See you in a year or 2.
Play as old as times:
- Company announces garbage change
- People freak out
- Company says ok we will only do half of the garbage
- People calm down and forget
- Company later does the rest of the garbage
- Nobody cares because half of it is already there
Foot in the door technique is a timeless way to get what you want. People seem oblivious to it.
I hear frogs experience the same phenomenon with hot water.
Actually they only stay in the boiling water if their nervous system is impaired
Good thing humans dont have nervous systems
Hm? Did you say something? Sorry, I was distracted.
Also works the other way around.
100% Microslop.
I mean it makes total sense the minute you think about it at all.
- some middle managers year end goals include this unpalatable feature
- they release it
- public freaks out
- pr walks it back a bit
- that managers back at work the week after trying to get that feature in because they need to justify the work they just did on it for better compensation
It’s the same with laws.
It’s very hard to get the electorate united to oppose something but if they manage to unite and oppose a bill the lobbyists are back at work on Monday pushing it by a different name.
Laboyists are the scourge of democracy. Every last one of them has a rope and spear with their names written on them.
Are you implying that CA regulators do exactly what disgusting corporations do?!? I am shocked sir!
That reminds me. We are quickly approaching the date discord postponed age verification to.
Technology makes everything cheaper, including changing minds.
At some points it was unfeasible to abuse consumers because they’d object. Now, if it’s on a large enough scale and valuable enough, you can just pay to convince the majority of them that it’s fine.
also known as TESTING the waters, gauging public response. so they can adapt under a different scheme.
Plucking the goose with a minimum of hissing.
The principle that Bullshit, sprayed around often enough, becomes Air Freshener.
Tbh, this is just a massive stack of misguidedness.
First, look at what the original law does:
- OS needs to know the age.
- OS itself doesn’t do anything with the age
- OS needs to provide the age to apps and services asking for it
- Apps and services need to block content based on the age provided with the OS
- If the OS doesn’t provide an age, apps and services have to block as if the user was a toddler
Removing the requirement for the OS to provide an age doesn’t change anything at all, because someone running an OS that doesn’t provide an age will just be blocked everywhere. That’s not a solution, that’s a joke to appease idiots who don’t know what the law does.
This is just as misguided as the backlash against systemd who added an age field to the user account to allow people to be still able to access age-restricted content.
The actually relevant part that people should be combatting is the requirement for apps and services to do age verification using the OS-provided age. The OS age field doesn’t matter.
I wish people actually read the california law, it’s rather short, and covers a lot of the “gotchas” people are coming up with (e.g. No it doesn’t apply to servers).
I don’t like age verification laws (Especially since I live in a jurisdiction with one already in effect) but at least argue against the law itself rather than a strawman version people heard about via social media.
This is so common online.
Bad Thing happens.
People argue against Bad Thing incredibly fucking badly. Just abysmal. They don’t understand why or how the Bad Thing happened. They didn’t read the document containing Bad Thing. They don’t know who or what is involved with Bad Thing or where. Nonetheless, they vehemently argue against Bad Thing, using only their imagination as source material.
Someone with more experience fighting Bad Thing shows up in the comments, tries to argue against the misinformation, only to inevitably be accused of defending the Bad Thing.
How about the government focus on taking rights away from people who have actually harmed kids, like I don’t know, maybe a giant pedophile ring in plain sight? Instead the focus on taking rights from everyone because someone, sometime, in the future harm a child.
its not even about “protecting the innocent” is about snooping on potential dissidents/ threats to the status quo of the govt.
The whole digital footprint thing is really having me dawn a tinfoil hat. I was doing Uber a few days ago, and listening to Pandora. I spoke very limited, and brief, Spanish to two riders and I immediately started getting full on español ads on Pandora! Like I don’t speak fluent Spanish! Your ad budget is legit getting wasted.
But I am a little flattered thinking the algorithm thinks I do.
Dunno where I was going with this, but I’m excited to see Linux growing, and hope it gets mainstream enough that a year old unlocked phone has a fork.
Because it’s not about protecting children, obviously.
When someone with certain personality problems tells blatant lies, they are really only trying to convince themselves. You exist only as an introject inside their minds, you are not real to them, it does not matter if you don’t believe them because it doesn’t need to make sense to you.
The government was paid by Meta… They are just doing what they were told to do
I’m a DevOps engineer and my employer runs a lot of Linux instances in AWS. I’d love for these politicians to explain to me how age verification of Linux web servers should work for auto-scaling environments where instances are spun up and terminated automatically based on traffic volume. I’d also like to know if I should be using the age of our CEO, the age of our company (thanks to Citizens United), or something else.
