It would make it illegal to sell our products there, as our central control unit has an OS, too. I know, I have written it, and I have no plans of implementing an age veryfication system for the people logging in to set and control parameters.
Republicans: Full of pedophiles and pedophiles protectors. Hated by every sane person with any kind of conscience.
Democrats: Not on my watch! I can be an asshole too!
Republicans: Full of pedophiles and pedophiles protectors.
Imagine believing this is just republicans. smh.
Pretty sure they’re 100% zionist though (with the possible exception of chomsky).
bOtH sIdEs
Get a load of this guy, he actually believes there’s more than one side
Impossible to enforce. Pro version of Windows allows for local account creation also with Linux too.
Fun fact: Dell now offers their ready made desktops in linux and windows. That never happened before. Windows had to really suck to get that shit go that bad.
They’ve sold their XPS line with Ubuntu as an option for like 10 years. Maybe they stopped for some time, but it’s not new
And steam has linux too in their devices. Linux is going mainstream, and i feel like this time is real.
standing on a San Francisco street corner, opening my trench coat revealing 40 USB sticks
Hey kid, wanna buy illegal Linux?
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More liberal fascism? No surprise.
My Steam account is 21 years old and can now buy alcohol. Does that count?
They don’t care. They want your face, retina, fingerprints, DNA. All for their LLMs and so they can sell you something else.
Also to blackmail you later if they think they can or just feel like it… because they will put all that shit on an insecure server and some 13 year old hacker in Turkmenistan will leak it and make a killing (literally and figuratively) with it.
FYI, I am not a lawyer.
Have you actually read the bill itself? Nowhere in it does it mention any of the things that you mentioned. It doesn’t even mention ID cards at all.
What it does say is operating system providers shall “Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device”. What we should look out for is that the law does not forbid OS providers from requiring IDs.
It does however require that OS providers “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.” (emphasis mine)
I wonder how much this is news outlets overreacting to a proposed bill that is not actually that bad, or if this is some marketing against the bill by some Corp.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043
No, it is bad.
Suppose it’s used to verify your age when visiting Pornhub. How is Pornhub going to trust the user’s computer didn’t lie about the user’s age? A “just trust me bro” sent by the browser isn’t going to suffice; teenagers would find a way around that.
Thr attestation will have to be cryptographically signed by some trusted party—and that’s either going to be the government, or the operating system vendor.
If it’s the government holding the signing keys: the website can now verify that you’re a resident of $state in $country and use that for fingerprinting and targeted advertising. And what if your country doesn’t participate, or if Pornhub doesn’t trust the signing keys used by the government of Estonia? Tough shit, no porn for you! It would be impractical to manage all those keys, though, so why not instead leave it up to the operating system vendor?
If it is left the operating system vendor, it’s going to end up being exactly the same as Google Play Service’s SafetyNet “feature”. If you’re not using an approved operating system (a.k.a. Windows, MacOS, stock Android, iOS) you’re not visiting Pornhub. Or a banking app. Or applying for jobs. Etc.
This bill is a poison pill for device ownership and FOSS operating systems being handed to corporations on a silver platter.
Totally a valid point.
Just to clarify I am not for this law. I do not think that this should have been passed. But also the law seems to have some good intentions and I don’t want to jump to conclusions after just reading headlines.
It feels like the law makers want to standardize and restrict how this age verification works without actually providing any guidance whatsoever on how to implement such a system.
I’m curious to see what systems companies come up with and what major flaws they will have (intentional or not) that data collectors will exploit.
So everyone’s windows OS will be registered to Mike Hunt born 1/1/1970. Gotcha
This actually speaks to one of the concerning things about this law. There is a section forbidding developers from collecting additional information (unless they have confident information that your age is incorrect). But there is no such clause for OS providers.
Developers shall not “Request more information from an operating system provider or a covered application store than the minimum amount of information necessary to comply with this title.”
Or
“Share the signal with a third party for a purpose not required by this title.”
This means that discord could not collect IDs or face scans without confidence that your age is incorrect. But windows can still require whatever they want.
