The only device mandates that should be taking place is for the default installations of web clients should be checking to see if parental controls are enabled. This only impacts the major browsers. An intern at each browser company could add this check in minutes. If they are enabled and the person logged in is on a regular account (not admin or power user of sorts) then the base installation of web clients must check for an RTA header [1]. If present, prompt for a override password and also give the option for the admin to approve-list the domain at that time. That's it. Not perfect, nothing is or will be.
The only thing server, platform, website, service providers should be doing is setting an RTA header if the content could possibly be adult or user-contributed content that could dynamically become adult, moderation aside. This knocks out two issues with one fix. Small children don't see much if any adult content and they are kept off social media until the admin (parent or legal guardian) approves it.
If a site is not adding the RTA header then progressively fine them into oblivion. If they accept the fines as the cost of doing business then seize everything and put everyone in GenPop. An intern could enable the header in 5 minutes.
All legislation regarding age verification must revolve around this otherwise people must reject it as an abusive form of tracking and privacy invasion. The focus should be on small children as teen share porn, warez, movies and such within Rated-G games.
Bold of you to assume that lawmakers have any common sense when it comes to technology legislation. It could have taken 3 interns 3 hours at each browser company to implement a cookie consent standard 15 years ago, yet here we are in cookie banner hell.
I was referring to the intern being able to add the header. Politicians need financial incentive. I don't have the resources to lobby them. I think that might require a philanthropist should there happen to be one that lurks on HN. There are some interesting people that lurk here that we sometimes learn about.
They can't do anything today as it is a federal holiday but they could do something tomorrow.
This is misinformation stemming from disinformation propagated by organized industry retaliation to the law. Cookie banners are not and never have been required by law, they are intentional harassment designed to make users oppose laws that actually just say “you may not track users without their consent”. A good faith implementation would be simply nothing, because no explicit consent is required when you’re actually using cookies for honest purposes.
I think the header/metatag is designed poorly. The RTA proposal is that every operator of every site must verify the content and add the header to mark the site as "safe" or "unsafe". This is unnecessary burden that they have to bear if this proposal is given a green light and this is wrong.
Instead, the default should be, that if there is no header or it cannot be parsed, then the content is unsafe. And if there is a header, it describes the page rating, like what kind of dangerous content it may contain. The header may be added to any displayable content like HTML, text, images, audio or videos, but not to machine-readable content like JS files or AJAX responses.
So only those who wants their site to be accessible by minors, have to add headers. For social networks, the user might have an option to mark his content as "safe".
This means that with my proposal existing site operators need not to do anything to mark their sites as "unsafe" - all sites are "unsafe" by default. This means that millions of site operators need to spend 0 dollars to adapt their sites. How great is that?
The browser on a device with parent mode, should not allow displaying any content which doesn't have a header or that is marked as unsafe, or that contains header with invalid value. The parents may whitelist some sites.
There should be a reponsibility for intentionally marking unsafe content as "safe". We should also think what to do with foreign operators, intentionally putting invalid headers for unsafe content. Maybe they should be added to some kind of blacklist that the browsers would periodically update.
Search engines like Google could work by default in "safe" mode, but add "unsafe" header if the user wants to turn off restrictions.
> If a site is not adding the RTA header then progressively fine them into oblivion.
I think my proposal is better because it requires only fining those who intentionally misrepresent content safety.
The problem with your proposal is that it's already the status quo. Various whitelists exist but service operators don't generally bother with these things. What you end up with is a largely unusable experience if you enable whitelist filtering.
The core problem is the lack of buy in. Unfortunately that likely needs to be forced. I think it's not unreasonable to legally require people to make a claim about the nature of what they are serving up. They already need to be aware of the legal status of what they're doing anyway so it hardly seems as though making such a determination should pose a burden when you consider that it's an alternative to either requiring ID, requiring the client send age bracket information, or other heavy handed interventions. The choice here isn't "the status quo vs a header" but rather "some other age related regulation vs a header".
An easy way to enforce this "voluntarily" (ie coerce) without sending government agents after every small time website operator would be to require that mainstream browsers and other client software (based on MAU or similar metrics) refuse to process content that does not send a classification header. Doesn't matter what the header says or what the status of the user account or parental controls or whatever else is, it has to send the header regardless or it will be blocked without exception. That would presumably trigger broad compliance with the relevant regulations.
The difference is one of redressing a concrete dysfunction. Libraries or the local bookstore or whoever aren't trying to sneak into your home, onto your child's school bus, into your child's classroom, while pushing various extremist publications purely for their own profit (ie "engagement"). We do in fact have zoning laws - I can't inadvertently encounter a strip club in a quiet residential area. Meanwhile it's commonplace for children to carry a network terminal around with them with which one can readily access the equivalent of things far worse than that.
What I've described does not restrict one's ability to speak freely. It is most similar to an impressum except it bears no identifying mark thus poses no hazard to anonymous speech.
Impressums cannot be required in the US, once again thanks to that pesky First Amendment. You may be mixing us up with Germany.
Mandates on how speech must be structured are a violation of freedom of speech, Constitutionally speaking.
“Redressing a concrete dysfunction” does not appear in the Constitution as an exemption to guaranteed rights, as far as I am aware. The proper remedy for this kind of problem is an Amendment, assuming you can get enough people to agree with your assessment.
For what its worth this header has been around for a very long time. It's actually the second iteration and much simpler than it's predecessor.
Parents today can accomplish what you are suggesting by installing parental control software and only allowing access to things they explicitly approve.
This can also be done via headers explicit blocking of all the things and was suggested in another thread. [1] Some people liked the idea.
The point is that it is unrealistic to expect millions of people to mark the content. Also, the header is better than the metatag because it can be added to images, videos and other non-HTML content as well.
I tend to agree - making folks intending to interact with minors comply makes more sense.
That said, outside of the merits of this approach, I am dubious of any actual implementation given 2 points.
1) Protecting the youths will always be a leaky bucket. With disadvantaged youths possibly more at risk. Those exposed to non-compliant parents ("cool" parents who are ok with sharing unsuitable content) or lacking strong parental involvement, likely won't benefit a great deal from any implementation.
2) Anti privacy social networks stand to gain the most from targeting ads utilizing signals from most child safety acts. They also might be able to reduce some costs from moderation if they can make it someone else's problem. I'd argue the net social impact from these social networks is likely both more normalized and strongly negative for our youths than any smut.
On the balance I'd say we are better off investing our energy in other places.
> "cool" parents who are ok with sharing unsuitable content
Or simply parents who won’t agree with the government on what is suitable for their children.
We already have parental control on all mainstream operating systems, why cannot this simply be the responsibility of the parent as are so many other things regarding what children do, watch, eat etc?
We don't have parental control on any mainstream operating system that actually works. In fact, California just removed the law that said operating systems have to have working parental control.
Because what parents have access to now is extremely ineffective unless they prevent their kids from going outside or going to school. Right now the onus is entirely on parents too keep their kids off the Internet equivalent of smoking cigarettes, and it’s a losing battle. What we’re looking for is for the liability to shift off the parent and onto the people intentionally communicating with children. Frankly the proposal above was very reasonable. If you don’t want to intentionally communicate with kids then do nothing and you have no liability.
I want to intentionally communicate with kids, because kids have always been valued members of the online communities I frequent. Right now, it is easy for social media giants to exploit children, easy for child predators to get access to abuse children, and increasingly-difficult to maintain online spaces in which children are allowed to safely exist. That is surely not what we are intending to accomplish, here.
The header (for videos and other) was mentioned in [1]. I agree that is the way to go.
Adding a header to a web server or load balancer or app server if done globally can be done in a minute or two. Maybe 5 minutes for the intern not counting QA testing.
But you are right, the inverse is easier. I like that too. That was debated in the other recent thread.
The page having a simple rating assumes there can be one mapping from content to rating for the whole world. I doubt we can even have one for North America and Europe.
It's a hard problem but the key is that it needs to be on the client rather than on the server, because that's what can have any information on jurisdictions, local regulations, religions, or general parental preference.
For example, it would be insane if every website and blog in the world to had to run logic to detect and prevent Elbonian males under 16 lunar years from seeing ankles except on Thursdays.
Come up with a few categories and let the browser/OS decide.
Websites by default are ‘true’ for every category, unless they specify.
Categories are, for example of some: nudity, sexual, violence, etc.
It doesn’t have to be perfect but sites will have to err on the side of caution.
We could even create an html tag <restricted type=violence> for example, and the browser can simply not render that portion of the page of the user has that type disabled.
And we could give companies a pass for best-effort categorization using tech to assess user-generated content, along with allowing users to flag their own content as “safe”
The goal should be to satisfy most reasonable governments. A neutral technical standard and an international organization to maintain the the ontology for content descriptors
That's a sorry attempt at an excuse. Companies are expected to collect ID and have related business logic that respects local laws but can't figure out how to tag their content? That's an utterly nonsensical position.
There's no reason a simple, standardized header can't be used to communicate any number of classifications simultaneously.
Edit: It occurs to me that if you oppose all age related measures then my above response isn't entirely fair to you. I still think it's an absurd objection but the comparison I made no longer applies.
Well fair enough. In that case we are actually in agreement. Let the end user (or network admin) sort out what is and isn't acceptable in a given context.
What we need regulation to provide (IMO) is a reliable way of doing that.
Yes, exactly, this should be really simple as a foundation: by default the Internet is for adults. All of it. Where it's desirable for things to be available for kids, create the economic incentive and easy tools for parents to use and run on a white list, not a black list.
I'd actually go somewhat further though and ask whether it's a good idea to even do this via web pages at all. We have a great potential system for this already: DNS. Do something useful amongst all the ridiculous vanity and spam TLDs for once and set up a ".kids" gTLD, or ccTLD for that matter so that different countries can set their own regulatory standards naturally (ie, .kids.us, .kids.uk etc). Domains could also be used for some broad buckets for people who don't want to drill in, ie, .1-6.kids, .7-12.kids, .13-17.kids, or whatever is deemed appropriate, but simple age brackets that would offer some sane defaults. 1-6 could simply not allow any ads, user generated content or algorithmic feeds whatsoever for example. There are a lot of knobs to turn. And then at the registry level it can be ensured from the get-go that anyone getting a .kids domain is fully identified, located in the country in question, has valid ID, has specific credentials or is an accredited organization, or whatever other criteria makes sense.
But ultimately the point would be to create something that is built right from the ground up, and in turn that doesn't interfere with what has already been built at all. Something that can also be worked with at the gateway and thus cover every device on a LAN, and for that matter can easily be plugged into the vast number of powerful tools we have for working with that stuff. It'd be easy to put a nice UI on all this, even to make it higly automated. For example, have a setup wizard where you enter children, put in date of birth for each, and it'll spit out a password for each one. This then auto-provisions the network such that each kid has their own VLAN (password for PPSK or even wired connection) and is automatically limited to the domain groups of their age bracket, which then changes as their age changes.
Parents should be able to dig further in and get more granular with content categories, metadata for which could be required for anyone hosting a site within that domain, but I think there is the potential to make something both pretty bullet proof and pretty accessible, using existing tech stacks, and without impinging on the present internet at all including privacy and anonymity.
The vast bulk of the internet is child neutral. For example my church a web site, the bakery down the road has one, the local pro sport team has one. They're not designed "for kids", but kids are welcome.
Does StackOverflow need to register a .kids domain just so children might get answers to programing questions?
If my-bakery.co.uk and my-bakery.co.au both want to be visible to 16yo there needs to be at least kids.uk and kids.au.
Does OpenSSL.org or OpenSSL.com get to be OpenSSL.kids?
Sorry but duplicating the entire neutral internet domain space with yet another tld isn't a helpful approach.
This is correct. It is not the government's job to raise our children. The more we ask the gov't to do that we should do, the less power we actually have. Some will say this ship has sailed, well, I say it's not too late to sink it.
On the other hand, I know several "home-schooled" people [0] who literally can't even read and later married people more than twice their age or had other serious deficiencies in their life potential. The government can probably step in a little more here and there.
[0] I also know home-schooled people whose parents are far better than any teacher I've ever had and whose education and achievements reflect that obvious fact. Home-schooling itself isn't the issue, and I'd prefer that it remain possible.
> On the other hand, I know several "home-schooled" people [0] who literally can't even read and later married people more than twice their age or had other serious deficiencies in their life potential. The government can probably step in a little more here and there.
Anecdotes like this don't help the case much when government schools in a lot of places "graduate" large proportions of their pupils who are functionally illiterate and innumerate. Then you get misconduct, bullying, abuse that goes on in government schools. Who should "step in" on the government?
Public education is extremely different from age checks in apps. Yes, homeschooled people are generally really dumb because humans are not born with the knowledge of the world or how to teach it. This is different from California telling Debian to ask for user ages.
I read one of those papers. Only between 10% and 25% of homeschool families completed the test. And that's of families that could be located because they had previously interacted with major homeschool testing companies; there isn't a national list of homeschooled kids and many parents homeschool precisely to avoid standardized testing. Plus in many cases the parents were the proctors. This is hardly a robust finding.
Thanks for investigating deeper than I did. I don't know where else to look. However, unlike the post I originally replied to, every homeschooled adult I know is doing better than average, but anecdote vs anecdote isn't helping.
Earlier today there was a large thread on HN about the golden age of child rearing, from time immemorial to about two decades ago, when children started getting sent home and parents got a stern talking to from the police, just for owning a pocket knife or biking home alone.
We really can't have it both ways, that every failure of the child is blamed on the parent for lapsing in their almost totalitarian oversight, while also idealizing the idea that children must make their own mistakes and gradually growing into responsibilities and self-governance. Except having access to the Internet, apparently.
Taking a step back, this all smells like madeleines and a yearning for the good old days when everyone rode bikes and nobody owned smartphones. That's not really a productive stance on anything.
(If you would ask me, and I'm sure nobody would, I would think that there is a sort of trade-off here but with a clear answer: Make clear restrictions about buying cigarettes, alcohol, abusive content and extreme porn. But these restrictions aren't meant to be technically perfect. It's ok that some kids will learn to lift the limits and explore what is forbidden. At least then they would know that there is some reason society collectively considers these things off-limits, and that they soon will be in a mistake of their own making.)
Let me be very explicit so we're not dancing around the topic:
The potentially all-powerful government shouldn't know:
- what vices a person has
- what religion a person has or doesn't have
- what porn you watch
- what alcohol and drugs you buy
PERIOD.
All of these things can be exploited. To control jobs, to control finances, to extort influence, to shape ideology, etc.
The government shouldn't be able to catalog those things in a database for later misuse.
The government shouldn't be able to install friction or barriers that make it easy to cordon off and kill these things at a later time.
The "think of the kids" argument can go to straight to hell. Nobody's having children anyway.
This is a very real (not logically fallacious) slippery slope right into the pages of 1984.
It's not about kids. It's about control over society as a whole. They're going to force you to use your ID to access the internet, force you to use an approved device, and the minute you step outside of allowed behavior, you'll be punished.
Shackles and telescreens are coming, and they're using this argument to build it.
Nobody here disagrees. What should be the case is that sites are broadly required to flag what kind of content they serve so parents can choose to exercise their own level of desired control.
To me an all powerful government is one that has all the information the user just listed, because governments are by definition the most powerful force in our countries.
Private companies should also be regulated with regards to data sales of private information, yes.
I am sick of these "government bad" takes. They lack constructive suggestions, like your "sink it" nugget, they lack decent problem descriptions, as if anything after the sinking (likely private governance, aka feudalism) is immune to the ills of big-gov, and on top perpetuate reductivist arguments as if any kind of restrictions of freedom is by definition bad.
This broad rejection without good reasons is borderline sociopathic. ... and parental control is not the gov raising anyone.
I dunno, "government bad" seems like a pretty reasonable default. Governments typically have a high amount of corruption and are generally unhealthy organizations. It doesn't make sense to delegate more responsibility to an entity with such structural issues.
Friend, we have a fair amount of suggestions ( including constructive ones! ). Do you know why? Because we mostly know how to make education decent for individual students like:
- keeping class sizes small
- keeping class within similar development range ( AP with AP. short bus with short bus )
None of it is a secret, but government can't (edit:or won't) make it happen. Hence regular people just doing the best they can within the system at their disposal.
I know people who will adamantly insist that keeping classes within similar development ranges is harmful and will vociferously reject any such proposal, up to and including things such as "gifted" schools and the like.
It's why some schools in (iirc) California did away with higher maths like calculus entirely.
Sadly, it seems there's nothing actually common about common wisdom.
I will admit that I never heard a serious argument from anyone that did not rely on issues not related to individual student's education. If you have any materials on those, I would love to read some of it.
Montessori advocates for mixed age classes where more advanced help teach the less advanced, as the teaching itself solidifies it in the more advanced student's mind. Not sure if it is valid. But it is something with studies and meta studies that may have been done well or poorly, not just an aesthetic choice. I think Vulcan style training pods driven by AI like khanmigo will end up being better education than the vast majority of students will ever have access to in person. Or consider it the realization of "a young lady's primer" from diamond age.
And I am sick of people constantly wanting every single aspect of life regulated by the government. You guys need to understand that government isn't static and society changes. The rules you come up with today are going to get in the way in unexpected ways tomorrow. Regulations should only happen if you can demonstrate that it substantially improves things in a measurable way.
Eg "if you ban cellphones in schools then average test scores (on tests like PISA) will substantially improve". Or something else like that.
>This broad rejection without good reasons is borderline sociopathic.
It's sociopathic to not want the people in control to constantly make up new arbitrary rules? I guess we just need a few more Patriot Acts and Snoopers Charters.
"And I am sick of people constantly wanting every single aspect of life regulated by the government." We're carting that strawman out again? What folks mostly want is for private industry to collectively display something approximating business ethics and maybe self-regulate away from objectively harmful/predatory behavior. The last few decades have very clearly demonstrated that there is literally no bottom to private industry depravity unless one is literally forced in place by legislation.
Enabling government spying under the guise of "protecting children" doesn't put private industry in check one bit.
It's like saying we should install Flock cameras everywhere so that we can protect consumers from buying harmful products. Corruption and mass-violation of human rights is all that's ever going to come out of it.