I’d like to see them pair a bluetooth headset to a phone.
How old is that headset ?
If it’s over 18 years old, does it automatically pass age verification
only 18 years or younger headphones qualify for consideration.
13*
These are politicians, after all.
Obviously corporations just become exempt from the law. And any laws, why* not.
Obviously uhhhh uhhhhhhh put your ID in a GitHub secret and uhhhhhh social security number and uhhhhhh
I’d love for these politicians to explain to me how age verification of Linux web servers should work for auto-scaling environments where instances are spun up and terminated automatically based on traffic volume.
Come on, can’t be that tedious. What could it be 200-300 instances tops per day? My kid sister does that many selfies.
Also, is each docker container a “computer” of its own? After all, I could use different distro base images!
You are required to have age verification. We licence our age verification on an instance basis. An instance is defined as whatever makes us the most money, or alternatively causes you the most pain.
You know. A worst case scenario.
Yeah, I don’t even know what you’re talking about, and that makes me extra certain that politicians definitely don’t know what you’re talking about. It is nice to see them perhaps taking into account expert opinions on this subject, but 1 for 100 doesn’t make for a good average.
The govt…. Uhhh…. Finds a way (to fuck shit up)
Honestly I wonder if this is why the amendment is being suggested. AI products in particular are likely to be interacting with a lot of websites that will be required to verify ages, and I’m sure California in particular is loath to make waves that might throw that revenue stream into doubt.
It’s the 20s version of “the internet is a series of tubes”. They couldn’t explain it if they wanted to, but all they care about is that the bribes are still spending.
Good points, and well put!
politicians are far to stupid to know any of that. The only computer they know is their phone and maybe a laptop.
Fuck age verification, fuck it all to hell. Not for Linux or any other OS or device.
I think that the major current closed-source OSes today are busily harvesting all the data they can anyway, and the vendors probably don’t care much about also grabbing age, but stuff like, oh…is it illegal under this law to distribute proprietary versions of older OSes now? Like, classic MacOS, say. That’s definitely not open-source. And Apple is not going to go back and do a new release of classic MacOS to add age verification to it. But…there’s still some old software that you need classic MacOS to run. So…is it illegal to distribute essential software required to run classic MacOS software in California as of the middle of next year?
I mean, you might be infringing on copyright as well, but Apple may be okay with people copying classic MacOS around, as they can’t really make any money off it today. But this is the State of California, not Apple, that would act here.
Right… But in the age of AI, data-harvesting the right data (i.e. the human/non-AI-slop) becomes very interesting to a lot of companies, “age-verification” is an easy argument (for policy-makers) of e.g. social-media companies to know whether the user is an actual human, thus the verified data is a lot more valuable.
Sure, but we can’t make the argument that everyone vouching for age verification is doing so for the same reason.
It is undeniable that there is a very large, and growing, population of parents and adults that want age restrictions for adult content. I think their concern is valid, too. However, they don’t care how it’s done.
That’s where big tech “saves the day” by generously offering to collect all of our IDs and tying it the our accounts. Secure, and private, age verification can be done with zero knowledge proofs. But that probably won’t happen without competent government
IIRC from past reading, the driving factor behind the California bill was that some places were passing laws that would have placed responsibility for age verification on websites. Meta — probably correctly assessing that anything they did was going to be defeatable and not wanting to engage in a big fight with regulators over that — drove the California effort to create an OS-level responsibility. It’s not that this especially solves anything from the standpoint of people who want age restrictions, but that it dumps the legal problems on the OS vendors, like Apple and Microsoft, instead of on Meta.
Agree but would rather it be enforced at the OS level than per app or site. My kid just told me she uploaded her photo to some game she plays which sucks.
How about neither. We don’t need it.
On most phones/pcs, you have tools to restrict what your kid can or can’t do. I don’t know the specific OS this has happened on, but you can probably limit downloads, timegate specific apps so that they can only play them when you’re around, or maybe even deny camera access to some.
How about they spend their time revamping parental controls instead? The age gate stuff is clear about user data collection and nothing else.
Because they don’t give a single fuck about the kids, unless they’re pedos fucking kids, then they give all the fucks.
The Epstein class wants to know who the minors are on the internet.
Install a router/device based content filter if you need to block children from accessing porn.
Considering things that are, or could be considered as, porn are everywhere from Reddit to Wikipedia, that doesn’t fix the issue. But I agree, this is something for parents to deal with, not legislation.
It has nothing to do with children at all.
Yeah, and while we’re at it, kids should be able to buy alchohol and drugs and go to strip clubs. It’s just a parenting issue.
