrop of prudishness, infecting everyone outside its own borders.
Their ideas are deeply unhealthy for children and worst of all, lazily shift the responsibility of parenting from the parents to the state.
Many European countries have long had a culture of slowly increasingly responsibilities and freedoms to their children gradually, letting them slowly and safely test their boundaries. At least the proposed EU solution (for identity) tries to prevent overreach. The wholesale EU spying to “save the children”, which seems to be funded by the U.S. is a different topic and we need to continue to fight it tooth and nail.
The insidiousness lies with major tech companies and their pursuit of eyeballs on screens. The Internet was supposed to be something we used to learn, gain knowledge and connect. They took the internet over, bastardized it and made deeply addictive apps and games to keep you watching ads regardless of age.
These age checks are just for data collection and spying to sell the data to the highest bidder, which is likely governments in order to control and herd their populations.
The reason for this is easy to understand in the context of AI. In the future the only valuable asset will be a data and the access to that data.
In the future, any app will be built, replicated, deployed and maintained by AI. Apps, websites, especially B2B apps - their days are numbered.
If my business needs a billing system tailored to my business in the future, I’ll describe it and have an AI built and maintain it. That is not that far away in relative terms.
Our goal collectively (as technology advocates) is to make sure that this consolidation of personal data doesn’t happen. If personal AI is to be built, then the user should have full ownership and away from the spying eyes of groups like Palantir and the NSA. They cannot be trusted. The Jews learnt that catastrophically in Germany in the 1940’s putting their trust in a government that became authoritarian and evil.
What is digital will never die and what is digitally given cannot be taken back.
"Age verification" is such a politician's way to label this. It doesn't actually verify your age. What it does do is set the groundwork to argue that none of us should use any software on any computer that an App Store with Age Verification doesn't allow us to.
But there's a bigger issue than just what software you're allowed to run on your own computer. What's really insidious is the combination of the corporate and government interest. If every server tracks how old you are, it's a short step to tracking more information. Eventually it's a mandatory collection of metadata on everyone that uses a computer (which is every human). Something both corporations and governments would love.
You were worried about a national ID? No need. We'll have national metadata. Just sign in with your Apple Store/Google Store credentials. Don't worry about not having it, you can't use a computer without it. Now that we have your national login, the government can track everything you do on a computer (as all that friendly "telemetry" will be sent to the corporate servers). Hope you didn't visit an anti-Republican forum, or you might get an unfortunate audit.
Not commenting on this specific law, but I do believe the premise that children should be exposed to everything is wrong, and that the overall view on humans in this post is naive.
These days, exposing an immature brain to the raw internet is basically just handing the brain and personality over to be molded by large corporations and algorithms.
And humans have never been rational, self-contained actors that self-educate perfectly when exposed to information, converging on an objectively good and constructive worldview. Quite the opposite.
Humans develop in relation to one another, increasingly in relation to algorithms, and sometimes become messed up, and sometimes those mess-ups would have been avoidable had relations or exposure been different.
In fact I would say you as a parent is not doing your job if you are not trying to make sure a 12 year old isn't pulled into, say, an anorexia rabbit hole.
Whether that is best done through making sure exposure doesn't happen, or through exposure and education, will depend on the child and parent (and society) in question. What worked best for a highly rational self-reliant geek teen may simply be a disaster for another human. And what worked for an upper class highly educated family may not work for a poor family with alcoholized parents or working 18 hours a day to make ends meet.
And parents are not perfect -- if all parents were perfect, there also would be no alcoholics and drug addicts or poverty or war. But people are imperfect, and it's natural to make laws to mitigate at least the worst effects of that. (Again, haven't read this specific law proposal, but found the worldview of OP a bit naive.)
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.
I'm surprised by the complete lack of dissent or even nuance in the discussion here. I'm much more ambivalent on this: the historical record for prohibition is not good, but instagram and the like are uniquely and disastrously harmful and the companies pushing them on children are powerful in a way that has no real historical precedent. In the balance, anything the reduces the power those companies have over our lives (and our politics) has to be at least considered. In other words, I don't think this is necessarily the right measure - but I'm desperate.
Didn't regulating cigarettes kind of work?
Comparing today's internet to the 90s is hardly fair. It has become extremely predatory, and most places youth gravitate towards are controlled by algorithms with the goal of getting them hooked on the platforms to make them available for manipulation by the platform's customers.
Of course, there will be stories of smart kids doing amazing things with access to vast troves of information, but the average story is much sadder.
The EU is working on a type of digital ID that an age-restricted platform would ask for, which only gives the platform the age information and no further PII.
