alt Hacker NewsI'm probably missing something, but when I read the California statute I didn't understand it to be anything like "computers enforcing age" - more like, when you create an account it needs to ask your age, and then provide a system API by which apps can ask what bracket the account holder is in. This seems better than the current solution of every app asking independently?
Again, I'm probably missing something but it strikes me as pretty trivial to comply with?
Replies
Being "trivial to comply with" is completely disjunct and not at all an argument against "this type of law is fundamentally at odds with the liberty and self-determination that open source projects require and should protect." It's a shot across the bow to open-source, it's literally the government telling you what code your computer has to run. It is gesturing in the direction of existential threat for Free software and I am not exaggerating. It's purposefully "trivial" so you don't notice or protest too much that this is the first time the State is forcing you to include something purely of their own disturbed ideation in your creative work.
If that’s true, I think the law is fine. There are good solutions for anonymous disclosure of information about you, the most mature being Verifiable Credentials, which is an open standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verifiable_credentials
You can disclose just a subset of a credential, and that can be a derived value (eg age bracket instead of date of birth), and a derived key is used so that its cryptographically impossible to track you. I wish more people discussed using that, but I suspect that it’s a bit too secure for their real intentions.
The government really shouldn't be telling us how/what we can compute at all.
But on this specific point - It's a bellwether. They're doing this to lay the groundwork and test the waters for compulsory identification and/or age verification. Getting MacOS and Windows and Linux and etc to implement this WILL be used as evidence that compulsory identity verification for computer use is legally workable.