The ONLY way I could remotely support age verification is if it was anonymized from the individual, similar to how companies like Mullvad do their VPN or with prepaid gift cards etc
You get a card that has a PIN behind a scratch-off section. You can buy the card for cash or order online, but there’s nothing tying the buyer to the card.
Age verification can be similar where you go to a registered location, provide valid ID and like $5 to get a scratch off card. The code on the card just validates “user is 18+” but otherwise has no ties back to their actual identity.
If a site wants to do an age check, it can validate the card PIN or on phone potentially scan a 3d barcode behind the scratch-off. Maybe some hash check could be involved to avoid the need for a centralized provider.
The German ID card has that functionality. Date of birth is saved on the chip card and you can identify yourself via NFC reader and the open source ID app. You can see what information is transmitted before sending it. In the case of age verification, it would only be “underage yes/no”.
It’s not perfect but pretty good from a privacy standpoint.
My computer, regardless of the OS that it runs, should do my bidding and only my bidding.
If I want to enable or disable something, that should be my prerogative.
I commented in a similar thread and I’ll restate it here:
I do support parental controls being an option, and will use the whole Free-Market thing and choose to use an OS that has parental controls for my children – but I am also happy to see my children evade my restrictions with their knowledge and skills. And, more specifically, these need to be OPT-IN. As a parent, I can create an account and identify it as supervised or give it an age range, and that’s all cool. What isn’t cool is making me Verify* MY age range in order to create an account on a device I own.
*especially verification that involves giving up my privacy, such as face scan, government ID or similar PII. We used to have laws protecting this data. I’ve helped build whole systems to ensure that only trained admins had rights to access customer PII.
H.R. 8250 is an attack on freedom to use… everything… It’s so vague, and doesn’t even describe it’s terms the way the California bill does. A Missile developed by Lockheed Martin has an Operating System and I’m certain that if I had one in my hands I could make it run DOOM, thus making it a ‘General Purpose Computing Device’.
… Maybe those Doom-on-fridge/toaster people were on to something. Samsung, LG, etc need to quickly evaluate their fucking toasters to ensure they can’t run DOOM, or ensure they can verify a user’s age before enabling toasting.
I also (dis)like how section 2.A.5.i will require the commission to describe how every operating system will verify a parent or legal guardian’s age’s within 6 months and then have an effective date of a year. Has anyone involved with writing this bill done software development?! Sure, this sounds simple on paper, but I have a 30+ year plan to actually implement it; because I’m a volunteer open source dev working on my OS in my free time without pay.
Anyone looking at this and thinking it’s a good idea, take a moment to think about this: Who has resources to dedicate whole teams to implementing this privacy invasion? It’s the big players like Microslop, Apple, Google, and a handful of Enterprise-grade Linux/Unix providers. Anyone else could face financial ruin for distributing their home-grown OS experiment if it gets enough attention and that will prevent new distros or operating systems from being developed, leading to effectively regulatory capture by the existing players. That’s not going to end well.
I mean, for the most part yes. I’m not even so much concerned about my kids viewing porn, more so than somebody else will make nasty deepfakes of them and post online etc, so age verification won’t fix that.
I could see it help with discriminating between people at their “own damn computers” and bots or misinformation/psyops campaigns run out of certain foreign countries though (assuming any ID also ties back to parent country).
we already have laws for all those issues you mentioned but there is no profit in the way they are currently enforced. this bill will create massive profit opportunities and kill off a ton of the little guys; for fb etc it’s competition squishing essentially.
I would support a simple toggle, a content safe mode and an unrestricted mode, selectable at the OS level through a parental controls option. Then have sites flag all “objectionable” or not safe for work material. The restricted mode would not even download such content.
Done, more power to parents, and smart kids, while not destroying the internet to block content that conservatives don’t like. Which is what all of these laws are based on.
You can kinda already do that with parental controls on kids’ devices and many routers, as well as services provided by ISP’s.
In Canada there’s also a free national DNS provider that has a tier the filters out known malicious and/or adult sites at the DNS level depending on which hosts you point at.
The ONLY way I could remotely support age verification is if it was anonymized from the individual, similar to how companies like Mullvad do their VPN or with prepaid gift cards etc
You get a card that has a PIN behind a scratch-off section. You can buy the card for cash or order online, but there’s nothing tying the buyer to the card.