Companies (not talking about system76) amazingly always find the shittyest interpretations of their obligations to make sure to destroy the regulations intention as much as they can. The cookie popups should have been an option in the browser asking the user whether they want to be tracked and platforms were meant to respect this flag. Not every site asking individually, not all this dark pattern annoyance. It's mind-blowing that that was tanked so hard.
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.
Rather than age verification, this is what we should be doing instead:
Don't let phone manufacturers lock the bootloader on phones. Let the device owner lock it with a password if they decide to. Someone will make a child-friendly OS if there is demand. Tech-savvy parents should be able to install that on their kid's phone and then lock the bootloader.
What about non-tech-savvy parents?
There should be a toggle in the phone's settings to enable/disable app installation with a password, like sudo. This will let parents control what apps get installed/uninstalled on their kid's device.
But what about apps or online services that adults also use?
Apps and online services can add a password-protected toggle in their user account settings that enables child mode. Parents can take their child's phone, enable it, and set the password.
----
All it takes is some password-protected toggles. They will work better than every remote verification scheme.
The only problem with this solution is that it does not help certain governments build their global mass surveillence and propaganda apparatus, and tech companies can't collect more of your personal info to sell, and they can't make your devices obsolete whenever they want.
> The challenges we face are neither technical nor legal. The only solution is to educate our children about life with digital abundance. Throwing them into the deep end when they’re 16 or 18 is too late. It’s a wonderful and weird world. Yes, there are dark corners. There always will be. We have to teach our children what to do when they encounter them and we have to trust them.
This resonates so much with me. I don’t want to control my kids. I will never be able to protect them from everything. I hope I won’t be able because I want to die before them. I want them to be able to navigate in the world and have all the cognitive tools necessary to avoid being fooled. I want to rest in peace knowing they can in turn educate their own children. I want to trust them and be relieved that I can focus on some tasks of my own without needing to constantly worry about them.
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.
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.
Are these laws not 1A violations due to code being speech and the gov not being allowed to compel speech?
California may be able to target companies like System76, but it will be completely powerless against modular and decentralized distros like Debian and Arch.
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
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.
The children are a distraction. They're a secondary justification. Don't lose the plot. This law serves only one outcome: enablement of further authoritarianism.
What’s the plan when hardware manufacturers are legally required to add an age verification TPM-like module that only enables verified OS’s to boot?
I hope things won’t go that way but I do think it’s likely they will.
I think there is an unspoken concern among policy makers about how sophisticated AI is becoming. I think they envision a scenario of swarms persuasive AI bots controlled by an adversary, pushing people to elect bad actors with bad policies. So the main objective isn't to protect the children it is to eliminate anonymity! At some point these age verification requirements will go from answering a simple question to providing your ID. I'll add that there is also an aligned interest with companies that rely on ad revenue as they don't want to serve ads to bots!
Since these things can be made into forks with minor difference relatively easily, instead of playing along with this tech company + creepy government data grab because California says so
So much for privacy I guess, hence pulling out this protecting children BS that I saw too many kids at my urban CA highschool get stabbed to fall for. The fact these tactics still work, where we limit our toothless privacy protections that the firms that don't comply the state might eventually sue when someone with more money than I presses the Attorney General, but then dial it back marketing it as protecting children and people still buy it? Absurd these same people work at such bleeding edge tech firms but then again LLMs can do that busy work they actually are doing better most of the time....
"Liberty has costs, but it’s worth it"
The whole point. Very well worded post. I weep for the all digital future.
This is a very sensible statement. The legislators are out of control, and are severely unfamiliar with anything related to technology.
This is 100% about spying and information harvesting from users who deserve privacy, and would be better off managing their own children without the help of the government.
Organize and fight the policy. Do not take your frustration out on people and companies that just try to adjust to a law. Talk to your representatives. Create educational websites similar to fightchatcontrol.eu.
> Kids are smart and easily learn how to work around restrictions.
Absolutely. I feel like adults frequently mistake kids’ lack of education for stupidity. Lack of education about something is a temporary condition, and kids have ridiculous amounts of time, energy, and motivation to quickly become expert about something they care about. Particularly in reaction to “you can’t do that.”
One possibility: These laws forget that 18 year olds have kid siblings. The 18 year olds need money and like everyone else, enjoy the prospects of easy money. The 18-year-old has a phone bill to pay. These are the makings of a black market. Kid sibling acts as a broker for the older sibling’s services among the kid’s classmates and collect a commission.
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?
Linux distributions could do a lot of good geo blocking California right now.
> The only solution is to educate our children
That’s correct, it’s been correct for decades, and parents just won’t do it, not the majority at least. Either they want the state to raise their kids for them, or the task is so complicated and costly that they’re not willing to do it.
