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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.
Are they going to check people's PCs at the state borders as they move in then?
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.
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.
"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
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.
Age verification is identity verification.
It's already laughably easy to parent these days. Parental controls are on every device and require so little effort. You dont even have to pay that much attentjo - the software literally analyzes use and reports notification. It's so stupidly easy and still people can't do it. Literally ask any of supporters of this what parental control system they use and most are dumbfounded and just change the topic.
It's never about protecting kids.
Now instead of asking to verify age, make the parents input the age bracket and you reinvented parental controls. The correct way to protect children.
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.
Colorodo democrats have always been lousy. Here they are following texas and montana and tennessee, locking down the internet with dishonest arguments. No one in reality thinks this is about protecting kids, and it's not the state's place to do so, it's the parents, it's a violation of the 1st amendment to make adults expose their identities to people recording everything they do online and using it against them, and selling it to the government.
We need to repeal these bills, and we need a popular open source of model legislation to counter-act ALEC, that writes these bills and state lawmakers just fill in the blanks, after the united corporations give them a plausible excuse to and pay them off
Account is created? Who said were making accounts for our operating systems
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.
Hear, hear. When I was young my friends and I wanted to see the naked boobies but because the internet had not been invented we just couldn't. It was impossible! Its not the kind of thing you find lying around!
At this point, it's probably cheaper and more effective to have proper sex education in schools...
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.
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
HOLY HELL
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH
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.
How do they secure age data? Age is most likely two characters, with a max of three characters. If there are penalties for sharing the age data when they aren't supposed to, how do they secure this? Even with cryptography a two character number with only 70-ish reasonable and expected variations is going to be difficult to secure.
How do they ensure no one who is a different age ever uses the device? "Use mom's iPad" is univseral. Does mom get in trouble for letting her child use her device, does the parent end up with the fine?
However, if a developer has clear and convincing information that a user's age is different than the age indicated by an age signal, the developer shall use that information as the primary indicator of the user's age range.
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.
They are coming for android first.
These people are idiots
If I could trust that the people in government know how computers work I'd be down but well I can't
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.
Fucking idiots don't know how operating systems work or what they're for.
What would be the point of that? If the check was done locally it would be trivial to spoof.
Technically, this can't work. It's a bad idea.
Another aspect beyond making Linux legally dubious is this: How do they actually secure the age-data?
Age is generally two characters with a limited character set [0-9] even with an extremely well hashed and salted you're looking at only less than 70 combinations being very likely.
There are penalties for sharing with a third party, but what if it's trivial for a third party to exfiltrate this data?
