This is horribly vague.

>a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.

It leaves open to interpretation if it applies to all computers, or just general purpose ones.

Does a car count as a mobile device?

Car is clearly a mobile device; it has a touchscreen and an IMEI.

Going to be fun when my washing machine asks me to upload a scan of my passport to the CIA before it will open the door.

were you trying to launder any dirty laundry :)

No worries, by that time so many people will have lost their jobs because of AI that you can hire a homeless person to register all your devices for a snickers. Dirty Mike and the Boys are going to own a lot of mobile devices, and control the world trade of snickers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FkK8ZFE7Y0

The CIA hates that trick.

lol what makes you think YOU won’t be the homeless person.

I got a house with a 25-year roof, an indestructible Japanese shitbox car I can repair myself from scrap if I have to, and enough in the bank at three to five percent to pay my taxes, all of my hobbies, eating steak every day if I wanted and my share of the universal multi-payer health care system in my country.

That puts me for the rest of my life at a level of fuck you.

And if the system breaks down, I’m just going to hunt and eat you. How big do you think your chance of survival is meeting someone hungry who spent over a decade in war and conflict zones and is still here?

I’m more concerned about the future for your sake than for mine.

Breathtaking entitlement, self-righteousness, and arrogance.

Arrogance is usually a defense mechanism that you can't fix with logic... people use it to shield themselves from their own insecurities so they don't feel inadequate or threatened.

If you can't see your own flaws, you can't understand why others don't like your behavior.

"As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding."

> Breathtaking entitlement, self-righteousness, and arrogance.

Oh stop it. You’re breathtaking!

Haha I think he was just being humorous, expletives notwithstanding.

Know what gave it away?

> enough in the bank at three to five percent

I mean lol if he’s expecting banks to be around in a societal collapse situation he’s got another thing coming, wonder how the shitbox car will do when fuel runs out in 8 weeks worldwide. Mad max baby!

Digital currency can help control you. Imagine negative inflation based on your social score.

Social score is for communists and autocratic regimes, minton. I live in a democra…

Wait, 27% for the right-wing extremists in Germany? The strongest party if there were elections today? Some of them publicly state they are the friendly faces of facism?

Oh, oh. I’m in danger.

Cannibalism threats on HN - is this a recession indicator?

To be fair, people who eat ultraprocessed foods are basically human wagyu.

https://health.yahoo.com/wellness/nutrition/articles/ultrapr...

It’s conditional cannibalism Sir. That’s a difference.

Oh, AGI can turn everyone into matchsticks, but when I talk about turning humans into tasty sausage the internet goes wild.

It’s obviously sarcasm, just for the neurodivergent talent in here panic buying cannibalism safe bunkers now.

/s

Oh, you're german? Man, here I was worried you had crazy plus guns. Just crazy.

I'm adapted to the American diet, so I'm sure that they'll cover my nutritional needs.

Let's stay on opposite sides of the pond like Godzilla and King Kong.

Jokes on you. I have a Waffenbesitzkarte.

I like you whisky.

That’s a deal I can get behind.

I will send your administration a request to put your statue on top of the Arc de Trump. If they can pay 400 million for a ballroom, they can spend one for a diamond statue of the man that saved a lot of American lives today.

True heroes don’t always wear capes. Sometimes they have butcher knife’s.

Hahah calm down man. Google for “daddy chill meme”.

Reading this made me think of the 4chan Navy Seals copypasta about a top of the class navy seals trained in gorilla warfare, the best sniper in the whole US marine corps.

https://dailydot.com/navy-seal-copypasta

This will be perfect for those washing machine manufacturers! It will permanently pair itself to your passport with e-fuses, so that if you ever try to resell your old washing machine on the secondary market, it'll be worthless unless you also sell the buyer your passport

Is a scientific calculator, like kids are expected to use at school, a general purpose device?

It has an OS, a network stack, an interpreter. Usually used for games as much as for classwork.

> It leaves open to interpretation if it applies to all computers, or just general purpose ones.