If the goal is to stop predatory companies, why not do so? Oh right, because that was never the goal.
The current form of government and the last administrations have allowed this environment to exist. We don't have antitrust regulation being enforced and citizens united is still in effect.
This is only going to cause things you describe to get worse and the U.S. government is complicit in this because we have a two party system that works directly or indirectly for the establishment.
I'm not sure if you are encouraging more government intervention, but its clear this is not working. Its like going to a criminal gang and asking for security while they ransack your community and charge you for it.
That's a problem with the politicians folks have chosen to elect, not an issue with the concept of governance. And while I agree with your analysis proposing we all wait patiently for "market forces" to resolve whatever ludicrously unethical bullshit industry is up to at any given time is also clearly a non-starter. So now what?
I am categorically not a "government bad" person. There are things that only government can do to help society and it's an important institution. However government shouldn't take over things in your household. I feel for the government to do a thing it should have to demonstrate that the state has an defensible interest. Gay marriage? Gov't has no business in marriage. Gov't demanding age checks in apps or in electronics? No, gov't doesn't need that.
> like your "sink it" nugget, they lack decent problem descriptions
Let me be clearer then: The legislation has passed but it is 100% possible to repeal that law. And it should be repealed, and we need to not let up pressure on California until it is rescinded. It was a bad law that was not thought out at all and fails to solve any problems.
I'm not worries about corporate feudalism and app age checks.
I'm not sociopathic, you're just making broad assumptions.
What's really wild is 9 times out of 10 when you back a crypto-libertarian into a rhetorical corner far enough to get them to drop their pretenses what you're left with is "OMG YOU ARENT MY DAD" is, at least in their mind, a cogent political philosophy.
Your post says far more about you than libertarians. Remember, every time you give the government a power, you are creating an avenue for corruption and by design putting someone who probably isn't qualified in charge of decisions they lack the experience to make reliably. There you go, a simple argument that increasing government power has a drawback that you never consider. And that's why you post says more about you than anything. Such an extreme position is impossible to defend and anytime you try either a) the person you are debating isn't very skilled at debating or b) you are just being stubborn and ignoring facts and arguments you don't like. I suspect its B.
And every time you remove legislation you open up entire new vistas of corporate depravity and as the last 40 years have comprehensively demonstrated, "market forces" are not a viable replacement for legislation. Increasing government power is a liability only and solely when folks make a habit of electing incompetents and the corrupt. Governance as a concept is fine, what you're actually arguing for is better politicians.
A lot of us who grew up pre-social-media agree in principle.
What it fails to account for is that today's internet is qualitatively different from the pre-social-media, pre-smartphone internet. The vast majority of the internet audience, too, is qualitatively different. Incentives are misaligned for an average parent who might want to keep a tight leash on smartphone internet access for their kids, when attempting to do so will generate fierce opposition from their kids and leave them socially out of the loop.
In some countries they scan you ID and likely keep it some database when you buy drugs or enter bars or clubs. In others they just look at your ID card if you don't look old enough.
The first example is bad, the second is tolerable.
But the reason most kids don't smoke is that the parents and the teachers instilled in them that it was bad. If a kid wants to smoke or drink, they can surely get an older friend or a friend of a friend to sell them the cigarettes or alcohol. Anyone can buy 20 bottles of hard liquor and 50 packs of cigarettes, sell them to a 15 year old who can then sell them to their friends. That doesn't happen often not because a surprise police raid will show up and bust the seller but because there isn't enough demand. If there is demand from the kids and the parents don't care, kids will get their hands on drugs. Maybe not 9 year olds but certainly the teens.
> But the reason most kids don't smoke is that the parents and the teachers instilled in them that it was bad.
Big honking "citation needed" there. I think it's far more likely that laws against advertising to minors, and tightening enforcement of prohibiting the sale to minors, is what did it.
On top of it all, smoking has decreased among adults too. Part of that is certainly cutting off a big chunk of the teen-to-adult smoking pipeline, but part of it is also just that adults don't think it's so cool anymore (and "going out for a smoke" is no longer a social or even professional activity), and are more aware of the health risks.
Well lack of age verification definitely isn't fixing anything either so what's they play here? We all just collectively as a society just shrug like oh well, no fixing any of that?
No, we should take measures that actually address the problems that exist. Problem numero uno: the Big Tech companies are creating systems and digital environments that are hostile to everyone (of which children are a subset), compelling everyone to use them, and punishing those who attempt to get away. We cannot fix that by merely dictating terms, especially if those terms are such that only the Big Tech companies themselves could possibly know enough to enforce the terms.
Ok we might be in violent agreement here but so far I've yet to see anyone put forth anything like a serious plan to dismantle Big Tech, which clearly indicates that "triage legislation" half measures are the only thing currently on the table. I see little sense in letting perfect be the enemy of good.
I agree with you, as a longtime free speech believe.
but... I would also like to keep my kids from seeing the very worst of the internet before they're ready to handle it. I tried using a PiHole but Firefox DNS-over-HTTPS nullifies that now. It's not realistic for me to be watching over their shoulders 24/7; what can I do to keep them away from stuff 99% of people agree isn't for children to see, without something like this?
Unbound DNS if compiled with --with-libnghttp2 can listen for DoH and your Unbound/Pihole can forward to any destination you desire. This is what it looks like on my firewall:
# https://doh-int.mydomain.net/dns-query
interface: [ip of lan port]@443
interface: [ip of wifi port]@443
https-port: 443
http-max-streams: 220
tls-service-key: "/etc/unbound/keys.d/unbound_server.key"
tls-service-pem: "/etc/unbound/keys.d/unbound_server.pem"
Null routing the open DoH resolvers is just having a startup script that reads a list of all their IP addresses and
ip route add blackhole "${IP}" 2>/dev/null
People will argue that DoH can run on anything which is true but all the major resolvers will always use dedicated IP addresses as to not risk blocking CDN end points.
If the childs account is not able to gain admin privs then their ability to change settings can be disabled.
OK but we're talking about a general social problem (parents understandably don't want their kids corupte dby adult stuff, and some adult services vendors are unscrupulous but the internet makes it easy for them to hide.
I personally think this current version of the legislation is a good compromise. Tech workarounds are fine for the few of us that understand the relevant technology (though I have never bothered to compile DNS in my life and have no plans to do so in the future), but they are simply not practical for most people. Every time I hear someone suggesting this sort of thing I find myself tempted to say 'why worry about legislation? If you don't like what it mandates you can just write your own operating system.'
Of course this would not be helpful because writing your own OS is extremely hard beyond classroom/toy examples. And likewise, tech workarounds and even parental controls are hard for most consumers - partly by design. I have an xbox console and have been trying to figure out why it keeps freezing on certain apps for months now. I suspect a telemetry problem but it's just a guess, there isn't really any way to look at logs so it's a trial and error process because most consumer hardware/application vendors want their products to be black boxes.
> I personally think this current version of the legislation is a good compromise.
I don't think it is a good compromise. It seems to cover the wrong use cases.
My use cases have nothing to do with children on any level. Why would I want to submit to government restrictions? That makes zero sense.
It's as if the right-to-repair-movement would suddenly be undermined by a lobbyist advocating how restrictions are great. Or Jackie Chan suddenly praising the sinomarxist mono-party.
I'm sure than intelligent person like yourself understands that a lot of voters have kids and prioritize feeling that their kids are safe, even if those feelings are not always grounded in rationality. Most people shy away from complexity.
Yes, but equally so, some intelligent voters (who might've moved out of CA by now, as moving might be the best way to solve that disconnect) might also believe that we should be living in a Republic (and the government should not impose majority-favoured restrictions to the detriment of minority) rather than unrestricted Democracy. .
That's an interesting problem. Even if you have full control over your children's devices they can still simply toggle the DoH feature back on unless you do complicated enterprise style device management things.
However DoH isn't obfuscated and in order to operate the list of resolvers that firefox uses must be published somewhere. It follows that you should be able to filter the major DoH providers at your gateway.
Well in the past there were laws banning the selling of cigarettes and alcohol to minors. Selling alcohol to a minor can cause you to lose your liquor license. With much of the online content being free and not involving a physical product it has become significantly harder for a parent to protect their children.
If one kid is able to bypass the system it means it's zero percent effective. Same thing with alcohol, and cigarettes. Especially if it means I have to show my ID to buy those things.
Some kids getting access to booze here and there with planning and coordination is different from kids walking into a liquor store or bar whenever they want.
Shit thanks for pointing that out. My door lock isn't 100% effective at stopping thieves, so I guess I can get rid of that annoying thing. Will be nice to never worry about being locked out again!
Just like no past generation had so much information so readily available. One quick quip can always be rebutted by another quick quip, but it doesn't really move the conversation along in any meaningful manner.
Support getting rid of Citizens United and support your representatives to support enforcing antitrust.
This is the main problem that needs to be addressed. Everything else is just a byproduct of it. If you support the by product of what was created by conditions that are not being address, you only make the problem worse.
Here we talk about use cases for EVERYONE. I don't see how your use case is fine for me, because I personally do not agree with it on any level at all whatsoever. You believe in restriction. I don't. There is no common ground here.
> It's not realistic for me to be watching over their shoulders 24/7
Is this your job? At which age will you stop monitoring them?
> what can I do to keep them away from stuff 99% of people agree isn't for children to see
99%? Where do you get those numbers from?
Besides, what stuff anyway? Even then the issue isn't about your kids. It is about laws for EVERYONE.
Teens for sure bypass all restrictions. Teens are young adults. My suggestions are for small children. Once a small child evolves and adapts to their surroundings, they too will one day bypass things. Reward them when they do this, it means they're smart and you did a good job.
I agree fundamentally and ideologically but we are past that point. The toothpaste is already out of the tube as they say. There will be restrictions so all I can do is suggest more sensible restrictions that keep the control on the client side and do not share data. Any data shared can and will be abused, leaked, sold, stolen without consequence.
We are not past the point at all. Any democracy can ultimately decide on laws and regulation. Why would you wish to insinuate otherwise here? California could easily decide to not implement such laws, for instance.
That data leaks out is always a given. So, gather less data. Ideally none. But this is not a discussion about data. This is a discussion as to what state actors think they are allowed to do. It is an attack on private life of people. See the combined strike against VPNs.
Please remember that there are CA state policies that the voters voted to overturn (in a referendum) and the current CA state government refuses to do so. California voters decided. The California government un-democratically decided to ignore the voters against their own laws they themselves passed.
PS I'm referring to bail reform here.
PPS Just trying to frame what the CA government thinks its allowed to do which is apparently anything it wants.
I heard that lie about "sensible restrictions" so many times, now I am waiting for "sensible violence", "sensible beating to death" and so on. It is a false argument that "there will be restrictions so all I can do is suggest more sensible restrictions", what you can do is recognize that "no restrictions is an option".
It is like negotiating with a terrorist that wants to kill you and this is his starting position and then he wants to agree on some compromise, like seriously beating you. There is no negotiation.
How do you propose doing age restrictions for social media?
These are broadly popular. (And the evidence supports them.) They are happening. So the question is how to do it best. The project for reversing the consensus isn’t worthless. But it’s a long-term project that will have to bear fruit after these restrictions go into effect, if ever.
Voters are collectively deciding for all of our children. And there are absolutely group dynamics that require cooperation. It’s why rich communities ban phones in classrooms while in poor communities, the one family that tries doing it alone is probably going to be less successful.
Again, I’m not saying you’re fundamentally wrong. Just that this debate has been had and the polling is massively in favor of bans for under-14 year olds and strongly in favor for under-18s. (And to the degree I’ve connected with electeds, the folks calling in and writing were almost 100% one way. The civically-engaged electorate is practically at consensus.)
we are not collectivist/communist country to have a "muh gubernment" rule and dictate over every little thing.
I want government bureacrats, empowered by the stupid median voter, to be as far away as possible from things that I (and any other parent) are perfectly capable of solving by ourselves.
How does this work for mixed-content sites? Like say a minor visits a video sharing or social media site and the default feed/recommendations list includes stuff that should be age-restricted, but is mostly stuff that shouldn't be.
The entire site shouldn't be blocked; the browser needs a way to tell the website "my parental controls are enabled and I need to you to filter out age-restricted content".
Alternatively, the RTA header/meta could include a parameter/attribute for an "alternate URL" to load when parental controls are enabled. This could be useful to allow sites to present a custom error-type response, but could also be used to automatically redirect the user to similar, but age-appropriate, content.
Anyway, this all ignores the fact that "protect the children" isn't really the goal here: it's to slowly eat away at our ability to be anonymous (even read-only anonymous) on the internet. Age verification is just a watered-down way of saying they require positive identification, and eventually our hardware will have to cryptographically attest we are who we say we are. I really hope this isn't inevitable, but it's starting to feel that way.
You make the mistake of solving the stated problem, and not the actual problem. This was never about children, or a solution like what you describe would be trivial.
I've emailed politicians as have others but only received boilerplate thankyou's. I suspect the real reason is kick-backs but they will never admit it.
No harm in people reaching out to their politicians state and federal. The more people that bring it up the better. Let them know your childrens data will not be shared and when the data is leaked you will hold the politicians accountable.
Well, if the concern is they might miss out on revenue from a small child accessing their site and they are not a child specific site then perhaps they should be pushed out of the market one way or another.
I largely agree, but the RTA header doesn't seem to be good enough for most websites to use. When a website wants to block browsers with parental controls on, but it isn't porn and it shouldn't be blocked by SafeSearch, what do they do?
They stop trying to put everything in a different category and treat RTA as the person under the age of consent must get approval from their parent or legal guardian. Keep it simple.
I imagine Google wants to distinguish between websites that want to be blocked by SafeSearch, versus websites that want to be blocked when parental controls are on? There's no reason to leave that ambiguous. Plenty of adults have SafeSearch on.
Defining a new header isn't hard; the hard part is getting consensus and adoption.
For what it's worth this header has been around for a long time. It's predecessor (PICS ICRA) was too complicated and started using topics. After a while they added so many topics that even being an abbreviated header it was still massive and confusing. There were websites that people could select all the topics and what not but even then the adoption was low due to complexity and topics constantly changing on sites.
Are today's videos beheading's without blood, with blood, with or without anguish, with nudity, without nudity, etc... After a while it gets out of hand.
It turned out the internet was too dynamic so the RTA header was created to just say "adult".
Correct. Until parent or guardian puts in password next to the text that says "Approve this site, forever."
You gave me an idea. Maybe there could be categories similar in concept to those that exist in corporate firewalls today that say things like:
- News Category (Known to be SFW)
- News Category (That may be NSFW)
- Child friendly sites
- Social media sites
... and so on.
This could be crowd sourced, ideally in a way that can not be gamed. The masses could flag/report false claims. That, or just keep it simple. ad-hoc input of permitted sites by parent.
What is [N]SFW under your definition? I don't think anybody has a problem with children seeing an adult heterosexual couple kissing, but what about a teenage couple? A homosexual couple? A mixed-race couple? A couple with a 40 year age gap? Audible moaning? Groping under clothes? Implied but not explicit hands touching genitals? Dripping saliva and face licking?
The problem with defining categories is that artists will do their best to defy categorization. That has been the nature of art for as long as humans have been making art.
I do not have a proposal for that. I'm only covering the issue of sharing any personal attributes of a child or anyone with any corporations as they have proven time and time again they can not be trusted with it. If anything they have proven beyond any shadow of doubt they can not be trusted with anything.
I will leave the NSFW definitions to yourself and others. Since the W stands for Work I guess company management and HR get some say in it too. I don't know where they get their standards from.
Ages ago I worked for a company that hosted porn and their standards were uniquely liberal.
This is a terrible idea and your proposed society is terrible. It doesn’t matter if it’s safe for work; you asked to identify sites with content that can change. Either the parent has seen and approved the content or not.
> The only device mandates that should be taking place is for the default installations of web clients should be checking to see if parental controls are enabled. This only impacts the major browsers. An intern at each browser company could add this check in minutes. If they are enabled and the person logged in is on a regular account (not admin or power user of sorts) then the base installation of web clients must check for an RTA header [1]. If present, prompt for a override password and also give the option for the admin to approve-list the domain at that time. That's it. Not perfect, nothing is or will be.
It's useful to contrast this with the various device-based mandates that have been created in order to get a sense of what legislators seem to be trying to do. With that in mind, a few points:
* What you are proposing allows parents to opt in via parental controls, but age assurance mandates (both device-side and server-side) tend to require positive action to enter unrestricted modes. In some cases (CA AB 1043, for instance), this is just a matter of entering your age. In others, you actually need to demonstrate your age via some technical mechanism.
* While many age assurance mandates focus on adult content, which is primarily consumed via the Web, others (e.g., Australia's Social Media Minimum Age) focus on social networking, which is primarily consumed via apps, so anything that is Web only will not be effective.
* Site-level granularity isn't really fine enough in some cases. For example, the New York SAFE for Kids act prohibits certain behaviors such as algorithmic recommendations when a user is a minor, but doesn't require blocking minor usage entirely. It's potentially possible to implement this with something like RTA, but it would have to at minimum be at much finer granularity.
None of this is an endorsement of age assurance techniques; I'm just trying to help flesh out the situation.
> All legislation regarding age verification must revolve around this otherwise people must reject it as an abusive form of tracking and privacy invasion.
It's a bit late for that, given that around half of US states already have some kind of age assurance mandate.
It's a bit late for that, given that around half of US states already have some kind of age assurance mandate.
Perhaps late to solve this globally but parents can still install parental control software if they so desire and can still intervene locally to prevent sharing data with 3rd parties. At worst this means small children might not get to visit social media and other assorted sites and I am fine with that. I think a number of parents would be fine with that as well.
Sites can voluntarily label as some do. It just means that parental controls would have to default to blocking everything until approved and while sub-optimal maybe that's what people will have to do in order to avoid the evil pattern of sharing data with all the websites that will ultimately leak, or "leak", be sold, stolen, etc... Good parents will not participate in the evil patterns of sharing their children's personally identifiable information.
When the PII of children is ultimately shared with evil people the children once adults will resent their parents for not protecting them.
