5 ms·

I feel like all of these laws are being designed backwards. Content providers, like MPAA films, should have to identify what sort of content they are providing.

by kej 1mo ago

I feel like all of these laws are being designed backwards. Content providers, like MPAA films, should have to identify what sort of content they are providing. Then I can give my kids a device configured to allow some or all of that at my discretion. Requiring my kids' devices to advertise their age (or their age "bucket", as if that was a meaningful difference) to protect them is not doing me or my kids any favors.

lettergram 1mo ago
I think you’re missing the real purpose vs the stated purpose. The point is monitoring everyone, age verification requires you to share who you are.
nickff 1mo ago
Having the ability to identify who is watching or saying what on the internet would be immensely useful to the government; the justifications are really meaningless. Anti-money-laundering is a comparable field, as all the AML regulations and laws are ineffective at identifying money launderers, but they're wonderful for verifying (auditing and prosecuting) tax compliance.
- avianlyric 1mo ago
  > Anti-money-laundering is a comparable field, as all the AML regulations and laws are ineffective at identifying money launderers, but they're wonderful for verifying (auditing and prosecuting) tax compliance. As someone who’s implemented AML, KYC, and tax reporting functions in a bank. I think you would be very surprised at how shit they are for tax auditing at scale. Unless the tax man is specifically auditing you, and basically requesting all your transaction details, the reporting that banks do would only allow tax agencies to catch the most brazen and incompetent tax dodgers. All of the tools however do make much harder to perform money laundering, forcing criminals to recruit and pay huge numbers of naive bank customers to allow criminals to launder money via their personal accounts, using them as money mules. Which then gets flagged and shutdown pretty quick by banks because the behaviour is generally pretty obvious. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective) banks can’t/don’t coordinate on identified money mules or know launderers, so criminals just move on to other banks and repeat.
  - nickff 1mo ago
    Criminals don't have to "recruit and pay huge numbers of naive bank customers"; in my jurisdiction, they just walk into a casino with a few hundred thousand dollars, exchange for chips, pretend to gamble for an hour, then exchange the chips for cash, and walk out with a nice receipt. There're more complex schemes involving real estate and other mediums too.
    - avianlyric 1mo ago
      That’s cute, but it doesn’t really scale. Organised crime groups aren’t interested in laundering a few $100k at a go. They’re moving and laundering millions, you can’t put that through a casino without it being very obvious. There is a huge international criminal industry that exists to find and hire money mules, and launder eye watering amounts of cash. Where I worked, we broadly assumed that the police weren’t interested in fraud or money laundering unless it was measured in 10s of millions. We reported everything, of course, but we only got call backs for really big schemes. If you’re just committing fraud measured in $100ks, the odd of anyone bothering to investigate, and attempt to bring criminal charges, was basically zero.
      - nickff 1mo ago
        The 'small-scale' 100k-1MM per participant per day per casino laundering can add up to 'real money' quite fast. The larger-scale money laundering in my area is a but more complicated, involving import/export schemes, real estate transactions, and property developments. I'm not in a mega-city, so I assume these schemes are taking place at a larger scale in those. I have only ever heard of very basic and stupid schemes (which didn't provide any tax revenue to my goverment) being detected or prosecuted.
  - strbean 1mo ago
    > Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective) banks can’t/don’t coordinate on identified money mules or know launderers, so criminals just move on to other banks and repeat. Or criminals just get a bank like HSBC to do the money laundering for them.
- al_borland 1mo ago
  > Having the ability to identify who is watching or saying what on the internet would be immensely useful to the government This sounds unconstitutional.
downrightmike 1mo ago
How dare you try to use a system that we've used for generations!
hackinthebochs 1mo ago
Parents already have the ability to do this, at least when it comes to porn. The fact is that most parents aren't doing it. Hence the push for legislation that increase the uptake of content blocks for minors.
agentultra 1mo ago
Or anyone else! This isn’t for the protection of kids. It’s for the protection of profits by surveillance capitalism.
pwg 1mo ago
> Content providers, like MPAA films, should have to identify what sort of content they are providing. Then I can give my kids a device configured to allow some or all of that at my discretion. If the intent were to actually protect children, then this would be what was done. "Protect the children" is just a subterfuge to get electorate support for voting for the foundation for a "1984 thought crime" style monitoring of the internet.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- AtHeartEngineer 1mo ago
  And surveillance capitalism
- slg 1mo ago
  Do folks realize how many people would need to be a part of this conspiracy to get these laws passed at the state level? Maybe some people actually want to do good and are just misguided. And responding to those people as if they are evil government stooges certainly isn’t going to help them find the light.
  - an0malous 1mo ago
    On the other hand, I don't know a single person or have even heard of people or organizations who are advocating to pass these laws. They want the war in Iran to stop and for costs to go down. How is there so much political willpower for the former and almost none for the latter?
    - shakes_mcjunkie 1mo ago
