other_catLinux is Getting a Free Pass on Age Verification in California and Colorado
Other open source software gets similar treatment, with Colorado going as far as explicitly excluding code repositories and container platforms.
chrash0oh wow gee thank you for not… [checks notes]… forcing open source developers to write state mandated spyware without compensation
“Thank you for not forcing me to participate in your getting-kicked-in-the-balls program… But perhaps just don’t?”
MillerI would not accuse the legislators of any decency of thought only that open source would be far harder to police due to its more nebulous and intermingled path to the client with far less money at the end of it.
There may have also been some big money lobbyists from companies like Google, Amazon, etc, that pointed out how much money it would have cost their poor shareholders to implement.
The entire dynamic is off somehow, so age verification is for the safety of children but won’t be implemented on some platforms for reasons that are by extension more pressing than child safety, as if such reasons might exist. It is almost like age verification is actually nothing to do with child safety.
It’s not really a win though. It just means Linux will get blocked by platforms.
The fun part of open source is that someone smarter than me will inevitably just update the existing spoofing tools to include whatever checks those platforms are using.
Hopefully it is as easy as saying the user is an adult without storing anything. It won’t be, but that would be nice.
Gonna be a whole lot of people born on Jan 1, 1970
A number of VPNs have tools to let you spoof browser IDs. It’s useful if you want to access YouTube and pretend you’re on Chrome to get better performance.
ohshit604You don’t need a VPN to spoof the user agent of a web-browser. Quite literally type User Agent Switcher in the Mozilla plugin page and you’ll have a plethora to choose from.
The problem with this is Chromium based browsers work outside the standards for web-development, they implement features that Firefox or non-chromium based browsers do not comply with as it does not meet the standards and specifications laid out, hence why people say “Use Chrome if Firefox doesn’t work”.
Digital signatures might be required to prove your age. Then spoofing won’t do the trick.
I hope I’m wrong though.
If the pirates have taught me anything, it’s that there’s a way around everything, and someone somewhere is smart enough and bored enough to find it.
MalMen@IrateAnteater @hanke if privacy is only for criminals, only criminals will get privacy
That ship sailed years ago. We are all criminals now.
Fuck the platforms. We’ll make our own.
Snot FlickermanWe’re literally on one “we” made on our own right now. So yeah, exactly, we’ll make our own. With blackjack… and hookers. In fact forget the platforms.
DyskolosYou know what? I have a branch of my credit union within biking distance. I’m fine with needing to physically go there occasionally.
That surely is not a valid solution for everyone 😁 i have accounts e.g. at a swiss and france bank. Can’t just go there 😁 And from the other banks, only one would be reachable by foot.
Modern banks don’t even have offices you can visit.
Modern banks don’t even have offices you can visit.
Well, fuck ‘modern’ banks, then. My bank does have offices you can visit, and I’ll resist as long as possible moving to anything else.
And from the other banks, only one would be reachable by foot.
Guess that’s the bank I’d be using if I were you.
Not so simple, I need more than one bank. Also I’m a cheapskate. These with offices usually cost 10-30 bucks a month. Just for that. If only using those that’d be around 50-200 moneyz a month for…nothing but being able to walk there, stand in line, then use a damn nasty machine made for dwarfs or talk to a stupid human. For every silly transaction?
Yes. Fuck them. But also…I need them. My solution was to just cave in and use one dedicated bank-phone. With fake google-acc, and firewalled to the roof.
Better than this walking solution? Like it was before. Web banking. On the web. With tan-generators or SMS. That was secure enough.
These with offices usually cost 10-30 bucks a month.
Such bullshit!
My bank with abundant offices all over town is free. Their only requirement is that I keep at least $10 in my account.
If that’s possible here, why isn’t it possible there? Maybe this is a huge business opportunity for someone who wants to start a new bank (or expand an existing one) in your area – one with low/no fees and good, in-person customer support.
There were many “new” banks. Free and easy. But no offices. Places are extremely expensive, people are too. That shit trickles down. And yup, total bullshit but that’s what it is here (germany). A handful majors that have offices all around, but those cost. Even with income they still charge you. Even though you deposit a ton of cash THEY will gamble with, they still charge you for that :-) One even charges me for every transaction separetely. Like 5 fucking cent i think. On top of the basic charge. Very sucky for an account with a large volume of transactions.
The worst with those “modern” banks on the other hand is not only the app-shit, but also they only accept you with video-ident. Some video-conferencing-bullshit where like 512831 “legitimate interest”-partners have your very details and video at hand. Costs them just some bucks, all other identifications are more expensive and hence ignored.
Last bank-account I needed to switch phones with the app, and they locked me out. “Due to security-reasons”. I needed a FULL verification process again. My response “I don’t do video-chat, period” was ignored. I was effectively kicked because “security” kept them accepting phone A in my hand granting access to phone B in my other hand. Over the same wifi, at the same location, by the same fingerprint. Withdrew all my money, overdrafted to max just to piss them off and canceled my account. You probably guess how fast they could suddenly be with REAL customer-support :-)
Long story short: Most people just don’t care. They do the video-ident, always use credit- or debit-cards, and never ever stepped foot into a bank-office. And those that care about offices, usually don’t care about the cost. I’m just a horrible cheap-ass :-)
el_eh_chaseA reasonable solution if it comes to it would be to get a cheap android phone only for banking and whatever else doesn’t work on non digital ID platforms.
