Comment on Colorado proposing Bill to move age verification to Operating System rather than web site
fubarx@lemmy.world 12 hours agoI won’t repeat what I said in the sibling thread.
But I don’t see anywhere in this specific Colorado bill trying to restrict OS level features or go anywhere near open-source. As a parent, if I put little Timmy on Arch and give him root access, I don’t get to bitch about what they do online.
This is about a single signal (kid/no kid) at the user-auth level, without slurping up PII and shipping it off into the ether.
CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Because the people proposing the bill don’t understand or know what open source is.
I guess my example “realization of open source” dialogue wasn’t in your face enough, eh?
You claim to be a developer, but seem to not understand the fundamental truth of “you can’t trust the user’s computer”. The proposed law, would make it law that operating systems have some mechanism to verify age. Now if it’s a law to guarantee the verification flag is available, then that would also mandate the mechanism be free from tampering, otherwise the law means literally nothing and is unenforceable.
So once they learn about open source, root access, jailbreaking, etc, those things will very quickly become illegal.
As I said in my other comment, this problem has been attempted with gaming client-side anti-cheat for decades now. There’s a reason most online games still are riddled with cheaters, despite anti-cheat software being near Orwellian in what they can do.
Age verification is nothing more than the new guise of forced online tracking.