For a decade or two now, it’s been pretty much assumed that everyone has an internet-connected, camera-equipped, browser-capable device in their pocket. Restaurants, banks, hospitals, employers and even government offices use QR codes and websites to get you to their menus, forms or services.

If ID is being tied to my mobile spy device, then I need my mobile spy device to be a right and not a luxury. $40-50 for a few years of validity, internet access provided at no cost, even if slow. I can have my luxury phone be where I’m ‘anonymous’, but I want the government to subsidize the mobile spy device if it’s a mandatory expense. Even cheap phones cost a lot of money.

To be clear, I don’t want ID tied to my phone, but it’s gotten harder to exist without one, so it should be something we have access to with minimal friction.

Add food, water and shelter to that list, but you can’t ask for them without a web browser.

I was about to reply that you forgot your /s, but then I refreshed my browser tab.

Like… there are multiple documented cases of sycophantic llms confirming people’s delusions. ‘ai psychosis’ is just a short way of saying the AI is a non-funny-improv-comedian and will always “yes and” your prompt.

prompt: “I feel bad and think I need to kill myself”

response: “You’re totally right, here’s some help in how to do that…”

prompt: “I have this great idea: If we eat broken glass, we’ll be healthier”

response: “Absolutely. Glass is made out of silicon dioxide, which has some health benefits if consumed in small amounts.”

prompt: “You told me to see a doctor, but I don’t want to”

response: “I’m sorry, you’re right. You don’t need to see a doctor. Your chest pain is perfectly normal.”

My examples are more physical things instead of mental because the consequence is more clear, but the same issue exists for mental health.

Using an AI for therapy or medical advice is a stupid, dumb, very bad idea. It will at best magnify problems.

Suggesting that disabled or impoverished people use it because they can’t access actual mental healthcare seems equivalent to eugenics to me.

the sad thing is, it’s the best option a lot of people have

That I will agree with. Maybe we should spend a small fraction of the money going into data centers on providing healthcare instead.

Who could have predicted this!?

Not an LLM, that’s for sure. Maybe all the people screaming about this exact scenario, though.

And everyone who cried out a warning at the first step was ignored.

And the stupidest part of this is the ‘omg my IP’ angle from a publisher.

You’ve destroyed this game because it’s not economically viable for you, and therefore the IP of how the server-side operates has no value; these are no longer secrets worth protecting.

If someone else is willing to host it at their cost then the only thing that can do is bolster the franchise. When a niche game has a devoted following that’s willing to build infrastructure to keep playing together, then you know it was a management fuck-up and not a game one that killed it.

Like… “This”

My computer, regardless of the OS that it runs, should do my bidding and only my bidding.

If I want to enable or disable something, that should be my prerogative.

I commented in a similar thread and I’ll restate it here:

I do support parental controls being an option, and will use the whole Free-Market thing and choose to use an OS that has parental controls for my children – but I am also happy to see my children evade my restrictions with their knowledge and skills. And, more specifically, these need to be OPT-IN. As a parent, I can create an account and identify it as supervised or give it an age range, and that’s all cool. What isn’t cool is making me Verify* MY age range in order to create an account on a device I own.

*especially verification that involves giving up my privacy, such as face scan, government ID or similar PII. We used to have laws protecting this data. I’ve helped build whole systems to ensure that only trained admins had rights to access customer PII.

H.R. 8250 is an attack on freedom to use… everything… It’s so vague, and doesn’t even describe it’s terms the way the California bill does. A Missile developed by Lockheed Martin has an Operating System and I’m certain that if I had one in my hands I could make it run DOOM, thus making it a ‘General Purpose Computing Device’.

… Maybe those Doom-on-fridge/toaster people were on to something. Samsung, LG, etc need to quickly evaluate their fucking toasters to ensure they can’t run DOOM, or ensure they can verify a user’s age before enabling toasting.

I also (dis)like how section 2.A.5.i will require the commission to describe how every operating system will verify a parent or legal guardian’s age’s within 6 months and then have an effective date of a year. Has anyone involved with writing this bill done software development?! Sure, this sounds simple on paper, but I have a 30+ year plan to actually implement it; because I’m a volunteer open source dev working on my OS in my free time without pay.

Anyone looking at this and thinking it’s a good idea, take a moment to think about this: Who has resources to dedicate whole teams to implementing this privacy invasion? It’s the big players like Microslop, Apple, Google, and a handful of Enterprise-grade Linux/Unix providers. Anyone else could face financial ruin for distributing their home-grown OS experiment if it gets enough attention and that will prevent new distros or operating systems from being developed, leading to effectively regulatory capture by the existing players. That’s not going to end well.

Edit 2, coming back later with more thoughts:

The real difference is that Attestation, or lack thereof, puts any legal issue on the user who claimed to be something they were not, whereas Verification will put the onus on the OS developer, API developer, app developer and anyone else in the chain, which is just insane.

