Disney is all: Calling it “Euro”? Let us know how that goes…

You really underestimate the trouble meta and YouTube are in. The specific rulings were barely tickets to them, but if they are upheld then follows flood gates of identical lawsuits are going to be opened up. They had millions and millions of child users in the 2010s that they knowingly served an addictive product to. If the current ruling is upheld, then there will likely be a very large class action settlement to payoff all the past injured users. But instead of changing their product going forward they want to get rid of the responsibility for their product entirely.

Stop making up fake conspiracies and be mad about that.

I don’t agree that Epstein is much of a counter point. There were lots of people taking about him, it really wasn’t that closely held of a secret, and he was arrested and prosecuted and murdered for it. Ultimately, with the files released, there really isn’t much in them that we didn’t already know.

Just to clear something up, my brand new account is only new because lemmings.world is closing and I had to migrate to a new server.

The biggest problem with conspiracy theories like this is always the number of people involved keeping their mouths shut. Anyone that has ever managed a large project knows how impossible it is to keep a large group of people quiet about something. In real life, there are conspiracies. Often very large ones. But they didn’t stay secret for long.

What is easier to believe: (1) that all these people involved, across countries with leaders of many different political varieties, all agreed to stick to a single narrative in order to cover up a deep international conspiracy to build a massive international database of people’s ages online, OR (2) Meta and other orgs are doing a normal business thing and trying to reduce their liability costs.

“There’s no mechanism that the government currently has that can track you as effectively as these age verification laws can.”

I honestly can’t tell if you were serious or not.

The governments just buy your data from Google. Do you have any idea how much information on you Google has?

I didn’t know about that. Maybe that’s plays into it too. But I’m generally a “simpler answer is more likely the most correct” type of guy.

In this case the simple answer is that Meta and others just had their “Tobacco Lawsuits” moment in court and liability floodgates are any to open wide, and they are pushing these laws to divert their liability onto someone else.

Google “Protected Processor Identification Number (PPIN)” to learn more.

It’s so funny to me how badly people want this to be some nefarious governmental conspiracy. Listen, the government already has much better tools to track you online. Your computer has, on a hardware level, sent unique identifiers to ISPs and websites since Pentium IIIs. This age requirement thing isn’t a government conspiracy to track you, they already track you.

It is a *corporate *conspiracy. It’s Meta and other major websites, games, and applications companies that want to off load their liability. Meta and Alphabet just lost major lawsuits for their negligence in protecting kids on their own websites. There is a liability dam about to break for these companies and schools and other advocacy groups start their own lawsuits. That’s what this is about. That’s the real conspiracy.

It’s a website that doesn’t require a user to report their age.

You don’t understand how this protects kids because you haven’t been taught to think like a monster. That’s okay. But I have had lots of training in child protection.

The way “grooming” online often works is to get the kid to a place where the predator can start blackmailing the kid, but that’s a process. That often starts on chat apps. Those can be in video games or social media platforms, etc. The predators identify kids in the apps and then will start chatting with them. It will start off innocuous, talking about the game or whatever, but eventually it turns into the predator trapping the kid into a secret (it’s always about secrets). The predator will ask the kid “Hey, want to see some porn?” or something like that. And of course a 13 or 14 year old kid is going to be interested in that. Then “don’t tell your parents” always follows. Once they have agreed to the secret, the trap is set. The predator brings the kid darker and darker porn and makes the kid feel more and more guilty and uncomfortable. Eventually it turns into, “Send me photos of your self or I’ll publish these chats” (or worse, like in person meetings).

This is why “This is the parent’s responsibility” is cruel bull shit. Parents can’t be everywhere all the time and these predators make sure they stay out of parents views. The parents are victims too.

Everyone that says “This isn’t about protecting the kids” is half right. It’s not really about protecting the kids, it’s really about protecting Meta and other developers from liability. Users love private messengers, and internet companies love them too. But it’s a problem for Internet companies because they are the dark corners that make the internet companies liable. And they do have a responsibility to protect users on their websites, and they can’t just claim “we didn’t know”, because they damn well know.

So, their solution is to require the OS to record the user’s age, even if that’s just “18+”. The websites can call the age from the OS, get the “verified age” (they really don’t care what “verified” means, that’s the OS maker’s problem) and then open their doors to the customer. (If the kid is using their parent’s account or what ever, the internet companies don’t care. They did their due diligence.) But if the OS returns “<18” then the websites can lock down the user’s account. They can automatically turn on parental controls, require a parent’s consent, etc. Most importantly for child protection, they can turn off or very strictly limit private messaging (all of the online problems start with private messaging). They can basically do a lot of the things they are doing now, just off loading the liability onto the OS maker. Which, personally, I think is better for the parents too. It’s much easier for parents to monitor the OS then it is for them to monitor hundreds of websites and games.

And Lemmy, Mastodon, and fediverse users (and especially hosts) should want this too. Hosts on the fediverse do not understand how much liability they are taking upon themselves (if they did, they wouldn’t be hosting).

The crash is going to be rough.

I wouldn’t mind if your drug dealer didn’t sell drugs to kids.

Linux Community: It’s Free Software. You can do what you want!

Also Linux community: BUT NOT THAT!

You are going to get downvoted to hell on this platform, but you aren’t wrong. You aren’t alone though. There are at least two of us that can think rationally about this.

The anti-California age law reaction in tech-bro internet circles is really irrational.

Well, very possibly.

That’s actually a funny consequence I hadn’t thought of. A media company could go to a pirating site and then file a police report claiming neglect of child protections. That could really start to spiral quick…

You’ll get age-gated in a heart beat.

The funny thing is that by January 7, all the bros screaming “I’ll never use an OS that asks my age” will have switched to an OS that asks their age because they can’t go a week without their porn.

Pixel isn’t sold with GraphineOS. You have to install it yourself.

I think it’s more likely that soon China will start heavily pushing out a forked version of Linux on cheap fully home-built PCs. Then it’s basically game over for American software companies.