      Meta is spending a lot of money on age verification lobbying https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-user-uncovers-behind-meta-154717384.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-user-uncovers-beh...
  - EvanAnderson 1mo ago
aposm 1mo ago
I'm now pretty convinced that this is the best argument for persuading non-technical and non-internet-privacy minded people why this is a problem. It's hard to explain all the technical factors that make it impossible to implement without compromising privacy... but it's pretty easy to get them to understand the real intent. If you start them thinking through what mechanisms would make sense _if_ the original premise truly was protecting kids from content they aren't ready to see, it's easy to arrive at that answer, and equally easy to see why "everyone must provide their ID so we can verify their age" probably comes from other motivations.
- bryanlarsen 1mo ago
  > "everyone must provide their ID so we can verify their age" but that's not this law. This law requires self-declaration by whoever creates the accounts on the device.
  - genewitch 1mo ago
    and that's as useful as self-documenting "i am over 18" or "over 21" for things that require that, without any document checks. this is a way to get something legal on paper, the rest of the stuff (patches, if you will) comes later. This asserts that age is important enough to force an operating system to comply, this opens the door.
    - bryanlarsen 1mo ago
      > and that's as useful as self-documenting "i am over 18" or "over 21" for things that require that, without any document checks. No OS I'm aware of allows non-admin users to add new users to the system. Parents that care about these sorts of things don't give their kids admin access to their computers. > the rest of the stuff (patches, if you will) comes later. Unless the legislation allows for such patches through non-legislative process, patches to legislation generally happens on a ~20 year cycle in my experience.
      - genewitch 1mo ago
graceful6800 1mo ago
They're actually designed quite well for the intended purpose: mass surveillance and suppression of speech. Don't ever for one second pretend this is about anything else.
- xp84 1mo ago
  Why then did this completely leave out verification? Parents want and accept the out-of-box declaration idea. It requires no ID, no face scans, no "ID dot ME" or whatever. As parents we are more than able to open the box before giving our kids a laptop or phone and entering their DOB, and also able to see with our own eyes if the kid suddenly turns up with a second cell phone that they bought and configured as an adult. Any parents who are pathetically absent from parenting their kids, well, they can just go right on ignoring their kids and letting the kid themselves put in 9/9/99, and consume all kinds of inappropriate crap. This particular law is respecting everyone's rights.
  - marak830 1mo ago
    I would argue the reason is so people can make arguments like yours. Step 1: get easily passed, simple looking laws passed to 'protect the children' Step 2: 'oh look at all these people bypassing the law. It's so simple for a child to watch porn with this.' Step 3: increase the requirements bit by bit on the verification By letting something simple pass, they can claim it's not thst bad, and anyone who argues against it is being hyperbolic.
    - xp84 1mo ago
      Can you back that up? > Step 2: 'oh look at all these people bypassing the law. It's so simple for a child to watch porn with this.' This would be a demonstrably stupid argument. A parent who simply opens the box and does 5 minutes of setup before giving their child a new $300-2000 device, and maintains the most basic awareness of any rogue devices (i.e. ask questions if a new phone appears) is all it takes to make sure no "bypassing" takes place in your home. Anyone claiming "all these kids are bypassing it" would be lying, unless the law isn't even being enforced or sites aren't cooperating. And no law can overcome those problems.
xp84 1mo ago
Did you read the law? It actually imposes very (in my humble opinion) good rules on the content providers, specifically social media. We know why social media is addictive - the personalized feeds are highly optimized to extend usage time, with no amount of time being "good enough." Social media sites would be banned from using this type of feed, limiting it to feeds of content you've subscribed to or requested only. Instead of seeing mainly influencers and viral videos, people might even start seeing their friends' own content. > Requiring my kids' devices to advertise their age ... to protect them is not doing me or my kids any favors. Idk about you, but it'd be doing me favors because my kids will not be physically able to use the most addictive platforms that exist today in their current form. It would be a major disruption to the behavioral manipulation that Meta, TikTok, and X do.
- quotemstr 1mo ago
  Controlling my information consumption is not a legitimate function of the state. If algorithmic feeds get a lot of use, it's because people like them. Is that so hard to comprehend? That your preferences are not universal? And that you shouldn't use the government to bludgeon people into accepting the kind of information feed you, personally, would prefer for them? What gives you the right to do so? What you calling "addictive" is just revealed preferences of the populace.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - xp84 1mo ago
    Great, let's legalize recreational fentanyl too, since 'whatever people seem to like' is good for society. In this case, unless you're a child, nobody's trying to control what content you consume. And if you are a parent and want to make sure your children can continue to consume the most addictive possible social media, by all means lie about their age. The law does nothing to stop you from doing so. By contrast, having zero mechanism for the rest of the parents to control this, as is the current case, does impose your "do whatever feels good" values on the rest of the world.
varispeed 1mo ago
It seems like after Epstein was gone a lot of politicians in many countries suddenly want to identify children, take photos for "age identification", and their ages and what apps they use. Very strange.
