Comment by mgfist

(A), honestly.

You might think you can keep 16 year olds from looking at porn, if they want to. You can't. You have never been able to. All you can do is teach them that the law is stupid and pointless, and they should treat rules with contempt. But they'll still be able to look at porn.

What you can do is allow the government and private companies to track everyone, everywhere, all the time. And you can create more gatekeepers that hold personal identity data, misuse it, and leak it.

A), which is the status quo. I don't see any other option as realistic.

B) makes things worse in several ways, but primarily by stifling innovation. Only large incumbents will have no trouble paying for the measures required to ensure compliance.

There's also the cost of enforcement, which will likely have to be borne by the taxpayers. I don't think this is a good thing to spend money on.

C) cannot be enforced, and any good faith attempts will cost more than the damage from harm they're supposed to prevent.

Does "the government doesn't get to decide what people can look at on the internet" count as C or D to you? It is the situation we've been in technically for 20 years now anyway; the world hasn't ended and it generally seems to be pretty workable. The status quo isn't an especially radical one.

What about every other system where we rely on parents to parent?

Kids can turn apple juice into wine in their closet

they can drive their bicycle to a drug dealer

they can rub a butter knife against the sidewalk until it's pointy

Do we need govt AI cameras in kids closets and on their bicycles? How do we verify they're cycling somewhere safe? How do we make sure they're not getting shitfaced on bootleg hooch they made with bakers yeast and a latex glove?

D) Parents take sole responsibility for this.

C and D, combined. New internet for kids-only. This internet would be WHITELIST only. We would not be wack-a-mole trying to catch porn sites (sigh...)

Rather, companies would have to submit a formal proposal to get their website listed on Kid Internet. This inverts the responsibility. It's not my cost, or your cost, it's their cost now. If they want kids, they better prove it.

Then, you can trivially configure your router or any computer, with any operating system, to use the Kid Internet DNS. It's now completely operating system and device agnostic. It can be organizational wide with the flick of a switch. It can be global, if we want.

The proposal we're seeing here is bad, bad, bad. Not just for privacy reasons, but because it will not work. Not might, will. This will not work. For many reasons:

1. Most operating systems are not going to implement some stupid ass bullshit.

2. Most websites do not give a single fuck. Porn websites will not care. Trying to play wack-a-mole is ALWAYS a losing game, no exceptions.

3. This is trivial to bypass.

4. If it's not trivial to bypass, it still will not work, but it will now be the end of computing as we know it.

D) Parenting

>A) 18+ content is behind a pinky swear

Things were way, way, way sketchier in like 2005 than they are now and those people turned out mostly fine.

E. Platforms that want to serve violent, sexual, predatory, scammy, snake oil content in the most addictive way possible to exploit minors and other vulnerable populations for profit should save some of their revenue for lawsuits when they hurt people. Hold products that cause harm responsible.

The Illinois bill is not about 18+ content. It's about controlling who your children can talk to on social media. The OS age check is just a means to that end. The end is blatantly unconstitutional. The bill of rights doesn't mention age limits. Freedom of assosiation applies to kids just as much as it does to adults. If the bill passes, then any racist parent could block all comms from kids of a different color for example.

E) parenting

A. Not even a thought required.

The spin control on this story is intense. Saying that it's "just parental controls" when we've had fscking parental controls since the 1990s is disingenuous as hell. Obviously it's something new, but that's really all they have got to try to spin it back into their favor.

Every system intended to protect children ends up patronizing everyone as a child.

Protect people's rights and don't get tricked in to giving them up just cause someone has a story about a child.

You are not crazy for thinking that.

However it appears that it takes pretty disasterous consequences for us to be able to walk anything back.

Society won’t delay reward now for future good on its own. Even if one person will, there’s a line of people who will step in to pollute the lake or kill the whales for a bag of money.

It will just decay until it’s a short squeeze into oligarchy or worse (the corrupt will be forced into an arms race of accelerating corruption as opportunity becomes scarce). Then some other country who isn’t leaving it up to their society to do the right thing will be in charge. Until the same happens to them.

This is the value of religion historically, one of the few ways of coercing a population into doing the right thing for their own good. But every group can be spoiled or hijacked by a small handful of bad actors who are willing to do what others are not.

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Facebook has less than zero interest in allowing people to use their platform anonymously. They very much want to know everything about their users including their age and they would never back a law that would stop them from collecting that data. Now that you know that facebook isn't pushing this law to protect anyone's anonymity why do you think they're doing it?

uploading your IDs to an untrusted third party is asking too much.

So have the government do it? They already know who we are and when we were born.

Actually given boot chain protection, this will probably get harder as time goes on but even assuming some kids are able to, this is clearly definable as a user error: the fault lies with the kid and as a parent you need to think about your threat model.

Right now, it's not even clear how to create parental controls at a reasonable level so there's no clear path for what to do or how to respond.

Maybe we can agree that if you're mature enough to hack your own phone, you're mature enough to see a nipple. Why am I rate limited though? Dang must hate this opinion.

I don't think "real" age verification with ids is immune to this either. (kids paying an adult to get an id for it or fooling an ai classifier, whatever).

Basically unsolveable, so why worry about that edge case? Kids will always get through to some adult content somewhere. A token system will make parents feel better in the meantime.

It gives the parents the tools to age restrict things, but does not require parents to use them or use them well.

From a parent's perspective, that's the great part about bubbling it up to the OS user account level.

Its trivially easy to see if the user (child) has indeed created multiple OS level user accounts with different permission levels if you want to spot check the computer.

You'll see it on first startup and then you can have "a chat". With Guest account access disabled, spawning a new account on a computer takes 2-3 minutes, will send emails and dashboard notices to the parent.

Its very much near impossible to verify that the child is not just going to Facebook etc. and using separate accounts and just logging out religiously.

That said I wish Apple/Microsoft/Google had more aggressively advertised their Parental Control features for Mac/Windows/ChromeOS as a key differentiator to avoid Ubuntu/Open Source distros from having to implement them.

So you're advocating for stronger and more invasive controls?...

I think this is a sensible compromise. It gives parents more control than before without relying on shady third-party software or without turning every platform into a cop. Yeah, it also aligns with Meta's interests, but so what?

The age attestation solutions pursued by the EU are far more invasive in this respect, even though they notionally protect identity. They mean that the "default" internet experience is going to be nerfed until you can present a cryptographic proof that you're worthy.

I mean on a UNIX OS you could make it yet another group the user needs to be part of. Like the group for access to optical media or for changing network credentials. Whether the child gets root access is on the parent, but that is like with anything else. A child can get around this, but it means finding and exploiting a 0-day on the OS. If they are able to pull this of I would congratulate them.