But the harms continue to happen, and we’re now left at the mercy of tech-illiterate lawmakers.
I don’t really mind age verification, since we do it in real life (outside the internet) constantly for products and services that are meant for adults, like some-rated movies and alcohol.
I do mind a lot of the data process. I do not want my id, personal preferences or any metadata of my self stored anywhere ever. And IF by some weird law some process has to store some data somewhere of me, i want to have very easy full access to it so i can delete it whenever i want. You can keep the process itself but anything else has to go.
Yes, i have a passport. Yes, it was verified and validated. No you may not know or store the color of my eyes.
I also do not want curious kids to be prosecuted for poking around. They should teach them and thank them for finding flaws.
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?
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...
The good old "child protection" and "anti-terrorism"... I have gotten numb to seeing either of these
If my parents blocked me from doing admin stuff (which was not even possible back then) I would certainly not started to code by myself when I was a tween
More concerning than that is that it all doesn't seem because they care about teenagers and kids.
> A parent that creates a non-admin account on a computer, sets the age for a child account they create, and hands the computer over is in no different state. The child can install a virtual machine, create an account on the virtual machine and set the age to 18 or over.
Er, how does a child install a VM from a non-admin account?
> Or the child can simply re-install the OS and not tell their parents.
It's gonna be pretty easy to detect when the parent finds programs are missing/reset or the adult account they created can't log in with their password.
The California law seems entirely tame and sane, whereas the New York bill seems pretty heavy-handed and authoritarian. They are in no way similar to each other.
I believe it is necessary to implement this at the OS level. This has been needed for a long time, because the “goodwill” approach never works.
The introduction of age verification is something that was to be expected with the growth in the use of the web, rather than individual programs. But there are a bunch of ways to get around it, which you do, but no one will punish you. This way, you will have parental control and transfer it to the website, while facilitating control over minors' access to unwanted content. And this way, websites do not need to implement their own terrible age verification methods. And when people complain that this is a problem for parents, this is exactly what will help parents: once they set the age in parental controls, programs and websites will have to monitor access (following the law, not goodwill).
This way, access can be controlled at the first level, i.e., at the OS level. There is a law, and there will be others to help improve it. In the same way, you can avoid the use of identifiers and, in general, face verification and a bunch of nonsense.
Ultimately, the responsibility lies with parents who did not specify the user's age on the device. But there may be “products” that ignore information from the OS.
Current parental controls do not solve the problem well, because you have to pay for a bunch of questionable products, sacrificing privacy. And it still does not protect against outdated black/white lists. Therefore, the requirement at the OS level to have such control and place responsibility on “products” is an excellent solution in my opinion.
And quite an elegant one at that. Without involving any government identifiers or anything else.
Combined with the widespread implementation of TPM, this will become even more feasible.
In addition to System76's thoughtful response here, does anyone have a good _personal_ plan for what to do? Possibilities I'm thinking about include:
- Switch to a non-compliant distro. (could put me in a dead end down the line depending on what happens)
- Find a browser that can block the API access and just use two browsers.
- Have an "online accounts" computer and an "old fashioned" computer?
- Switch to books and DVDs?
This is becoming a wedge issue. It should not be. As an industry, we can solve this. As an industry, we have too. If we don't, legislators will do it for us. And they'll make a bad job of it. And if you petition your local legislator wherever yiu are in the world, then that's cool, but if this is solved locally, we will see serious fragmentation. As an industry projecting ones politics isn't going to make much difference.
I'm out of the loop on this whole debacle but can't OS providers just say "Not for use in California" and be done with?
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
On using VMs I suggested something similar earlier https://lemmy.ml/post/43994511/24315514 so it's clearly not a deep or original ideas. It will be figured out quickly. In fact any kid reading that article or those comments is probably already researching about this topic and chatting about their successes and failures with friends. No way it can hold.
The laws should regulate Meta, Google, Apple, TikTok, Microsoft and closed source vendors. On the one hand they want monopoly, but the cost of that regulation is now on opensource individual people's speech?
Petition US Congress: Say no to bad internet bills
"The child can install a virtual machine, create an account on the virtual machine and set the age to 18 or over."
No, the vm is for grownups over 18.
I wonder how this law affects Gentoo or LFS since one builds the OS..?
Hopefully this has a domino affect across the industry and more companies do this.
It really is just a parenting issue at its core.
If the problem was really kids safety, we would remove abductors and sex predators from the internets. Not kids.
Using a deceased human’s likeness in jest like this is wack. Encouraging and rewarding a young person in this twisted act should not be normalized.
—-system76 customer
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.