michaelt 1mo ago
The idea of a 'user agent' where the 'device owner' decides 'what should be displayed and how' is ancient history, grandad. Modern social media is delivered through 'apps' which are like web browsers, except without ad blockers or privacy settings, and with push notifications to make them more addictive, and they only show one website, and they're each 5x the size of a web browser for some reason.
- Happily2020 1mo ago
  This use case could also be covered with a similar technical solution. The device decides what features will be allowed to run. If the political willpower for a better solution exists, the technical side is readily solved.
throw0101d 1mo ago
> I feel like all of these laws are being designed backwards. Content providers, like MPAA films, should have to identify what sort of content they are providing. Then I can give my kids a device configured to allow some or all of that at my discretion. This was tried in the past: * https://www.w3.org/2007/powder/ https://www.w3.org/2007/powder/ * https://www.w3.org/PICS/ https://www.w3.org/PICS/
AtHeartEngineer 1mo ago
This is definitely not about "protect the kids" or age verification, this is a stepping stone to full identity verification to use the internet at all.
zenoprax 1mo ago
Can we extend that beyond just parental controls? I'd love to permaban 90% of the internet from ever reaching me. But the laws are designed backwards because they're probably written for someone else's benefit. If this age verification stuff ever becomes plausible we always have the option of distributing actual Linux ISOs over bittorrent. Failing that, source code in RAR'd archives distributed across IPFS nodes and Tor. I feel like many of us would welcome the challenge if it were under better circumstances.
- tosti 1mo ago
  > source code in RAR Good luck extracting that shit.
  - zenoprax 1mo ago
    I know RAR isn't the coolest archive format but it has particular strengths for data preservation. Namely, built-in recovery records and effectively no archive size limit. It is more reliable than most other archives in my experience though I prefer ZIP for general compatibility. Compressed TAR is not great for random access though I think you can create indexed tarballs which helps.
    - tosti 1mo ago
      Do you have working, buildable source code for extracting a RAR?
MrJohz 1mo ago
I think the issue is with something like algorithmic feeds — that's not content that can be allowed or blocked at the client-level, that's a setting that needs to be fed back to the service. It would be very difficult (impossible?) to design an API that allows services to identify whether a user should be served an algorithmic feed without also having that service know that the setting change was triggered by local age restrictions. Like, I can imagine a browser exposing an API that says "wantsAlgorithmicFeeds: boolean", and websites would be required to respect that setting. In theory, anyone can toggle that setting, so the website doesn't know if the user is under 18 or not. But if in practice the vast majority of people with "wantsAlgorithmicFeeds: false" are children, then websites can use that API as a good enough proxy for identifying information in the vast majority of cases. Moreover, the more of these specific APIs you add, the harder it gets to keep things anonymous — especially if different states have different requirements on age-restricted content, you'd end up being able to triangulate not just age brackets, but also potentially location as well. I agree that age bucket still has the potential for exposing identifying information (e.g. if you can monitor a user as they move from one bucket to another, you can identify their date of birth), but it's harder, and it reduces the amount of side-information that can potentially get leaked. That said, exposing the information in the other direction as well would be a good step because it would allow websites or apps to enable OS-level age restrictions without requiring that they also read the "age bucket" bit. It would be nice if "read a person's age bracket" were a permission that an app or website would need to request, rather than one that was given by default, and that could be coupled with the fully-privacy-preserving approach you describe, so that different applications with different requirements could mix-and-match. All that said, I suspect it would be a lot easier to coordinate on good technical solutions like the one you're describing if the default reaction to anything that even smells like age restriction wasn't the sort of abject horror and moral panic that is so clear in this thread. Like, sure, age verification at any level has all sorts of issues. But that isn't the only possible solution to the problem here, and if technical people react to these proposals by pretending the problem doesn't even exist in the first place, then we're never going to find those better solutions.
samspot 1mo ago
Do you actually manage devices for kids? It's a massive pain fine tuning all the controls on Apple, and the only way to really be sure is to completely ban the web browser and the app store (and probably more things I have missed). Now do this for multiple kids. Most parents can't be bothered, especially if they are non-technical and intimidated by settings. And so they give their kids unrestricted devices. I think I read the average first exposure to pornography is now age 7. I'm speaking from experience as many parents I've talked to have thrown up their hands because they can't keep their elementary aged kid from using the ipad all night, despite there being an extremely easy screen time fix for that very problem. I am technical enough to understand how to do all this, but even then I encounter many bugs in the parental controls, for example one kid is able to use Safari despite my blocking, even though they are on an identical device to another child who is successfully blocked. There are infinite content sources now, and it's not possible to manage them all 1-by-1. All that being said, broadcasting device user age should be completely opt-in for those who want it, and not mandated for every customer.

