Ridley @ WATCH LYCORECO1d ago
I see so many people making a huge deal out of linux stuff adding support for the california age thing, and I'm like. you know basically every online service has been required to ask for your age since 1998? this is literally just "at account creation, the device owner can set an age field. to whatever they want. and then apps can query that instead of asking themselves."
you can set it to the unix epoch if you want
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧1d ago
@rcombs yeah i really don't get it
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧1d ago
@rcombs everyone knows young people will lie about their age. this enables them to lie about their age very easily. why the fuck would you put up a fuss about it
Show threadchozu v1.2.01d ago
@whitequark @rcombs because people who should know better are uncritically treating the law as sacred (which is a similar error to treating license text as code rather than trying to understand legal process and so on) and caring about things like "the best way to empower parents" (even in the context of absolute minimal legal compliance! quote is from https://lwn.net/Articles/1062112/)

I agree that the concrete thing is relatively meaningless so perhaps I still have too much remnant naive faith that people who should do actually know better (which is saying something since I hardly have a lot of that to begin with)
California's Digital Age Assurance Act and Linux distributions

A recently enacted law in California imposes an age-verification requirement on operating-syste [...]

LWN.net
Show threadchozu v1.2.0
@whitequark @rcombs there's a kind of person who can't think of anything worse than "that's _illegal_!"

there's a kind of person that will implement anything they can find (see e.g. various open source graphics stuff where hdcp was implemented or argued about, probably widevine in browsers is a similar thing), bonus points if you get "but it's a _standard_!"

there's a kind of person who believes that children do not deserve rights etc

these recent discussions feel like the confluence of these things, even if the actual concrete changes are not meaningful, and maybe that's just trivial in the sense that it's just reminding me that the world is a certain way, and it was already like that, but I think that empowering those kinds of people is worth complaining about, and I do not want people who want to "empower parents" to feel welcome in my vicinity
Mar 21 at 5:28amWeb