Eric Schultz4d ago

RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@wwahammy/116264430375745593

I want everyone who says "this is the law, distros need to comply" I want you to explain a plausible set of circumstances to lead to the following:

* That the AG of California will sue a random Linux distro which has effectively no money
* Prove who the OS distributor actually is (is it the committers? Committers of what part? Their bank account with $12 in it?)
* Prove by preponderance of the evidence how many children used the OS in order to set the fines
* get a judge and jury to think this isn't a massive waste of their time
* That it isn't just a violation of the law but is a "negligent" or "intentional" violation
* all the while, the OS maker and everyone else having effectively zero knowledge of who uses it since there's no continuing relationship with users.

How does all of this happen?

Show threadJoe Cooper 🇺🇦 🍉
@wwahammy while I agree the default answer to every invasion of privacy should always be, "fuck you, make me", I suspect this one will be enforced by the same companies that lobbied for it. So, Facebook, YouTube, streaming services, seem very likely to start blocking systems that don't report an age. I would just stop using those services (though some would be painful), but it'd be pretty disruptive for most folks, I think. Same story as DRM in Firefox.
Mar 21 at 9:19amWeb
Show threadEric Schultz3d ago
@swelljoe the California AG is the one who can enforce the law. It doesn't make sense for them to sue random distros.
Show threadJoe Cooper 🇺🇦 🍉3d ago
@wwahammy yeah, as I said, I don't think it'll be enforced by law. I think it'll be enforced by the same companies that lobbied for the law. You want to visit Facebook, YouTube, TikTok? Gotta have an OS that complies. And, they'll have the law to point at when people get angry about it. Obviously the big operating system vendors will comply, so the ostracization of open source users would suit the billionaires just fine.
Show threadSobri | Zoe (she/her)3d ago
@swelljoe @wwahammy we can just spoof it pretty easily. I bet it wouldn't be too hard their web apps.
Show threadJoe Cooper 🇺🇦 🍉3d ago
@cutesobri @wwahammy sure, so far it's just serving whatever you tell it your age is. And, with open source I can replace every component that gathers/shares personal data. But, it's obviously laying the groundwork for forcing users to identify themselves to use the web.
Show threadSobri | Zoe (she/her)3d ago
@swelljoe @wwahammy we have already started building outside infrastructure with Mastodon and with Peertube. Eventually, we will have the infrastructure outside of YouTube, these are the spaces to wear. They stop being used. As long as we have a policy of civil disobedience to bullshit laws we will win
Show threadSobri | Zoe (she/her)3d ago
@swelljoe @wwahammy imagine how much of a pain it would be to try and sue every bastard on instance, or every peer to instance, or every instance of any federated elwork. It would be the biggest pain in the ass. And because it's open source, as long as the instance has a copy of the source code mountain compiled, it's really fucking hard to erase the source code by attacking a get repository. Also, get kinda socks. So, if we build something so we can make like distributed changes like the source cut is mirrored across many different places and we can change it in a few places and like figure out how to manage that but have it so distributed it's hard to delete or attack that would be really useful.
Show threadWoozle Hypertwin3d ago

@swelljoe

If, say, FB started requiring systems to report birthdate, they'd have to get that information through the browser -- which would then have to be implemented by multiple vendors, and what's to stop them from just allowing you to enter whatever birthday you like? (For that matter, what's to stop a system user from filling in whatever birthday they like?)

This requirement looks to me exactly like a typical political "be seen to be doing something, even if it's really stupid".

@wwahammy