According to a recent CRYPTO-GRAM issue from Schneier, it's in Meta's interest to push these regulations as their product isn't an OS. Their competition (Apple/MS/Google) are OSs though.

I'm not sure why Meta's lobbying is harped on so much when all of Big Tech benefits from this; Zuckerberg is just the fall guy. Tech companies love the idea of identity / age verification so they can target ads more effectively. My general feeling is also that privacy is a thorn in their side when it comes to integrating more deeply into people's lives.

There are also state actors at play here who would love if computing without ID became a very niche thing to do. Obviously their top line would be "fighting terrorism" and "saving the children" but in reality we've seen how these organizations (ICE, NSA, etc.) abuse their power and spy on people without warrants.

tl;dr: there is much more at play here than Facebooks interests alone.

Google and Apple certainly don't benefit from this - they can serve more ads, track more data, and assume you're authorized to spend a gazillion dollars in a game if they don't know you're a child.

One example of this was last year when high-profile apps like Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans were found to have privacy policies on their websites restricting users to 13+ so they could track and advertise more while their Android and iOS apps were designated for all ages so they could get more downloads.

for the youngest ones, a lot of these are "mom's phone" or something like that, it's not even accurate to say you are identifying the user

Fair point on the plausible deniability they currently have w.r.t. children. I'm thinking more about the possibilities that open up when software can assume that OSes have this information and start gating access based on it. Once the APIs are there, I fear the internet will turn into a bunch of ID-related prompts before you can do anything. I haven't thought it through fully, but I imagine what we see as benign today like using an Adblocker could actually become more "serious" once they know your identity and can seek damages... we see companies wanting to use the legal system in Germany for example when people find a connection string in plaintext on the client instead of just fixing the security hole.

It seems like a more lucrative path to go down even if you lose the under-18 crowd gambling / watching ads on your platform.

> Zuckerberg is just the fall guy

This is likely because of Zuck's testimony in the very recent court case where he testified exactly that the "best place" to do "age verification" was in the operating system.

This was but a few weeks before all these, largely very identical sounding bills, suddenly started appearing in state houses across the USA.

because Meta's lobbying has been publicly identified. When the other companies are found to be spending millions of dollars to push these age verification laws, then they, too, will be harped on.

> I'm not sure why Meta's lobbying is harped on so much when all of Big Tech benefits from this

Because meta will not have to spend real $ to add/support age verification, plus they get to point the finger at someone else for age issues.

> plus they get to point the finger at someone else for age issues.

This is the real benefit to Meta/FB/etc. that many seem to overlook. Meta/FB/etc. are already staring down a lot of court cases related to "addicting youngsters" to their product (and potentially a lot [i.e. billions of dollars] of payout for settlements or penalties in cases that side against them).

But, if they can get the government to mandate that the operating system is responsible for verifying a user's age, they get to avoid liability (i.e., more billions of dollars) for serving anything from their properties to an underage user if the OS tells them that the user is "old enough" for whatever they served. So long as Meta follows the law and asks the OS "is this user old enough" and if the OS replies "old enough" then the liability for mistakes in the age identification shifts to the OS provider and away from Meta/etc.

The part that is odd here is why Microsoft, Apple and Google (the "OS providers" truly being targeted) are not massively lobbying against this due to the legal liability risk that Meta is trying to shift over to them.

Fall guy or not, Zuckerberg's influence on my life has been entirely negative. From addictive social media feeds, to anti-competitive acquisitions that ruin once good products, to crap like this - he's the worst, most destructive CEO in tech. Even Oracle at least provides some value through their database products. Meta can go die in a fire.

This is one of the issues with all of the steadily eroding privacy that get accepted because you’re allowed to opt out. It doesn’t take long before you’re the only one in your neighborhood who opts out, and that makes you very identifiable and suspicious.

Looks like compelled speech to me, both for the operating system creator and the users. I do not believe that “interstate commerce” powers negate the first amendment.

If you really want to get constitutional on it, I think a better angle might be 4A (unreasonable search) or 5A (due process).

Requiring disclosure of my age is effectively a search, without specific probable cause, and there are no means for me to challenge this in court.

It's really a violation of all of the above.

Ever seen a giant warning on cigarette ads that nicotine is addictive? Do you think half the ad is covered by the black box out of charity?

Settled law decades ago.