by kej 1mo ago

lettergram 1mo ago

I think you’re missing the real purpose vs the stated purpose. The point is monitoring everyone, age verification requires you to share who you are.

nickff 1mo ago

Having the ability to identify who is watching or saying what on the internet would be immensely useful to the government; the justifications are really meaningless. Anti-money-laundering is a comparable field, as all the AML regulations and laws are ineffective at identifying money launderers, but they're wonderful for verifying (auditing and prosecuting) tax compliance.

avianlyric 1mo ago
> Anti-money-laundering is a comparable field, as all the AML regulations and laws are ineffective at identifying money launderers, but they're wonderful for verifying (auditing and prosecuting) tax compliance. As someone who’s implemented AML, KYC, and tax reporting functions in a bank. I think you would be very surprised at how shit they are for tax auditing at scale. Unless the tax man is specifically auditing you, and basically requesting all your transaction details, the reporting that banks do would only allow tax agencies to catch the most brazen and incompetent tax dodgers. All of the tools however do make much harder to perform money laundering, forcing criminals to recruit and pay huge numbers of naive bank customers to allow criminals to launder money via their personal accounts, using them as money mules. Which then gets flagged and shutdown pretty quick by banks because the behaviour is generally pretty obvious. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective) banks can’t/don’t coordinate on identified money mules or know launderers, so criminals just move on to other banks and repeat.
- nickff 1mo ago
  Criminals don't have to "recruit and pay huge numbers of naive bank customers"; in my jurisdiction, they just walk into a casino with a few hundred thousand dollars, exchange for chips, pretend to gamble for an hour, then exchange the chips for cash, and walk out with a nice receipt. There're more complex schemes involving real estate and other mediums too.
  - avianlyric 1mo ago
    That’s cute, but it doesn’t really scale. Organised crime groups aren’t interested in laundering a few $100k at a go. They’re moving and laundering millions, you can’t put that through a casino without it being very obvious. There is a huge international criminal industry that exists to find and hire money mules, and launder eye watering amounts of cash. Where I worked, we broadly assumed that the police weren’t interested in fraud or money laundering unless it was measured in 10s of millions. We reported everything, of course, but we only got call backs for really big schemes. If you’re just committing fraud measured in $100ks, the odd of anyone bothering to investigate, and attempt to bring criminal charges, was basically zero.
    - nickff 1mo ago
      The 'small-scale' 100k-1MM per participant per day per casino laundering can add up to 'real money' quite fast. The larger-scale money laundering in my area is a but more complicated, involving import/export schemes, real estate transactions, and property developments. I'm not in a mega-city, so I assume these schemes are taking place at a larger scale in those. I have only ever heard of very basic and stupid schemes (which didn't provide any tax revenue to my goverment) being detected or prosecuted.
- strbean 1mo ago
  > Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective) banks can’t/don’t coordinate on identified money mules or know launderers, so criminals just move on to other banks and repeat. Or criminals just get a bank like HSBC to do the money laundering for them.
al_borland 1mo ago
> Having the ability to identify who is watching or saying what on the internet would be immensely useful to the government This sounds unconstitutional.

