Flipboard Tech DeskNot sure we've ever said womp womp before, but if ever a story deserved it... A U.S. judge has tossed Elon Musk's X lawsuit against advertisers who he claimed illegally boycotted his platform. Here's @BBCNews with more.
Matthew RimmerSupreme Court of the United States delivers decision in Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment
https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/cox-communications-inc-v-sony-music-entertainment/
Supreme Court sides with Cox Communications in a copyright fight with record labels over downloads
MusiqueNow 
✡️ 🇵🇸 
THIS IS REALLY FRIGHTENING
🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
#California #rightwing Sheriff #ChadBianco (who is also a LEADING candidate in the #CaliforniaGubernatorialRace) seized ...wait for it... over 500 000 ballots from the recent ballot initiative election in #CA
“Explosive!” New #GOPBallotScandal SURGES INTO #NEWS
#BeianTylerCohen with #MarkElias of #DemocracyDocket
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-D-IoXVTYdE&pp=ugUEEgJlbg%3D%3D
#FarRight #ExtrêmeDroite #USNaziParty #BallotSeizure #USLaw #Law
“Explosive!” New Republican ballot scandal SURGES INTO NEWS
Meta must pay $375 million for violating New Mexico law in a child exploitation case after a civil trial. The state’s attorney general had alleged that Meta had failed to safeguard its family of apps from child predators. Here's more from CNBC.
JdeBPCases in point:
1. Only Colorado bill SB26-051 has exemptions for intra-business apps if being used by employees of the business.
1. Louisiana bill HB977 requires the 'providers' of covered application stores to collect age data, connect minor to parent accounts, and send various notifications from upstream projects to users and their parents. Colorado and Illinois bill HB5511 place the requirements on the 'providers' of operating systems, instead. (Hello, #Debian Developers! You both 'control' a 'covered application store' per LA and 'develop' the operating system software on 'computers' and 'devices' per IL/CO.)
1. Louisiana explicitly requires that store providers maintain information about parent accounts in the accounts database. Colorado and Illinois do not.
1. Only New York bill 2025-S8102 rules out just asking the user for xyr age and trusting it ('user self-reporting of age').
1. Only Colorado has data exemptions for H.E. institutions.
A lesson can be learned from timezones in #Unix.
At (almost) first there was the simplistic implementation of the TZ environment variable having something like GMT0BST1 ; then extended to things like GMT0BST1,M3.5.0/01:00:00,M10.5.0/01:00:00 . This was 'good enough' for people who didn't care about time from a few years ago; and who didn't live in a place with multiple timezone jurisdictions; and who didn't travel widely. It got ossified into the Single Unix Specification.
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/basedefs/V1_chap08.html#tag_08_03
Then came the Olson tz database which encoded the complexities of odd laws and complex histories in loads of differing jurisdictions around the planet.
Of course, the laws on #AgeVerification are already following the latter model.
The simple dæmon + account database age field system that I predicted on 2026-03-01 is the simplistic implementation.
An Olson-level implementation will need to know current location, business/work/school/personal use, & accountholder's parents.
It's actually quite difficult to fix the laws, with the right legalese, so that they don't overreach like this beyond what clearly the people who wrote them wanted to target.
I've thought through several possibilities.
It's difficult to make exceptions based upon age. Write an exception for operating systems first published before 1999, for example, and that lets the current Microsoft Windows, and its Microsoft Store, off the hook. Windows NT 3.1 was published in 1993.
Write an exception based upon operating system last update date, akin to the exception based upon application last update dates that's already there, and you catch out everyone who has (say) patched a ROM in an emulator.
https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/116268137012358487
@morgant @ShadowInTheVoid
#USLaw #retrocomputing #AgeVerification
@raymierussell
[…Continued]
One can tell from the fact that in v1.0 these were 'App Store Accountability Acts' and from the several published legislative histories, that the Microsoft/Google/Apple App Store systems were the targets. However, as written the legislation covers any operating system on any general purpose computer that 'downloads' applications from an 'application store'.
By my reading, loading things from cassette tape onto a Speccy (or other such) won't meet the definition of 'covered application store' by dint of it not being publicly available.
Closed source ROM from the 1980s might meet the 'available technology' exemption bar; but only 2 of 5 states have that.
Fast forward a few years to BBSes, FTP, Usenet binaries, & BitTorrent; and the definition will encompass you. As it does the BSDs and Linux-based operating systems with ports/packages systems.
You are.
I've been following this since #MidnightBSD drew it to everyone's attention, and have directly read the bills in the 4 state legislatures that I know of, done my own analyses and compared with the analyses of others.
The problem is that legislators use fairly uncontroversial definitions that won't surprise software people of 'operating system', 'application', and 'developer'; define a really broad concept of a 'covered application store'; and place onuses on operating system makers and application developers, the latter being required to have their apps ask about age, and the former being required to have their operating system provide an API for answering the questions.
https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/116268403720368221
[Continued…]
@morgant @ShadowInTheVoid
No, they're not. Because this is version 2.0, purportedly done after learning the lessons from version 1.0 already having been overturned in court. From what I've seen so far, although I've not cross checked the bills against the injunction in detail myself, the things that the court had trouble with have been changed.