Make phones 18+ to buy. Make it a legal requirement for parents to set up parental controls. Make parental controls not suck ass. Make the phone tell the website if child or adult no age brackets nonsense. IMO children don’t need access to all websites.
Still there are some issues where abuse can come from parents but hey if they wanted they could give their children alcohol too so that point doesn’t really fly with me.
I mean, it’s not going to work, because your kids are gonna have a smartphone, and they can go to their friend’s house or wherever and they aren’t gonna have content filters. And then you think “okay, I’ll install software on my kid’s viewing device to censor stuff”, but these days, it’s probably not terribly difficult to get ahold of an old phone/tablet/computer, if all you want to do with it is view pornography. Everything’s got a web browser in it, and that’s been the case for long enough that there’s lots of disused hardware just sitting around that can browse the Web. I’ve thrown out a PSP, phones, tablets, countless computers…I suspect that someone’s parents are probably willing to hand their old gear to their kid, and they float around. If you live in an isolated cabin in the Alaskan wilderness, maybe access to Web-capable devices is a barrier, but if your kid has friends, I suspect that it’s not all that hard to get ahold of one device that they have that can browse the Web.
I mean, the realistic answer here is “you’re not going to stop kids from viewing pornography if they sufficiently want to view it”. One kid figures out how to do X, and it doesn’t take long for word to get around.
EDIT: I just hit Amazon looking for an example.
https://www.amazon.com/HOTTABLET-Tablet-Android-Protective-Bluetooth/dp/B0F3XD9M6C
That’s a $39 Android tablet that can browse the Web, has 3 GB of RAM, 32 GB of flash (plus an SD card slot). That’s gonna be fine for browsing all the porn you want out there.
Like, it’s pretty hard to keep someone from getting access to something like that. If there weren’t a supply of old hardware floating around and new hardware wasn’t this cheap, okay, but devices capable of browsing the Web are everywhere.
TV on wall aggregates and displays daily web data for each device?
This is like winning a small fight and continuing to march on to Moscow on the winter.
They’ll keep whittling rights down until everything you do is logged with your ID and is whitelisted for your consumption (and I mean whitelisted by rich white list of folks who have the power).
Anything LGBTQ will be blocked as controversial. And teaching they don’t like will be hidden. Was slavery bad? “Well, that’s controversial. The Europeans did nothing but civilize those savages don’t you know! And our wealth justifies the whole thing!”
So they’re basically admitting that they don’t need this for any computer since if you don’t need it for open source why would you need it for closed source? You think kids don’t know how to download and install linux? If I could do it with floppies and a book in the 90s then kids today can do it with a USB image and LLM assistance.
But in reality they’ll probably just wait for a few years and try and push it through again like how they do with most shitty legislation.
You think kids don’t know how to download and install linux?
Yes. I think most kids don’t know how to download linux. Just the same as I think most adults don’t know how to do it. It doesn’t matter if it’s actually easy. That’s not the question. The question is if people know how to do it.
Just the same I don’t think they know how to download a non-google based browser.
It’s not about difficulty. It’s about desire to do so. I’ve heard pancakes are very easy to make. I have no desire to make pancakes. I’m 42 and have never made pancakes. I know there’s eggs and flour, and a bowl. I’d have to learn. And to learn, I have to want to learn. And that all goes back to having desire to learn.
Necessity is the mother of innovation. And right now, 90% of the population do not give a damn about which os they use. They just call it “the facebook machine”, and it’s their cell phone.
Desktop across all platforms is dying. Windows 11 sucks. The ram costs are making everything unobtainable. The vast majority don’t even know there is a different way. They just pull out their cell phone, check their tiktok and whatever else, and they go about their day.
At this point three people have desktops. Gamers, hobbyists, and people who need them for work.
So yeah. I DO think most people have zero clue that you can install linux from a usb. I also think most people have never heard of linux.
I wish I still knew where this comic was. It was two geologists, and they’re discussing how the common man must surely know of the starter rocks that everybody knows. Then they start listing a bunch of crystals and rocks nobody has ever heard of before. And they say “oh, and obviously everybodys heard of (insert rock you’ve never heard of)” and his coworker says “well obviously”.
Completely unaware that what seems common to them is completely unknown to everyone else. I really feel like about 30-50% of linux users have that mentality about PCs. They have a PC. They find Linux easy. Therefore it IS easy, and everybody on earth can use linux.
For some of you, you don’t see the failure of that logic, while the rest of you are cringing right now.
I wish I still knew where this comic was.
