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
Cassandra is only carbon now@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.
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