Submitted 3 weeks ago by Beep@lemmus.org to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202602/colorado-moves-age-checks-from-websites-to-operating-systems
Under the bill, an operating system provider would be required to collect a user’s date of birth or age information when an account is established.
It’s so fucking obvious the people who wrote this have no idea other operating systems than iOS, Windows and Android exist.
What are you on about? If they get 95% of the population with this it’s still a huge win for them.
I think it is notable that it never makes assumptions about the verification method, so it could just be a simple parental control system. Granted I have no doubts that the corpos will take this as requiring Id, but the bill itself makes no such requirements.
“OPERATING SYSTEM PROVIDER” MEANS A PERSON THAT DEVELOPS, LICENSES, OR CONTROLS THE OPERATING SYSTEM SOFTWARE ON A DEVICE.
great, for my devices then, that would be me
I fully expect this to become a move to hamper linux, or any non-windows desktop usage, because “we can’t trust a user who has full access to their OS” or some other bullshit.
AFAIK, only adults can sign up for internet access, so a minor watching porn on the internet is the same as said minor watching their parents’ adult DVDs or drinking alcohol their parents purchased. It’s already illegal for adults to give minors access to these things, so what’s next? Alcohol bottles that only open and DVDs / Bluerays that only play if you can provide an ID and prove your age every time?
its not about limiting children’s access to porn and other stuff, it never was.
DON’T give them ideas!
It’s already laughably easy to parent these days. Parental controls are on every device and require so little effort. You dont even have to pay that much attentjo - the software literally analyzes use and reports notification. It’s so stupidly easy and still people can’t do it. Literally ask any of supporters of this what parental control system they use and most are dumbfounded and just change the topic.
It’s never about protecting kids.
Eh… I agree that age checks are dumb, but have you ever tried parental controls on most phones these days? They are all complete shit.
What? The software is incredible these days. It literally detects dangers and warns you. Check out Bark which is only 14$/mo but even Google family does a lot of that for free
Now instead of asking to verify age, make the parents input the age bracket and you reinvented parental controls. The correct way to protect children.
Age verification is identity verification.
Moving the responsibility to anyone but the parents.
But who will verify the parents’ age?
The IRS.
Colorodo democrats have always been lousy. Here they are following texas and montana and tennessee, locking down the internet with dishonest arguments. No one in reality thinks this is about protecting kids, and it’s not the state’s place to do so, it’s the parents, it’s a violation of the 1st amendment to make adults expose their identities to people recording everything they do online and using it against them, and selling it to the government.
We need to repeal these bills, and we need a popular open source of model legislation to counter-act ALEC, that writes these bills and state lawmakers just fill in the blanks, after the united corporations give them a plausible excuse to and pay them off
I actually disagree, because hardware-level verification is basically the most privacy-conscious method of accurately verifying a user’s age. Rather than fighting age verification entirely, I think it’s more productive to start assuming users are under 18 until proven otherwise… Age verification is inevitable, (if you don’t like it, tor is always an option), so we should at least figure out secure and private ways of doing so. Rather than resisting it outright, present them with secure and safe ways to do it. The internet is a dark place full of a lot of creeps, and services like Roblox have proven that they will enthusiastically become nesting grounds for predators unless they’re forced to add safeguards.
Sure, it’s easy to say “just monitor your kids” but no parent can be present 24/7. And in fact, oftentimes parents end up using screen time so they can do other things like chores, without needing to watch their kid. So the “just watch your kids” argument is diametrically opposed to the reality of why parents tend to rely on screens. Sometimes you just need 15 minutes to wash the dishes, without a kid demanding your constant attention. Even I, a child-free person, can understand that. And it becomes increasingly difficult to monitor them as they grow into teens and (reasonably) start expecting their own privacy.