downrightmike 1mo ago

How dare you try to use a system that we've used for generations!

hackinthebochs 1mo ago

Parents already have the ability to do this, at least when it comes to porn. The fact is that most parents aren't doing it. Hence the push for legislation that increase the uptake of content blocks for minors.

agentultra 1mo ago

Or anyone else! This isn’t for the protection of kids. It’s for the protection of profits by surveillance capitalism.

pwg 1mo ago

> Content providers, like MPAA films, should have to identify what sort of content they are providing. Then I can give my kids a device configured to allow some or all of that at my discretion. If the intent were to actually protect children, then this would be what was done. "Protect the children" is just a subterfuge to get electorate support for voting for the foundation for a "1984 thought crime" style monitoring of the internet.

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
AtHeartEngineer 1mo ago
And surveillance capitalism
slg 1mo ago
Do folks realize how many people would need to be a part of this conspiracy to get these laws passed at the state level? Maybe some people actually want to do good and are just misguided. And responding to those people as if they are evil government stooges certainly isn’t going to help them find the light.
- an0malous 1mo ago
  On the other hand, I don't know a single person or have even heard of people or organizations who are advocating to pass these laws. They want the war in Iran to stop and for costs to go down. How is there so much political willpower for the former and almost none for the latter?
  - shakes_mcjunkie 1mo ago
    Meta is spending a lot of money on age verification lobbying https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-user-uncovers-behind-meta-154717384.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-user-uncovers-beh...
- EvanAnderson 1mo ago

aposm 1mo ago

I'm now pretty convinced that this is the best argument for persuading non-technical and non-internet-privacy minded people why this is a problem. It's hard to explain all the technical factors that make it impossible to implement without compromising privacy... but it's pretty easy to get them to understand the real intent. If you start them thinking through what mechanisms would make sense _if_ the original premise truly was protecting kids from content they aren't ready to see, it's easy to arrive at that answer, and equally easy to see why "everyone must provide their ID so we can verify their age" probably comes from other motivations.

bryanlarsen 1mo ago
> "everyone must provide their ID so we can verify their age" but that's not this law. This law requires self-declaration by whoever creates the accounts on the device.
- genewitch 1mo ago
  and that's as useful as self-documenting "i am over 18" or "over 21" for things that require that, without any document checks. this is a way to get something legal on paper, the rest of the stuff (patches, if you will) comes later. This asserts that age is important enough to force an operating system to comply, this opens the door.
  - bryanlarsen 1mo ago
    > and that's as useful as self-documenting "i am over 18" or "over 21" for things that require that, without any document checks. No OS I'm aware of allows non-admin users to add new users to the system. Parents that care about these sorts of things don't give their kids admin access to their computers. > the rest of the stuff (patches, if you will) comes later. Unless the legislation allows for such patches through non-legislative process, patches to legislation generally happens on a ~20 year cycle in my experience.
    - genewitch 1mo ago

graceful6800 1mo ago

They're actually designed quite well for the intended purpose: mass surveillance and suppression of speech. Don't ever for one second pretend this is about anything else.