You’re probably thinking of an xkcd comic:
Necessity is the mother of invention. If you put enough roadblocks in the way these kids will learn same as we did. The only difference is they’ll have an LLM and youtube videos to learn what they need instead of BBS, IRC, and books like we used. Kids know how to search the web. They might not know what they don’t know but as soon as they search “how do i browse the web without my computer telling on me” and linux comes up then they’ll fall down the rabbit hole. It’s like you think these kids exist in bubbles.
You’re placing a lot of "if"s in there, and treating them as if they’re already true.
If you put enough roadblocks in the way these kids will learn same as we did.
Roadblocks to what? To using a pc? What makes you think kids WANT to use a PC at all? Is the roadblock getting to access the internet? Because there’s no roadblocks for that. They have cell phones. Thats what they know the internet as, and they’re accessing it just fine. Is the roadblock privacy? You think kids who take out their cell phones in public, and record them and their friends, and anyone walking by in the background, as they dance the newest trendy dance, to upload to tiktok, are worried about privacy?
And yes, I do think everyone lives in a bubble. Some people live in the same bubble. Most people live in multiple bubbles.
Did you know the Cleveland Cavaliers have lost the first 3 games in a 7 game series against the NY Knicks? Probably not. I live in Cleveland. It’s all anybody in this bubble is talking about. I don’t even like basketball, but right now everyone in the Cleveland sports bubble is losing their shit. I imagine outside of Cleveland nobody gives a shit.
Your bubble seems to be linux. You think linux is more prominant than it is. Right now desktop linux is at a 5% highest ever user base. It has nothing to do with people ditching windows. It has nothing to do with privacy concerns. It has everything to do with Valve making huge progress towards gaming on linux. People are taking their old “not good enough for windows” pcs, and suddenly their gaming lifespan covers more.
Because again. Nobody is saying linux is bad. What it does, it does well if you know what you’re doing. What I’m saying is nobody cares about any of that until they have a desire to use a pc, that isn’t windows. Most people are just ditching pcs completely because for watching youtube, and browsing facebook, and recording tiktoks, why do you need anything more than a low end cell phone? Why buy a pc during a time when prices are sky high, when they get what they need from the thing already in their pocket?
You’re placing a lot of "if"s in there, and treating them as if they’re already true.
I want your energy. I’m going to use this one in the future, thanks.
I wish I still knew where this comic was. It was two geologists, and they’re discussing how the common man must surely know of the starter rocks that everybody knows.
You’re thinking of XKCD 2501: Average Familiarity:
Comments like these are very healing for me.
Most kids don’t know anything about computers these days. All they know are phones and tablets. Maybe this will get them to learn some basic computer skills.
On your last point: I think that’s why Colorado should do a referendum. If we collect enough signatures the passed law goes to the ballot and the citizens can reject it. We can also collect signatures to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot to ban some of the most invasive age/identity verification going forward.
To be fair, there are important differences between open source and closed source software.
I guess, California is killing Windows without knowing.
The proposed amendment specifically states: “Operating system provider” does not mean a person or entity that distributes an operating system or application under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.
That’s one way to encourage people to move to open source software
Imagine if that made MicroSlop and Apple open-source Windows and Mac OS. That would be a wild world.
deleted by creator
Yes we ou.
The controversy became particularly heated after reports suggested platforms like SteamOS could still fall under the law due to their ties to proprietary application ecosystems.
Ehhh. I think that’d be a hard argument to make. I mean, the OS is open-source. You can download it and modify it and reinstall it or whatever. Sure, it runs Steam, which is proprietary, but so does any other GNU/Linux distro.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SteamOS
The core operating system is free and open-source software, while the Steam client remains proprietary.
Like, the only way in which SteamOS differs from another Linux distro is that Valve, which makes the proprietary client, also happens to be distributing the OS.
Enforcing it on android/apple/windows/steamos/chromeos is still problem tho.
Tho I do wonder how they handle chromeos. Do each student have to put their age every year?
My steam account is old enough to legally drink. Wonder if that’ll factor in.
That doesn’t prove anything. There’s no proof that the person currently using it is the same person as the person who created the account.
By the way, you might also notice this argument also works against age verification systems where the user’s age is verified only once. Unless you intend to check their identity every single time they log in.
Age verification is just a ham-fisted way for the state to try to take over a role that should be exercised by parents. Parental controls exist, people!
Unless you intend to check their identity every single time they log in.
or rather every single second the device is being used
Parents not raising their kids right is why we can’t have nice things. It’s always used as an excuse for some draconian measure.
the parental control thing is a thin smokescreen. Its about control.
The reality is our OSs and the websites we visit know exactly who we are. They know our blood type, they know if you are pregnant before you do. Why would they need your ID?