I’ve been saying for a while now that we need to shift to hardware verification. Your device (or for shared devices like desktops, your user account) verifies your age once. And then it doesn’t need to do so again. All of the various sites and apps can simply ask your device “hey, is this user over {age}?” And the device responds with a simple true/false. You’re not needing to give your PII to every single site you visit, and the device isn’t needing to report back to the government every time an age verification check happens. It’s all done locally. The handshake could even be cryptographically secured, to prevent tech-savvy kids from MITM’ing the age check. And then protecting kids online is as simple as not age-verifying their device (and protecting your own password on shared devices). Hell, devices like cell phones could even have the age bracket set by the parent directly, since the phone would be on the parent’s phone bill. Similarly, parents could create child accounts on their shared devices, so kids can access age-appropriate content. It won’t stop kids from getting a prepaid phone, but it’ll at least prevent them from easily verifying that phone.
And it’s also the most elegant for the user experience. As far as the adult user is concerned, they never even see an “are you over 18” verification when they visit a porn site. They simply get access to the site. And kids simply get redirected back to Google’s home page (or more realistically, a page on the porn site saying “hey you failed the age check. If you’re over 18, be sure you do that with your device before trying again, because this is the only page you’ll be able to access until then. Or if you’re under 18, click here to return to where you were before” explanation) as soon as the age check fails.
Hardware age verification is basically the best of every world. You don’t rely on a third-party service to verify your PII (which will inevitably leak it, like Discord did). You don’t need to verify with every single individual site and service. The government doesn’t get a record of every site that asks for verification. And kids are automatically prevented from stumbling across adult content.
I agree that Colorado democrats are typically the “if we cozy up to the right they might stop being mean to us” candidates. I think this bill is a poor implementation, but it’s at least done under the right premise. If we could force hardware manufacturers and/or OSes to support native age verification, it would solve a lot of the current issues that we have.
You make some good points. If what you say is true, then most countries and states won’t adopt this style of verification because compromising everyone is the point. But they could probably set it up so it does compromise everyone at the hardware level.
Is it unrealistic to expect no age checks? We’ve lived through an entire internet without age checks, why is it different now? There aren’t more creeps, the only thing that’s different is our politicians feel emboldened to surrender us to tech. To use age checks as a trojan horse, to get AI behind the walls, to make us all social scores to be used secretly against us.
So I don’t see it as inevitable at all, especially not in the US, with the first amendment. Not in blue states, Colorodo is the only blue state doing any of this as far as I’ve heard either. Because they are conservative sell outs.
So I am on the side or rejecting age checks, and calling them out for what they are, surrendering us to tech for total surveillance, and replacing every politician that has supported it.
It is the donors influencing all of them. Corrupt fucks
and it’s not the state’s place to do so, it’s the parents
Not every parent is a good steward or guardian of their children, like those who have been caught cyberbullying their own children or those who send their gay/trans children to conversion camps to “pray the gay away” or even parents who deny their children life-saving vaccination and medical procedures because it conflicts with parental beliefs. A technically proficient parent how is “protecting their kids” could easily be blocking their children from access to information that is important to the child’s development just as much as the government could be.
The argument that it’s always fully the parents right and no one else’s is an unintentional argument in favor of parents treating children like property and normalizing the ability for parents to abuse and control their children under the guise of the false idea that a parent always knows what is best for their child. Plenty of parents shat out kids while knowing fuck-all about how the world works and definitely don’t know what is best for their child.
Government is imperfect, but so are parents.
If America or any other society moves to have UBI as the basis of all things, children could have personal agency. If free housing and a monthly income is available to all, alongside free education and healthcare, a child could choose to leave their family at any time. This would go a long way to preventing abuse, allow children to fulfill their personal growth, and so much more.
Family, friendship, and community should exist because people like each other, rather than being a product of authority.
Holy fuck this is bad
Only for privacy and anonymity. Google and Microsoft will do fabulously however. Who donates to him I wonder.
Just think: Without legislation like this, kids will be able to see people having sex! Thus, ending their lives. Not so different from staring into the eyes of Medusa!
The amount of children exposed to sex that have died—or suffered worse consequences like early onset conservatism—may have been zero so far but the dangers are clear! We must skip right over parental involvement in child rearing and go straight to the source of the problem: Computers.