- To all parents here, your children have no idea what risks are out there including devious companies that want their data. They will one day be adults if all goes well. Protect your children as corporations and governments will not. They will thank you when they find out all their friends data was shared, leaked or otherwise abused forever.
Certainly parents can install parental control software, but what does this have to do with children's PII being shared with sites?
Just so we're on the same page, the way AB1043 works is that the OS determines the user's age and then shares the age bracket with apps. No PII is shared with sites (this is not to say that the age isn't sensitive, but it's not PII as usually regarded). Is your concern here that sites get access to children's information because children visit certain sites regardless of legislation? That's a real thing, but it seems mostly orthogonal to age assurance.
Certainly parents can install parental control software, but what does this have to do with children's PII being shared with sites?
The parent can block or just never approve all the sites that require PII.
but it's not PII as usually regarded
We will never agree here. All the companies I worked for financial considered any attribute of the person to be PII, even their IP address. We were audited very strictly on this. If a users age was disclosed to a third party without their written consent that was a contract violation and came with severe monetary penalties. Parents should expect this to be the minimum standard. It's their children, not the corporation or governments children.
Thanks for your explanation. I understand what you're talking about, but this all just seems to be entirely orthogonal to age assurance mandates, which are largely about controlling which content and experiences minors engage with, in many cases regardless of what parents want.
Again, this isn't an endorsement of these mandates; I'm just saying that what you're proposing here doesn't address the objectives that policymakers who are in favor of these mandates are trying to achieve.
doesn't address the objectives that policymakers who are in favor of these mandates are trying to achieve.
Oh trust me, I get it. They and I will never align. I know I am beyond beating the dead horse. It's gone from bone dust to micronized dust to sub-atomic particles to sub-quantum particles at this point. That poor horse will never be forgotten. Perhaps it is an illness on my part but I will find a way to bring this up every time until the year 2150 after which point this will be the least of anyone's concerns.
> If they are enabled and the person logged in is on a regular account (not admin or power user of sorts) then the base installation of web clients must check for an RTA header [1].
Your cite is an earlier post of yours which says
> The one and only method I will participate in is server operators setting a RTA header [1]
and that cites a still earlier post of yours
> I stand by my repeated statements of how this could have been solved simply using an RTA header [1]
which finally actually cites¹ something that explains what the heck on RTA header is.
It would be quite a bit more reader friendly to cite https://www.rtalabel.org/page.php rather than make the reader traverse a linked list of comments to get there.
A) Aren't you targeting a completely different problem than this law? It's my understanding that this law targets the collection of the age from the user. What the user agent does with that signal is a different problem, and seems to already be solved, except for the definition of "actual knowledge" which they are trying to establish here.
B) How would your RTA header intersect with content rating in different jurisdictions? What if the content is illegal for children in Turkey but legal for children in Kentucky?
For topic (A) I am suggesting to negate this behavior all together. No more sharing personal data. That evil-pattern must be stopped.
For topic (B) companies can set or not set the header based on GeoIP. Not perfect but GeoIP is already used in load balancers, web servers and applications.
For (A) we have nothing to talk about. I think we fundamentally disagree about how society functions, and we aren't going to knock that out over hackernews.
For (B), your proposal requires the website have a database over current rules in every country they would be accessible from. Would a website then, in your opinion, be responsible for the accuracy of this database? We have to presuppose an official GeoIP source that would then be legally binding and under democratic control, but given such a database, would a website serving a wrong header to an IP associated with a specific country then be committing a crime in that country? What would the punishment be?
For (A) I guess you are right, we won't agree. I do like your username however.
For (B) this is already a thing. Porn sites and already doing this. Instead of blocking a region I am proposing to stop blocking and instead the law permit them to just add a header. The only people I can imagine apposing this are commercial VPN providers.
I think a better example might be places like polymarket (not allowed to operate in us) or usatoday (serves an EU only version with no cookies). The technical limitations on those systems are both GeoIP as far as I'm aware, and that seem sufficient for regulators.
What I find more interesting is that what you want is within the scope of this law. It's only required that the operating system takes in your age from an admin, from there the application (user agent/webbrowser) is supposed to handle the blocking, which it could do with a header as you suggest.
I will note that you are going to find a lot of libertarians that would oppose banning GeoIP circumvention.
Are small children losing money on gambling sites already? If so I have not been paying attention. That really needs to be reigned in as they are likely using their parents credit cards without their permission. We need to break that habit before they reach the age of consent and that becomes a punishable crime. Our prison system already has too many young people. That's an awful way to start.
> An intern at each browser company could add this check in minutes.
An intern could also just delete the product which would also "solve" this "issue". The fact that it's easy or cheap is not significant to the problem at hand.
> should be doing is setting an RTA header
Many sites will just set the header by default. Now you've created a problem.
> then progressively fine them into oblivion.
This does nothing. See: Ofcom vs 4chan.
> device mandates
Mandate that the device provide an API for child protection software. Then it's up to individual parents to decide to install that software or not. Then we also get competition in this market rather than relying on whatever solution an intern cooked up one day.
Many sites will just set the header by default. Now you've created a problem.
I am not seeing a problem. Kids need not access those sites unless the parent or legal guardian approves it. Sites meant for children would not be adding the header.
> Sites meant for children would not be adding the header.
Is Wikipedia "meant for children?" Should they be fully denied access to it? Should Wikimedia be fined if they make a mistake? If they get fined often enough do you think they'll just turn the header on everywhere in order to avoid risk?
Replace Wikipedia with any other mixed content site you prefer.
Child specific sites would not add the header. Anyone else could. I add it to my hobby sites. Some porn sites already add it to their sites [1]. Shodan can't reach my sites. I do not want small children on my blogs.
Add it to any site not specifically meant for children, that is totally fine.
- Site adds a header if they may potentially have adult content.
- Browser detects header. Prompts for local password to access site.
- Child does not know password, picks a different site or begs parent for access.
- This is now between small child and parent. No third parties, no tracking, no telling website the users age, no local or remote API's sharing data.
- At some point if all goes well the child will be an adult and will thank their parent for looking out for them when all their friends data was sold and abused.
Absolutely trivial and totally comprehensive solution, enabling adult content blocking at the account level, device level, network level, and the ISP level. Could even be expanded to any sort of content blocking, if you want to allow households to restrict access to vaccine critique or criticism of the king without violating the First Amendment or rooting everyone's devices.
The problem is that the point is to root everyone's devices. Anyone explaining how easy this is would be pushed out of the conversation as fast as if they were advocating for single-payer healthcare.
edit: I've been advocating the nearly identical but opposite solution - restricted access sites shouldn't respond to requests that lack an appropriate age/content restriction header. If they do, jail them.
They're literally going to have to do this anyway. Rooting people's devices to force them to lie about their age when they install their operating system is an absolutely fake pretendy solution; the only way it works is if you have to verify your age with some government agency when you install an operating system, in order to make that OS age official. The point is the identification.
Imagine having to police the OS installations at everyone's home. It's dangerous enough to serve warrants to known felons at known locations. I would not want to be the paramilitary officer going door to door having to be ready to flashbang the family or worse. I don't know if there are even words to describe the PTSD that all the enforcers and families would have. Someone in North Korea probably has the words to describe this.
No. That requires information disclosure to a third party. The point is enabling device admins better control over local device behavior. We're trying to keep conscientious parents able to do their thing. Not further enable the ability to manage the populace with official registries. If a kid can figure out how to install their own OS without their parent's help, odds are the kid is with it enough to start dipping their toes in the deep end. Or at least until they out themselves in front of their parents. In that case though it's a home problem, not a rest of the Internet problem.
It's still a stupid unconstitutional law, but I see what the aim is, even without strawmanning it.
Thats crazy talk, how are we gonna build a database of computers tied to physical identification of users by which we can monitor, control, and monetize… you’re saying parents should be responsible for their children? How is the state going to be able to exert more control if it doesn’t have ubiquitous surveillance of it’s population!?
/s
As usual 95+% of people commenting have no idea what is actually in the California law, and so are commenting about things that have nothing to do with it.
Different states, countries, and multi-country organizations that have legislated in this area or are working on legislating in this area have went with many different approaches. These differ in their scope, how age is verified (or even if age is actually verified), what documentation is required (or even if documentation is required), whether they apply to the web or to apps or to both, whether they make anonymous use harder or not, how much if any sensitive information they disclose to the apps/sites that need to check age, whether they could allow government to track your usage, and in other ways.
Most ridiculous are the comments that after saying how bad it is (clearly talking about things not in the California law) then say how it should work and describe something close to the California law.
It's not out of the ordinary for folks on HN to discuss the general subject of a topic and not the exact contents of TFA. The article tends to just be a catalyst for discussions.
It is kinda silly to read comments that do what you mention at the end (have a seemingly novel idea to fix the issue at hand and their solution is the one from TFA). That's just embarrassing.
But I feel like the rest of the discussions are fair game.
If I'm reading that right this covers all of Meta's state lobbying spending which is $45M + $25M federally and it's not all directly related to this age gating stuff, but general shaping anti-child exploitation policy?
> On every social media regulation bill in Colorado, Meta takes an "Amending" position, actively fighting changes. Across 117 lobbying records on 22 bills:
> Bills regulating social media: Meta position is "Amending" (fighting)
> The one bill putting the burden on OS providers: Meta position is "Monitoring" (watching)
> Meta fights bills that regulate Meta. Meta watches bills that regulate everyone else.
So their lobbyist choosing not to fight against the OS age gating is the big reveal.
There was an AI generated slop report posted to Reddit that went viral. It even got some news coverage before anyone stopped to read the files and discover that it was gibberish.
I still get downvoted for pointing it out and trying to ground the conversation in facts. As you noticed the story continues to thrive on bad news sites and social media.
Meta has not spent $2 billion lobbying for this or on lobbying altogether.
It’s amazing how that one AI slop project that made this claim got so many people to believe this number.
Spreading this disproven AI slop around isn’t helping. It just makes opposition look like uninformed conspiracy theorists who can’t fact check anything.
If you go take a read through the CA bill text that "became law", you'll quickly realize that whomever did write it must live in a very narrow bubble where the only "computers" that exist in the world are tablet style cell phones, the only OS'es that exist in the world are Android and iOS, and the only way anyone installs any software on the only computers that exist is via an "app store".
Meanwhile, while the overall writing clearly indicates the author has a very narrow view of "computers", the definitions of the terms is so broad that every computer, even the tiny embedded CPU in your microwave oven, might just need to ask your age before it allows you to do anything.
> every computer, even the tiny embedded CPU in your microwave oven, might just need to ask your age before it allows you to do anything.
Why do I keep seeing this bullshit exaggeration? It doesn't help anything to make such ridiculous statements. Nobody's microwave oven has an app store.
The bill was written by Buffy Wicks, who represents me in the State Assembly, who is very good on housing, transportation, and climate, and who should absolutely stay in her lane and not try to legislate platform APIs.
The bill is written 'do good, stop bad stuff by establishing a committee or group to make sure fund good stuff, bad stuff doesn't happen' then the law passes and lobbyists write the details that fund the programs that tax the people that generate the income for companies that donate to the politicians that sell their votes to the lobbyists and interest groups.
California politicians start with the end goal "maintain power, secure revolt, obtain capital, deny failure".
It goes beyond lying to your face. They will be convincingly genuine, heartfelt, while finding a way to extract as much as possible for themselves, by extension their party, by extension the 'government' and do absolutely anything to keep the illusion that you have a choice, a vote, and a voice.
I lived here my whole life. These politicians are evil. Lie, cheat, and steal - deny if caught, punish if provoked.
A cynical person might suspect that the reason they are doing this is so that Linux developers don't have standing to challenge the law on 1st amendment grounds...
This is the classic "what we're trying to do is bullshit on a fundamental level so we're gonna just exempt random things until it becomes a niche issue and we can just do what we want and from there we'll just close all those exceptions over time" move.
Give it 5yr and you'll have idiots in the comments talking about how the "linux loophole" was a mistake and should be closed.
That’s exactly what it is. It removes standing, and that is a major flaw in our legal system. We need significant changes to defend constitutional rights properly.
Remember when women kept suing for the right to get an abortion and the courts kept just waiting out the pregnancy? Something something sixth amendment...
It is an admission from the writers that this law is unrelated to safety and people should very loudly and frequently point that out.
If OSes that don't verify the age of their users are a genuinely unsafe for children, why should they be allowed just because they are open source? That doesn't seem to mitigate dangers associated with age in any away I can identify.
Have you considered that the writers typically have legislative but not technical skills and are just trying to placate upset voters, without really understanding what the optimal solution could be? Reading this and other threads you can see therea re plenty of highly technical people who struggle to articulate what kind of policy they want or what kind of parental controls they want to set up themselves?
It's kind of a hard problem and legislators are inclined picking the lowest hanging fruit. Their primary concern is to not be smeared as child predators by their political opponents at the next election, eg "jwitthuhn voted to give gambling websites, pronographers, and pedophiles easy access to YOUR children - s/he OPPOSED age verification laws on internet sleaze!! Who's jwitthuhn really working for - you, or the people who want to exploit your kids?!!"
One can point out that such electoral pitches are dishonest bullshit until one is blue in the face, but the fact is they work on a lot of voters because most of them are not smart and don't have the energy or inclination to research every issue. And it is true that there are a lot of hustlers on the internet who are willing to either passively or actively exploit kids, and the anonymity, non-locality, and technical complexity of the internet makes that relatively easy to do and hard to prosecute. Legislators offer simplistic solutions because that's what a most of the public wants, and people often make their voting decisions based on emotional factors rather than cold rationality.
You don't need mustache-twirling villains saying 'let's impose burdensome techn regulations that perpetuate oligopolies and allow me to make another trillion dollars, a few million of which I'll send your way, mwhahahaha' to get shitty legislation (which is not to say they don't exist). It will emerge naturally by default if other conditions are right.
"One can point out that such electoral pitches are dishonest bullshit until one is blue in the face"
This is what I intend to do. To just let lawmakers get away with passing bullshit because "of course they will" is a defeatist attitude that I don't advocate.
That is why it is so important to be loud about this incredibly obvious disingenuous behavior. Make sure everyone knows the people advocating this do not care one bit about children's safety.
> One can point out that such electoral pitches are dishonest bullshit until one is blue in the face, but the fact is they work on a lot of voters because most of them are not smart and don't have the energy or inclination to research every issue.
That sounds like a suggestion that democracy should be limited only to intelligent or educated people, or people who have researched all relevant issues. I know that was not your intent, but it is an easy conclusion to come to from your stated perspective.
Democracy, like the free market, is viable only for informed participants. But once a certain large mass of participants are no longer informed - willfully or not - the system fails for all participants.
Not just Linux. More specifically: “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.
Yes, I wonder what false positives and false negatives will result from that definition. I suppose Microsoft permits corporate licensees to copy (to all their PCs and servers), redistribute (internally), and modify (by corporate software developers and also by sysadmins using group policy) the software.
Maybe it should say, the software 'code' - requiring open source code - and to do it all 'for free'.
Linux will be exempt for now. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them try to slip it through later. Legislators in California have learned over the years, and have carved out exemptions in bills such as gun control bills to get it passed, and later classified their exemption as a "loophole" to be closed.
Steam itself does age verification, which when you first boot a steamdesk, afaik it forces you to log into steam before you can do much of anything without some initial hackery. That said, once in there's nothing stopping them from launching into desktop mode, launching firefox, and watching pr0n that way.
Sadly the solution is still for parents to do real parenting, but that's like saying stupid people shouldn't breed.
It's a classic case of regulatory capture. Only the biggest players can get away with fully implementing age verification — if Microsoft requires age verification to use its OS, most people will oblige. If HN starts doing that most people will probably just log off forever.
What is maddening is how often people think such laws are about limiting the influence of "big tech." Big tech isn't going anywhere because of these laws, you are.
Hypothetically, preemptive market recapture? This could theoretically make foss OSs non-kosher for any suitably large market (websites, games, chat platforms, etc), and serve to force foss OSs into a niche where theyre technically capable of being personal desktop software, but practically unusable because of lockout.
This is part of a large movement to end personal computing as we know it, and give all control over our digital lives to the mega corporations. It is already impossible to use some national ID or banking apps on non-Apple and non-Google phones. (say GrapheneOS), giving them an immense edge in the market, and they're using that domination to add more restrictions like installing non-play store apps on Android. This goes bit by bit, try to add a restriction, go back enough to quiet the backlash, try again. This new law is a foot in the door to achieve the same restrictions on PCs. PCs are the last open computing platform and bastions of personal digital freedom and thus they must be destroyed by capitalists and governments. Once the technical means have been put in place to restrict access to some services, the system can be hardened : impose that the age checks can't be tampered with by using a TPU module, impose a link to the individual's identity so that all online activity can be traced to anyone. Pretenses are easy to find : protect children, block sex offenders from accessing dating sites, and so on. At this point I'm pretty convinced we're geared towards a global totalitarian regime, and there's a lot of evidence.
As a dad of two younger kids (7 and 10), I have been incredibly frustrated with the way age restrictions are handled across various services.
Really, my main complaint comes down to: I completely disagree with what these services choose to restrict for kids and what they allow.
They block my kids from doing things I have no problem with them doing and they allow things I would never want my kids to do in 1000 years. It is incredibly frustrating.
Often times, there is literally no way for me to bypass some stupid restriction they put on my kids, so the only way I can get it to work is to help my kids lie about their age… and at that point, I lose the ability to actually block things I care about.
These laws are just going to make it worse. I don’t want someone else choosing how I control what my kids do. Give me tools to control it myself, and you can choose some presets for parents to use, but don’t force me to use your definition of age appropriate.
> I don’t want someone else choosing how I control what my kids do. Give me tools to control it myself
I agree. Parental controls have been the norm for thirty years. The adult who owns the device should have control over it, not Microsoft or California.
A pure whitelist mode, especially for video apps. Netflix, Disney, etc don't provide this because they want to push their new shows on your kids. YouTube does provide a whitelist mode, which I appreciate. But it's hard to find, poorly implemented, and blocks a lot of great content from being whitelisted. It's very frustrating to come across a great educational YouTube video and have big nanny Google block you from sharing it with your kids.
