Technology

Motherfuckers want this so they can more easily find kiddies to groom and rape.

Start selling the narrative folks, this is not gonna be a clean war

If this thread is any indication, we’re cooked. If this many people are willing to give the government the benefit of the doubt, after what we’re dealing with…

This will not be benign, it will seem innocent at first, but we’ll have given up yet another seemingly simple thing that will eventually be used against us.

They can’t even arrest the pedophiles in government but they want to mass surveil us for everything.

1. This bill is being pushed by Meta and they are NOT going to stop with age verification. It is not about "protecting children" and it never has been. It's always been about surveillance and control. Meta wants to know who you are, where you are, what you buy, what you download, who you associate with and what your politics are.

2. If Meta succeeds in putting all this on your computer at the operating system level, then what is the point of even having a VPN anymore? Also Meta will sell this information to anyone who asks for it.

Or a parent could, I don't know, just parent their own kids instead of expecting the government to.

"Parents Decide Act"

Yet text of it has basically nothing about parents in it, just government data collection lol

Parents ALREADY decided. They decided they didn't give enough of a shit to use the parental controls already available to them. No legitimate reason to push this shit on everyone else.

Donate here: https://www.eff.org/ https://epic.org/ https://cdt.org/ https://www.aclu.org/

Get off Android if you can: https://grapheneos.org/ https://lineageos.org/ https://e.foundation/e-os/

Pick a Linux distro to try on a beater laptop (save yourself some trouble and just use Ubuntu to start): https://distrowatch.com/

"and for other purposes" umm

https://5calls.org/

Tell your reps that this bill doesn't get a chance to breathe if they ever want your support in future elections.

Disgusting. This is my representative, I unfortunately voted him in.

Our president is a pedophile and we still get the "for the children" bullshit. How about making a law requiring tracking the data on the Epstein class phones instead?

I sent a letter to him, hopefully enough people do.

To paraphrase someone:

You need to win every time. I need you to lose only once.

Anyone thinking that this won't pass this time, or next year, or the year after that or the year... They will push this as a new thing, wrapping the same bullshit lies in a new paper each time...

Eventually it'll pass, it always does. All they need is patience

The only possible cou ter to this is to enshrine the right to own a computer and internet access into your constitution or something like that.

This is how the democrats lose the next election.

GJ snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Again

I disagree with all of you. Now that our benevolent theocratic autocratic overlords have decided to track everything we say and do and escape is impossible, I completely support their brave new dystopian agenda. All hail the wonderful leaders!

That bill had just been introduced. It is a loooooong way from passing. No need to panic. This is not our doom yet.

Now is the time to give those representatives a call, mention the bill number, and tell them in a few logical and polite sentenses why this bill is a terrible idea.

Fuck this bill. And it's not going to be too late to use the less polite methods later. We lose nothing by trying to be polite first.

maybe for you...but not for me.

I'll switch back to a dumb phone and run a Linux distro so obscure nobody's seen it for 25 years.

fuck em. I'll never comply with this shit.

Obligatory: the Democrats are not here to save you.

Fascism with a smug smile instead of a sneer.

This might be the most anemic open ended bill I have ever read. On its face, it has no teeth. The most well defined portions of the bill are to make sure that applications have access to age data. Making this look more like a way for corporations to gather data and verify real people as opposed to online personas.

There is zero regulation actually defined and instead they have a 180 day period to define the regulation and a year for it to be contacted and implemented. The bill could pass tomorrow and we still wouldn't know what age verification looks like.

As scary as these efforts are, they are also a bit humorous to me. By and large software exists independently of its creator, especially in the FOSS space. There would be no way to require an individual to install an OS that supported this or even use an updated browser that supported it.

Ultimately, the only way to really enforce any sort of age verification system is to force all content providers to have an age verification step. This presents as OS level, but you have to give people a reason to upgrade in order to implement. If Wikipedia suddenly required some sort of OS based age verification protocol to access its content, it would become a lot harder to avoid.

They are putting this at the OS level, but I think this is a way to back into removing anonymous access to the Internet.

Using parental control is too hard so leave it to the government huh

what a fucking joke

I've seen a lot of people saying how this will be unenforceable and so isn't something we need to worry about.

Except this could be enforced. Google came out with a proposal a few years ago for a method of validating the a request came from a "trusted" (aka, signed and with secure boot enabled OS), ostensibly to combat bot traffic. They dropped it after push back, but it still provides a blueprint for how this could be enforced.

https://github.com/explainers-by-googlers/Web-Environment-Integrity

If web platforms are mandated by law to enforce something like this then the web could be effectively restricted to only approved operating systems. There could still be a dark web, but with the weight of the law behind it, once anything gained momentum access to it could be shut down at the service provider layer.

This shouldn't be dismissed as a threat because it's "unenforceable", because it is.

still have no idea how they will implement this, with phones that can be rooted or running something like lineageOS or others.

But in any case, I am glad I am not from the US.

They're gonna call it The Super Duper American Act

This coming up not a fortnight after his floundering interview with The Bulwark is some Curb Your Enthusiasm level comedy, there's not even really an "at best" to look for in American politics, a handful of progressive anomalies that came about after MONTHS of tireless campaigning that we can only pray result in a trend toward some kind of wave but that's it, pay the right Democrat just enough money and they'll be dancing like a GOP worm.