Glyphwhile I have a level of sympathy for the california/colorado style of age-verification law, and I think many reactions against it are overheated, at the end of the day we still have to oppose stuff like this because society's ideas of what ought to be age-gated are just wrong on the merits. the goal is to ban access to perfectly normal healthy things like queer communities and still allow kids access to fucked-up dangerous adults-only stuff like catholicism and the president of the united states
like I have a young child and nothing would please me more than to put their birthday into the OS and then let them go nuts on the internet doing whatever they want, but my values (no child should be allowed to access a chatbot under any circumstances, roblox should be a crime, but children should be allowed to read wikipedia pages about human anatomy if they want) are just not reflected in our social fabric because all age-related internet stuff is just a series of very frustrating moral panics
we live in a world where Jonathan Haidt and Thomas Chatterton-Williams are both still broadly taken seriously as intellectuals, there's no way we are getting sensible regulation of social media any time this century
Cassandra is only carbon now@glyph God, the list goes on. Why is Ross Douthat... just why is he? Or Chris "my god he just tweeted his evil plan on main" Rufo taken seriously?
@xgranade are you on IBCK premium, btw? their last premium episode features an *extremely* funny Ross Douthat moment
@glyph I'm not, no, but I might have to. Always here for funny moments at Ross Douthat's expense.
Jason Lefkowitz@jalefkowit @xgranade oh come on that's not fair. With the amount of time Tom Friedman spends in Ubers, he would be a whiz at directing cars through a car wash, he must have a CAD-model level of detail in his mental map of the interior of the 100 most popular car models in the last 20 years
Jeff Miller (orange hatband)
Dave bauer@glyph Dang it! I just saw something that sounded helpful and interesting but it was 50% Haidt so at least I saved the time watching it.
@glyph I mean, I'm sympathetic to, but I think targeting the OS level is really problematic. I don't want to give government veto power over what runs on my own devices, especially when that veto power is largely at the behest of corporate bad-faith actors.
It feels like targeting services, a la GDPR, while still problematic, offers a lot better opportunities for getting things right?
@xgranade I absolutely want the government to have veto power over what runs on my devices!
This example is too confused with different layers of harm, so let me give a better example:
Imagine a law which established a Glass-Steagall level of separation between OS vendors and app stores. If you have an OS you can define an app store protocol, but you are prohibited from operating the store or the certificate authority yourself.
App stores become regulated marketplaces like stock exchanges.
@xgranade Now you've got all the benefits of sandboxing and malware detection that an app store gives you, without the lockout. A side-loading interface for both app stores and root certs, which appropriately informs users of the risks, is part of that regulatory framework.
Emma needs ☕️ and paying work
Damien de Lemeny@glyph @xgranade this argument broke my brain for a second. I would not have thought of market regulation as having a veto on what runs on the device.... but it makes some sense ? It's a far stretch though, I'd make an explicit distinction between vetoing what can be distributed to run on my device and vetoing what I can run at all, because the second interpretation is the same kind of nasty overreach as what app stores can currently do.
@ddelemeny @xgranade let me put it differently I guess: what you run on your device is not and has never been your decision. it is a negotiation between you and several overwhelmingly powerful corporate interests. even if you are running desktop Linux, a pretty big majority lot of that code is going to be written by IBM and companies like it, and if desktop linux ever gets popular enough to bother anyone, they'd definitely use their ongoing maintenance of that code to gain some revenue
@ddelemeny @xgranade when one has a negotiation between a disconnected bunch of powerless individuals and large corporate interest, that is a recipe for corporate abuse. so the role of the government in this exchange is to become the counterparty in that negotiation, taking the users' interest into consideration
Ken Milmore@kbm0 @xgranade that said I do wish that there were a much clearer dividing line between regulating commercial entities and regulating individual volunteer actions. "open source" is largely a professionalized endeavor supported by corporations and this fig leaf of "but what if someone wanted to write a billion lines of code for an operating system as a hobby, for fun, by themselves?" is used as a fig-leaf to give them impunity
@glyph @xgranade You have to think of the general case of a system running Linux or BSD or even some tiny embedded code where there is no distinction between application and OS: The system is built from source, some or all of which you write yourself, some or all of which you build yourself and some or all of which you install in binary form from some third party source. Forcing any arbitrary subdivision between "apps" will restrict what people can do, in ways that will only be enforcable... 1/
@kbm0 @xgranade counterpoint: nope
laws deal with this kind of ambiguity all the time. when you subdivide the universe small enough, it's all fields and waves and stuff. and in terms of physics and chemistry, who can even say what "alive" means? there's not a discrete, discontinuous moment where all biological functioning is unambiguously happening, and then has unambiguously ceased. and who can say what "causality" really is, anyway? all effects have multiple causes
yet murder remains a crime
@kbm0 @xgranade Let me concede that if you wrote all the OS code yourself, or even if it was created exclusively by volunteers and no money changed hands at any point, then fine, you can have a "bodily autonomy" metaphor. I don't think that the government should get involved unless money is changing hands in a scenario like this
@glyph @xgranade ...if you restrict *everything*. Furthermore, it seems to me that all of the harms people are trying to prevent arise in the interaction via the network with online services. So it makes much more sense, and is far less invasive, to police those interactions at the network level rather than tell people what they can do with their own computers. It's like the difference between embracing bodily autonomy and preventing assault.
aeva@glyph it's amazing to me that the discourse about age attestation assumes that nobody is going to use that information in a predatory way.
@aeva I am such a fan of tech companies getting told that socially important aspects of their platform designs are simply not their call, but I would really like the people telling them that not to be the most pitiable simpletons on earth
brennen@brennen @aeva unfortunately this might still be the "good ending" of age gating legislation, because right now the choice we seem to be facing is either CA style (you tell the OS, only the OS knows, the OS only discloses age ranges) or UK style (you tell every online service provider individually, they all keep high-resolution depth-mapped scans of your face, your passport, and your fingerprints on file forever)
@brennen @aeva Calling this an age "verification" law is a little misleading, because the only "verification" taking place is that app "verifying" an age range with the OS. The user themselves does not have to "verify" anything; there's actually some language in the bill ("Send only the minimum amount of information necessary to comply with this title") forbidding gratuitous surveillance.
@brennen @aeva if you want to get it straight from the source: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043
Viacheslav A@glyph on what level do you have sympathy to misdirected laws lobbied heavily by the corporation who is solely responsible for a huge chunk of all online harm happening today and does not want to do shit about it? I honestly think the overall reaction is underwhelming, most people don’t care, and the ones who do have to scream with all their might to attract at least some attention
@via4 our choice may be between California (age gating via personal attestation, in the OS) and Texas (age gating via extremely invasive and unrestrained collection of massive amounts of personal information, separately in every online service). If we have to make that choice, I'll choose California. But the whole reason I posted this is that we should get rid of it and choose neither.
@glyph there should be no ambiguities, it's some fake DOB in userdb today, it's remotely verified name, SSN and a dozen other fields in several years Probably worse than Texas, cause they were able to get a foothold on the OS level. Even worse if more states adopt it as an easy way that does not cause much of a push back