On that note, today is April 15th, tax day. The day where if you don’t provide hard numbers about your life against your will and at your own expense, prison opens as a possibility.

Cigarettes are a product that is sold. Many operating systems are free. I use several that are small projects entirely produced by hobbyists.

Even if they stack the courts with muppets who ignore the obvious first amendment angle to get this passed, I will never comply with this and I will happily help others defy it.

I pledge to defy it.

So if I hand out free cigarettes, I’d be in the clear.

The laws about giving (not selling) tobacco to minors are state laws, not federal. There’s no interstate commerce there or here.

Besides, you’re comparing apples to oranges. Cigarettes are a physical product, not a form of expression. Code is speech and compelled speech violates the first amendment. That makes even state laws for OS age verification unconstitutional.

> Code is speech and compelled speech violates the first amendment.

The first amendment does not blanket ban compelled speech. You can be compelled to testify against someone if granted immunity. You can be forced to take an oath or affirmation in court. I'm sure there are other examples.

> The laws about giving (not selling) tobacco to minors are state laws, not federal. There’s no interstate commerce there or here.

If multiple states have differing legislation over the same area of commerce, it can affect interstate commerce. But anyway, after Wickard v Fiilburn interstate commerce is never not implicated.

> An Ohio farmer, Roscoe Filburn, was growing wheat to feed animals on his own farm. The U.S. government had established limits on wheat production, based on the acreage owned by a farmer, to stabilize wheat prices and supplies.

> Filburn grew more than was permitted and so was ordered to pay a penalty. In response, he said that because his wheat was not sold, it could not be regulated as commerce, let alone "interstate" commerce (described in the Constitution as "Commerce ... among the several states").

> The Supreme Court disagreed: "Whether the subject of the regulation in question was 'production', 'consumption', or 'marketing' is, therefore, not material for purposes of deciding the question of federal power before us. ... But even if appellee's activity be local and though it may not be regarded as commerce, it may still, whatever its nature, be reached by Congress if it exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce and this irrespective of whether such effect is what might at some earlier time have been defined as 'direct' or 'indirect'."[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn

Court proceedings have been the one place that lasting, narrow 1A exemptions like these have been granted. (The Court is willing to give itself a few exceptional powers now and then.)

> Wickard v Fiilburn

A bad decision that is slowly being undermined and which will eventually be overturned. The State is not omnipotent.

This is such a bad decision - its infuriating. Incredible overreach of state power. This decision laughs at values such as liberty and freedom.

As I recall, the bill contains a 90-day sundown clause, affer which it becomes ineligible for judicial review under the Constitution. So unless you file your action challenging the constitutionality of the bill within 90 days, it becomes settled law and cannot be overturned on constitutional grounds.

Good luck getting standing to challenge the law within 90 days.

How can Congress put anything into a law saying that the courts can't override it? Doesn't that impinge on separation of powers?

The text of the bill hasn’t been published and this “sundown clause” in itself would be unprecedented and unconstitutional. You are talking out your ass here. I frankly suspect you are trolling especially given your comment history.

US should first implement a national identifier that can be used for healthcare purposes before implementing age verification, that would be a lot more helpful.

There have been bills in the past like "The improved digital identity act of 2023" that never get out of committee. The latest incarnation seems to be "H.R.7270 - Stop Identity Fraud and Identity Theft Act of 2026". There almost always have one republican and one democratic sponsor. But they don't seem to rise to the level of urgency to get past the current dysfunction in congress.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/7270...

Oh, but that could be used for voting and we don't want that.

Voter ID changes would be a lot easier to swallow with a free national id that you don't have to register or fill out paperwork to get.

Maybe add in automatic voter registration to sweeten the pot?

It would give the federal government inappropriate control of state elections.

I don't know how many times this needs to be iterated, but voter ID has absolutely nothing to do with election security. It has everything to do with voter suppression, just like poll taxes and literacy tests. It gives poll workers discretion to turn people away.

There's a reason this idea is pushed solely by Republicans with the explicit goal of reducing the number of people who can vote, because fewer people voting is better for Republicans.

So how would you recommend ensuring only citizens vote and only do so a max of once per election?

What we do now works fine. Numerous studies, including by people that had a strong interest in wanting to find problems, have found that the amount of ineligible voters that slip through is insignificant.

Voter registration records are generally public and are scrutinized by partisan organizations that want to try to disqualify voters that they think will vote for a different party.

