Comment by spullara

5 days ago

this is completely insane. we need some kind of constitutional amendment to get rid of all this kind legislation forever.

32 comments

spullara

Reply
Aunche  5 days ago

People are making way too big a deal of this IMO. This is basically the OS equivalent of that checkbox you click to enter a porn website that gets exposed to Meta, so they can claim that they did what they all the they could to protect children if they get sued by parents. Any determined kid would figure out a way around this, but I can see it stopping younger and less determined kids, and it's a useful tool for parents.

  • 0xbadcafebee  5 days ago

    It does not stop at the check box. Someone is going to sue Google/Apple when a 13 year old gets on a porn site. Then Google/Apple will introduce "verification" that requires linking your identity to your device, and attesting this to the "operator" (porn site). Then every person using any OS is tracked, on every website and app, all the time, by law. And Linux becomes illegal without it.

    This is not a theory. Laws requiring this are going through the state and federal level right now.

  • davorak  5 days ago

    Unlike the California law, I seemed to be in the minority in this opinion, this one does seem to require programs like grep to ask for a users age bracket.

    > (b) An operator shall request a signal with respect to a particular user from an operating system provider or a covered application store when the application is downloaded and launched.

    Unlike the California law I do not see anything that restricts this to child accounts only.

    So let say I have a program:

        print("Hello, World!")

    and I want to publish it to say npm or nixos, or some linux distribution. Not with out violating this law. This application needs to request the users age brackets at least at 'downloaded and launched' optimistically that means once on first launch, but potentially needs to be requested on each launch of the application. So lets fix the program

        import ageBracket
    ageBracket.get()
    print("Hello, World!")

    There we go, now the code is compliant with my imagined ageBracket module.

  • zardo  5 days ago

    Wouldn't a some kind of technical standard proposal be a more sensible way to do this than trying to pass OS laws state by state?

    • ezfe  5 days ago

      iOS (for example) already has that technical standard in place and usable.

  • whalesalad  5 days ago

    Microsoft has already made the installation of Windows a fucking nightmare with MS account requirements. Imagine when they are forcing every new device to not only have 50+ TOPS for Copilot, but also a tiny little internal mass spectrometer autosampler which will prick your finger as you login and analyze blood to carbon date the age of the user.

    • burnt-resistor  5 days ago

      Install offline, no ms cloud bullshit account required. I just did this with Win 11 enterprise 25h2. Used an activator cmd script at the end that bypassed activation.

  • acuozzo  5 days ago

    How would this work for e.g. RTOS or even TempleOS?!

    Does the hidden Minix installation on every Intel CPU with the Intel Management Engine count?

varispeed  5 days ago

constitutional amendment to criminalise corporate lobbying with severe penalties - including capital punishment and confiscation of entire corporation.

burnt-resistor  5 days ago

Unfortunately, a rhetorical knee-jerk response that it needs universal, specific counter legislation for a "permanent fix" is panacea, magical thinking.

The root cause is a corrupt government doing the bidding of a few rich people and other countries. Fixing that will be very difficult but is nonetheless necessary and possible to largely thwart legislators from working against their own ostensible constituency.

ActorNightly  5 days ago

I actually see the golden lining here

>"Operating system provider" means a person or entity that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system software on a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.

I.e Linux will most likely to be immune, since its not tied to a particular computer.

Which just means Linux stay winning. It already made big headway in the video game space, so its prime to take over personal computing too.

  • tokai  5 days ago

    All the distros are the providers here. The Linux kernel is not an operating system.

    • 1718627440  5 days ago

      Since GNU(or other)/Linux OSes allow the sysadmin to compose the OS out of parts and change them, the final OS is created by the sysadmin. That's what makes distributing binary software so annoying for maintainers, every installation can be it's own snowflake OS.

  • jmye  5 days ago

    > since its not tied to a particular computer.

    That's a really weird and nonsensical reading of "operating system software on a computer".

jjtheblunt  5 days ago

it's entirely possible such nonsense is all show, and wouldn't be passed, however.

i'm from illinois, worked in california, and no longer live in either. from afar, it seems that whatever california bureaucrats propose, after a short delay, gets proposed by their little sibling bureaucrats in illinois.

chronic20001  5 days ago

[flagged]

  • prophesi  5 days ago

    > For the record, I don’t care enough about age verification. Whether the law passes or not, I don’t really care.

    Sounds like there actually would be some benefit commenting about it on HN.

    • alephnerd  5 days ago

      No one who matters uses HN or cares about HN. The handful of us on HN who are in or near a position to affect change are basically here due to habit or $#itposting until we get banned.

      So they are right in that sense - commenting on HN is cathartic but ultimately useless.

      And the people who matter and are against this also don't use HN because they view this platform as toxic and reactionary.

      6 replies →