That's not even the worst part:

> a person that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system

Suppose you write a generic piece of code that some third party then includes in an operating system, but you're the only relevant person in the jurisdiction. Are you now an "operating system provider"? If the "operating system" is made by hundreds of people or more, is it none of them or all of them or what?

Suppose you're a company and you've got a bunch of servers, which are computers, and you have root on them, i.e. you "control" the "operating system".

IMHO, the law tries to target the last entity which has practical control over the OS design and implementation aka the final developer/integrator.

For example in the Linux world, it's the distributions.

Where it gets murky is with Android (and to a lesser extent Windows).

IMHO, the entities which should be responsible are Google and Microsoft.

But since vendors, specially in the Android world, can heavily tweak the OS, there is a case that it's more the device manufacturers like Samsung which are responsible.

The relevant interpretation in practice will usually happen naturally, and the most ambiguous stuff will be set by jurisprudence if necessary.

> IMHO, the entities which should be responsible are Google and Microsoft.

So let's say someone in e.g. South America publishes an Android ROM. >99% of the code was written by Google but the author isn't using Google Play or any form of Google service for updates, it's only using the base Android code with their own updater.

If someone in California uses this ROM and the person in the other jurisdiction made modifications so that it doesn't comply with this law, who is in trouble? It's pretty unreasonable to claim that it's Google, but then is it no one, since the party responsible is outside the jurisdiction?

That one is murky.

I would argue it falls more on a case like the Linux distributions one and the guy in South America is responsible.

Google, in my opinion, can be held accountable for Android because they deeply control the ecosystem (App Store, APIs, Services) and de-facto prevents significant modifications, specially when they deal with Android security framework & mechanisms (if you modify this stuff too deeply, the Apps could break).

But if a distribution cuts ties with that, then it's the author or the entity behind it who is responsible, and if it's deemed illegal, downloading his ROM should be blocked in the US.

In truth, if I were a defender of this law (which I'm not), I would not worry too much about it. This text is here to force mainstream OS vendors to provide an API for age verification. The micro-subset of people flashing custom roms onto their phone or recompiling a piece of OSS software with some flag disabled is in practice so small that it's not really an issue.

While I do agree that this law could be better written, properly categorizing in it the cases of MS, Apple, Google and maybe entities like Linux Distribution honestly is kind of a nightmare.

"General Purpose Computing Device"

A car houses numerous Turing-complete computation systems.

I'm wondering how I'm going to age verify on my abacus and stacks of napkins...

And what about containers/VMs, or booting software bare metal?

Does my laptop have to pass my age verification to a Docker container?

Am I at risk of government censorship (or worse) if I create a hobby smart home app that boots bare metal on a Raspberry Pi?

Or even the shell apps that I run daily. Does curl (which can access any web url) have to validate my age? What about AI models/ollama?

Thank you for the laugh in these dreadful times. :D

Linux is Obsolete!

Long live Linux!

Brazil just passed the exact same law, nearly unanimously. Even the wording and definitions are exactly the same. This is scary as hell.

>This is scary as hell.

"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."

If it looks like a conspiracy, it's probably one.

It's not even a conspiracy at this point, Meta was proven to be lobbying hard for this via small proxy companies.

And why? What's in it for Meta?

[Edit: Never mind, others have explained elsewhere in the discussion. It's the lawsuits Facebook is losing for addicting kids. So rather than, you know, stopping doing that, they want to instead legally force us to alter every OS on the planet. Disgusting.]

Just answering with a possibility here, but they could be seeking freedom from liability for failure to moderate content or ensuring their service is "not harmful". If it's only for consenting adults, and every adult can be pinned down with an identity, whatever happens can have the blame assigned away from meta.

edit: I took too long to write this :)

And they can offer an age verification product now too.

I wonder if they plan to provide "services" to web sites that need age verification... via their app and Facebook account..

As someone that doesn't have a Meta account (and will not), this could become potentially problematic.

yeah there is no "one" provider in that example

BIOS or now UEFI support basic functions of computers... Does that mean those should as well have On-Device age checks?