xp84 1mo ago
Why then did this completely leave out verification? Parents want and accept the out-of-box declaration idea. It requires no ID, no face scans, no "ID dot ME" or whatever. As parents we are more than able to open the box before giving our kids a laptop or phone and entering their DOB, and also able to see with our own eyes if the kid suddenly turns up with a second cell phone that they bought and configured as an adult. Any parents who are pathetically absent from parenting their kids, well, they can just go right on ignoring their kids and letting the kid themselves put in 9/9/99, and consume all kinds of inappropriate crap. This particular law is respecting everyone's rights.
- marak830 1mo ago
  I would argue the reason is so people can make arguments like yours. Step 1: get easily passed, simple looking laws passed to 'protect the children' Step 2: 'oh look at all these people bypassing the law. It's so simple for a child to watch porn with this.' Step 3: increase the requirements bit by bit on the verification By letting something simple pass, they can claim it's not thst bad, and anyone who argues against it is being hyperbolic.
  - xp84 1mo ago
    Can you back that up? > Step 2: 'oh look at all these people bypassing the law. It's so simple for a child to watch porn with this.' This would be a demonstrably stupid argument. A parent who simply opens the box and does 5 minutes of setup before giving their child a new $300-2000 device, and maintains the most basic awareness of any rogue devices (i.e. ask questions if a new phone appears) is all it takes to make sure no "bypassing" takes place in your home. Anyone claiming "all these kids are bypassing it" would be lying, unless the law isn't even being enforced or sites aren't cooperating. And no law can overcome those problems.

xp84 1mo ago

Did you read the law? It actually imposes very (in my humble opinion) good rules on the content providers, specifically social media. We know why social media is addictive - the personalized feeds are highly optimized to extend usage time, with no amount of time being "good enough." Social media sites would be banned from using this type of feed, limiting it to feeds of content you've subscribed to or requested only. Instead of seeing mainly influencers and viral videos, people might even start seeing their friends' own content. > Requiring my kids' devices to advertise their age ... to protect them is not doing me or my kids any favors. Idk about you, but it'd be doing me favors because my kids will not be physically able to use the most addictive platforms that exist today in their current form. It would be a major disruption to the behavioral manipulation that Meta, TikTok, and X do.

quotemstr 1mo ago
Controlling my information consumption is not a legitimate function of the state. If algorithmic feeds get a lot of use, it's because people like them. Is that so hard to comprehend? That your preferences are not universal? And that you shouldn't use the government to bludgeon people into accepting the kind of information feed you, personally, would prefer for them? What gives you the right to do so? What you calling "addictive" is just revealed preferences of the populace.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- xp84 1mo ago
  Great, let's legalize recreational fentanyl too, since 'whatever people seem to like' is good for society. In this case, unless you're a child, nobody's trying to control what content you consume. And if you are a parent and want to make sure your children can continue to consume the most addictive possible social media, by all means lie about their age. The law does nothing to stop you from doing so. By contrast, having zero mechanism for the rest of the parents to control this, as is the current case, does impose your "do whatever feels good" values on the rest of the world.

varispeed 1mo ago

It seems like after Epstein was gone a lot of politicians in many countries suddenly want to identify children, take photos for "age identification", and their ages and what apps they use. Very strange.

michaelt 1mo ago

The idea of a 'user agent' where the 'device owner' decides 'what should be displayed and how' is ancient history, grandad. Modern social media is delivered through 'apps' which are like web browsers, except without ad blockers or privacy settings, and with push notifications to make them more addictive, and they only show one website, and they're each 5x the size of a web browser for some reason.

