Since people aren’t reading the article and the headline is misleading. The law requires:
- The OS ask the user their date of birth on account creation (kinda like the Steam date of birth prompts)
- The OS provide an API that returns which of four age brackets the user fits in
- Companies notified by the OS that the user is under age may be liable
It was explicitly written by the authors not to mandate ID or facial recognition checks. You can lie about your date of birth. This basically creates a standard set of parental controls for parents configuring kids devices.
I think that this might actually help with the whole discord facial recognition issue in places other than the UK by allowing them to offload the issue to parents setting up devices rather than collecting kids biometrics.
No matter how hard they try, you can’t legislate parenting.
No biggie. I got ready for this in minutes after hearing about it.
#!/usr/bin/env fish read -P "Are you old enough? (yes/no) " input if test "$input" = "yes" -o "$input" = "Yes" echo "Proceeding..." else echo "You are not old enough. Exiting." exit 1 end… What? … Why are you all looking at me like that?
That would be a completely unworkable law since devices may not even have internet connectivity, or a user interface. And even if they did, it would have a chilling effect on software development in California.
Our president is fucking children, and you’re telling me I gotta verify my date of birth to run Linux, in the name of “Protecting the Children”?
Get the fuck outta here.
You guys are asking the wrong questions.
How is Linux going to do this? There’s no server for the os to send the information to report the age of its users, no way of forcing its user base to comply and no single person or entity to fine, arrest or otherwise force into compliance.
They made a law they cannot enforce.
This is a whole new level for system level fingerprinting
Even if they could enforce it which I highly doubt, this law is clearly a “Fuck you and your free software”.
Like if a “too young” user have the skills to update the OS to change or even remove the age verification, who will be responsible? Yeah I don’t know either, but both will be bad.
No doubt in response to Europe making its choice for software open source. Expect targeted attacks on FOSS to increase
How the hell are they going to enforce this?
The law does not require photo ID uploads or facial recognition, with users instead simply self-reporting their age, setting AB 1043 apart from similar laws passed in Texas and Utah that require “commercially reasonable” verification methods, such as government-issued ID checks.
What even is the point of this then? To make shitty parents feel better?
It’s so next year when they expand the requirements the infrastructure is already in place.
Sell data. profile people more accurately.
Moving towards removing anonymity on the internet.
IRL Community is dead in america, They know the only thing we have left to band together on against their Nazi regime is the internet. This is why they are trying to destroy anonymity.
Soon it will be “Linux is for criminals” (like they said with graphene).
Yup. Replacing cash with digital transactions and eliminating anonymity online.
Yep!! All their plan, laid out clear as day. But you’re the crazy person if you bring that up among normies!
The point of it is actually the exact opposite. With this law the parent would set the age of their child. And if they decide to lie and their child is affected then they could be fined.
The other thing it does is if a platform decides to ignore the age range of a user and it affects a child then they could be fined. But as long as they do best effort then it really only affects the parents.
It also prevent platforms from requesting additional ID verification unless they have confidence that the age bracket of that user is incorrect.
There is absolutely no reason for an OS to know a users age. At this point it is certain that they can escalate this into including gender or even race.
The children or even the teens have no meaning in this law - they are simply used as sugarcoating for the cyanide pill that’s aimed at the populace.
I agree until this law there was no reason for my os to know my age. This law creates that reason.
Any law can be bad if we take into account the imagined future possibilities. Should we outlaw electricity because it might be used in some way to make nukes?
If lawmakers try to issue further requirements for ID or facial scans then we can fight that. But until then there is nothing in this law that affects me outside of needing to enter a number less than 2005 when I setup my OS.
If you don’t have any kids then you literally can’t be fined under this law.
If your code is installed on a general purpose computing device that is provided to a child, you can be fined.
If you provide code to the general public without requesting an age signal from the receiver’s OS, you can be fined.
The attorney general of California might consider the JavaScript in your web page to be “content”. They might consider it to be an “application”. There is no clear distinction. If you request an age signal before providing content, you can be fined. If you fail to request an age signal before providing an application, you can be fined.
The more I read about this law, the less I think it will actually go into effect. It’s going to face a whole series of injunctions. The lawyers are going to bill thousands of hours, but the whole thing is going to be scrapped.
Should we outlaw electricity because it might be used in some way to make nukes?
No, because there are lots of good uses for electricity. What is the good use of this bill?
It prevents apps from asking for additional ID verification. I’d rather my os ask me for a number I am able to lie about than to have to send my ID to 30 different apps and data aggregators.
Many people say that we should put more responsibility on the parents for what their kids are allowed to do online. This law does that.
But it actually does require that. Read section 1798.502.b. Every developer of every application has to ask for your age bracket through this mechanism. The open source developers behind ‘ls’, ‘cp’, ‘rsync’ are all suddenly required to ask my age category of face a $2500-$7500 fine per time my kids run apt upgrade. That is utterly absurd.
Hell, I’m suddenly liable if a kid downloads my pong example project that I put up on crates.io or PyPI?!?
Yea they have to ask for your age bracket. That’s not the same as an ID.
I agree, the definition of an application is much too broad. And should be revised. But the difficulty is how do you restrict it without also creating a multitude of loopholes for businesses to exploit. At the very least we should restrict it to applications whose primary purpose is to interact with the internet.
And before you say it, yes I am aware that that still leaves many apps like curl, wget, ssh being covered. But it could be a start.