Computers have been giving everyone access to too much information for too long! We must restrict it! The first step is to get an implementation that actually works to censor information—to save the children (wink wink)—then later, we will have the tools necessary to censor whatever we want!
When glorious dictator decides that information about trans-genic mice must be erased from the Internet, we shall have the power to do so!
Hear, hear. When I was young my friends and I wanted to see the naked boobies but because the internet had not been invented we just couldn’t. It was impossible! Its not the kind of thing you find lying around!
Definitely not in ziplock bags hidden in the nearest forest to the school, put there by your older brother…
I would argue that early and excessive exposure to very misogynistic porn can be damaging to a child in that it can reinforce that misogyny and bad sexual patterns/ideas.
I would also argue that it is the job of the parent or guardian of said child to make sure the information they get online (or anywhere for that matter) is age-appropriate, and not the job of the state.
These are clearly laws that are either not well thought through or (probably more likely) intentionally limiting of every citizen’s privacy. I don’t think that even if the porn or bullying or whatever problem was as bad as they say it is that this would even be justified.
When my kids were young, but old enough that they may inadvertently stumble upon porn, I told them the truth. The truth that so few explain to their children. The truth that many adults don’t understand and many more completely forget.
Porn is fake.
It’s not real. The sounds? Acting. The breasts? Those are fake too. The perfect skin? Makeup (or airbrush).
Even “amateur” porn is fake! As soon as someone agrees to be filmed having sex it ceases to be real.
Also, let me get this straight: Your greatest fear from children being exposed to porn is they might begin to accept mysogyny‽ As in, you think porn is the most likely place kids will be exposed to it and somehow just nod their heads‽ “Oh wow, that’s totally sexist! But they’re having sex so it must be OK. I’ll try to be like that!” (Child nods head).
Or perhaps you think kids will be viewing so much porn—specifically, the mysogynistic kind—that it will somehow carve mysogyny into their minds?
This is so much like the beliefs of conservatives that try to ban books that mention LGBTQ people. Stop and think for a moment: How much porn did you view as a kid? How did that impact your life?
I seriously doubt it changed much. Unless, of course, you were reading Playboy for the articles.
Account is created? Who said were making accounts for our operating systems
At this point, it’s probably cheaper and more effective to have proper sex education in schools…
At which ages? And how?
Any age, really. You can introduce the topic gradually through learning about biology. Pollination of plants, for example. Or bird mating rituals. At primary school, we had an egg incubator where we could watch the live growth of a chicken fetus. Make it clinical and normal rather than this forbidden mysterious thing.
High schoolers should definitely be taught about safe sex and disease prevention. Also, consent and how to deal with unwanted attention, or even what to do after rape, dealing with shame etc. Heck, talk about masturbation and how it effects the body and mind.
It all needs to be laid out on the table so, in the future, these kids grow up into well informed adults and we can forget about data harvesting for surveillance.
HOLY HELL
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH
Goodbye tech ownership in Colorado if this passes. We’re moving one step closer to the government issuing out thin clients that only they control.
Not the OS.
The OS “provider”
Linus Torvalds ain’t gonna check my ID. And i don’t want him to, either.
Everyone was born at 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970
The os provider is the one who installs it on your computer…
.>
Well, looks like the ‘above 18’ box was checked by the os provider on my computer, I’m good to go!
Even better!
This goes in a better direction than web sites doing it themselves, I think. The government put out an open source tool that runs locally and the browser just gets a yay/nay return code from it.
How do they secure age data?
How do they ensure no one who is a different age ever uses the device?
However, if a developer has clear and convincing information that a user’s age is different than the age indicated by an age signal, the developer shall use that information as the primary indicator of the user’s age range.
1) You don’t. 2) Easy. The device constantly captures images of the user and checks them against the user image on file 3) By scanning a government issued ID and checking against an online database with poor security.