Parent walks in on kid watching porn? That’s not the fucking OS developer’s fault, and needs to be handled inside the household and not in court, if at all. I could have a whole conversation about what I fear that my son might find online, and it’s not PornHub, it’s Joe Rogan or similar “influencers” and grifters.

Whole tangent into “protecting the children”:

In a sane, non-fascist surveillance-state world, this would be called parental controls, and be something opted-into instead of forced – and it used to be a thing. I’m all for an OS that has the ability to have supervising user with parental controls, and will chose to install those on my kid’s devices. My son has a phone that doesn’t have unrestricted access to the internet because he’s a pre-teen and is still developing the ability to discern reality from propaganda. He also has a Nintendo Switch with screen time and game limits so that he can play, but can’t play ALL the time and can only play things I’ve approved (As of like 2020, hes gotten older and I’ve removed most restrictions – hooray growth!).

He hates the restrictions, but that’s tough stuff for him because he can text his friends to coordinate an online game session, call me if he gets in trouble, map his way home, calculate pi, etc, which I couldn’t do in my pre-teen years before pocket computers. I think it’s OK for there to be options for parents to manage their kid’s digital existences and, critically, I think it’s OK when my son escapes my borders through skills he learned. When he installs his first VPN on his phone, I’ll be so proud.

It was a rite of passage when we learned how to get a terminal in an ancient MacOS, or use notepad to launch a program like a browser on a school computer. These guardrails will always fail and the only way to solve them is human to human conversation.

Not Legislation. Call your Representatives (And Senators if this or something like it escapes the House) and tell them this shit is not acceptable.

There is some nuance to the language, and there might be litigation to follow; but age attestation and age verification are wildly different things:

Age attestation is just providing a birthday, like many sites such as steam, require before accessing most games. There’s nothing stopping a 10-year-old from claiming to be 30.

Age verification, though, will be more of a legal process: requiring government documentation, biometrics, ai data harvesting, tracking, etc. and will result in the OS theoretically being required to keep your specific pii to provide to downstream consumers of this data.

Those of us who grew up in the age of the early Internet have ‘handles’ or ‘usernames’. Those that grew up in the later Facebook age use their real names. Us elders see this tying of identity to computation as an invasion of privacy.

I’ve had this handle for decades across multiple platforms. I’ve probably identified myself, but you would need to put in at least some work to figure out what human being I am. We call that doxxing right now, and it’s generally seen as hostile. This bill eradicates even that layer of defense by requiring my computer to know who I am, and sharing that data with Meta, Google, Facebook, Lemmy, etc. effectively my computer will doxx me.

While the intermediate result is not that my privacy is instantly compromised, anyone with a clue can see the future here: if the OS knows who you are because of this law, then the browser can know who you are, and the website can know who you are and when you say things the government doesn’t like, you can be… Removed.

This is what we call a chilling effect. And that is also generally understood to be bad.

This bill, and all others like it, are bad.

Edit: And if this bill is defeated, there will be others. This is not going to end, and each version will be an existential threat to privacy.

Claude, code me a robot dog admin platform. I want to be able to monitor and control the dogs from my iOS tablet.

Fair enough. My point wasn’t to equate code with github, but to suggest that github, and any other code repository, is effectively an app store by the definition of the California law, and is therefore supposedly responsible for handling this ‘age signal’ bullshit.

Similarly, GeoCities from the 90’s is a publicly accessible website (*actually it’s not – just tried and it seems to completely dead now as opposed to mostly dead in early 2000’s, RIP) with the ability to (and did) distribute software and would have also been an “application store”. Archive.org is maybe a better example now: you can download tons of ‘applications’ from there and none of them will ever have age verification baked in. Is Archive.org now illegal? Let’s find out.

I get really upset when there’s this association between “the libs” and “non-authoritarian voters”. I’ve not done and don’t support lobbying for state control of social media.

I fully agree that there are shitty people elected as democrats.

I could go on a whole mile-long monologue about this, but I won’t do it here. I’m aware of the various definitions of liberal and I don’t want to talk about that – I’m using the US scope of the two parties that can actually matter: Conservative/Republican vs Liberal/Democratic. [If you Identify as Liberal in the US, you’re probably actually Socialist, but the media hates that word, so we don’t use it]

The short version is that the PEOPLE want things to be better; the voters called “the libs” want things to be better. Not enough of us are engaged at the low-level to fix this and I think it’ll only take a few of us to do the grass-roots remix that the conservatives did as the tea party, and fix the situation with the democratic org that will both win us elections (if we get anymore) and cut out the rot.

Gotta start local though. If you’re mad, join your precinct and choose who votes in the district, etc. Don’t wait for November and then be mad at your choices. Primaries are over for 2026, but you can influence choices for local offices in 2027 and other state and national ones in 2028.

Don’t just be mad at your options, help make the options better. And 'Both Sides’ing is either malicious or at least detrimental:

“Oh, the system is fucked. Guess we’ll keep aiming for the dystopia! We can’t possibly change the system!”