Honestly, I don’t have a perfect answer. It really depends on what the service is.
My main thing is I want to be able to opt in or out of various filters. I don’t mind if my kids want to listen to music that has swear words, but I don’t want them watching videos where they give horribly sexist pickup artist advice.
This isn’t just about what I feel is age appropriate, either. It is also about what I know about my kids.
My 10 year old hates scary things, and she gets completely freaked out when they show scary movie previews. I would like to be able to block those for her. On the other hand, my 7 year old is obsessed with scary things and I don’t mind if he plays zombie video games.
> My 10 year old hates scary things, and she gets completely freaked out when they show scary movie previews. I would like to be able to block those for her.
The difference between this and the usual "parental control" mechanisms is that what you're describing here is something the child wants to cooperate with, voluntarily. In which case, you don't need a mechanism that makes it absolutely impossible; you need a mechanism for helping them not see things they don't want to see. That's something some adults also want (e.g. tools for preventing oneself going to Facebook, or going to TVTropes for too long).
Honestly, this is how I feel about all content for my kids. I am not trying to stop them from seeing something they really want to see. I am trying to stop them from seeing stuff they don’t want to see.
Now, sometimes my kids might not know they don’t want to see something, which is where my judgment comes in… but I don’t (or at least have not yet, anyway) feel the need to block my kids from watching things they want.
Now, I have spoken to my kids about some things they watch that I have issues with. I tell them why I think the content is problematic and why I would prefer they don’t watch it. But it is always a conversation rather than me just telling them they aren’t allowed.
I have been happy with how my kids have handled these conversations, and haven’t yet found the need to enforce specific rules yet. Even when they watch some things I don’t like, I have found it has made for really effective conversations about my values and what I hope their values are. Some of those topics are too abstract to have without having something tangible (like a YouTube video or channel) to center the conversation around.
I'm as a big of a horror movie fan as you can find, and I'm completely dumbfounded by the jump scares marketing is allowed to show in trailers nowadays. IMO (coming from someone who is basically unaffected by jump scares), they've gotten more shocking in the past couple years.
The internet is too dynamic to build a working filter around. Perhaps just tools which help parents quickly and efficiently monitor their child's device usage would be best.
Do you want to alter behaviors or lock children in a gilded cage?
All the best stuff is online, though. My kids have found some of their favorite hobbies and interests from online videos they found. They enjoy using the internet for all the same reasons the rest of us do. I love computers and technology and the internet, and my kids and I play games together and build computers and explore technology. I have taught them a lot about internet safety (both personal and technological), and I am very impressed with their skills and abilities.
I would never tell another parent they were wrong for choosing not to allow their kids to use the internet or consume certain types of media. Those are very personal choices.
My wife and I have deliberately have chosen what to allow our kids to do, and continually have talks with each other and with the kids about our internet usage.
I don’t feel the need or desire to seek advice or approval from random internet commenters.
Wow this is smart politically because the largest group against this age verification bulls*t just so happens to overlap a lot with people who love open source software (technical people who value user freedom)
Of course this also means that the nerds who use linux or lineageos get to win cool points because they can access more adult stuff
This is a bad move. California has no age verification law, only an age asking law and all of the reasons it's good to ask if the user is over 18 are still good reasons if the OS is Linux. And the penalty for providing an OS that doesn't ask if you're over 18 is that it's considered a defective product and you can return it for a refund, but open source software is already provided for free with no warranty so who cares. Unless you bought it from Red Hat so this is basically just giving Red Hat impunity to violate this law, for no reason.
This will only help if the law states that internet companies that check this have to default to assuming the user is an adult. Otherwise the end result will be that Linux clients will get caught in a dragnet of automatic denial.
How does this age verification crap apply to server environments? If you can't use windows desktop without age verification can you just install windows server or IoT as a loophole?
Open software should not implement this feature because slippery slope is not a fallacy based on my experience. Force them to actually create a government approved operating systems to make it clear how absurd this is and so that we know who will bend the knee.
We did it despite the naysayers who faught us saying it "wasn't a big deal" and that this is the "best version of the law we could get". Never listen to the naysayers and compromise your principles to appease them, stay true to what you believe.
So are kids not going to have access to llms? Seems trivial to get around this from a technical standpoint for frontier llms no matter how this is implemented.
This is a potential loophole. Companies could have an "open source" OS but restrict installations like Tivo did in the 2000s (i.e. "Tivoization"). Or they could allow installation of modified software but restrict functionality like the way the Google Play Integrity API can nerf apps running on custom builds of Android.
Or, they can have a license like the Business Source License where you can copy, redistribute, and modify the software but you can't use it commercially. This goes against OSI's open source definition.
We emailed this amendment to Buffy Wicks's staff:
§1798.504(f) This title does not apply to[...]:
(4) An operating system or application that meets both of the following conditions:
(A) The operating system or application is distributed under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software, including for commercial purposes and without payment of a royalty or fee.
(B) The operating system provider or developer does not, by technical or contractual means, prevent the recipient from installing modified versions of the software on a device on which the unmodified version operates, and does not restrict the functionality or interoperability of modified versions.
Shouldn't that specify the code not or not only the software? For example, the corporate Windows license allows the corporation to copy, redistribute (internally), and modify (via group policy, APIs, or development on the Windows platform) the software. The big difference between that and Linux is licensees can't access the code. FOSS requires free access to, use of, modification of, and redistribution of the code.
Honestly you're probably right, code is a better term. I copied that language from Colorado's SB26-051 bill which also has a FOSS exemption and they use the word "software". I'm not a lawyer but I'm hoping that a court's interpretation of one state's language will apply to other states.
That and lots of FOSS licenses use some variant of those words "copy, redistribute, and modify" so it's probably a term-of-art that courts recognize.
This is what Colorado's law says. It prevents Tivoization but not feature nerfing like the Play Integrity API.
§ 6-30-105 (3)
(e) AN OPERATING SYSTEM PROVIDER OR DEVELOPER THAT
DISTRIBUTES AN OPERATING SYSTEM OR APPLICATION UNDER LICENSE TERMS
THAT PERMIT A RECIPIENT TO COPY, REDISTRIBUTE, AND MODIFY THE
SOFTWARE WITHOUT ANY PLATFORM-IMPOSED TECHNICAL OR CONTRACTUAL
RESTRICTIONS IMPOSED BY THE PROVIDER OR DEVELOPER ON INSTALLING
ALL MODIFIED VERSIONS.
What are they defining as an operation system? It’s a term that has fuzzy edges as a technical term, and given laws are usually piss poor at defining technical terms, I can’t see it being well defined in CA law.
I think there's a lot of proprietary stuff, from Google Play Services to Pixel specific features. A very significant stack of "modern" software layers are proprietary, even on Android.
This is the whole 'opt-in vs opt-out' at a high level. A better law would be crafted like 'some services have been determined to be harmful to minors and require age verification. Those -specific- services shall have these specific mitigations.....' Facebook and others should have a clear legal distinction of 'harmful to children' and then the law kicks in.
Parental controls should be a client side option set by the user.
Sure, make it easy for users to do so, but it's a users choice.
Kids don't buy phones or computers, their parents do, and during initial setup, parents could choose "this pc is used by a child" option, input some override password to disable this in the future, and the phone could block whatever needs to be blocked.
The California law has no age verification, identity verification, or surveillance. It is just a pretty simple parental control system, which only applies to devices whose primary user is a child.
The reason is simple: the pattern I see hints that there is:
a) money spent, to push through age-sniffing, and
b) it is happening almost globally.
I am not necessarily saying that all this can be singularized down to one
bribe-using company, be it Meta, Google or what not, or state actors becoming
beyond Evil. But just as the butterfly effect is used as analogy how a strong
wind can be created further downstream, I see the situation here VERY similar.
To me it is not confined to age-sniffing. Remember the sudden declaration of
war by the UK against VPN. This is in my opinion connected here. The goal is
not "protect the children" but instead spy more on people than before. A
gradual extension of this. And some companies and private interests will
benefit. See also the recent Palantir claim made against London aka "the major
is responsible for more robberies when he refused to obey to our rule". These
companies are greedy - and insolent.
> 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.
How about composite software products, say a de facto operating system which contains substantial elements subject to a permissive license? What if those are the components which support networking? If, hypothetically, a commercial operating system vendor built on Mach and 4BSD?
And I bet that Microsoft employee who was sending PRs to all the linux distros (and systemd) will not bother sending apologies to them for wasting their time.
He isn't. Also never was (unless the CV lies that is).
As for what drove him instead.. I suppose we will never know.
All we can know for certain is that the whole thing felt _very_ inorganic and not like something a reasonable human being would just start doing out of the blue.
(Corporate) politics love plausible deniability, so maybe it was just inherently human randomness. I'm sure it was.
Please move along.
The state should handle personal records, authentication, and age verification. Compliance should be as simple as implementing dead simple state provided interfaces.
Why should Linux be exempt? Linux lobbyists seem to be against the public good. It takes an AI agent 5 minutes to add this feature and then they add be good forevermore. And given that the software is open source, everyone can use the same library to be compliant. Belly-aching snowflakes…
1st amendment. There's a long history of carve outs around commercial products. But, if Linux devs (who aren't selling anything) went to the mat against this law, the government of California would lose and (at least part of) their law would be struck down.
What's depressing to me is just how self-serving all this is. The original bill was AB 1043. Who supported that, breaking with other tech companies? Why Meta of course [1][2]! Meta likes this because it pushes liability onto the OS providers. Guess who doesn't have an OS? Google's support is a little stranger given Android. It seems like AB 1043 also shifted liability to third-party app developers instead of the app store so, conflicting goals?
Likewise, you'll have Microsoft and maybe Apple pushing for Linux to be included for, again, entirely self-serving reasons. Microsoft is never one to miss an opportunity to benefit Windows.
All that's going on here is competing corporate interests. Likely nobody in power actually cares the actual end users.
As much as libertarians chafe against it, I think we've demonstrated that something has to be done in relation to children online. Advertising to children, harmful impacts of social media, cyberbullying, addictive behavior and selling the data of minors needs to stop. How we get there is unclear. Meanwhile, everyone responsible is just trying to limit and shift their legal liability and that's it.
If Meta is liable for when someone underage uses their service, then Meta is going to require proof of age which almost certainly means giving them copies of things like driver's licenses or passports probably along with video showing that you match the photo.
In jurisdictions taking the California approach Meta does not need to ask for anything like that. Their app just has to ask the OS, which reports the age bracket that was entered when the user account was made on the device, and the OS gets that information from whoever set up the account. The OS trusts whatever is entered at that time. No driver's licenses or passports or face scans or videos are involved.
> As much as libertarians chafe against it, I think we've demonstrated that something has to be done in relation to children online
...and this is pretty much the way to do it with the least impact on privacy and anonymity possible without first building up some high tech cryptographic infrastructure that would likely include hardware requirements that would, at least at first, exclude users who do not have an iOS/iPadOS or Android device that has a secure hardware element.
> If Meta is liable for when someone underage uses their service, then Meta is going to require proof of age—
Let's be clear what this means, "Meta is going to require" something. They'll require it to continue to do something, which is namely to be a bad company, running bad services, without pivoting to something else.
Of course, no one requires Meta to continue to be Meta. We'd protect people by requiring companies like Meta to request PII outright, because then the user is explicitly prompted to decide whether using Meta's services is worth surrendering their privacy. And if consumer sentiment and market forces mean anything anymore, that will incentivize Meta to replace their bad services with better ones, ones that don't cause them tricky liability issues.
In other words, forcing operating systems to demand PII from users from the get-go, regardless of the quality of that signal, and to broadcast that to any website, is not, as you put it, "the way to do it with the least impact on privacy and anonymity possible", etc etc. The "way to do it" is to phase out this rotten era of surveillance apparatus disguised as social media companies.
Sorry for being irate, it just feels like so many people these days arrive too quickly (for my taste) at conclusions without testing certain popular assumptions about the inevitability of tech oligarchy.
> As much as libertarians chafe against it, I think we've demonstrated that something has to be done in relation to children online
Just cuz today's ad-supported social media is bad for kids, doesn't mean everyone should have to verify their identity to use it. You can just make it 18+ and if kids lie to get around it that's not the end of the world. And in general, regulations that would make these things better for everyone would be better rather than just saying kids can't use it and not fix the actual problems with them
Huh? An operating system, as defined by Andrew Tanenbaum[0], the author of both Minix and of the best operating textbook ever, is a combination of:
- an "extended machine": provide usable abstractions over the hardware to reduce complexity to a manageable level
- a "resource manager": provide for an orderly and controlled allocation of the processors, memories, and I/O devices among all the various programs wanting them.
By that definition, Linux is very much an operating system... unless by "Linux" you meant the kernel only without the additional tooling (systemd, libc, coreutils, shell, etc.) that distros ship with.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!
The only device mandates that should be taking place is for the default installations of web clients should be checking to see if parental controls are enabled. This only impacts the major browsers. An intern at each browser company could add this check in minutes. If they are enabled and the person logged in is on a regular account (not admin or power user of sorts) then the base installation of web clients must check for an RTA header [1]. If present, prompt for a override password and also give the option for the admin to approve-list the domain at that time. That's it. Not perfect, nothing is or will be.
The only thing server, platform, website, service providers should be doing is setting an RTA header if the content could possibly be adult or user-contributed content that could dynamically become adult, moderation aside. This knocks out two issues with one fix. Small children don't see much if any adult content and they are kept off social media until the admin (parent or legal guardian) approves it.
If a site is not adding the RTA header then progressively fine them into oblivion. If they accept the fines as the cost of doing business then seize everything and put everyone in GenPop. An intern could enable the header in 5 minutes.
All legislation regarding age verification must revolve around this otherwise people must reject it as an abusive form of tracking and privacy invasion. The focus should be on small children as teen share porn, warez, movies and such within Rated-G games.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47950091
Bold of you to assume that lawmakers have any common sense when it comes to technology legislation. It could have taken 3 interns 3 hours at each browser company to implement a cookie consent standard 15 years ago, yet here we are in cookie banner hell.
Cookie banners exist because it is a dark pattern companies use to get you to opt into marketing cookies by making the easiest thing the worst choice.
This could all be handled by settings in the browser, only if the sites themselves listened to the users' browser preferences.
I was referring to the intern being able to add the header. Politicians need financial incentive. I don't have the resources to lobby them. I think that might require a philanthropist should there happen to be one that lurks on HN. There are some interesting people that lurk here that we sometimes learn about.
They can't do anything today as it is a federal holiday but they could do something tomorrow.
DNT exists, not even that is honored by websites. There is no need for a cookie banner for technical cookies.
This is misinformation stemming from disinformation propagated by organized industry retaliation to the law. Cookie banners are not and never have been required by law, they are intentional harassment designed to make users oppose laws that actually just say “you may not track users without their consent”. A good faith implementation would be simply nothing, because no explicit consent is required when you’re actually using cookies for honest purposes.
I think the header/metatag is designed poorly. The RTA proposal is that every operator of every site must verify the content and add the header to mark the site as "safe" or "unsafe". This is unnecessary burden that they have to bear if this proposal is given a green light and this is wrong.
Instead, the default should be, that if there is no header or it cannot be parsed, then the content is unsafe. And if there is a header, it describes the page rating, like what kind of dangerous content it may contain. The header may be added to any displayable content like HTML, text, images, audio or videos, but not to machine-readable content like JS files or AJAX responses.
So only those who wants their site to be accessible by minors, have to add headers. For social networks, the user might have an option to mark his content as "safe".
This means that with my proposal existing site operators need not to do anything to mark their sites as "unsafe" - all sites are "unsafe" by default. This means that millions of site operators need to spend 0 dollars to adapt their sites. How great is that?
The browser on a device with parent mode, should not allow displaying any content which doesn't have a header or that is marked as unsafe, or that contains header with invalid value. The parents may whitelist some sites.
There should be a reponsibility for intentionally marking unsafe content as "safe". We should also think what to do with foreign operators, intentionally putting invalid headers for unsafe content. Maybe they should be added to some kind of blacklist that the browsers would periodically update.
Search engines like Google could work by default in "safe" mode, but add "unsafe" header if the user wants to turn off restrictions.
> If a site is not adding the RTA header then progressively fine them into oblivion.
I think my proposal is better because it requires only fining those who intentionally misrepresent content safety.
The problem with your proposal is that it's already the status quo. Various whitelists exist but service operators don't generally bother with these things. What you end up with is a largely unusable experience if you enable whitelist filtering.
The core problem is the lack of buy in. Unfortunately that likely needs to be forced. I think it's not unreasonable to legally require people to make a claim about the nature of what they are serving up. They already need to be aware of the legal status of what they're doing anyway so it hardly seems as though making such a determination should pose a burden when you consider that it's an alternative to either requiring ID, requiring the client send age bracket information, or other heavy handed interventions. The choice here isn't "the status quo vs a header" but rather "some other age related regulation vs a header".
An easy way to enforce this "voluntarily" (ie coerce) without sending government agents after every small time website operator would be to require that mainstream browsers and other client software (based on MAU or similar metrics) refuse to process content that does not send a classification header. Doesn't matter what the header says or what the status of the user account or parental controls or whatever else is, it has to send the header regardless or it will be blocked without exception. That would presumably trigger broad compliance with the relevant regulations.
Should books require an age rating?
What about spoken words?
What makes online speech different, from the perspective of the Constitution that limits the power of the state?
The difference is one of redressing a concrete dysfunction. Libraries or the local bookstore or whoever aren't trying to sneak into your home, onto your child's school bus, into your child's classroom, while pushing various extremist publications purely for their own profit (ie "engagement"). We do in fact have zoning laws - I can't inadvertently encounter a strip club in a quiet residential area. Meanwhile it's commonplace for children to carry a network terminal around with them with which one can readily access the equivalent of things far worse than that.
What I've described does not restrict one's ability to speak freely. It is most similar to an impressum except it bears no identifying mark thus poses no hazard to anonymous speech.
Impressums cannot be required in the US, once again thanks to that pesky First Amendment. You may be mixing us up with Germany.
Mandates on how speech must be structured are a violation of freedom of speech, Constitutionally speaking.