I feel like #1 and #2 are problems whether its client side or server side. As for #3 I would lean in the direction of there being a one-time check with no persistent knowledge. Like when you flash your ID to the bartender to order a drink. A client app that scans the ID and returns the answer to the requestor.
But I don’t think there is any way to reliably implement this sort of thing. I think it should really just be left to parental control and monitoring.
On paper, I like this solution better than every app/site developer having to hack together (or outsource) their own age verification system. But I’m sure it opens up a ton of potential problems. And if it’s open source, someone could just fork it and make a version that always says “yes” so unfortunately it’ll never be FOSS.
Some kind of cryptographic signing of the executable could probably help with that.
Ultimately I don’t believe there can ever be a foolproof solution and the emphasis should be on client-side parental controls.
It wouldn’t even work on paper. All it would take to twist this into something dystopian is requiring attestation for the age range, and knowing lawmakers, they would justify it as a countermeasure for kids lying about their age. Expand the feature as a web API so websites can use the “easier” and “more secure” system-level age verification process and—oh look, now we can’t use important websites without a commercial operating system.
It would be like Secure Boot but worse. At least with that you can turn it off or enroll your own keys.
The only thing this bill seems to affect are apps. It has no provision for websites, meaning kids would still have unlimited access to adult content. If a kid wants to get around browser checks, all they have to do is either install an older browser that doesn’t use the OS verification, or find a plug-in that fakes it (and of course those will immediately come out).
Even worse, if the OS requires ALL software to acknowledge the age verification checks, what do you think that means? Everyone in Colorado is required to immediately spend thousands to buy all new versions of every program they use? And what happens to the software that is no longer updated? If you’re lucky, you can buy something completely different and spend months rebuilding all your old information into the new system? Sounds wonderful.
I think it’s pretty clear that this was written by people who are used to getting everything from the iOS store/macOS store/Microsoft store/Google Play store and have no fucking clue what using a computer that isn’t “app-based” is like.
They are coming for android first.
These people are idiots
It’s aight. We have Linux anyways, who cares about Windows?
Ðen ðey’ll classify linux as an 18+ þing, allowing ðem to fine to deaþ every linux website ðat doesnt comply. We still have to care about ðis because when one pillar falls, ðe rest are soon to follow.
This isn’t Reddit, don’t do some weird colour of not using specific letters
Fucking idiots don’t know how operating systems work or what they’re for.
If I could trust that the people in government know how computers work I’d be down but well I can’t
Why can’t we just have better parental controls? I’m a parent and I do want to protect my kids but I will not upload a photo or anything else.
You will need to verify your age to breath the freaking air next!
What would be the point of that? If the check was done locally it would be trivial to spoof.
Technically, this can’t work. It’s a bad idea.
They want mandatory end user identification, through the backdoor. Can’t tolerate any wrongthink, citizen.
Well my custom browser says my age is verified, we’re all set here here. All set. Move along.
Sorry for the stupid question, but what would an “operating system provider” mean here? Does that mean “the organization that builds and distributes the operating system”? If so, Linux is sort of screwed in CO; even The Linux Foundation can’t act for Linux the same way Apple or Microsoft can for macOS or Windows respectively. Maybe Red Hat could, but only for their flagship distro RHEL, and the E stands for Enterprise, lest we forget.
If “operating system provider” were interpreted to mean “system administrator”, however (which is a stretch, but still), that might be a decent solution, since it has the effect of age-limiting content in an enforceable way, but keeps identity information from being centralized under a government or (single) private agency. The sysadmin for children would be parents, who are the only ones who would be providing the hardware, and that could work, especially if there was only the child’s account on the device (like a cell phone).
I dunno if the above is horribly ignorant; if so, I’m open to being more educated on the topic.