The voter ID laws Republicans are trying to pass would stop at most a negligible amount on ineligible voters, but would also disenfranchise several million citizens, most of whom are poor and/or elderly and/or minorities.

If Republicans would propose a voter ID law that also includes funding to provide free IDs to every citizen who does not have one (including covering the costs of obtaining the necessary documentation for those IDs), then most people objecting to the current proposals would drop their objections.

As someone who would vote for voter ID, I would also vote just as fast to provide tax payer funded help so any US citizen can vote, regardless of financial situation.

The same way we do now, checking their voter registration. Voter fraud isn't prevalent enough to require overhauling major systems and policy.

I can see another group getting very upset "They want to see my what before letting me buy a gun!"

Yes but they would need a functional healthcare system first.

I struggle with this. Outcomes for our healthcare system are much better than critics want to accept. Most of the negative health outcomes in the United States are mostly about our built environment - people who aren't very poor and live in walkable urban centers in the US have health outcomes similar to Europe. Those reading this website in the US often have outcomes that exceed their peers in Europe - we have much better cancer treatment, for instance. US city air quality is starting to beat European cities because we don't use nearly as much natural gas (NYC is better than Berlin, for instance, at pm2.5).

Most negative US health outcome factors can be traced to suburbanization, which is also where the vast majority of the gun violence is, and systemic racial wealth disparity. We have a pretty good healthcare system, we just need to subsidize it for people who can't afford it.

"If we focus on a subset of the population that is lucky, we have a great healthcare system." Got it!

Sorry for the sarcasm, but that's how your comment reads.

Do those lucky people have healthcare insurance tied to their employment? Are they afraid to go to a demonstration or advocate a union, because they could lose their job and thus healthcare?

A good healthcare system treats everyone equally, no matter where they live in a country, their income level, being employed/unemployed, etc.

We have a pretty good healthcare system, we just need to subsidize it for people who can't afford it.

No, it is broken. The US healthcare capita costs twice as much per capita as most West European countries and the 'outcomes per capita' are worse. The problem is, similar to the prison system etc., the privatization of the system. It's run by companies that go for profit maximization, which entails rejecting as many claims as possible, driving up medicine prices, etc.

The problem is none of these criticisms are most easily solved with "the healthcare system". The healthcare system itself functions quite well.

For instance, almost every bit of infrastructure (virtual or physical) in the US costs twice as much per capita as Europe. That's not something that's wrong with "healthcare". It's not even likely to be a good idea to change that.

Blue states have largely already solved the access issues with subsidies; low income folks do get surprisingly good very cheap access in states like New York and Washington.

Calling out it being "private" isn't even in the top ten things that would improve health outcomes more easily.

In the US, quality of health care is not really a problem. The problem is that the cost is too high, and also availability (in part because of the cost).

The US should first implement an equivalent to the GDPR that puts a stop to the ongoing abuses of the current identification systems. After we see that is working, then we can talk about increasing the technical strength of identification systems.

Welllll, the land of GDPR keeps pushing for the chat control. Not sure there are any good guys left.

Uh, okay? I wasn't talking about "good guys" but rather a way to reign in the abuses that are already occurring even with our rudimentary identification systems.

I didn't even know a bill could be listed without the text being out.

Too early to discuss much though?

There are several different approaches to trying to keep children from things that are probably bad for them on the internet that have been proposed or passed as laws.

1. Requiring sites in various categories (porn, social media) to make sure they aren't serving children, without specifying how they are to do that.

2. Similar to #1, but specifying specific means the sites must use. They are often pretty bad from a potential privacy perspective because they often specify uploading copies of passports or driver's licenses or other things that could be very harmful to you if they leaked. These laws do at least often require the sites to delete those documents. With #1 sites often ask for the same documents but aren't required to delete them.

3. Like #2 but includes among the allowed means of verification some that don't give the site copies of your sensitive documents.

4. Ones that require operating systems on devices whose primary user is a child to let the parents set the age of the child when the child's account is being set up, and to provide an API that apps can query to find out if the current user is a child.

Whenever any of those are discussed here, or whenever any of the other approaches being developed such as those that allow binding a digital copy of your government ID to a hardware security module you have (such as on a smartphone) and to use that to demonstrate age range without disclosing anything else (Google and Apple have these, and the EU is planning on such a system) is discussed here, 95% of the commenters comment as if it was a #2 type of system.

