Comment by michaelt
1 day ago
> why does the operating system need to be involved in this?
Well, the politicians probably meant to say “Apple, Google, Microsoft, plus maybe Sony and Nintendo”
i.e. the companies that already have biometrics, nigh-mandatory user accounts, app stores linked to real identities, parental controls, locked down attested kernels, and so on.
If phones had workable parental controls that let parents opt their kid into censorship, that’s better than the give-your-passport-to-the-porn-site approach the UK have taken.
Of course if they have applied it to every OS, not just the big corporate-controlled options, that’s a dumb choice.
> Of course if they have applied it to every OS, not just the big corporate-controlled options, that’s a dumb choice.
I guess we'll just have to trust that our legislators are technologically savvy...
The law defines an operating system provider as "a person or entity that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system software on a computer, mobile device, or any other general computing device." If the intent were to target mobile vendors or app store vendors, I would be fine with it, but that's not the text. Of course it's the case that US lawmakers often write incoherent or extremely onerous legislation and then turn around and say, like, "Oh that's obviously not what we actually meant. We don't know what any of this stuff is, it just sounded good."
So are cellphones and game consoles general computing devices? What about servers? Raspberry pi?