people on reddit are doing a whole lot of yapping about age verification in Linux
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@cas Have the projects received guidance from actual lawyers? It doesn't seem like the text of the legislation is final in a lot of jurisdictions. I don't know if anybody knows what interpretation or enforcement might look like either. If the devs' hands get forced then it is what it is, but it feels like an own goal to pre-comply too early.
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@jane i argue against specific features, that are often included in "parental control"
so far the only thing people convinced me could be okay, is screen timeout timers
what i get worried is, for a teenager, making it easy to allowlist-only or blocklist websites and content types, and making it easy to track everything they do with their devices
sure, there is other ways of doings those things, but the easier those tools are to enable and use, the more i saw them get abused@navi you should be arguing against technology being sold as a substitution for teaching and parenting. of course big tech with its "ask me later" doesn't teach consent.
this is isn't a technological problem, this is a societal problem and tolerating abusive parents. not asking children in school what they face at home, how they are allowed to use technology. only since the year 2000 have children the right for nonviolent parenting in germany.
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people on reddit are doing a whole lot of yapping about age verification in Linux
I would generally agree that the whole approach of these laws is total dogshit and clearly a wedge issue to enable stricter surveillance laws in the future
at the same time though, the actual implementation and potentially having a portal which exposes the users age bracket seems totally reasonable as a way to implement parental controls... I'm also not totally against holding service providers to higher standards for data processing when it comes to minors, and hey if they're doing that why shouldn't adults get the same treatment?
what im totally miffed about though is why the fuck would you get mad at systemd for adding a birthDate field to userdb, what would you have them do? Would you rather every desktop environment had its own way to store this data??
An XDG portal for this also means you can *trivially* write a stub that always identifies you as an adult or even lets you pick per-app (heck maybe per website! that might be the new cursed way of avoiding trackers under late stage capitalism)
and yeah it sure would be shit if we get real-id laws in a few years, but systemd or XDG standing on "principle" and refusing to implement this API is absolutely not going to lead to better outcomes for anyone. The last thing we want is for users in certain regions to wind up relying on implementations maintained by distros or random individuals, if we need to have this crap the least we could ask is that it's maintained by established and trusted people in the open source community!
@cas I usually agree with a lot of your takes, and the ones I don't are usually very minor, but I cannot in good conscience agree with this. Complying in advance is never the proper reaction to any change that could be used to oppress people. Life is not a vacuum. The rise of fascism in the United States and its increasing influence in the rest of the world makes it obvious that these age restriction laws are only for controlling information. Compliance means giving in to fascism.
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Y'all SERIOUSLY need to trust your kids more. They arent stupid.
Dunno about your local culture. But everyone here grew up knowing you never had to talk to strangers, nwver dibulge any information and stay away from anything that demands a paynent.
Kids are smarter than you remember. Tell them not to do something and why and 99% of the time they will follow through.
No, you will not get a free PS2. No, that raffle for the shiny creature is rigged against you. No. You may not have horse armour. That game looks sketchy but it comes from Steam you might have it. No i dont care all your friends are posting selfies they are going to get hurt and you cannot make an instagram.
One thing is not letting your kids have any agency (helicoptering) and the other is telling them gently they cannot have things and why.
You cannot leave IBM, Amazon, Google, Meta and Oracle decide how it is best to take the task of parenting. The owners of the platforms with addictive content aimed towards children do not have the besr intentions at mind with these policies. The best way to prevent kids from being in places they should not be is... Being literally around them every now and then to check what they are up to and simply... Dont let them go to those platforms.
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@Tijgertje1987 to continue the analogy: at that point it was already neglect to have still kept the training wheels
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@VileLasagna @cas the mere existence of the system, bypassable or not, is extremely problematic. These half assed layws have to be fought against.
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people on reddit are doing a whole lot of yapping about age verification in Linux
I would generally agree that the whole approach of these laws is total dogshit and clearly a wedge issue to enable stricter surveillance laws in the future
at the same time though, the actual implementation and potentially having a portal which exposes the users age bracket seems totally reasonable as a way to implement parental controls... I'm also not totally against holding service providers to higher standards for data processing when it comes to minors, and hey if they're doing that why shouldn't adults get the same treatment?
what im totally miffed about though is why the fuck would you get mad at systemd for adding a birthDate field to userdb, what would you have them do? Would you rather every desktop environment had its own way to store this data??
An XDG portal for this also means you can *trivially* write a stub that always identifies you as an adult or even lets you pick per-app (heck maybe per website! that might be the new cursed way of avoiding trackers under late stage capitalism)
and yeah it sure would be shit if we get real-id laws in a few years, but systemd or XDG standing on "principle" and refusing to implement this API is absolutely not going to lead to better outcomes for anyone. The last thing we want is for users in certain regions to wind up relying on implementations maintained by distros or random individuals, if we need to have this crap the least we could ask is that it's maintained by established and trusted people in the open source community!
"The last thing we want is for users in certain regions to wind up relying on implementations maintained by distros or random individuals, if we need to have this crap the least we could ask is that it's maintained by established and trusted people in the open source community!"
I trust most random individuals more than I trust Poettering's slopcoded garbage. systemd is not a community project and it never has been.
