alt Hacker NewsI can't fathom all the rage and confusion here about these laws. It's been a well-known effect since forever that when a government deems that something needs to be done, they'll go for the first "something-shaped" solution.
This all could've been avoided. Governments all over the world have been ringing the alarm bells about lack of self-regulation in tech and social media. And instead of doing even a minimum of regulation, anything to calm or assuage the governments, the entire industry went balls-to-the-wall "line go up" mode. We, collectively, only have ourselves to blame, and now it's too late.
If you look back, it didn't have to be this way: - Governments told game publishers to find a system to handle age rating or else. The industry developed the ESRB (and other local systems), and no "or else" happened. - Governments told phone and smart device manufacturers to collectively standardize on a charging standard, almost everyone agreed on USB-C and only many years later did the government step in and force the lone outlier to play ball. If that one hadn't been stubborn, there wouldn't have been a law.
The industry had a chance to do something practical, the industry chose not to, and now something impractical (but you better find a way anyway, or else) will be forced upon them. And I won't shed a tear for the poor companies finally having to do something.
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> We, collectively, only have ourselves to blame, and now it's too late.
Can't believe I'm reading this. I don't want age verification at all, whether it's self-imposed or not. I should be free to use whatever tools I want however I want.
> The industry had a chance to do something practical, the industry chose not to
Wrong. There was no choice. Any type of identification technology causes more problems than it solves. The right choice is to look for different approaches than identification technology for solving the problems. And as the article points out, the problems are best tackled with education and not with tech.
"because we didn't do a stupid and pointless thing, now we are being forced to do a stupid and pointless thing, therefore we are to blame"
Uh, no.
Speak for yourself. This is impacting open source and is fundamentally against the open source ethos.
Governments demanding computers enforce age is as dumb as governments demanding books, pen, and paper enforce age.
This is unrelated to industry. This is idiots running the government.
>We, collectively, only have ourselves to blame, and now it's too late.
No, "we" really don't. I wrote software. It's free. You're welcome to use it, or not. Nobody is forcing my software on you. You are not allowed to tell me that the software I wrote, for free, and gave to you, for free, needs to have features that I don't care about.
You have an LLM now. I'm obsolete now, right? Do it. Build your nerfed distro, and make it popular. Oh, yeah... there isn't a single solitary disto built by an LLM, is there? Not even one. Wow. I wonder why...
> We, collectively, only have ourselves to blame, and now it's too late.
Why would we have to be blamed for a law written by some lobbyists? That makes no sense at all. There are of course some folks that are in favour of this because "of the children" but their rationale does not apply to me nor to many other people. Why should they be able to force people to surrender their data, with the operating system becoming a sniffer giving out private data to everyone else? That makes no sense.