Age verification can be similar where you go to a registered location, provide valid ID and like $5 to get a scratch off card. The code on the card just validates “user is 18+” but otherwise has no ties back to their actual identity.
If a site wants to do an age check, it can validate the card PIN or on phone potentially scan a 3d barcode behind the scratch-off. Maybe some hash check could be involved to avoid the need for a centralized provider.
This would still be a bad idea as porn is still available elsewhere online.
The German ID card has that functionality. Date of birth is saved on the chip card and you can identify yourself via NFC reader and the open source ID app. You can see what information is transmitted before sending it. In the case of age verification, it would only be “underage yes/no”. It’s not perfect but pretty good from a privacy standpoint.
That sounds pretty close to what I’d expect, except for it presumably still being tied to the person overall
Or we could just let people do what they want on their own god damn computers.
Like… “This”
My computer, regardless of the OS that it runs, should do my bidding and only my bidding.
If I want to enable or disable something, that should be my prerogative.
I commented in a similar thread and I’ll restate it here:
I do support parental controls being an option, and will use the whole Free-Market thing and choose to use an OS that has parental controls for my children – but I am also happy to see my children evade my restrictions with their knowledge and skills. And, more specifically, these need to be OPT-IN. As a parent, I can create an account and identify it as supervised or give it an age range, and that’s all cool. What isn’t cool is making me Verify* MY age range in order to create an account on a device I own.
*especially verification that involves giving up my privacy, such as face scan, government ID or similar PII. We used to have laws protecting this data. I’ve helped build whole systems to ensure that only trained admins had rights to access customer PII.
H.R. 8250 is an attack on freedom to use… everything… It’s so vague, and doesn’t even describe it’s terms the way the California bill does. A Missile developed by Lockheed Martin has an Operating System and I’m certain that if I had one in my hands I could make it run DOOM, thus making it a ‘General Purpose Computing Device’.
… Maybe those Doom-on-fridge/toaster people were on to something. Samsung, LG, etc need to quickly evaluate their fucking toasters to ensure they can’t run DOOM, or ensure they can verify a user’s age before enabling toasting.
I also (dis)like how section 2.A.5.i will require the commission to describe how every operating system will verify a parent or legal guardian’s age’s within 6 months and then have an effective date of a year. Has anyone involved with writing this bill done software development?! Sure, this sounds simple on paper, but I have a 30+ year plan to actually implement it; because I’m a volunteer open source dev working on my OS in my free time without pay.
Anyone looking at this and thinking it’s a good idea, take a moment to think about this: Who has resources to dedicate whole teams to implementing this privacy invasion? It’s the big players like Microslop, Apple, Google, and a handful of Enterprise-grade Linux/Unix providers. Anyone else could face financial ruin for distributing their home-grown OS experiment if it gets enough attention and that will prevent new distros or operating systems from being developed, leading to effectively regulatory capture by the existing players. That’s not going to end well.
I mean, for the most part yes. I’m not even so much concerned about my kids viewing porn, more so than somebody else will make nasty deepfakes of them and post online etc, so age verification won’t fix that.
I could see it help with discriminating between people at their “own damn computers” and bots or misinformation/psyops campaigns run out of certain foreign countries though (assuming any ID also ties back to parent country).
Mate, they can’t even stop scammers faking a caller ID. This will do absolutely nothing against bad faith actors.
I think it’s less a matter of “can’t” and more a matter of “can’t … be added to bother putting in a significant effort/investment”
So why do you think this will be any different?
we already have laws for all those issues you mentioned but there is no profit in the way they are currently enforced. this bill will create massive profit opportunities and kill off a ton of the little guys; for fb etc it’s competition squishing essentially.
I would support a simple toggle, a content safe mode and an unrestricted mode, selectable at the OS level through a parental controls option. Then have sites flag all “objectionable” or not safe for work material. The restricted mode would not even download such content.
Done, more power to parents, and smart kids, while not destroying the internet to block content that conservatives don’t like. Which is what all of these laws are based on.
You can kinda already do that with parental controls on kids’ devices and many routers, as well as services provided by ISP’s. In Canada there’s also a free national DNS provider that has a tier the filters out known malicious and/or adult sites at the DNS level depending on which hosts you point at.