“Redressing a concrete dysfunction” does not appear in the Constitution as an exemption to guaranteed rights, as far as I am aware. The proper remedy for this kind of problem is an Amendment, assuming you can get enough people to agree with your assessment.
You are correct.
Also, FWIW, 18 U.S.C. § 2257 applies to printed books as well as online content.
But pure text literature (physical or online) isn't as regulated as visual media.
For what its worth this header has been around for a very long time. It's actually the second iteration and much simpler than it's predecessor.
Parents today can accomplish what you are suggesting by installing parental control software and only allowing access to things they explicitly approve.
This can also be done via headers explicit blocking of all the things and was suggested in another thread. [1] Some people liked the idea.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47952999
The point is that it is unrealistic to expect millions of people to mark the content. Also, the header is better than the metatag because it can be added to images, videos and other non-HTML content as well.
I tend to agree - making folks intending to interact with minors comply makes more sense.
That said, outside of the merits of this approach, I am dubious of any actual implementation given 2 points.
1) Protecting the youths will always be a leaky bucket. With disadvantaged youths possibly more at risk. Those exposed to non-compliant parents ("cool" parents who are ok with sharing unsuitable content) or lacking strong parental involvement, likely won't benefit a great deal from any implementation.
2) Anti privacy social networks stand to gain the most from targeting ads utilizing signals from most child safety acts. They also might be able to reduce some costs from moderation if they can make it someone else's problem. I'd argue the net social impact from these social networks is likely both more normalized and strongly negative for our youths than any smut.
On the balance I'd say we are better off investing our energy in other places.
> "cool" parents who are ok with sharing unsuitable content
Or simply parents who won’t agree with the government on what is suitable for their children.
We already have parental control on all mainstream operating systems, why cannot this simply be the responsibility of the parent as are so many other things regarding what children do, watch, eat etc?
We don't have parental control on any mainstream operating system that actually works. In fact, California just removed the law that said operating systems have to have working parental control.
Because what parents have access to now is extremely ineffective unless they prevent their kids from going outside or going to school. Right now the onus is entirely on parents too keep their kids off the Internet equivalent of smoking cigarettes, and it’s a losing battle. What we’re looking for is for the liability to shift off the parent and onto the people intentionally communicating with children. Frankly the proposal above was very reasonable. If you don’t want to intentionally communicate with kids then do nothing and you have no liability.
I want to intentionally communicate with kids, because kids have always been valued members of the online communities I frequent. Right now, it is easy for social media giants to exploit children, easy for child predators to get access to abuse children, and increasingly-difficult to maintain online spaces in which children are allowed to safely exist. That is surely not what we are intending to accomplish, here.
The header (for videos and other) was mentioned in [1]. I agree that is the way to go.
Adding a header to a web server or load balancer or app server if done globally can be done in a minute or two. Maybe 5 minutes for the intern not counting QA testing.
But you are right, the inverse is easier. I like that too. That was debated in the other recent thread.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47950091
Do you need them to? Treat everything unmarked as unsafe. Websites intended for kids will mark themselves in time.
The page having a simple rating assumes there can be one mapping from content to rating for the whole world. I doubt we can even have one for North America and Europe.
Every app submitted to the App or Play store already has to do this. If parental controls are on, then users cannot download those apps.
The only hard part for the web is that a site could lie since there is no gatekeeper, but some black lists can help with bad actors.
Do the app stores have per-country rules to decide a rating?
It's a hard problem but the key is that it needs to be on the client rather than on the server, because that's what can have any information on jurisdictions, local regulations, religions, or general parental preference.
For example, it would be insane if every website and blog in the world to had to run logic to detect and prevent Elbonian males under 16 lunar years from seeing ankles except on Thursdays.
Come up with a few categories and let the browser/OS decide.
Websites by default are ‘true’ for every category, unless they specify.
Categories are, for example of some: nudity, sexual, violence, etc.
It doesn’t have to be perfect but sites will have to err on the side of caution.
We could even create an html tag <restricted type=violence> for example, and the browser can simply not render that portion of the page of the user has that type disabled.
And we could give companies a pass for best-effort categorization using tech to assess user-generated content, along with allowing users to flag their own content as “safe”
A header is probably better than a tag.
The goal should be to satisfy most reasonable governments. A neutral technical standard and an international organization to maintain the the ontology for content descriptors
That's a sorry attempt at an excuse. Companies are expected to collect ID and have related business logic that respects local laws but can't figure out how to tag their content? That's an utterly nonsensical position.
There's no reason a simple, standardized header can't be used to communicate any number of classifications simultaneously.
Edit: It occurs to me that if you oppose all age related measures then my above response isn't entirely fair to you. I still think it's an absurd objection but the comparison I made no longer applies.
My point was they shouldn’t give an age rating, but instead a list of standardized content descriptors
Well fair enough. In that case we are actually in agreement. Let the end user (or network admin) sort out what is and isn't acceptable in a given context.
What we need regulation to provide (IMO) is a reliable way of doing that.
Yes, exactly, this should be really simple as a foundation: by default the Internet is for adults. All of it. Where it's desirable for things to be available for kids, create the economic incentive and easy tools for parents to use and run on a white list, not a black list.
I'd actually go somewhat further though and ask whether it's a good idea to even do this via web pages at all. We have a great potential system for this already: DNS. Do something useful amongst all the ridiculous vanity and spam TLDs for once and set up a ".kids" gTLD, or ccTLD for that matter so that different countries can set their own regulatory standards naturally (ie, .kids.us, .kids.uk etc). Domains could also be used for some broad buckets for people who don't want to drill in, ie, .1-6.kids, .7-12.kids, .13-17.kids, or whatever is deemed appropriate, but simple age brackets that would offer some sane defaults. 1-6 could simply not allow any ads, user generated content or algorithmic feeds whatsoever for example. There are a lot of knobs to turn. And then at the registry level it can be ensured from the get-go that anyone getting a .kids domain is fully identified, located in the country in question, has valid ID, has specific credentials or is an accredited organization, or whatever other criteria makes sense.
But ultimately the point would be to create something that is built right from the ground up, and in turn that doesn't interfere with what has already been built at all. Something that can also be worked with at the gateway and thus cover every device on a LAN, and for that matter can easily be plugged into the vast number of powerful tools we have for working with that stuff. It'd be easy to put a nice UI on all this, even to make it higly automated. For example, have a setup wizard where you enter children, put in date of birth for each, and it'll spit out a password for each one. This then auto-provisions the network such that each kid has their own VLAN (password for PPSK or even wired connection) and is automatically limited to the domain groups of their age bracket, which then changes as their age changes.
Parents should be able to dig further in and get more granular with content categories, metadata for which could be required for anyone hosting a site within that domain, but I think there is the potential to make something both pretty bullet proof and pretty accessible, using existing tech stacks, and without impinging on the present internet at all including privacy and anonymity.
A .kids domain is not a useful approach.
The vast bulk of the internet is child neutral. For example my church a web site, the bakery down the road has one, the local pro sport team has one. They're not designed "for kids", but kids are welcome.
Does StackOverflow need to register a .kids domain just so children might get answers to programing questions?
If my-bakery.co.uk and my-bakery.co.au both want to be visible to 16yo there needs to be at least kids.uk and kids.au.
Does OpenSSL.org or OpenSSL.com get to be OpenSSL.kids?
Sorry but duplicating the entire neutral internet domain space with yet another tld isn't a helpful approach.
I think it really needs to be per-page.
And, if we are going to do this the “design” should be global and anticipate a range of cultures.
That’s like saying movies should have to rate every scene so a 7 year old can watch the “safe” parts of an R movie?
If a site is really mixing so much content (like Reddit) then they should really be separating their sites into different subdomains.
For every different counties rating system? What about Wikipedia?
No such mandates should take place at all.
This is correct. It is not the government's job to raise our children. The more we ask the gov't to do that we should do, the less power we actually have. Some will say this ship has sailed, well, I say it's not too late to sink it.
On the other hand, I know several "home-schooled" people [0] who literally can't even read and later married people more than twice their age or had other serious deficiencies in their life potential. The government can probably step in a little more here and there.
[0] I also know home-schooled people whose parents are far better than any teacher I've ever had and whose education and achievements reflect that obvious fact. Home-schooling itself isn't the issue, and I'd prefer that it remain possible.
> On the other hand, I know several "home-schooled" people [0] who literally can't even read and later married people more than twice their age or had other serious deficiencies in their life potential. The government can probably step in a little more here and there.
Anecdotes like this don't help the case much when government schools in a lot of places "graduate" large proportions of their pupils who are functionally illiterate and innumerate. Then you get misconduct, bullying, abuse that goes on in government schools. Who should "step in" on the government?
Home schooled people do fine, statistically.
Public education is extremely different from age checks in apps. Yes, homeschooled people are generally really dumb because humans are not born with the knowledge of the world or how to teach it. This is different from California telling Debian to ask for user ages.
You have that backward.
The home-educated typically score 15 to 25 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests.
-- https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#Academic
I read one of those papers. Only between 10% and 25% of homeschool families completed the test. And that's of families that could be located because they had previously interacted with major homeschool testing companies; there isn't a national list of homeschooled kids and many parents homeschool precisely to avoid standardized testing. Plus in many cases the parents were the proctors. This is hardly a robust finding.
Thanks for investigating deeper than I did. I don't know where else to look. However, unlike the post I originally replied to, every homeschooled adult I know is doing better than average, but anecdote vs anecdote isn't helping.
Site: National Homeschool Education Research Institute
First independent search result:
> The US-based NHERI describes itself as a leading research institute in the field of homeschooling. However, its neutrality is often questioned.
Asking NHERI to evaluate the effects of homeschooling is like asking Focus on the Family whether children do worse when raised by gay couples.
Aside from the horribly biased source, standardized testing scores are a terrible metric for judging education levels.
Earlier today there was a large thread on HN about the golden age of child rearing, from time immemorial to about two decades ago, when children started getting sent home and parents got a stern talking to from the police, just for owning a pocket knife or biking home alone.
We really can't have it both ways, that every failure of the child is blamed on the parent for lapsing in their almost totalitarian oversight, while also idealizing the idea that children must make their own mistakes and gradually growing into responsibilities and self-governance. Except having access to the Internet, apparently.
Taking a step back, this all smells like madeleines and a yearning for the good old days when everyone rode bikes and nobody owned smartphones. That's not really a productive stance on anything.
(If you would ask me, and I'm sure nobody would, I would think that there is a sort of trade-off here but with a clear answer: Make clear restrictions about buying cigarettes, alcohol, abusive content and extreme porn. But these restrictions aren't meant to be technically perfect. It's ok that some kids will learn to lift the limits and explore what is forbidden. At least then they would know that there is some reason society collectively considers these things off-limits, and that they soon will be in a mistake of their own making.)
But it seems that many parents do not bother to do anything to raise their children properly, including setting up parental controls.
Let me be very explicit so we're not dancing around the topic:
The potentially all-powerful government shouldn't know:
- what vices a person has
- what religion a person has or doesn't have
- what porn you watch
- what alcohol and drugs you buy
PERIOD.
All of these things can be exploited. To control jobs, to control finances, to extort influence, to shape ideology, etc.
The government shouldn't be able to catalog those things in a database for later misuse.
The government shouldn't be able to install friction or barriers that make it easy to cordon off and kill these things at a later time.
The "think of the kids" argument can go to straight to hell. Nobody's having children anyway.
This is a very real (not logically fallacious) slippery slope right into the pages of 1984.
It's not about kids. It's about control over society as a whole. They're going to force you to use your ID to access the internet, force you to use an approved device, and the minute you step outside of allowed behavior, you'll be punished.
Shackles and telescreens are coming, and they're using this argument to build it.
Should a government control the porn a child can walk into a shop and buy? The alcohol and drugs they can work into a shop and buy?
Are you suggesting we remove current laws making it illegal for children to purchase these things?
Nobody here disagrees. What should be the case is that sites are broadly required to flag what kind of content they serve so parents can choose to exercise their own level of desired control.
Surely parents can look at the sites and decide for themselves whether or not they are suitable.
I am certain that with even two minutes of thought you can understand why this makes zero sense.
What constitutes an all-powerful government? It seems rife for a no-true-scotsman argument.
Would it be acceptable for a private company to own this information? Perhaps sell it to others?
To me an all powerful government is one that has all the information the user just listed, because governments are by definition the most powerful force in our countries.
Private companies should also be regulated with regards to data sales of private information, yes.
I am sick of these "government bad" takes. They lack constructive suggestions, like your "sink it" nugget, they lack decent problem descriptions, as if anything after the sinking (likely private governance, aka feudalism) is immune to the ills of big-gov, and on top perpetuate reductivist arguments as if any kind of restrictions of freedom is by definition bad.
This broad rejection without good reasons is borderline sociopathic. ... and parental control is not the gov raising anyone.
I dunno, "government bad" seems like a pretty reasonable default. Governments typically have a high amount of corruption and are generally unhealthy organizations. It doesn't make sense to delegate more responsibility to an entity with such structural issues.
Friend, we have a fair amount of suggestions ( including constructive ones! ). Do you know why? Because we mostly know how to make education decent for individual students like:
- keeping class sizes small - keeping class within similar development range ( AP with AP. short bus with short bus )
None of it is a secret, but government can't (edit:or won't) make it happen. Hence regular people just doing the best they can within the system at their disposal.
I know people who will adamantly insist that keeping classes within similar development ranges is harmful and will vociferously reject any such proposal, up to and including things such as "gifted" schools and the like.
It's why some schools in (iirc) California did away with higher maths like calculus entirely.
Sadly, it seems there's nothing actually common about common wisdom.
I will admit that I never heard a serious argument from anyone that did not rely on issues not related to individual student's education. If you have any materials on those, I would love to read some of it.
Montessori advocates for mixed age classes where more advanced help teach the less advanced, as the teaching itself solidifies it in the more advanced student's mind. Not sure if it is valid. But it is something with studies and meta studies that may have been done well or poorly, not just an aesthetic choice. I think Vulcan style training pods driven by AI like khanmigo will end up being better education than the vast majority of students will ever have access to in person. Or consider it the realization of "a young lady's primer" from diamond age.
Montessori does advocate that, but mixed ages is not mixed intelligence.
And I am sick of people constantly wanting every single aspect of life regulated by the government. You guys need to understand that government isn't static and society changes. The rules you come up with today are going to get in the way in unexpected ways tomorrow. Regulations should only happen if you can demonstrate that it substantially improves things in a measurable way.
Eg "if you ban cellphones in schools then average test scores (on tests like PISA) will substantially improve". Or something else like that.
>This broad rejection without good reasons is borderline sociopathic.
It's sociopathic to not want the people in control to constantly make up new arbitrary rules? I guess we just need a few more Patriot Acts and Snoopers Charters.
"And I am sick of people constantly wanting every single aspect of life regulated by the government." We're carting that strawman out again? What folks mostly want is for private industry to collectively display something approximating business ethics and maybe self-regulate away from objectively harmful/predatory behavior. The last few decades have very clearly demonstrated that there is literally no bottom to private industry depravity unless one is literally forced in place by legislation.
Enabling government spying under the guise of "protecting children" doesn't put private industry in check one bit.
It's like saying we should install Flock cameras everywhere so that we can protect consumers from buying harmful products. Corruption and mass-violation of human rights is all that's ever going to come out of it.
If the goal is to stop predatory companies, why not do so? Oh right, because that was never the goal.
The current form of government and the last administrations have allowed this environment to exist. We don't have antitrust regulation being enforced and citizens united is still in effect.
This is only going to cause things you describe to get worse and the U.S. government is complicit in this because we have a two party system that works directly or indirectly for the establishment.
I'm not sure if you are encouraging more government intervention, but its clear this is not working. Its like going to a criminal gang and asking for security while they ransack your community and charge you for it.
That's a problem with the politicians folks have chosen to elect, not an issue with the concept of governance. And while I agree with your analysis proposing we all wait patiently for "market forces" to resolve whatever ludicrously unethical bullshit industry is up to at any given time is also clearly a non-starter. So now what?
I am categorically not a "government bad" person. There are things that only government can do to help society and it's an important institution. However government shouldn't take over things in your household. I feel for the government to do a thing it should have to demonstrate that the state has an defensible interest. Gay marriage? Gov't has no business in marriage. Gov't demanding age checks in apps or in electronics? No, gov't doesn't need that.
> like your "sink it" nugget, they lack decent problem descriptions
Let me be clearer then: The legislation has passed but it is 100% possible to repeal that law. And it should be repealed, and we need to not let up pressure on California until it is rescinded. It was a bad law that was not thought out at all and fails to solve any problems.
I'm not worries about corporate feudalism and app age checks.
I'm not sociopathic, you're just making broad assumptions.
What's really wild is 9 times out of 10 when you back a crypto-libertarian into a rhetorical corner far enough to get them to drop their pretenses what you're left with is "OMG YOU ARENT MY DAD" is, at least in their mind, a cogent political philosophy.
Your post says far more about you than libertarians. Remember, every time you give the government a power, you are creating an avenue for corruption and by design putting someone who probably isn't qualified in charge of decisions they lack the experience to make reliably. There you go, a simple argument that increasing government power has a drawback that you never consider. And that's why you post says more about you than anything. Such an extreme position is impossible to defend and anytime you try either a) the person you are debating isn't very skilled at debating or b) you are just being stubborn and ignoring facts and arguments you don't like. I suspect its B.
And every time you remove legislation you open up entire new vistas of corporate depravity and as the last 40 years have comprehensively demonstrated, "market forces" are not a viable replacement for legislation. Increasing government power is a liability only and solely when folks make a habit of electing incompetents and the corrupt. Governance as a concept is fine, what you're actually arguing for is better politicians.
A lot of us who grew up pre-social-media agree in principle.
What it fails to account for is that today's internet is qualitatively different from the pre-social-media, pre-smartphone internet. The vast majority of the internet audience, too, is qualitatively different. Incentives are misaligned for an average parent who might want to keep a tight leash on smartphone internet access for their kids, when attempting to do so will generate fierce opposition from their kids and leave them socially out of the loop.
