And then another state or country passes a law that requires four age ranges, or another one that requires two, but they do not map nicely to the three CA requires.

You have now replicated another timezone mess.

Sensitive content Clicca per aprire/chiudere

parental controls on most things are really broken - just badly thought through - lacking integration with each other - and plain buggy.

I think that effective regulation which actually required well functioning parental controls would be a game changer.

I'm going to disagree. Very vehemently.

This is just a foot in the door to surveillance. You of all people should know better than to defend this.

Sure it's this now, but at some point, it will become like every other system so far.

So we build yet another layer for users to select Jan 1st, 1970?

Seems like an enormous waste of time.

How about parents parenting?

I agree with you building something that is easy to bypass and doesn’t require storage of PII is much better than the uploading of secure documents but in this case not making a change is also superior.

Parents adding their children to the sudoer list? Does any parent capable of this require an age verification system to assist them?

Local filtering is definitely the way to go here. Do I want parental controls to be legally mandated? Ehhh... Do I want to hand over my ID to 50 companies just to use the internet? Absolutely not.

It seems like the lawmakers actually thought about the privacy implications: Only 2 bits of information are ever disclosed and there's nothing stopping you from putting in a fake data (or rm-ing the file...).

Although I do think it should be implemented as a list of allowed content instead of an age: Having nothing allowed before 18 and everything allowed the day after seems arbitrary to say the least.

It also covers:
1798.500 (e) (1) “Covered application store” means a publicly available internet website, etc..

So, a private forgejo site could be held liable for every download of curl. I mean, if they didn't trap for an age signal that isn't defined yet by the law. If the store serves apps and libs, or software that are dependencies, then that is a huge legal mess waiting to hit a small project or solo dev at $2500-7500 a download.

That's surprisingly not that horrible.

For /now./

Still a bad precedent to set, though.

One problem with the law is that one section says: “Covered application store” does not mean an online service or platform that distributes extensions, plug-ins, add-ons, or other software applications that run exclusively within a separate host application. But another says: A developer shall request a signal with respect to a particular user from an operating system provider or a covered application store when the application is downloaded and launched.

It's confusing (more)

That is a brilliantly simple, and sensible way to approach this. Let parents/guardians to set things up for their kids.

But the issue politicians will find with this approach right away is that it gives control away. We can't have that. It is governments' job to parent kids, not parents' job.

All of this assumes good faith on the part of the website. But, if you are a predator looking for children, why wouldn't you actively seek out this signal? I have to be honest, there are way too many bad faith actors for me to see this as a good idea.

Some of them are lawmakers themselves. Here in the US, we don't manage to prosecute them.

It doesn't matter how inoffensive it might seem now. 1) It won't remain that way, and 2) politics and politicians should not be designing nor mandating requirements in software when maybe 1 in 10,000 of them have any understanding whatsoever of how what they're dabbling in works (and, perhaps more importantly, often fails to work).

The formerly lesser-evil Democrats in their misguided zeal to legislate utopia, now by dabbling in technology design, are pushing me into the arms of the anarchists.

@mullvadnet

invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=f…

#andthen

There's honestly nothing good about the law, if you want to talk in a serious way. I have also read the text of the law and it is plain and simple overreach.

Parents already have mechanisms for controlling what their children are exposed to. Up to and including strictly supervised access and "child friendly" DNS providers, among other things (although I admit with DNS over HTTPS, that at least can be fairly trivially circumvented if the child knows how and is unsupervised enough to do so).

What the ideal solution would be is a voluntary system that parents can OPT IN to, but is opt out by default, that would allow for an age range reported to supported providers. Not mandatory - choice.