But I guess silver lining is that neither of them can sell or even share the data with 3rd parties. Pretty minimal silver lining though.
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It saddens me that someone who is willing to stand so strongly against an oppressive law would work to discourage discussion about those laws on free social platforms.
I hope you can consider your words next time and we can enter into a good faith discussion over the merits and demerits of any law.
Sorry. Mea Culpa. I was expressing my frustration with the spirit of the law, making discussion about the details of the law moot. My comment was directed at the contents you posted, not at you for posting them.
This was passed and signed last October. Why is this just hitting the news cycle?
No idea.
This will immediately get struck down in court even if it passes, though everyone should make their voices heard in saying this is complete nonsense.
Yet another case of antiquated politicians not understanding technology whatsoever.
No doubt the law is hopeful and leaves out many details in regards to how such a system could/would/might be implemented.
But I am not seeing anything in the law that would be unconstitutional. But I’m not a lawyer so what do I know.
Not a lawyer, but deeply involved in the law from the tech side for many years at various deeper levels from the engineering side and bridge to product and so forth.
It doesn’t need to be unconstitutional to be struck down as the constitution doesn’t cover all laws, especially not state and local laws. All you need to do is prove that the language or intent of the law is either:
- impossible to enforce (ex: software processes cannot be patented or controlled/patrolled)
- the language is too broad (ex: What is an OS exactly?)
- it violates a prexisting law or creates a verifiable conundrum (ex: this would violate California’s own data privacy laws)
- it creates an undue tax or burden on existing technology (ex: devices out in the wild can’t be retrofitted to comply, which sort of fits with #1)
- it DOES actually violate a constitutional right (ex: 4th amendment)
Being on my side of things, the legal team would most likely start a case with something like “So you say the OS needs to be locked with age verification. Does that mean every TV, router, public computer, tablet…blah blah blah”, so it’s very likely to get tossed on #1 quite easily because these folks have no idea what an OS actually is, and that every piece of technology you interact with on a daily basis has an OS. The lack of specificity alone would get this tossed in a heartbeat.
If that failed, they’d argue there is no way to police or enforce this law because sites who rely on this rule existing are putting themselves in legal jeopardy by simply allowing any traffic from California to access their services. What if someone from another state or country is in California and wants to watch porn in their hotel, or play a game with friends on Discord? Police have zero right to verify that any device entering California complies with the law, so the provider of the service would have to be on the hook to do the verification, which means they would just block any device from California that doesn’t meet whatever flag is sent to say it safe. THEN you have the infrastructure that is required to ensure those devices…blah blah blah.
It’s just a stupid idea by dumbass technically illiterate people. It won’t go anywhere.
As soon as these idiots figure out what an OS is, this is dead in the water because of the above.
I appreciate the insight. And you are right, that was my lack of understanding about how it could be struck down in court.
I do want to talk briefly on your point about these other devices where the law might actually apply since I have seen a few people bring up this point.
I the definition of an OS provider the law asserts that an OS is “computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.” (emphasis mine)
To me this clearly excludes those other types of devices because routers, tvs, etc are not general purpose.
As far as public computers I think that is a really good point and speaks to the vagueness of the law. There is no clear direction on how that works in such a common use case.
Coming from the engineering side as well and I’ve put more time, thought, and effort into project proposals than it feels like they put into this law.
Solid point on the “single purpose” nature of some devices, but that’s also the legalese going to work here in that “Depends what the meaning of IS, is” sort of way 🤣
Making laws with vague definitions will get challenged, as you point out.
You’re right. I had the same thought about the definition of “account”.
Appreciate your explanation!
My first thought was maybe this will work for us. Can you imagine how many of these ancient fuckheads who vote for shit like this are going to die every day because they can’t figure out how to log in to their pacemakers and verify their age?
the legal team
What legal team? The people with money are supporting this. They’ll continue to do what they like as always.
Even if this particular law doesn’t pass, they’ll continue to waste resources on more and more violent control. That’s how we got here.
Linux, Gimp, etc. aren’t going to assemble and afford a legal team AFAIK.
This will immediately get struck down in court even if it passes
According to you?
Lol, get rekt