Or maybe just restrict it to social media applications. I am not a lawyer, I definitely don’t have a great grasp of how to create the type of language that is appropriate for laws.
The ONLY way this is even remotely OK is if the OS is set to 18+ all other age verification laws are satisfied and I don’t have to provide even more intrusive information to random companies.
Despite signing it, Newsom issued a statement urging the legislature to amend the law before its effective date, citing concerns from streaming services and game developers about “complexities such as multi-user accounts shared by a family member and user profiles utilized across multiple devices.”
then why did you fucking sign it in the first place??
words cannot describe the depths of my seething hatred for the complete, museum grade, massive piece of shit that is Gavin Newsom
People already hate him this much, and he wants to run for president. Because Democrats didn’t lose badly enough last time.
Because it’s a metric, a bullet point, and campaign speech fodder. Newsome thinks of his position in terms of a career rather than an office, his job isn’t to lead a nation towards what’s right or wrong, it’s to pander so that he can be re-elected or elected to higher office.
The bullshit way that lobbying groups conduct polling and market research means they he’s chronically out of touch and that his focus is on perpetuating his time in office so he can continue to “represent the people”, making a calling out of bowing to the desires of the mis-informed, outraged, panicked mob he believes his electorate to be instead of actually having a spine and exercising good judgement.
The consequences of shoddy legislation take second place to being able to declare he did something to “keep kids safe”. It doesn’t even have to work, all that matters is having something to wave around and back up that claim. Something to placate the plebeians and let him continue to do what he does best… listen to lobbyists who are lying about what people think.
Why? Because that’s what gets people elected these days. Despite being on a foundation of pure bullshit, somehow it works. So he goes along with it, encourages it, and remains in office as a result.
deleted by creator
My birthday is 01.01.0001
OK Newsom, you’ve lost me. I enjoyed your chaotic responses to the drumpf but you’ve officially lost me.
Realize, this has always been him. He is NOT a liberal. He is a conservative who calls himself a democrat.
That’s called a liberal.
Government-mandated age verification stuff on private hardware is basically the opposite of liberal though
Those who call themselves liberal have been doing shit like this for so long that this rank hypocrisy is part of what it means to be liberal.
If liberals don’t like it, they should have had some integrity instead of ridiculing the concept as a “purity test.”
Yup.
Welcome to newspeak, USA-flavor.
Still drinking hair of the dog to nurse the McCarthyian redscare hangover.
Layers deep into the newspeak. Liberal, conservative, democrat… all these terms already many contortions and inversions distanced from original meaning. Soon, even “him”, “he” and “himself” too. Then even “is” and “not”, and then the CIA’s work will be done.
I wouldn’t even say conservative, social fascist who hates poor and trans people.
Yeah, a liberal.
Look up the word neo-liberal. Cause that is what you mean. Continually replying “Yeah, a liberal.”, you sound like a moron.
Ahhh. Neo-liberal.
Gotta love that Orwellian marketing.
Neo-liberal. Neither new (neo), nor liberal.
Basically, same old fascist.
Are people finally ignoring his paid PR xitter team? It was annoying when my family bought into that trick. Newsom was always a POS.
California! Uber Alles!
Yup, a liberal.
He used to be married to the woman that also used to be Trump Jr.’s fiancé.
He is still overwhelmingly liberal and progressive. Calling him conservative is insane.
If only all those agents hadn’t told us to not use the political compass, we might be less lost now. :3
He is basically as conservative as you can be here in California while holding a state wide elected position and even that may not be true anymore with how things have shifted since the last governor election. Point is he is generally on the more conservative end of Californian politics, hell I know some Schwarzenegger style conservatives who are more progressive than him.
He’s not even making most of those responses to Trump. His social media manager is doing it. He’s still just another Howard Schultz. “I like the idea of equality as long as rich people don’t have to reduce the rate at which they become richer.”
Yikes
Why not parents responsible for their own goddamn kids? Stop interfering with the rest of our privacy for this bullshit. Parental controls have existed for decades. Fucking use them.
Because this isn’t about parenting or children, it’s about a creeping surveillance state
The new California republic seems to be the only people who see this coming
Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter.
When I got deployed to Vegas I thought there would be more gambling involved.
… That is literally what this law does.
When a parent creates the account for their child they specify the age. If the parent decides to lie or circumvent the system and it affects their child then they would be fined.
Just to be clear the law itself says absolutely nothing about actually verifying the age.
It also makes it mandatory to include this feature in every OS. It means you’ll be sending telemetry about who you are to anyone that wants it and you don’t have a choice. Fuck that. I don’t have kids, there’s no reason I should have to use an OS with this shit.
The law actually has a specific provision preventing both os providers and developers from sending your information to whoever they want.
And the OS is only allowed to send the minimum information that is required. Ie. your age bracket.
Send only the minimum amount of information necessary to comply with this title and shall not share the digital signal information with a third party for a purpose not required by this title.
Laws don’t prevent anything unless they are enforced. If the bill doesn’t also include how this will all be audited and incredibly harsh penalties for violating it that part might as well be toilet paper. I don’t care how minimal the data I’m sending them is. I want that amount to be 0. It doesn’t benefit me to give them anything so I shouldn’t be forced to do it.
Wake me when that actually leads to enforcement penalties. This law is vague enough as it is, no company is going to get slammed for “accidentally” skipping a user permission check, and having their FunPad app offer up your age info to one of Palantir’s long fingers.