It also says the age will be acquired ‘upon login’, so I’m not sure how that would work with linux. More anti-tech old farts making the rules
More anti-tech old farts making the rules
Wish we could blame it on them being old, but the primary sponsors aren’t that old. Matt Ball looks late thirties, early forties at most and Amy Paschal looks late forties, early fifties at most. I couldn’t find background on their specific ages, but Matt Ball’s bio refers to still raising his children, which also implies the younger side.
leg.colorado.gov/bills/SB26-051
Ah, I found the official answer to my question in the definitions (definition 9):
“OPERATING SYSTEM PROVIDER” MEANS A PERSON THAT DEVELOPS, LICENSES, OR CONTROLS THE OPERATING SYSTEM SOFTWARE ON A DEVICE.
This still leaves room for ambiguity, though, especially when it comes to Linux: is the OSP the person who installs the OS (e.g. a sysadmin)? They control the operating system on that device. Or are they the individual/organization that deems what software counts as a given operating system (e.g. Microsoft or Linus)? They develop and license the operating system that happens to be on a given device. Maybe it’s both, but the context suggests the latter more strongly to me.
Another aspect beyond making Linux legally dubious this: How do they actually secure the age-data?
Age is generally two characters with a limited character set [0-9] even with an extremely well hashed and salted you’re looking at only less than 70 combinations being very likely.
There are penalties for sharing with a third party, but what if it’s trivial for a third party to exfiltrate this data?
Darkcoffee@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
This is getting ridiculous.
Linux is the only reasonable choice anymore.
floofloof@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Linux won’t be legal in Colorado if they pass this. You’ll need an account with some age-policing corporation to be able to use a computing device.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
Not defend Democrats too much here, but they clearly have far less of a habit of doing this than the Republicans, even if they do enforce things quite selectively when it comes to actual leftists while letting Nazis run around with seeming impunity.
Colorado has been a solidly Blue state since the W. Bush years, and even then, it was pretty split down the middle with just over half going to Bush.
Further, the two main sponsors of the bill are both Democrats.
Once again, not saying Democrats aren’t guilty of selective enforcement, just pointing out that they’re far less likely to do so (or at least less likely to do so against conservatives, for genuine leftists it seems up for debate).
Now, that also means nothing in context to how other politicians can use this kind of legislation negatively, even if the writers and sponsors truly have the best of intentions. Democrats had the best intentions when it came to the PATRIOT Act and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security as well, and way back then folks like me were saying “this seems pretty dangerous, especially if we ever have a despot take control of the country and the levers for these tools” which clearly has come to pass.
DFX4509B@lemmy.wtf 3 weeks ago
Are they going to check people’s PCs at the state borders as they move in then?
hector@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
The courts should strike it down, I don’t have faith they will side with the constitution, but it’s clearly unconstititional and beyond the authority of the state as well, in the realm of interstate commerce which is explicitly given to the feds, whom can’t be trusted either obviously.
But the 1st amendment is clearly invalidating this, forcing people to identify themselves to groups that will record everything they say or do and sell it to everyone, including the government, that will chill speech, and groups will punish people for their speech.
Too bad scotus is all in on punishing people for speech though.
Jack_Burton@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
I dunno, the language suggests to me it can be worked around. It states age verification to make the OS account. Linux doesn’t require accounts. This seems to target Microsoft and Apple account creation (since you won’t be able to use the OS without one) and of course Google will implement account requirements on Android
imrighthere@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Not really, the microsoft asshole that coded systemd wants chips on hardware for linux just like 10/11. He’s going to help fuck linux the same way they fucked windows.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
Bro he worked for Microsoft for four years after working for Red Hat for fourteen and then left to create Amutable, and no offense, but I don’t see his goals for Amutable to be about trying to force everyone to use his solution as much as giving groups who use massive numbers of Linux servers an option for something they can more securely lock down and ensure hasn’t been fucked with.
This is just FUD fearmongering, especially considering how small the company is. He isn’t forcing the entire ecosystem to adopt his ideas.
troyunrau@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
You might need help. If you’re unwilling to seek help, then at least learn to code and, you know, read the code.
dreamkeeper@literature.cafe 2 weeks ago
Systemd is so much easier to use, absolutely was not a mistake.