Many US states planning or have operating system age verification laws

diacritical

I find it hard to believe that so many politicians have just completely lost their minds in the last few years. This is just so wrong on so many levels. Could be a ploy to give the big commercial players more power while making life shit for FOSS and smaller players. I doubt so many grassroots movements gained traction around the same time globally.

Havoc

What’s that North Korean Linux flavor called again?

mindslight

A friendly reminder that if any of this were about good faith attempting to protect children, the focus would be on end devices having software to facilitate parents directly controlling what types of sites their children can use. While this is rudimentarily possible now, the lack of it is a market failure and the point of legislation would be to prime the pump of network effects. The straightforward implementation would be a mandate that every website over a certain size must publish tags about what types of content their site contains, the user-user communication features, the moderation policies, etc. These would be legally-binding assertions on the part of the site operators. Browsers would then allow setting parental controls based on these tags, or other criteria the parents choose (eg no social media, even if social media companies go out of their way to make sites their lawyers deem child-appropriate). And with this setup, the only thing locked down owner-hostile computing devices would be necessary for is for the devices parents would want to give to their kids. The only way to view a mandate for an architecture with the complete opposite information flow is as a push to start exerting top down control over what can be published on the Internet for viewing by everybody . Basically, a governmental repudiation of the idea of the Internet as a permissionless communications medium, in favor of decreeing it must be a sanitized kid-friendly space by default, only becoming less restricted after you share your real-world identity.