So might as well discuss this one now. The discussion won't be any different once the text comes out.

4 is a more interesting pitch, but without knowing if the law requires the OS check the age somehow it's hard to say. I also think ideally it shouldn't be an actual age for privacy reasons? Ideally it should be a kind of adult / not adult flag that's on or off, presumably tied to other parental controls.

So if the legislation leans that way it would be interesting to discuss that part in particular.

The main type 4 law right now is the one California passed and some others copied.

It requires that the parent be able to enter an age or birthdate. The API that the OS must provide to apps is required to let apps ask for age ranges, with these ranges required: [0, 13), [13, 16), [16, 18), [18, ∞).

The California bill is mostly fine, and just needs some tweaks. It is way narrower than 99% of the people who comment on it think it is.

From what little that has actually been disclosed about the federal bill it sounds like it too is taking a parental control approach, but it also sounds like it might be requiring the OS to actually verify the age.

The big question is what does that mean? If it just means the OS has to ask the parents for the age it may be similar to the California law and might just take some tweaking. If it means the OS has to be provided actual proof then it is quite different and much more problematic.

This is a stupid bill, but how is this an anti-LGBTQ issue?

Anything that even slightly has to do with LGBTQ people will likely end up getting blocked from children’s eyes, while anything to do with non-LGBTQ people won’t.

I find it interesting this criticism assumes age-appropriate LGBTQ content isn’t a thing.

Age appropriate books intended for that still get banned, so the assumption is just that the decisions about it won't be made in good faith. "X has two dads" kind of books aren't really adult, and yet...

Then sue, at that point, and win.

SCOTUS says no.

Ah yes, I have a lot of faith that the stacked Supreme Court will return a fair result in this issue.

unless they're gonna bribe Clarence Thomas and the rest of the Bush appointees with more $$$ and goods that their current backers that approach is going to fail

the Tea Party's main goal was to get their people into local / state / federal circuit / SOCTUS positions, and they have succeeded.

Because the people who will use the law as a club to enforce their morality will assert that there is no such thing.

I'm currently reading Foucault's history of sexuality, and the reason you might want this is because population!

Obviously we are facing a population crisis, and we will need more bodies for the factories and retirement homes. Or at least this was the idea in the 1800s. We might have morally coated it with religion, but biopower is a real thing.

The current hypothesis is that the ever evolving LGBTQ+ is a way to sell niche products to these groups. You can imagine that with every new gender, there is a facebook ad and amazon order to be sold.

I don't really believe this, I'm an anti-realist and I think continental philosophy is BS... but this is a classic. Also, there are sooo many ways our sexual taboos are all about economics. Once you see it, you cant unsee.

I'm wary of reasoning that boils down to using utilitarian arguments to back up moralistic fundamentalism - especially when there are so many other things that would achieve similar results but continue to go unaddressed. We could start with making sure every child has abundant access to food and healthcare so they grow up as healthy as possible. We could address the economic treadmill wherein two incomes have become de facto mandatory, causing many straight women who want kids to put it off indefinitely. And if increasing our population is a desirable goal, we could even use public money to outright subsidize the cost of caring for kids. Never mind America-first policies like immigration to increase our own population at the expense of other countries.

> You can imagine that with every new gender, there is a facebook ad and amazon order to be sold.

This is veering off into conspiratorial thinking land. Of course there is an element of truth to it. But that same element of truth applies to basically every other meme as well.

@srslyTrying2hlp

FWIW I didn't say "no". I said it was dubious to place emphasis on that specific approach when there are other approaches that could help the same goal and are more in line with our Western values, but they aren't being followed (in fact they're closer to being actively rejected!)

In general it's extremely important to exercise one's judgement/heuristics of which arguments are worthy of focus, lest one end up being taken in by superficial criticisms and actually end up harming the thing you're claiming to want to fix. Like in this instance the proponents of religious fundamentalism are also responsible for pushing a lot of backwards policy that actively harms children once they've been born - their own heuristics are just wildly out of touch with the modern world.

@srslyTrying2hlp

I'd say you're using this idea of "fallibility" as a license to make unsubstantiated assertions and then avoid responsibility for the implications. Or maybe you just need to put down the bong, detox, and touch grass. Nobody is "denying reality and science" here.