Happily2020 1mo ago
This use case could also be covered with a similar technical solution. The device decides what features will be allowed to run. If the political willpower for a better solution exists, the technical side is readily solved.

throw0101d 1mo ago

> I feel like all of these laws are being designed backwards. Content providers, like MPAA films, should have to identify what sort of content they are providing. Then I can give my kids a device configured to allow some or all of that at my discretion. This was tried in the past: * https://www.w3.org/2007/powder/ https://www.w3.org/2007/powder/ * https://www.w3.org/PICS/ https://www.w3.org/PICS/

AtHeartEngineer 1mo ago

This is definitely not about "protect the kids" or age verification, this is a stepping stone to full identity verification to use the internet at all.

zenoprax 1mo ago

Can we extend that beyond just parental controls? I'd love to permaban 90% of the internet from ever reaching me. But the laws are designed backwards because they're probably written for someone else's benefit. If this age verification stuff ever becomes plausible we always have the option of distributing actual Linux ISOs over bittorrent. Failing that, source code in RAR'd archives distributed across IPFS nodes and Tor. I feel like many of us would welcome the challenge if it were under better circumstances.

tosti 1mo ago
> source code in RAR Good luck extracting that shit.
- zenoprax 1mo ago
  I know RAR isn't the coolest archive format but it has particular strengths for data preservation. Namely, built-in recovery records and effectively no archive size limit. It is more reliable than most other archives in my experience though I prefer ZIP for general compatibility. Compressed TAR is not great for random access though I think you can create indexed tarballs which helps.
  - tosti 1mo ago
    Do you have working, buildable source code for extracting a RAR?

MrJohz 1mo ago

I think the issue is with something like algorithmic feeds — that's not content that can be allowed or blocked at the client-level, that's a setting that needs to be fed back to the service. It would be very difficult (impossible?) to design an API that allows services to identify whether a user should be served an algorithmic feed without also having that service know that the setting change was triggered by local age restrictions. Like, I can imagine a browser exposing an API that says "wantsAlgorithmicFeeds: boolean", and websites would be required to respect that setting. In theory, anyone can toggle that setting, so the website doesn't know if the user is under 18 or not. But if in practice the vast majority of people with "wantsAlgorithmicFeeds: false" are children, then websites can use that API as a good enough proxy for identifying information in the vast majority of cases. Moreover, the more of these specific APIs you add, the harder it gets to keep things anonymous — especially if different states have different requirements on age-restricted content, you'd end up being able to triangulate not just age brackets, but also potentially location as well. I agree that age bucket still has the potential for exposing identifying information (e.g. if you can monitor a user as they move from one bucket to another, you can identify their date of birth), but it's harder, and it reduces the amount of side-information that can potentially get leaked. That said, exposing the information in the other direction as well would be a good step because it would allow websites or apps to enable OS-level age restrictions without requiring that they also read the "age bucket" bit. It would be nice if "read a person's age bracket" were a permission that an app or website would need to request, rather than one that was given by default, and that could be coupled with the fully-privacy-preserving approach you describe, so that different applications with different requirements could mix-and-match. All that said, I suspect it would be a lot easier to coordinate on good technical solutions like the one you're describing if the default reaction to anything that even smells like age restriction wasn't the sort of abject horror and moral panic that is so clear in this thread. Like, sure, age verification at any level has all sorts of issues. But that isn't the only possible solution to the problem here, and if technical people react to these proposals by pretending the problem doesn't even exist in the first place, then we're never going to find those better solutions.

samspot 1mo ago

Do you actually manage devices for kids? It's a massive pain fine tuning all the controls on Apple, and the only way to really be sure is to completely ban the web browser and the app store (and probably more things I have missed). Now do this for multiple kids. Most parents can't be bothered, especially if they are non-technical and intimidated by settings. And so they give their kids unrestricted devices. I think I read the average first exposure to pornography is now age 7. I'm speaking from experience as many parents I've talked to have thrown up their hands because they can't keep their elementary aged kid from using the ipad all night, despite there being an extremely easy screen time fix for that very problem. I am technical enough to understand how to do all this, but even then I encounter many bugs in the parental controls, for example one kid is able to use Safari despite my blocking, even though they are on an identical device to another child who is successfully blocked. There are infinite content sources now, and it's not possible to manage them all 1-by-1. All that being said, broadcasting device user age should be completely opt-in for those who want it, and not mandated for every customer.