People also wanted to smoke cigarettes but they got fierce opposition from their parents. That's what parents should do.
Maybe we should teach parents how to be parents instead of imposing draconian age checks (read: mass surveillance).
Aren't there laws against selling tobacco to minors? And advertising to them? Your analogy is supporting the opposite conclusion.
In some countries they scan you ID and likely keep it some database when you buy drugs or enter bars or clubs. In others they just look at your ID card if you don't look old enough.
The first example is bad, the second is tolerable.
But the reason most kids don't smoke is that the parents and the teachers instilled in them that it was bad. If a kid wants to smoke or drink, they can surely get an older friend or a friend of a friend to sell them the cigarettes or alcohol. Anyone can buy 20 bottles of hard liquor and 50 packs of cigarettes, sell them to a 15 year old who can then sell them to their friends. That doesn't happen often not because a surprise police raid will show up and bust the seller but because there isn't enough demand. If there is demand from the kids and the parents don't care, kids will get their hands on drugs. Maybe not 9 year olds but certainly the teens.
> But the reason most kids don't smoke is that the parents and the teachers instilled in them that it was bad.
Big honking "citation needed" there. I think it's far more likely that laws against advertising to minors, and tightening enforcement of prohibiting the sale to minors, is what did it.
On top of it all, smoking has decreased among adults too. Part of that is certainly cutting off a big chunk of the teen-to-adult smoking pipeline, but part of it is also just that adults don't think it's so cool anymore (and "going out for a smoke" is no longer a social or even professional activity), and are more aware of the health risks.
Laws like that are sensible – and, in fact, already apply to the internet, too. Age verification doesn't help with that.
Well lack of age verification definitely isn't fixing anything either so what's they play here? We all just collectively as a society just shrug like oh well, no fixing any of that?
No, we should take measures that actually address the problems that exist. Problem numero uno: the Big Tech companies are creating systems and digital environments that are hostile to everyone (of which children are a subset), compelling everyone to use them, and punishing those who attempt to get away. We cannot fix that by merely dictating terms, especially if those terms are such that only the Big Tech companies themselves could possibly know enough to enforce the terms.
Ok we might be in violent agreement here but so far I've yet to see anyone put forth anything like a serious plan to dismantle Big Tech, which clearly indicates that "triage legislation" half measures are the only thing currently on the table. I see little sense in letting perfect be the enemy of good.
This seems like a poor example, because we _also_ made it illegal for minors to buy (and smoke?) cigarettes.
I agree with you, as a longtime free speech believe.
but... I would also like to keep my kids from seeing the very worst of the internet before they're ready to handle it. I tried using a PiHole but Firefox DNS-over-HTTPS nullifies that now. It's not realistic for me to be watching over their shoulders 24/7; what can I do to keep them away from stuff 99% of people agree isn't for children to see, without something like this?
Unbound DNS if compiled with --with-libnghttp2 can listen for DoH and your Unbound/Pihole can forward to any destination you desire. This is what it looks like on my firewall:
Null routing the open DoH resolvers is just having a startup script that reads a list of all their IP addresses and People will argue that DoH can run on anything which is true but all the major resolvers will always use dedicated IP addresses as to not risk blocking CDN end points.If the childs account is not able to gain admin privs then their ability to change settings can be disabled.
99% of people have no idea what this means, but they do understand voting.
Yup I was just replying to the .001% that was discussing it. Please do reach out to your congress people.
OK but we're talking about a general social problem (parents understandably don't want their kids corupte dby adult stuff, and some adult services vendors are unscrupulous but the internet makes it easy for them to hide.
I personally think this current version of the legislation is a good compromise. Tech workarounds are fine for the few of us that understand the relevant technology (though I have never bothered to compile DNS in my life and have no plans to do so in the future), but they are simply not practical for most people. Every time I hear someone suggesting this sort of thing I find myself tempted to say 'why worry about legislation? If you don't like what it mandates you can just write your own operating system.'
Of course this would not be helpful because writing your own OS is extremely hard beyond classroom/toy examples. And likewise, tech workarounds and even parental controls are hard for most consumers - partly by design. I have an xbox console and have been trying to figure out why it keeps freezing on certain apps for months now. I suspect a telemetry problem but it's just a guess, there isn't really any way to look at logs so it's a trial and error process because most consumer hardware/application vendors want their products to be black boxes.
> I personally think this current version of the legislation is a good compromise.
I don't think it is a good compromise. It seems to cover the wrong use cases.
My use cases have nothing to do with children on any level. Why would I want to submit to government restrictions? That makes zero sense.
It's as if the right-to-repair-movement would suddenly be undermined by a lobbyist advocating how restrictions are great. Or Jackie Chan suddenly praising the sinomarxist mono-party.
I'm sure than intelligent person like yourself understands that a lot of voters have kids and prioritize feeling that their kids are safe, even if those feelings are not always grounded in rationality. Most people shy away from complexity.
Yes, but equally so, some intelligent voters (who might've moved out of CA by now, as moving might be the best way to solve that disconnect) might also believe that we should be living in a Republic (and the government should not impose majority-favoured restrictions to the detriment of minority) rather than unrestricted Democracy. .
That's an interesting problem. Even if you have full control over your children's devices they can still simply toggle the DoH feature back on unless you do complicated enterprise style device management things.
However DoH isn't obfuscated and in order to operate the list of resolvers that firefox uses must be published somewhere. It follows that you should be able to filter the major DoH providers at your gateway.
Well, you can't.
Like no past generation could stop their kids.
> no past generation could stop their kids
Past generations absolutely protected their kids from cigarettes and alcohol. A gate doesn’t have to be 100% effective to have net benefits.
I'm not saying parents shouldn't try.
But like your examples, it's not guaranteed to work.
Install a DNS filter. Firefox circumvented that? Smart kid :)
Censorship circumvention might be a good skill to have in the near future.
Well in the past there were laws banning the selling of cigarettes and alcohol to minors. Selling alcohol to a minor can cause you to lose your liquor license. With much of the online content being free and not involving a physical product it has become significantly harder for a parent to protect their children.
If one kid is able to bypass the system it means it's zero percent effective. Same thing with alcohol, and cigarettes. Especially if it means I have to show my ID to buy those things.
It feels more complicated.
Some kids getting access to booze here and there with planning and coordination is different from kids walking into a liquor store or bar whenever they want.
It's literally all or nothing[1]. Either measures are 100 percent effective or they are completely broken and should not exist.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)
Shit thanks for pointing that out. My door lock isn't 100% effective at stopping thieves, so I guess I can get rid of that annoying thing. Will be nice to never worry about being locked out again!
are you… are you /s-ing right now? it’s unclear to me whether you’re being satirical/sarcastic or not and i want to check before i point out a thing.
> If one kid is able to bypass the system it means it's zero percent effective
No. Like, obviously no. That’s not how effectiveness is ever measured.
Guess we should get rid of murder and rape laws, right?
Just like no past generation had so much information so readily available. One quick quip can always be rebutted by another quick quip, but it doesn't really move the conversation along in any meaningful manner.
Support getting rid of Citizens United and support your representatives to support enforcing antitrust.
This is the main problem that needs to be addressed. Everything else is just a byproduct of it. If you support the by product of what was created by conditions that are not being address, you only make the problem worse.
You but them smartphones, tables, laptops, and internet access and then complain there is too much access?
Yeah, why should it not be desireble to give them access to the good properties of such devices and the internet?
What are the good properties that justify giving kids smart phones?
If your kids are in the smart 1% who can bypass your authority, they will. Be proud. For the rest, we don't need a police atate
You could block the default DoH services for Firefox, I reckon.
You describe a use case for you. That's fine.
Here we talk about use cases for EVERYONE. I don't see how your use case is fine for me, because I personally do not agree with it on any level at all whatsoever. You believe in restriction. I don't. There is no common ground here.
> It's not realistic for me to be watching over their shoulders 24/7
Is this your job? At which age will you stop monitoring them?
> what can I do to keep them away from stuff 99% of people agree isn't for children to see
99%? Where do you get those numbers from?
Besides, what stuff anyway? Even then the issue isn't about your kids. It is about laws for EVERYONE.
> what can I do to keep them away from stuff 99% of people agree isn't for children to see, without something like this?
Nothing. VPNs exist (including free ones), some of classmates will have unlocked devices, etc.
Next question?
Teens for sure bypass all restrictions. Teens are young adults. My suggestions are for small children. Once a small child evolves and adapts to their surroundings, they too will one day bypass things. Reward them when they do this, it means they're smart and you did a good job.
block all VPNs?
I agree fundamentally and ideologically but we are past that point. The toothpaste is already out of the tube as they say. There will be restrictions so all I can do is suggest more sensible restrictions that keep the control on the client side and do not share data. Any data shared can and will be abused, leaked, sold, stolen without consequence.
We are not past the point at all. Any democracy can ultimately decide on laws and regulation. Why would you wish to insinuate otherwise here? California could easily decide to not implement such laws, for instance.
That data leaks out is always a given. So, gather less data. Ideally none. But this is not a discussion about data. This is a discussion as to what state actors think they are allowed to do. It is an attack on private life of people. See the combined strike against VPNs.
Please remember that there are CA state policies that the voters voted to overturn (in a referendum) and the current CA state government refuses to do so. California voters decided. The California government un-democratically decided to ignore the voters against their own laws they themselves passed.
PS I'm referring to bail reform here.
PPS Just trying to frame what the CA government thinks its allowed to do which is apparently anything it wants.
We are not past the point at all.
I can only hope you are correct.
I heard that lie about "sensible restrictions" so many times, now I am waiting for "sensible violence", "sensible beating to death" and so on. It is a false argument that "there will be restrictions so all I can do is suggest more sensible restrictions", what you can do is recognize that "no restrictions is an option".
It is like negotiating with a terrorist that wants to kill you and this is his starting position and then he wants to agree on some compromise, like seriously beating you. There is no negotiation.
> now I am waiting for "sensible violence"
That exists and is called "self defense", no?
No harm in pushing for no restrictions at all. I support this idea.
> toothpaste out of the tube
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2521/
No we aren't. Also you can put toothpaste in tubes or it wouldn't be in there. Hope that helps!
> No such mandates should take place at all
How do you propose doing age restrictions for social media?
These are broadly popular. (And the evidence supports them.) They are happening. So the question is how to do it best. The project for reversing the consensus isn’t worthless. But it’s a long-term project that will have to bear fruit after these restrictions go into effect, if ever.
only parents can decide for their own children, so you can do whatever you want for your own children
> only parents can decide for their own children
Voters are collectively deciding for all of our children. And there are absolutely group dynamics that require cooperation. It’s why rich communities ban phones in classrooms while in poor communities, the one family that tries doing it alone is probably going to be less successful.
Again, I’m not saying you’re fundamentally wrong. Just that this debate has been had and the polling is massively in favor of bans for under-14 year olds and strongly in favor for under-18s. (And to the degree I’ve connected with electeds, the folks calling in and writing were almost 100% one way. The civically-engaged electorate is practically at consensus.)
we are not collectivist/communist country to have a "muh gubernment" rule and dictate over every little thing.
I want government bureacrats, empowered by the stupid median voter, to be as far away as possible from things that I (and any other parent) are perfectly capable of solving by ourselves.
I want more freedom
Lolberts often underestimate the power and utility of collective action.
lolberts know the IQ of a median voter and how federal big government abuses its power without delivering on what was promised
> Lolberts
Huh?
Are you also against age limits for the purchase of alcohol, cigarettes, pornography etc?
Filed with nobody should be bad and essential services should be free
How does this work for mixed-content sites? Like say a minor visits a video sharing or social media site and the default feed/recommendations list includes stuff that should be age-restricted, but is mostly stuff that shouldn't be.
The entire site shouldn't be blocked; the browser needs a way to tell the website "my parental controls are enabled and I need to you to filter out age-restricted content".
Alternatively, the RTA header/meta could include a parameter/attribute for an "alternate URL" to load when parental controls are enabled. This could be useful to allow sites to present a custom error-type response, but could also be used to automatically redirect the user to similar, but age-appropriate, content.
Anyway, this all ignores the fact that "protect the children" isn't really the goal here: it's to slowly eat away at our ability to be anonymous (even read-only anonymous) on the internet. Age verification is just a watered-down way of saying they require positive identification, and eventually our hardware will have to cryptographically attest we are who we say we are. I really hope this isn't inevitable, but it's starting to feel that way.
You make the mistake of solving the stated problem, and not the actual problem. This was never about children, or a solution like what you describe would be trivial.
Has this idea been discussed when drafting legislation? I mean are they aware of it but dismissed it for any reason or no stated reasons?
I've emailed politicians as have others but only received boilerplate thankyou's. I suspect the real reason is kick-backs but they will never admit it.
No harm in people reaching out to their politicians state and federal. The more people that bring it up the better. Let them know your childrens data will not be shared and when the data is leaked you will hold the politicians accountable.
Yep, they get funding from companies like meta and their insiders
Exactly. More laws about internet services = less new competitors coming into the market, because the barriers to entry are too high.
Well, if the concern is they might miss out on revenue from a small child accessing their site and they are not a child specific site then perhaps they should be pushed out of the market one way or another.
I largely agree, but the RTA header doesn't seem to be good enough for most websites to use. When a website wants to block browsers with parental controls on, but it isn't porn and it shouldn't be blocked by SafeSearch, what do they do?
https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/140733/how-to...
what do they do?
They stop trying to put everything in a different category and treat RTA as the person under the age of consent must get approval from their parent or legal guardian. Keep it simple.
That's too simple to get much adoption. It's unreasonable to expect websites to drop out of Google search.
> It's unreasonable to expect websites to drop out of Google search.
Google's doing that for them though.
Google and others can adapt. RTA header? Added to potential adult or user-contributed category.
I imagine Google wants to distinguish between websites that want to be blocked by SafeSearch, versus websites that want to be blocked when parental controls are on? There's no reason to leave that ambiguous. Plenty of adults have SafeSearch on.
Defining a new header isn't hard; the hard part is getting consensus and adoption.
For what it's worth this header has been around for a long time. It's predecessor (PICS ICRA) was too complicated and started using topics. After a while they added so many topics that even being an abbreviated header it was still massive and confusing. There were websites that people could select all the topics and what not but even then the adoption was low due to complexity and topics constantly changing on sites.
Are today's videos beheading's without blood, with blood, with or without anguish, with nudity, without nudity, etc... After a while it gets out of hand.
It turned out the internet was too dynamic so the RTA header was created to just say "adult".
Right, no news sites for kids.
There are news sites tailored for kids, like BBC Newsround (https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround)
Right, no news sites for kids.
Correct. Until parent or guardian puts in password next to the text that says "Approve this site, forever."
You gave me an idea. Maybe there could be categories similar in concept to those that exist in corporate firewalls today that say things like:
- News Category (Known to be SFW)
- News Category (That may be NSFW)
- Child friendly sites
- Social media sites
... and so on.
This could be crowd sourced, ideally in a way that can not be gamed. The masses could flag/report false claims. That, or just keep it simple. ad-hoc input of permitted sites by parent.
What is [N]SFW under your definition? I don't think anybody has a problem with children seeing an adult heterosexual couple kissing, but what about a teenage couple? A homosexual couple? A mixed-race couple? A couple with a 40 year age gap? Audible moaning? Groping under clothes? Implied but not explicit hands touching genitals? Dripping saliva and face licking?
The problem with defining categories is that artists will do their best to defy categorization. That has been the nature of art for as long as humans have been making art.
What is [N]SFW under your definition?
I do not have a proposal for that. I'm only covering the issue of sharing any personal attributes of a child or anyone with any corporations as they have proven time and time again they can not be trusted with it. If anything they have proven beyond any shadow of doubt they can not be trusted with anything.
I will leave the NSFW definitions to yourself and others. Since the W stands for Work I guess company management and HR get some say in it too. I don't know where they get their standards from.
Ages ago I worked for a company that hosted porn and their standards were uniquely liberal.
This is a terrible idea and your proposed society is terrible. It doesn’t matter if it’s safe for work; you asked to identify sites with content that can change. Either the parent has seen and approved the content or not.
This is a terrible idea and your proposed society is terrible.
I think I know what you meant and sure we can keep it simple. Site is approved by a parent or it isn't.
> The only device mandates that should be taking place is for the default installations of web clients should be checking to see if parental controls are enabled. This only impacts the major browsers. An intern at each browser company could add this check in minutes. If they are enabled and the person logged in is on a regular account (not admin or power user of sorts) then the base installation of web clients must check for an RTA header [1]. If present, prompt for a override password and also give the option for the admin to approve-list the domain at that time. That's it. Not perfect, nothing is or will be.
It's useful to contrast this with the various device-based mandates that have been created in order to get a sense of what legislators seem to be trying to do. With that in mind, a few points:
* What you are proposing allows parents to opt in via parental controls, but age assurance mandates (both device-side and server-side) tend to require positive action to enter unrestricted modes. In some cases (CA AB 1043, for instance), this is just a matter of entering your age. In others, you actually need to demonstrate your age via some technical mechanism.
* While many age assurance mandates focus on adult content, which is primarily consumed via the Web, others (e.g., Australia's Social Media Minimum Age) focus on social networking, which is primarily consumed via apps, so anything that is Web only will not be effective.
* Site-level granularity isn't really fine enough in some cases. For example, the New York SAFE for Kids act prohibits certain behaviors such as algorithmic recommendations when a user is a minor, but doesn't require blocking minor usage entirely. It's potentially possible to implement this with something like RTA, but it would have to at minimum be at much finer granularity.
Section VI of https://kgi.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Age_As... goes into quite a bit more detail about various architectures (disclaimer, I'm an author).
None of this is an endorsement of age assurance techniques; I'm just trying to help flesh out the situation.
> All legislation regarding age verification must revolve around this otherwise people must reject it as an abusive form of tracking and privacy invasion.
It's a bit late for that, given that around half of US states already have some kind of age assurance mandate.
It's a bit late for that, given that around half of US states already have some kind of age assurance mandate.
Perhaps late to solve this globally but parents can still install parental control software if they so desire and can still intervene locally to prevent sharing data with 3rd parties. At worst this means small children might not get to visit social media and other assorted sites and I am fine with that. I think a number of parents would be fine with that as well.