Have you paid attention to the discourse of the would be censors? They've been conspicuously trying to turn crossdressing from a longstanding tradition (albeit mostly comedic) to obscenity. Hell, even calling trans people inherently obscene. Talk about giving away the game.

discussion of sex ed / lgbtq topics often falls under obscenity laws or age filtering, so queer youth might not be able to read it anymore, is the general worry.

Project 2025 includes a multi-prong plan specifically targeting LGBTQ and generally enforcing "christian values".

One of the prongs is requiring ID to go online. Another is to use a combination of media mergers with 'voluntary' government-controlled self-censorship to clamp down on unregulated speech.

So, its blast radius will be centered on LGBTQ issues, but it's designed to cover your comment too.

It isn’t, the author of the criticism is desperately trying to attach another issue to get people to pay attention.

It also doesn’t make sense a Democrat from New Jersey writing the bill saw it that way at all.

This. That crowd is constantly shoehorning themselves into non-pertinent issues as part of their pathological attention seeking behavior.

I’m old enough to tell you I’m old enough.

Wait…what happened?

Now I’m not old enough to tell you I’m old enough.

You will be charged with child endangerment if you let your kid use your phone.

I guess we'll be selecting Canada or Mexico at the country selection screen.

More likely Mexico

Good luck, our Canadian government loves data collection and "sticking it to big tech". This will be Canadian law very soon, I'm sure.

in most cases it is same lobbyists pushing the same agenda for the same billionaires as the US

Nonsense bills get introduced all the time. I’m not saying this shouldn’t be taken seriously, but this eventually getting codified is a long shot.

There are so many issues with how this can work in practice. Best case it just asks how old you are like a website that shows mature content, and the user lies. So from a liability perspective that shifts it to the user who gave false information. Beyond that there’s no practical way to actually verify someone’s age at the OS level.

>Beyond that there’s no practical way to actually verify someone’s age at the OS level.

KYC for windows, MacOS, iOS, Android, and internet players like Google and Cloudflare being forced to block unverified devices.

There probably would still be a way around it, but it would be a headache for most people.

Age verification in general rolled out so fast, I'm more inclined to think that nonsense gets passed more easily if it enables going after drastically more control.

You're assuming that politicians are competent, thorough, and consider all the implications before writing a bill or voting on a bill.

That is a _very_ dangerous assumption.

The government doesn't care if it's nonsensical and contradictory and enforcement would be a dumpster fire because all that essentially grants their buddies (if not now then in the future) in the executive more power.

It is currently in commitee the energy and commerce committee. If one of your reps sits on this committee my suggestion is to reach out to them and voice your opposition to this measure. Consider writing a letter or email as well.

Committee members can be found here: https://energycommerce.house.gov/representatives

F this BS. I will never send a single dime or packet to any company or politician that supports this. I will tell everyone I know to boycott their service or products.

The latest absurd power grab in the guise of protecting the children.

Will this make Linux illegal?

Not if the software complies, which is in discussion.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Undecided-Age-Laws

Many distributions have decided not to comply. Debian has settled on not making anything like this mandatory, as they are an international project, although they may (after discussion and likely voting) agree to optionally package age verification stuff for users who want it for some reason.

I'm worried that Poettering's new startup is designed to ban unapproved Linux, BSDs, etc.

https://linuxiac.com/systemd-creator-lennart-poettering-join...

The cynic in me says the Win 11 "you must have a TPM" push (along with passkey's "big tech owns all your accounts" design) were rammed through specifically to centralize control of the open web.

At this point, if the federal government actually forced OS-level censorship, most literate folks would just download Linux. So, first, they need to close the remaining door.

I'm not exactly holding a candle for debian. SystemD has already started adding support for this, and, in the past, downstream has been able to force unpopular debian votes through.

SystemD only added an optional birthdate field to userdb, and many distros don’t even use userdb by default. And there exist distros without SystemD. So I wouldn’t worry too much about the SystemD angle, although IMHO they were spineless for adding the field.

This did not take long, we all knew this was coming but I am surprised on how quick this appeared.

Lets hope they carve out exemptions for Free Operating Systems based upon revenue. But we know that will not happen.

[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47772203

Comments moved thither. Thanks!

As I’ve said before, it’s a great time to invest in a pallet of SFF computers and source/ISO archives of all the best distros.

Input age here:

100'); DROP TABLE Age;--

-32,768

0.000023s

lizard

Will there be a shooting because of this?

Do ICE count?