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"The last thing we want is for users in certain regions to wind up relying on implementations maintained by distros or random individuals, if we need to have this crap the least we could ask is that it's maintained by established and trusted people in the open source community!"
I trust most random individuals more than I trust Poettering's slopcoded garbage. systemd is not a community project and it never has been.
That aside, the first rule of data security is: _never_ collect, store, relay or distribute any data you don't need to, especially when it's personal information.
Have a fun headache with GDPR if you don't fall back to dummy data. -
people on reddit are doing a whole lot of yapping about age verification in Linux
I would generally agree that the whole approach of these laws is total dogshit and clearly a wedge issue to enable stricter surveillance laws in the future
at the same time though, the actual implementation and potentially having a portal which exposes the users age bracket seems totally reasonable as a way to implement parental controls... I'm also not totally against holding service providers to higher standards for data processing when it comes to minors, and hey if they're doing that why shouldn't adults get the same treatment?
what im totally miffed about though is why the fuck would you get mad at systemd for adding a birthDate field to userdb, what would you have them do? Would you rather every desktop environment had its own way to store this data??
An XDG portal for this also means you can *trivially* write a stub that always identifies you as an adult or even lets you pick per-app (heck maybe per website! that might be the new cursed way of avoiding trackers under late stage capitalism)
and yeah it sure would be shit if we get real-id laws in a few years, but systemd or XDG standing on "principle" and refusing to implement this API is absolutely not going to lead to better outcomes for anyone. The last thing we want is for users in certain regions to wind up relying on implementations maintained by distros or random individuals, if we need to have this crap the least we could ask is that it's maintained by established and trusted people in the open source community!
@cas As far as I understood it, the administrator will still be able to claim whatever they want as birth dates of their users. And it is “only” required that websites et al. react appropriately to what the system says is the age of the current user.
If that is the case, I'd consider that the definitely better idea of how parental controls could look like. Unfortunately, on this side of the pond, they seem to rather go in the direction of actually checking government IDs which _is_ a surveillance nightmare.
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@cas i am waiting for the moment when these folks who partake in this misguided shitstorm learn about the kind of PII the good old GECOS field on Linux/UNIX carries...
And once people are over that the next shock waits for them! There's a file in /etc/ that contains a hash (i.e. a unique identifier!) of your most personal, private, secret data: your password. And linux systems even kinda insist on you on providing that on first install! Can you believe that?
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people on reddit are doing a whole lot of yapping about age verification in Linux
I would generally agree that the whole approach of these laws is total dogshit and clearly a wedge issue to enable stricter surveillance laws in the future
at the same time though, the actual implementation and potentially having a portal which exposes the users age bracket seems totally reasonable as a way to implement parental controls... I'm also not totally against holding service providers to higher standards for data processing when it comes to minors, and hey if they're doing that why shouldn't adults get the same treatment?
what im totally miffed about though is why the fuck would you get mad at systemd for adding a birthDate field to userdb, what would you have them do? Would you rather every desktop environment had its own way to store this data??
An XDG portal for this also means you can *trivially* write a stub that always identifies you as an adult or even lets you pick per-app (heck maybe per website! that might be the new cursed way of avoiding trackers under late stage capitalism)
and yeah it sure would be shit if we get real-id laws in a few years, but systemd or XDG standing on "principle" and refusing to implement this API is absolutely not going to lead to better outcomes for anyone. The last thing we want is for users in certain regions to wind up relying on implementations maintained by distros or random individuals, if we need to have this crap the least we could ask is that it's maintained by established and trusted people in the open source community!
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@Tijgertje1987 @cas @jane @freya it is not like it is not all that hard to figure how to boot into single-user mode (on anything non-systemdboot anyway)
Kids, if you are reading this, no need to thank this internet bunny for the tip
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@cas @jane @freya
I mentioned here here:
https://social.vlhl.dev/notice/B4PU0aMRZdCXV8QAJk
but tl:dr I believe that a child young enough to need parental controls should not be left alone unsupervised w/ an internet device, and that teenagers should have already learnt discretion and have built a trust relationship with their parents
in a good world then, parental controls would just be guardrails for the former, but in the world we live in, i fear how much abuse, well, abusive parents might cause on the latter by forcing parental controls on their devices -
@Tijgertje1987 @cas @jane @freya it is not like it is not all that hard to figure how to boot into single-user mode (on anything non-systemdboot anyway)
Kids, if you are reading this, no need to thank this internet bunny for the tip
@ZanaGB what's a boot? what do shoes have to do with it?
2501: Average Familiarity - explain xkcd
explain xkcd is a wiki dedicated to explaining the webcomic xkcd. Go figure.
(www.explainxkcd.com)
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@cas saying "as required by recent laws" indicates a mindset that "what we do here is to implement laws. States make laws, we implement them. That is what this software is about: compliance with laws."
And I think such a mindset goes against the idea of free software.
> I hope i don't just come across as contrarian
I appreciate your answer, and I'm sorry I only answered parts of it!
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@ZanaGB congratulations for delving into conspiracy theory! nobody is interested in the linux desktop, all of those players are into linux server.