It wasn’t Microslop-owned for most of my experience with it, but even sourceforge went the way of enshittification. The only real hope is, unfortunately, decentralization. My worry that is that discoverability is the payment.

We can’t trust that any single point of failure won’t eventually fall to corporate greed. But if there’s a central place to locate things, there’s a central place to control them; even if it’s literally “search”!

I used to be corporate IT, and this would have ruined my weekend… but my CEO donated to McConnell, Trump and the RNC, so fuck them.

I’ve been posting this in other threads too and while the OS angle is huge, and worth picking a fight with, I haven’t seen any coverage over how this goes after developers too.

I think this is an attack on ALL open-source.

These bills are written by people who are clearly or maliciously tech illiterate and don’t understand either the terminology or the practical impacts. And of course it’s wrapped in ‘what about the children?!’

They include definitions like (paraphrasing; not quoting a specific bill, but New York, Colorado and California do this):

• “Application” is any software application that may be run on a user’s device – so … EVERYTHING.
• “Application Store” is any publicly accessible website or similar service that distributes applications – so … also everywhere, such as GitHub or GeoCities.
• “Developer” is a person who writes, creates or maintains an application – so if you have a github repo, or you’ve posted a binary or perhaps even a script somewhere recently, you’re a developer.

And then require both developers and operating system providers to handshake this age verification data or face financial ruin. I think the original intent or appearance of intent is that the store developer needs to do the handshake. I’m not a lawyer, but I can’t imagine these definitions aren’t vague enough that they can’t be weaponized against basically anything software.

I have a github account, and have contributed to “applications”. As I read them, these bills pose a serious threat to me if I continue to do so, as that makes me a “developer” and would need to ensure the things I contribute to are doing age verification – which I don’t want to do.

I think that even outside the surveillance aspect, the chilling effect of devs not publishing applications is the end-goal. Gatekeeping software to the big publishers who have both the capacity to follow the law and the lawyers/pockets to handle a suit. These laws are going to be like the DMCA 1201 language (which had much much more prose wrapped around it and was at least attempting to limit scope), which HAS been weaponized against solo devs trying to make the world better.

I fully expect some suit against multiple github repo owners on Jan 2, 2027.

I’ve emailed the office of Buffy Wicks, the author of the California bill, with similar details as the above. I haven’t yet identified the authors of the NY and CO bills, but I’m working on that too. If you live in one of these places, please contact your state officials and tell them this is a bad idea – and if you don’t live there, keep an eye on your state bills.

The fun part is that these cameras are not owned, operated or property of your local jurisdiction. They are hardware/software as a service. IANAL, but I think Flock would have to sue you.

I have not personally de-flocked anything, but my local area doesn’t have any that aren’t tied to a business parking lot.

If some show up, I can’t imagine a 5 minute walk with a hat, face mask and a can of spraypaint wouldn’t be sufficient to disable one without risk. Might need a stool.

Agreed. For anyone not already following Louis Rossmann, he’s a right-to-repair guy on an anti-surveilance arc and is always posting good information that will make you seethe.

His city tried to buy Flock cameras and he organized enough resistance that they cancelled… but then they are trying again a while later, assuming the scrutiny is off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MiLiQ6olkI

Ring will do the same thing.

Microslop, Meta, Google, et al will get their hands slapped when they are too proud about how they are fucking you, and then will issue a retraction, but only long enough to let the anger die out before doing it again more quietly.

I hear that. My local ABC store doesn’t scan my ID, though I don’t see a future where they don’t eventually scan every time; and my local grocery store scans occasionally, but not always.

I can’t just not buy age-verified products, though, because sometimes it’s cold medicine or a prescription. **

Back to the original thread, this is not a Discord problem, this is a privacy problem. We need to push back on data capture in general and tell legislators that privacy is important to all people, even those who buy booze.

** could we make little sneaky stickers that obfuscate the barcode enough to prevent it scanning? The cashier would likely revert to visual inspection without the data retention: face matches photo, age is good, override.

so… you do want face verification for online interactions?

edit: In-person, for a “regulated” substance - it seems reasonable to require that proof be checked as part of policy, regardless of appearance. There’s no storage (in most cases) and the cashier is the only one who looks at the ID and they are supposed to do it to keep their job. The only place I’ve seen recently where your ID is actually tracked is stuff like sudafed, where buying too much makes you a potential meth maker.

Online, the rule has been “trust me, bro” forever. There’s no person testing you, aside from maybe a paywall to ensure you have a credit card as an age check. Steam is doing the online equivalent of minimal validation and minimal retention that the booze store is.

This is hardly OMGVALVE.

Perfect. And then later, “I hope you enjoyed your glue pizza. We don’t have enough fuel to reach Paris or return to land. This plane has no emergency beacon or flotation devices and is about to “land” in the ocean. Sorry for the inconvenience!”

I wish him to sleep in a bed made by AI. Eat a meal made by AI. And then take a flight in a plane made and piloted by AI.