SanctusI haven’t heard anyone saying they want to take this to a referendum in Colorado. If we collect enough signatures, the bill has to go on the November ballot and we can collectively vote it down as a state. Even if we lose, it might buy us time.
Why is no one talking about this? Why is there no info about anyone doing anything right now? All I see are daily threads about how we should do something.
Because it’s difficult, confusing, or sometimes both. I’m not from CO so I can’t speak to whether or not that part is confusing or not (though I’d not be surprised if the average citizen wasn’t even aware this was an option for them.) The hard part would be that you have to collect signatures which eats up time.
Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t do it. I think it’s a great idea!
kingthrillgoreWe were distracted by fucking Jared Polis’ new fling. I wasnt, I contacted my rep in Lakewood about it
The bill passed and was signed. The next option is legal battles.
No1Waiting for…
403 Unauthorized
We’re sorry, your browser has not provided us with age verification, and so we are unable to show you our cat videos.
Reason:
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/148.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36
Why are you waiting for this? This is already the reality; example: fansly uses the ID verification service ondato, which only works on chrome browsers and tries to detect “tampered camera feeds”, ofc it doesn’t work on Linux.
Call it Surveillance ID, don’t give in to control freaks.
goatinspaceSo what’s the point in the bill then? They’re prepared to accept that open source solutions don’t have to implement it then they have to accept that the whole idea is daft anyway.
Not exactly. They can always take this one step further and make it more difficult to use anything but closed OSs for fundamental applications, like banking.
These laws should hopefully be struck down as unconstitutional because of their invasion of privacy(a violation of the 3rd and 4th amendments) and a general violation of the first amendment.
In a perfect world this means that closed ecosystem operating systems. Like windows, Mac and android. Who have an unfair amount of control and power over their customer base. Will be held to a higher standard by the law.
Since the potential for abuse is higher with windows or android then say arch or fedora.
That increased control should come at a downside of increased responsibility. There’s nothing stopping Microsoft or Google from releasing control and becoming more transparent in theory.
So if everything was in magical fairy land. This sort of enforced liability would push software towards more open standards with less burden of responsibility on the creators and more responsibility on the user.
Since really that’s where the responsibility should mostly be. It should be the user or parents of the user who decide how a system is used. And it should be the users responsibility to ensure they are adhering to laws and regulations.
I imagine that, while good on the surface, the apps that will then require the age information called from the OS will just reject any platform that doesn’t provide it, essentially segregating the internet.
Which, adding more and more friction makes it more likely that users will just give up and submit to giving up their privacy.
I expect I’ll need a phone that I turn on from time to time that’s got all my details logged so I can access things like banking and tax.
But that isn’t mandated in the laws
Regardless let them destroy the clearnet and we’ll make our own internet with blackjack and hookers
Yet. Don’t forget the legislation is funded by Meta. They want that delicious, scrumptious data that will help them legally avoid COPPA and target/collect data on child accounts and get them addicted while young.
And I know we will. We’re cool like that.
It’s back to the same question from the early days of the Internet. “How do you know the person you are talking to isn’t a cat?”. How can you know they aren’t a cat or maybe a clever money taking a break from typing Shakespeare, or how old they are, or who they even are?
You can’t.
You can implement every security measure available and anyone can simply lie or bypass it.
If by some miracle they actually implemented some age verification tech for OS and websites and the Internet as a whole, it will just pop up an underground market of “fake IDs” or hacks to get past it.
Absolutely we would, we’re paying attention. Most people aren’t.
What I worry about is the longterm effects. Look at children who have grown up with iphones. Most of them don’t know that other apps exist outside of their locked down appstore.
What scares me is the normalization through the generations of the surveillance state. Remember what we used to call spyware? I’d hazard a guess that basically every corporate application could be classified as spyware given the amount of data they collect on a user. But we’ve largely stopped using the term.
Chrome is spyware, but if you called it that you’d be met with “bro, what? It’s a browser” or even worse “so? I need it to access the internet”
Same with Flock and Ring and all the smartphone apps with location access we carry around all day.
We’ve slowly given away every last shred of privacy and have no increased security or happiness from it. In fact I believe our safety and security is FAR worse under mass surveillance than if we simply “did nothing”. Surveillance and police and punishment do not really stop crime or help protect anyone, it just opens up dozens of other avenues for harm.
Also, I don’t know about you guys, but I feel icky being out in public now. I’m so painfully aware that I’m being filmed from 15 different angles as I walk or drive or do anything, I feel like I’m being stalked and it’s creepy.
This is why my glasses now have an IR blocking coating to interrupt facial recognition somewhat.
Not that they don’t have gait tracking or other methods 🙃
Time to start a new fashion trend. Algorithm scrambling cloaks and trench coats lol
Even better idea for a new fashion trend. Cans of black spray paint and paintball gun accessories, with a cute little strap. And if a few cameras get accidentally blinded well that’s just the price we are willing to pay to slay.
Its unenforcoble in the first placr
My inbox is flooded with doomsayers and fear mongering about how they’re going to kill Linux because of this and no matter how hard I tried to convince them that it would be physically impossible to enforce such a law/rule on open source software they just wouldn’t listen.
Looks like the blokes in calif had to eat a lot of truth to come to this decision.
O, before you comment I am fully expecting more doomsayers. So please enlighten me.
Bobby
bo5onA future Linux install prompt: “Which state do you live?”
Everyone: Why, “California”, of course. Glad you asked.
There’s no way to enforce age verification, like on websites or closed software, in even normal circumstances, but if it’s open source or offline how could you even begin to attempt it? It’s so silly.
KairuByte