This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
At this point, it's probably cheaper and more effective to have proper sex education in schools...
At which age? And how?
Fucking idiots don't know how operating systems work or what they're for.
If I could trust that the people in government know how computers work I'd be down but well I can't
I fully expect this to become a move to hamper linux, or any non-windows desktop usage, because "we can't trust a user who has full access to their OS" or some other bullshit.
Hey Colorado. GFY and get your damn politicians under control.
First I've heard of it, dude. Don't get your knickers in a twist.
Holy fuck this is bad
Only for privacy and anonymity, companies like Google and Microsoft will do fabulously however. Who donates to him I wonder.
AFAIK, only adults can sign up for internet access, so a minor watching porn on the internet is the same as said minor watching their parents’ adult DVDs or drinking alcohol their parents purchased. It’s already illegal for adults to give minors access to these things, so what’s next? Alcohol bottles that only open and DVDs / Bluerays that only play if you can provide an ID and prove your age every time?
its not about limiting children's access to porn and other stuff, it never was.
DON'T give them ideas!
Under the bill, an operating system provider would be required to collect a user’s date of birth or age information when an account is established.
It's so fucking obvious the people who wrote this have no idea other operating systems than iOS, Windows and Android exist.
What are you on about? If they get 95% of the population with this it's still a huge win for them.
Account is created? Who said were making accounts for our operating systems
This is getting ridiculous.
Linux is the only reasonable choice anymore.
Linux won't be legal in Colorado if they pass this. You'll need an account with some age-policing, ID-reporting corporation to be able to use a computing device.
How do they imagine they could enforce this though? Presumably quite selectively, based on the user's political leanings.
What is in the actual bill? I haven't read any of this but if it was just a year of birth box at local signup then this could actually be pretty good. A sort of halfway between local only parental controls & age-policing, ID-reporting corporations.
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/SB26-051
Here's a summary, but the text of the actual bill can be gotten by clicking on "Recent Bill (PDF)"
This looks like self-reporting. ie: no third party ID snooping badness. Am I missing something?
Presumably quite selectively, based on the user’s political leanings.
Not defend Democrats too much here, but they clearly have far less of a habit of doling out enforcement based on political leanings than the Republicans, even if they do enforce things quite selectively when it comes to actual leftists while letting Nazis run around with seeming impunity.
Colorado has been a solidly Blue state since the end of the W. Bush years, and even then, it was pretty split down the middle with just over half of the votes going to Bush. It's honestly been mostly-Blue-dominated since 1992. (Lauren Boebert notwithstanding)
Further, the two main sponsors of the bill are both Democrats. This genuinely seems to me to be another example of "heart in the right place but don't know what the fuck they're actually doing" which seems common for the tech illiterate and often for Democrats in general.
Once again, not saying Democrats aren't guilty of selective enforcement, just pointing out that they're far less likely to do so (or at least less likely to do so against conservatives, for genuine leftists it seems up for debate).
Now, that also means nothing in context to how other politicians can use this kind of legislation negatively, even if the writers and sponsors truly have the best of intentions. Democrats had the best intentions when it came to the PATRIOT Act and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security as well, and way back then folks like me were saying "this seems pretty dangerous, especially if we ever have a despot take control of the country and the levers for these tools" which clearly has come to pass.
Are they going to check people's PCs at the state borders as they move in then?
Why can’t we just have better parental controls? I’m a parent and I do want to protect my kids but I will not upload a photo or anything else.
"OPERATING SYSTEM PROVIDER" MEANS A PERSON THAT DEVELOPS, LICENSES, OR CONTROLS THE OPERATING SYSTEM SOFTWARE ON A DEVICE.
great, for my devices then, that would be me
Age verification is identity verification.
For fuck's sake.
What are parental controls?
Goodbye tech ownership in Colorado if this passes. We're moving one step closer to the government issuing out thin clients that only they control.
Apple already has iCloud age settings
Ok but isn’t that just this?
Declared Age Range / AgeRangeService - iOS
Use Play Age Signals API - Android
Not the OS.
The OS "provider"
Linus Torvalds ain't gonna check my ID. And i don't want him to, either.
Everyone was born at 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970
Just think: Without legislation like this, kids will be able to see people having sex! Thus, ending their lives. Not so different from staring into the eyes of Medusa!
The amount of children exposed to sex that have died—or suffered worse consequences like early onset conservatism—may have been zero so far but the dangers are clear! We must skip right over parental involvement in child rearing and go straight to the source of the problem: Computers.
Computers have been giving everyone access to too much information for too long! We must restrict it! The first step is to get an implementation that actually works to censor information—to save the children (wink wink)—then later, we will have the tools necessary to censor whatever we want!
When glorious dictator decides that information about trans-genic mice must be erased from the Internet, we shall have the power to do so!
We must protect little Billy from seeing tits, so he can keep laser focus on preparing for the next school shooting.
This goes in a better direction than web sites doing it themselves, I think. The government put out an open source tool that runs locally and the browser just gets a yay/nay return code from it.
On paper, I like this solution better than every app/site developer having to hack together (or outsource) their own age verification system. But I'm sure it opens up a ton of potential problems. And if it's open source, someone could just fork it and make a version that always says "yes" so unfortunately it'll never be FOSS.
It wouldn't even work on paper. All it would take to twist this into something dystopian is requiring cryptogtaphic attestation for the age range, and knowing lawmakers, they would justify it as a countermeasure for kids lying about their age. Expand the feature as a web API so websites can use the "easier" and "more secure" system-level age verification process and—oh look, now we can't use important websites without a commercial operating system.
It would be like Secure Boot but worse. At least with that you can turn it off or enroll your own keys.
GOTEM! THIS IS ALL ABOUT POWER & CONTROL, AND THESE PEOPLE WANT TO COVER THEIR ASSES TOO!