Sites can voluntarily label as some do. It just means that parental controls would have to default to blocking everything until approved and while sub-optimal maybe that's what people will have to do in order to avoid the evil pattern of sharing data with all the websites that will ultimately leak, or "leak", be sold, stolen, etc... Good parents will not participate in the evil patterns of sharing their children's personally identifiable information.
When the PII of children is ultimately shared with evil people the children once adults will resent their parents for not protecting them.
- To all parents here, your children have no idea what risks are out there including devious companies that want their data. They will one day be adults if all goes well. Protect your children as corporations and governments will not. They will thank you when they find out all their friends data was shared, leaked or otherwise abused forever.
I'm not following you here.
Certainly parents can install parental control software, but what does this have to do with children's PII being shared with sites?
Just so we're on the same page, the way AB1043 works is that the OS determines the user's age and then shares the age bracket with apps. No PII is shared with sites (this is not to say that the age isn't sensitive, but it's not PII as usually regarded). Is your concern here that sites get access to children's information because children visit certain sites regardless of legislation? That's a real thing, but it seems mostly orthogonal to age assurance.
Certainly parents can install parental control software, but what does this have to do with children's PII being shared with sites?
The parent can block or just never approve all the sites that require PII.
but it's not PII as usually regarded
We will never agree here. All the companies I worked for financial considered any attribute of the person to be PII, even their IP address. We were audited very strictly on this. If a users age was disclosed to a third party without their written consent that was a contract violation and came with severe monetary penalties. Parents should expect this to be the minimum standard. It's their children, not the corporation or governments children.
Thanks for your explanation. I understand what you're talking about, but this all just seems to be entirely orthogonal to age assurance mandates, which are largely about controlling which content and experiences minors engage with, in many cases regardless of what parents want.
Again, this isn't an endorsement of these mandates; I'm just saying that what you're proposing here doesn't address the objectives that policymakers who are in favor of these mandates are trying to achieve.
doesn't address the objectives that policymakers who are in favor of these mandates are trying to achieve.
Oh trust me, I get it. They and I will never align. I know I am beyond beating the dead horse. It's gone from bone dust to micronized dust to sub-atomic particles to sub-quantum particles at this point. That poor horse will never be forgotten. Perhaps it is an illness on my part but I will find a way to bring this up every time until the year 2150 after which point this will be the least of anyone's concerns.
> If they are enabled and the person logged in is on a regular account (not admin or power user of sorts) then the base installation of web clients must check for an RTA header [1].
Your cite is an earlier post of yours which says
> The one and only method I will participate in is server operators setting a RTA header [1]
and that cites a still earlier post of yours
> I stand by my repeated statements of how this could have been solved simply using an RTA header [1]
which finally actually cites¹ something that explains what the heck on RTA header is.
It would be quite a bit more reader friendly to cite https://www.rtalabel.org/page.php rather than make the reader traverse a linked list of comments to get there.
¹https://www.rtalabel.org/page.php
A) Aren't you targeting a completely different problem than this law? It's my understanding that this law targets the collection of the age from the user. What the user agent does with that signal is a different problem, and seems to already be solved, except for the definition of "actual knowledge" which they are trying to establish here.
B) How would your RTA header intersect with content rating in different jurisdictions? What if the content is illegal for children in Turkey but legal for children in Kentucky?
For topic (A) I am suggesting to negate this behavior all together. No more sharing personal data. That evil-pattern must be stopped.
For topic (B) companies can set or not set the header based on GeoIP. Not perfect but GeoIP is already used in load balancers, web servers and applications.
For (A) we have nothing to talk about. I think we fundamentally disagree about how society functions, and we aren't going to knock that out over hackernews.
For (B), your proposal requires the website have a database over current rules in every country they would be accessible from. Would a website then, in your opinion, be responsible for the accuracy of this database? We have to presuppose an official GeoIP source that would then be legally binding and under democratic control, but given such a database, would a website serving a wrong header to an IP associated with a specific country then be committing a crime in that country? What would the punishment be?
For (A) I guess you are right, we won't agree. I do like your username however.
For (B) this is already a thing. Porn sites and already doing this. Instead of blocking a region I am proposing to stop blocking and instead the law permit them to just add a header. The only people I can imagine apposing this are commercial VPN providers.
> Porn sites and already doing this.
I think a better example might be places like polymarket (not allowed to operate in us) or usatoday (serves an EU only version with no cookies). The technical limitations on those systems are both GeoIP as far as I'm aware, and that seem sufficient for regulators.
What I find more interesting is that what you want is within the scope of this law. It's only required that the operating system takes in your age from an admin, from there the application (user agent/webbrowser) is supposed to handle the blocking, which it could do with a header as you suggest.
I will note that you are going to find a lot of libertarians that would oppose banning GeoIP circumvention.
Are small children losing money on gambling sites already? If so I have not been paying attention. That really needs to be reigned in as they are likely using their parents credit cards without their permission. We need to break that habit before they reach the age of consent and that becomes a punishable crime. Our prison system already has too many young people. That's an awful way to start.
> An intern at each browser company could add this check in minutes.
An intern could also just delete the product which would also "solve" this "issue". The fact that it's easy or cheap is not significant to the problem at hand.
> should be doing is setting an RTA header
Many sites will just set the header by default. Now you've created a problem.
> then progressively fine them into oblivion.
This does nothing. See: Ofcom vs 4chan.
> device mandates
Mandate that the device provide an API for child protection software. Then it's up to individual parents to decide to install that software or not. Then we also get competition in this market rather than relying on whatever solution an intern cooked up one day.
On the topic of 4chan [1]
Many sites will just set the header by default. Now you've created a problem.
I am not seeing a problem. Kids need not access those sites unless the parent or legal guardian approves it. Sites meant for children would not be adding the header.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47953096
> Sites meant for children would not be adding the header.
Is Wikipedia "meant for children?" Should they be fully denied access to it? Should Wikimedia be fined if they make a mistake? If they get fined often enough do you think they'll just turn the header on everywhere in order to avoid risk?
Replace Wikipedia with any other mixed content site you prefer.
Child specific sites would not add the header. Anyone else could. I add it to my hobby sites. Some porn sites already add it to their sites [1]. Shodan can't reach my sites. I do not want small children on my blogs.
Add it to any site not specifically meant for children, that is totally fine.
[1] - https://www.shodan.io/search?query=RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-R... [ Follow Links At Your Own Peril ]
I must be stupid. Reword this so it makes sense to me. I can't even parse it.
- Site adds a header if they may potentially have adult content.
- Browser detects header. Prompts for local password to access site.
- Child does not know password, picks a different site or begs parent for access.
- This is now between small child and parent. No third parties, no tracking, no telling website the users age, no local or remote API's sharing data.
- At some point if all goes well the child will be an adult and will thank their parent for looking out for them when all their friends data was sold and abused.
Absolutely trivial and totally comprehensive solution, enabling adult content blocking at the account level, device level, network level, and the ISP level. Could even be expanded to any sort of content blocking, if you want to allow households to restrict access to vaccine critique or criticism of the king without violating the First Amendment or rooting everyone's devices.
The problem is that the point is to root everyone's devices. Anyone explaining how easy this is would be pushed out of the conversation as fast as if they were advocating for single-payer healthcare.
edit: I've been advocating the nearly identical but opposite solution - restricted access sites shouldn't respond to requests that lack an appropriate age/content restriction header. If they do, jail them.
They're literally going to have to do this anyway. Rooting people's devices to force them to lie about their age when they install their operating system is an absolutely fake pretendy solution; the only way it works is if you have to verify your age with some government agency when you install an operating system, in order to make that OS age official. The point is the identification.
Imagine having to police the OS installations at everyone's home. It's dangerous enough to serve warrants to known felons at known locations. I would not want to be the paramilitary officer going door to door having to be ready to flashbang the family or worse. I don't know if there are even words to describe the PTSD that all the enforcers and families would have. Someone in North Korea probably has the words to describe this.
No. That requires information disclosure to a third party. The point is enabling device admins better control over local device behavior. We're trying to keep conscientious parents able to do their thing. Not further enable the ability to manage the populace with official registries. If a kid can figure out how to install their own OS without their parent's help, odds are the kid is with it enough to start dipping their toes in the deep end. Or at least until they out themselves in front of their parents. In that case though it's a home problem, not a rest of the Internet problem.
It's still a stupid unconstitutional law, but I see what the aim is, even without strawmanning it.
Thats crazy talk, how are we gonna build a database of computers tied to physical identification of users by which we can monitor, control, and monetize… you’re saying parents should be responsible for their children? How is the state going to be able to exert more control if it doesn’t have ubiquitous surveillance of it’s population!? /s
As usual 95+% of people commenting have no idea what is actually in the California law, and so are commenting about things that have nothing to do with it.
Different states, countries, and multi-country organizations that have legislated in this area or are working on legislating in this area have went with many different approaches. These differ in their scope, how age is verified (or even if age is actually verified), what documentation is required (or even if documentation is required), whether they apply to the web or to apps or to both, whether they make anonymous use harder or not, how much if any sensitive information they disclose to the apps/sites that need to check age, whether they could allow government to track your usage, and in other ways.
Most ridiculous are the comments that after saying how bad it is (clearly talking about things not in the California law) then say how it should work and describe something close to the California law.
It's not out of the ordinary for folks on HN to discuss the general subject of a topic and not the exact contents of TFA. The article tends to just be a catalyst for discussions.
It is kinda silly to read comments that do what you mention at the end (have a seemingly novel idea to fix the issue at hand and their solution is the one from TFA). That's just embarrassing.
But I feel like the rest of the discussions are fair game.
Who is actually writing this very concerning California Internet legislation, which will ultimately affect the entire nation and world?
Did someone write California Internet legislation without consulting any California Internet companies?
Did some California Internet companies write California Internet legislation?
Did some other party write California Internet legislation?
Meta alone spent 2 billion dollars lobbying for this worldwide, and it was a massive success, it's passing everywhere unanimously.
Citation for this claim? Searching lands on this page without any citations and seems AI generated slop:
https://captaincompliance.com/education/meta-is-spending-2-b...
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...
The link doesn't show what you think it shows.
If I'm reading that right this covers all of Meta's state lobbying spending which is $45M + $25M federally and it's not all directly related to this age gating stuff, but general shaping anti-child exploitation policy?
> On every social media regulation bill in Colorado, Meta takes an "Amending" position, actively fighting changes. Across 117 lobbying records on 22 bills:
> Bills regulating social media: Meta position is "Amending" (fighting) > The one bill putting the burden on OS providers: Meta position is "Monitoring" (watching)
> Meta fights bills that regulate Meta. Meta watches bills that regulate everyone else.
So their lobbyist choosing not to fight against the OS age gating is the big reveal.
There was an AI generated slop report posted to Reddit that went viral. It even got some news coverage before anyone stopped to read the files and discover that it was gibberish.
I still get downvoted for pointing it out and trying to ground the conversation in facts. As you noticed the story continues to thrive on bad news sites and social media.
> I still get downvoted for pointing it out and trying to ground the conversation in facts.
That seems right for current-day HN lol. I got downvoted for pointing out obvious inaccuracies in another comment.
Meta has not spent $2 billion lobbying for this or on lobbying altogether.
It’s amazing how that one AI slop project that made this claim got so many people to believe this number.
Spreading this disproven AI slop around isn’t helping. It just makes opposition look like uninformed conspiracy theorists who can’t fact check anything.
give source
If you go take a read through the CA bill text that "became law", you'll quickly realize that whomever did write it must live in a very narrow bubble where the only "computers" that exist in the world are tablet style cell phones, the only OS'es that exist in the world are Android and iOS, and the only way anyone installs any software on the only computers that exist is via an "app store".
Meanwhile, while the overall writing clearly indicates the author has a very narrow view of "computers", the definitions of the terms is so broad that every computer, even the tiny embedded CPU in your microwave oven, might just need to ask your age before it allows you to do anything.
> every computer, even the tiny embedded CPU in your microwave oven, might just need to ask your age before it allows you to do anything.
Why do I keep seeing this bullshit exaggeration? It doesn't help anything to make such ridiculous statements. Nobody's microwave oven has an app store.
> Nobody's microwave oven has an app store.
Meanwhile, Samsung refrigerators can have an app store.
The bill was written by Buffy Wicks, who represents me in the State Assembly, who is very good on housing, transportation, and climate, and who should absolutely stay in her lane and not try to legislate platform APIs.
No, no, and absolutely.
The bill is written 'do good, stop bad stuff by establishing a committee or group to make sure fund good stuff, bad stuff doesn't happen' then the law passes and lobbyists write the details that fund the programs that tax the people that generate the income for companies that donate to the politicians that sell their votes to the lobbyists and interest groups.
California politicians start with the end goal "maintain power, secure revolt, obtain capital, deny failure".
It goes beyond lying to your face. They will be convincingly genuine, heartfelt, while finding a way to extract as much as possible for themselves, by extension their party, by extension the 'government' and do absolutely anything to keep the illusion that you have a choice, a vote, and a voice.
I lived here my whole life. These politicians are evil. Lie, cheat, and steal - deny if caught, punish if provoked.
All this because public institutions have lost the will or capacity to regulate the companies. So they switch to burdening the consumers.
This is regulation from a public institution. Regardless of how such a resolution is passed, it will impact the consumers.
It’s regulation on consumers, not companies
Banning or limiting addictive features like algorithmic feeds would be regulating the companies.
Lost the will? How about paid to look the other way?
Another way to say it is that capital is operating as it always has: in its own interest.
A cynical person might suspect that the reason they are doing this is so that Linux developers don't have standing to challenge the law on 1st amendment grounds...
Nah, you're not cynical enough.
This is the classic "what we're trying to do is bullshit on a fundamental level so we're gonna just exempt random things until it becomes a niche issue and we can just do what we want and from there we'll just close all those exceptions over time" move.
Give it 5yr and you'll have idiots in the comments talking about how the "linux loophole" was a mistake and should be closed.
Source: history
They're finally applying their 2A strategy to the 1A.
That’s exactly what it is. It removes standing, and that is a major flaw in our legal system. We need significant changes to defend constitutional rights properly.
Remember when women kept suing for the right to get an abortion and the courts kept just waiting out the pregnancy? Something something sixth amendment...
LEarn to take a win as a win. People who are unable to look at anything without seeing themselves being scammed are clinically paranoid.
It is an admission from the writers that this law is unrelated to safety and people should very loudly and frequently point that out.
If OSes that don't verify the age of their users are a genuinely unsafe for children, why should they be allowed just because they are open source? That doesn't seem to mitigate dangers associated with age in any away I can identify.
I think it just means that people using those OS simply won’t be able to access adult content.
Have you considered that the writers typically have legislative but not technical skills and are just trying to placate upset voters, without really understanding what the optimal solution could be? Reading this and other threads you can see therea re plenty of highly technical people who struggle to articulate what kind of policy they want or what kind of parental controls they want to set up themselves?
It's kind of a hard problem and legislators are inclined picking the lowest hanging fruit. Their primary concern is to not be smeared as child predators by their political opponents at the next election, eg "jwitthuhn voted to give gambling websites, pronographers, and pedophiles easy access to YOUR children - s/he OPPOSED age verification laws on internet sleaze!! Who's jwitthuhn really working for - you, or the people who want to exploit your kids?!!"
One can point out that such electoral pitches are dishonest bullshit until one is blue in the face, but the fact is they work on a lot of voters because most of them are not smart and don't have the energy or inclination to research every issue. And it is true that there are a lot of hustlers on the internet who are willing to either passively or actively exploit kids, and the anonymity, non-locality, and technical complexity of the internet makes that relatively easy to do and hard to prosecute. Legislators offer simplistic solutions because that's what a most of the public wants, and people often make their voting decisions based on emotional factors rather than cold rationality.
You don't need mustache-twirling villains saying 'let's impose burdensome techn regulations that perpetuate oligopolies and allow me to make another trillion dollars, a few million of which I'll send your way, mwhahahaha' to get shitty legislation (which is not to say they don't exist). It will emerge naturally by default if other conditions are right.
"One can point out that such electoral pitches are dishonest bullshit until one is blue in the face"
This is what I intend to do. To just let lawmakers get away with passing bullshit because "of course they will" is a defeatist attitude that I don't advocate.
That is why it is so important to be loud about this incredibly obvious disingenuous behavior. Make sure everyone knows the people advocating this do not care one bit about children's safety.
Democracy, like the free market, is viable only for informed participants. But once a certain large mass of participants are no longer informed - willfully or not - the system fails for all participants.
A bad law that only affects other people might be a win for me, but it's still a loss for society
There is so much conspiratorial nonsense in these threads…
Not just Linux. More specifically: “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.
I read the title and thought "BSD folk must be in shambles". Glad it is not as shortsighted as I originally thought.
Yes, I wonder what false positives and false negatives will result from that definition. I suppose Microsoft permits corporate licensees to copy (to all their PCs and servers), redistribute (internally), and modify (by corporate software developers and also by sysadmins using group policy) the software.
Maybe it should say, the software 'code' - requiring open source code - and to do it all 'for free'.
Linux will be exempt for now. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them try to slip it through later. Legislators in California have learned over the years, and have carved out exemptions in bills such as gun control bills to get it passed, and later classified their exemption as a "loophole" to be closed.
>> SteamOS could still be affected
Steam itself does age verification, which when you first boot a steamdesk, afaik it forces you to log into steam before you can do much of anything without some initial hackery. That said, once in there's nothing stopping them from launching into desktop mode, launching firefox, and watching pr0n that way.
Sadly the solution is still for parents to do real parenting, but that's like saying stupid people shouldn't breed.
If it gets horny teenagers into free software, that's a good thing, I guess :)
I assumed it just means that you wouldn’t be able to access adult material at all on those os.
Okay, let's flip it: why would Apple, Microsoft, etc.. agree with such a law? What would the trickle down be for browser makers and website creators?
It's a classic case of regulatory capture. Only the biggest players can get away with fully implementing age verification — if Microsoft requires age verification to use its OS, most people will oblige. If HN starts doing that most people will probably just log off forever.
What is maddening is how often people think such laws are about limiting the influence of "big tech." Big tech isn't going anywhere because of these laws, you are.
Hypothetically, preemptive market recapture? This could theoretically make foss OSs non-kosher for any suitably large market (websites, games, chat platforms, etc), and serve to force foss OSs into a niche where theyre technically capable of being personal desktop software, but practically unusable because of lockout.
Doesn't Apple already ask you for your age when you set up a new device? And I think Microsoft requires you to be 18 on your admin account.
This is part of a large movement to end personal computing as we know it, and give all control over our digital lives to the mega corporations. It is already impossible to use some national ID or banking apps on non-Apple and non-Google phones. (say GrapheneOS), giving them an immense edge in the market, and they're using that domination to add more restrictions like installing non-play store apps on Android. This goes bit by bit, try to add a restriction, go back enough to quiet the backlash, try again. This new law is a foot in the door to achieve the same restrictions on PCs. PCs are the last open computing platform and bastions of personal digital freedom and thus they must be destroyed by capitalists and governments. Once the technical means have been put in place to restrict access to some services, the system can be hardened : impose that the age checks can't be tampered with by using a TPU module, impose a link to the individual's identity so that all online activity can be traced to anyone. Pretenses are easy to find : protect children, block sex offenders from accessing dating sites, and so on. At this point I'm pretty convinced we're geared towards a global totalitarian regime, and there's a lot of evidence.
As a dad of two younger kids (7 and 10), I have been incredibly frustrated with the way age restrictions are handled across various services.
Really, my main complaint comes down to: I completely disagree with what these services choose to restrict for kids and what they allow.
They block my kids from doing things I have no problem with them doing and they allow things I would never want my kids to do in 1000 years. It is incredibly frustrating.
Often times, there is literally no way for me to bypass some stupid restriction they put on my kids, so the only way I can get it to work is to help my kids lie about their age… and at that point, I lose the ability to actually block things I care about.
These laws are just going to make it worse. I don’t want someone else choosing how I control what my kids do. Give me tools to control it myself, and you can choose some presets for parents to use, but don’t force me to use your definition of age appropriate.
> I don’t want someone else choosing how I control what my kids do. Give me tools to control it myself
I agree. Parental controls have been the norm for thirty years. The adult who owns the device should have control over it, not Microsoft or California.
What tools would you want?
A pure whitelist mode, especially for video apps. Netflix, Disney, etc don't provide this because they want to push their new shows on your kids. YouTube does provide a whitelist mode, which I appreciate. But it's hard to find, poorly implemented, and blocks a lot of great content from being whitelisted. It's very frustrating to come across a great educational YouTube video and have big nanny Google block you from sharing it with your kids.
Honestly, I don’t have a perfect answer. It really depends on what the service is.
My main thing is I want to be able to opt in or out of various filters. I don’t mind if my kids want to listen to music that has swear words, but I don’t want them watching videos where they give horribly sexist pickup artist advice.
This isn’t just about what I feel is age appropriate, either. It is also about what I know about my kids.
My 10 year old hates scary things, and she gets completely freaked out when they show scary movie previews. I would like to be able to block those for her. On the other hand, my 7 year old is obsessed with scary things and I don’t mind if he plays zombie video games.
> My 10 year old hates scary things, and she gets completely freaked out when they show scary movie previews. I would like to be able to block those for her.
The difference between this and the usual "parental control" mechanisms is that what you're describing here is something the child wants to cooperate with, voluntarily. In which case, you don't need a mechanism that makes it absolutely impossible; you need a mechanism for helping them not see things they don't want to see. That's something some adults also want (e.g. tools for preventing oneself going to Facebook, or going to TVTropes for too long).
Honestly, this is how I feel about all content for my kids. I am not trying to stop them from seeing something they really want to see. I am trying to stop them from seeing stuff they don’t want to see.
Now, sometimes my kids might not know they don’t want to see something, which is where my judgment comes in… but I don’t (or at least have not yet, anyway) feel the need to block my kids from watching things they want.
Now, I have spoken to my kids about some things they watch that I have issues with. I tell them why I think the content is problematic and why I would prefer they don’t watch it. But it is always a conversation rather than me just telling them they aren’t allowed.
I have been happy with how my kids have handled these conversations, and haven’t yet found the need to enforce specific rules yet. Even when they watch some things I don’t like, I have found it has made for really effective conversations about my values and what I hope their values are. Some of those topics are too abstract to have without having something tangible (like a YouTube video or channel) to center the conversation around.
This level of filtering is so granular and bespoke that I'm not surprised no one offers it.
I'm as a big of a horror movie fan as you can find, and I'm completely dumbfounded by the jump scares marketing is allowed to show in trailers nowadays. IMO (coming from someone who is basically unaffected by jump scares), they've gotten more shocking in the past couple years.
The internet is too dynamic to build a working filter around. Perhaps just tools which help parents quickly and efficiently monitor their child's device usage would be best.
Do you want to alter behaviors or lock children in a gilded cage?
maybe at 7 and 10 they shouldn't use device connected to the internet without your active supervision at all? What will they miss?
Maybe it's the parent's decision on whether they should or shouldn't?
All the best stuff is online, though. My kids have found some of their favorite hobbies and interests from online videos they found. They enjoy using the internet for all the same reasons the rest of us do. I love computers and technology and the internet, and my kids and I play games together and build computers and explore technology. I have taught them a lot about internet safety (both personal and technological), and I am very impressed with their skills and abilities.
I would never tell another parent they were wrong for choosing not to allow their kids to use the internet or consume certain types of media. Those are very personal choices.
My wife and I have deliberately have chosen what to allow our kids to do, and continually have talks with each other and with the kids about our internet usage.
I don’t feel the need or desire to seek advice or approval from random internet commenters.
Wow this is smart politically because the largest group against this age verification bulls*t just so happens to overlap a lot with people who love open source software (technical people who value user freedom)
Of course this also means that the nerds who use linux or lineageos get to win cool points because they can access more adult stuff
This is a bad move. California has no age verification law, only an age asking law and all of the reasons it's good to ask if the user is over 18 are still good reasons if the OS is Linux. And the penalty for providing an OS that doesn't ask if you're over 18 is that it's considered a defective product and you can return it for a refund, but open source software is already provided for free with no warranty so who cares. Unless you bought it from Red Hat so this is basically just giving Red Hat impunity to violate this law, for no reason.
This law should never have been proposed to begin with. The fact that the backlash was needed is indicative of a huge problem in our lawmaking.
This will only help if the law states that internet companies that check this have to default to assuming the user is an adult. Otherwise the end result will be that Linux clients will get caught in a dragnet of automatic denial.
How does this age verification crap apply to server environments? If you can't use windows desktop without age verification can you just install windows server or IoT as a loophole?
Open software should not implement this feature because slippery slope is not a fallacy based on my experience. Force them to actually create a government approved operating systems to make it clear how absurd this is and so that we know who will bend the knee.
What about the BSD kernels? Other libre/open source operating systems? These laws should be canceled altogether. They make no sense at all.
Who else has that Tux plushie tho? I've had one since I was like 11 years old.
Same, my Dad ordered it for me at the time; sits on my desk :-)
So android is exempt?
The law is so broad that theoretically, age verification can be on your watches, your Ti-84, anything.
This will either fail or the entire law will go. Microsoft will spend a lot of money to make sure it's not at a disadvantage.
We did it despite the naysayers who faught us saying it "wasn't a big deal" and that this is the "best version of the law we could get". Never listen to the naysayers and compromise your principles to appease them, stay true to what you believe.
So are kids not going to have access to llms? Seems trivial to get around this from a technical standpoint for frontier llms no matter how this is implemented.
Patching inherently bad legislation doesn’t solve the problems it’ll cause.
Ah, but what about my internet connected TI 84 calculator?
No, not exemptions! Drop the stupid-ass law all together.
Kind of interesting - basically exempts any OS that’s under an MIT or GPL licence…
… doesn’t that excuse Android and possibly XNU, too?
This is a potential loophole. Companies could have an "open source" OS but restrict installations like Tivo did in the 2000s (i.e. "Tivoization"). Or they could allow installation of modified software but restrict functionality like the way the Google Play Integrity API can nerf apps running on custom builds of Android.
Or, they can have a license like the Business Source License where you can copy, redistribute, and modify the software but you can't use it commercially. This goes against OSI's open source definition.
We emailed this amendment to Buffy Wicks's staff:
§1798.504(f) This title does not apply to[...]:
(4) An operating system or application that meets both of the following conditions:
(A) The operating system or application is distributed under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software, including for commercial purposes and without payment of a royalty or fee.
(B) The operating system provider or developer does not, by technical or contractual means, prevent the recipient from installing modified versions of the software on a device on which the unmodified version operates, and does not restrict the functionality or interoperability of modified versions.
That's great, thank you.
> copy, redistribute, and modify the software
Shouldn't that specify the code not or not only the software? For example, the corporate Windows license allows the corporation to copy, redistribute (internally), and modify (via group policy, APIs, or development on the Windows platform) the software. The big difference between that and Linux is licensees can't access the code. FOSS requires free access to, use of, modification of, and redistribution of the code.
Honestly you're probably right, code is a better term. I copied that language from Colorado's SB26-051 bill which also has a FOSS exemption and they use the word "software". I'm not a lawyer but I'm hoping that a court's interpretation of one state's language will apply to other states.
That and lots of FOSS licenses use some variant of those words "copy, redistribute, and modify" so it's probably a term-of-art that courts recognize.
This is what Colorado's law says. It prevents Tivoization but not feature nerfing like the Play Integrity API.
§ 6-30-105 (3)
(e) AN OPERATING SYSTEM PROVIDER OR DEVELOPER THAT DISTRIBUTES AN OPERATING SYSTEM OR APPLICATION UNDER LICENSE TERMS THAT PERMIT A RECIPIENT TO COPY, REDISTRIBUTE, AND MODIFY THE SOFTWARE WITHOUT ANY PLATFORM-IMPOSED TECHNICAL OR CONTRACTUAL RESTRICTIONS IMPOSED BY THE PROVIDER OR DEVELOPER ON INSTALLING ALL MODIFIED VERSIONS.
Is all the code running on my Google Pixel 10 licensed under GPL and/or MIT?
I think we have our answer.
What are they defining as an operation system? It’s a term that has fuzzy edges as a technical term, and given laws are usually piss poor at defining technical terms, I can’t see it being well defined in CA law.
I think there's a lot of proprietary stuff, from Google Play Services to Pixel specific features. A very significant stack of "modern" software layers are proprietary, even on Android.
I think that was his point
Modern open-source Android doesn't even include a working keyboard nowadays so...
So if you load AOSP and don't use Google Play Services, then you're exempt?
I would hope so.
Sounds like another fellow GrapheneOS user!
Indeed!
No, Android is Apache 2.0.
This is the whole 'opt-in vs opt-out' at a high level. A better law would be crafted like 'some services have been determined to be harmful to minors and require age verification. Those -specific- services shall have these specific mitigations.....' Facebook and others should have a clear legal distinction of 'harmful to children' and then the law kicks in.
Parental controls should be a client side option set by the user.
Sure, make it easy for users to do so, but it's a users choice.
Kids don't buy phones or computers, their parents do, and during initial setup, parents could choose "this pc is used by a child" option, input some override password to disable this in the future, and the phone could block whatever needs to be blocked.
> Kids don't buy phones or computers, their parents do
It wouldn't take much for a kid to buy a phone or computer.
Kids also tend to live with their parents, who much to their chagrin can usually confiscate stuff the kid bought and not let them use it
The entire age verification and identity verification surveillance system shows state democrats aren’t on our side.
The California law has no age verification, identity verification, or surveillance. It is just a pretty simple parental control system, which only applies to devices whose primary user is a child.
Most politicians are easily swayed when their political bacon is on the line. Perhaps there is yet some hope for California!
Sounds like any GPL and perhaps other licences. Not just Linux.
I don't trust this one bit.
The reason is simple: the pattern I see hints that there is:
a) money spent, to push through age-sniffing, and b) it is happening almost globally.
I am not necessarily saying that all this can be singularized down to one bribe-using company, be it Meta, Google or what not, or state actors becoming beyond Evil. But just as the butterfly effect is used as analogy how a strong wind can be created further downstream, I see the situation here VERY similar. To me it is not confined to age-sniffing. Remember the sudden declaration of war by the UK against VPN. This is in my opinion connected here. The goal is not "protect the children" but instead spy more on people than before. A gradual extension of this. And some companies and private interests will benefit. See also the recent Palantir claim made against London aka "the major is responsible for more robberies when he refused to obey to our rule". These companies are greedy - and insolent.
If you look up either "half measures" or "unintended consequences" they should both say "See also: California"
Hopefully the add the BSDs too.
> 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.
How about composite software products, say a de facto operating system which contains substantial elements subject to a permissive license? What if those are the components which support networking? If, hypothetically, a commercial operating system vendor built on Mach and 4BSD?
And yet, still unlawful compelled speech
And I bet that Microsoft employee who was sending PRs to all the linux distros (and systemd) will not bother sending apologies to them for wasting their time.
You mean dylanmtaylor? I didn't know he was an MSFT employee but I guess I wouldn't be surprised.
He isn't. Also never was (unless the CV lies that is).
As for what drove him instead.. I suppose we will never know.
All we can know for certain is that the whole thing felt _very_ inorganic and not like something a reasonable human being would just start doing out of the blue.
(Corporate) politics love plausible deniability, so maybe it was just inherently human randomness. I'm sure it was. Please move along.
Maybe it's a Lennart Pottering sockpuppet.
I doubt it.
And you would doubt it too if you would look at the actual person that is Lennart beyond the "Pulseaudio bad. Systemd bad. Lennart bad." meme.
Very different handwriting too.
The state should handle personal records, authentication, and age verification. Compliance should be as simple as implementing dead simple state provided interfaces.
Why should Linux be exempt? Linux lobbyists seem to be against the public good. It takes an AI agent 5 minutes to add this feature and then they add be good forevermore. And given that the software is open source, everyone can use the same library to be compliant. Belly-aching snowflakes…
1st amendment. There's a long history of carve outs around commercial products. But, if Linux devs (who aren't selling anything) went to the mat against this law, the government of California would lose and (at least part of) their law would be struck down.
Why should I care about being surveilled? I have nothing to hide. \s
What's depressing to me is just how self-serving all this is. The original bill was AB 1043. Who supported that, breaking with other tech companies? Why Meta of course [1][2]! Meta likes this because it pushes liability onto the OS providers. Guess who doesn't have an OS? Google's support is a little stranger given Android. It seems like AB 1043 also shifted liability to third-party app developers instead of the app store so, conflicting goals?
Likewise, you'll have Microsoft and maybe Apple pushing for Linux to be included for, again, entirely self-serving reasons. Microsoft is never one to miss an opportunity to benefit Windows.
All that's going on here is competing corporate interests. Likely nobody in power actually cares the actual end users.
As much as libertarians chafe against it, I think we've demonstrated that something has to be done in relation to children online. Advertising to children, harmful impacts of social media, cyberbullying, addictive behavior and selling the data of minors needs to stop. How we get there is unclear. Meanwhile, everyone responsible is just trying to limit and shift their legal liability and that's it.
[1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/13/california-advances...
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...
If Meta is liable for when someone underage uses their service, then Meta is going to require proof of age which almost certainly means giving them copies of things like driver's licenses or passports probably along with video showing that you match the photo.
In jurisdictions taking the California approach Meta does not need to ask for anything like that. Their app just has to ask the OS, which reports the age bracket that was entered when the user account was made on the device, and the OS gets that information from whoever set up the account. The OS trusts whatever is entered at that time. No driver's licenses or passports or face scans or videos are involved.
> As much as libertarians chafe against it, I think we've demonstrated that something has to be done in relation to children online
...and this is pretty much the way to do it with the least impact on privacy and anonymity possible without first building up some high tech cryptographic infrastructure that would likely include hardware requirements that would, at least at first, exclude users who do not have an iOS/iPadOS or Android device that has a secure hardware element.
> If Meta is liable for when someone underage uses their service, then Meta is going to require proof of age—
Let's be clear what this means, "Meta is going to require" something. They'll require it to continue to do something, which is namely to be a bad company, running bad services, without pivoting to something else.
Of course, no one requires Meta to continue to be Meta. We'd protect people by requiring companies like Meta to request PII outright, because then the user is explicitly prompted to decide whether using Meta's services is worth surrendering their privacy. And if consumer sentiment and market forces mean anything anymore, that will incentivize Meta to replace their bad services with better ones, ones that don't cause them tricky liability issues.
In other words, forcing operating systems to demand PII from users from the get-go, regardless of the quality of that signal, and to broadcast that to any website, is not, as you put it, "the way to do it with the least impact on privacy and anonymity possible", etc etc. The "way to do it" is to phase out this rotten era of surveillance apparatus disguised as social media companies.
Sorry for being irate, it just feels like so many people these days arrive too quickly (for my taste) at conclusions without testing certain popular assumptions about the inevitability of tech oligarchy.
> As much as libertarians chafe against it, I think we've demonstrated that something has to be done in relation to children online
Just cuz today's ad-supported social media is bad for kids, doesn't mean everyone should have to verify their identity to use it. You can just make it 18+ and if kids lie to get around it that's not the end of the world. And in general, regulations that would make these things better for everyone would be better rather than just saying kids can't use it and not fix the actual problems with them
next step age-verification at BIOS/EFI level /s
Windows 12 will require a special component on the motherboard to support this feature.
Linux was always exempt--because it's not an operating system.
Huh? An operating system, as defined by Andrew Tanenbaum[0], the author of both Minix and of the best operating textbook ever, is a combination of:
- an "extended machine": provide usable abstractions over the hardware to reduce complexity to a manageable level
- a "resource manager": provide for an orderly and controlled allocation of the processors, memories, and I/O devices among all the various programs wanting them.
By that definition, Linux is very much an operating system... unless by "Linux" you meant the kernel only without the additional tooling (systemd, libc, coreutils, shell, etc.) that distros ship with.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!
Linux is the kernel.
This comment would impress a lot of people somewhere that's not HN.