So, OS-level age-gating is going federal, which will effectively kill your rights to device ownership and what’s left of free speech and expression.
Enjoy your free speech while you still have it because this is a clear attempt to erase that right.
SOPA never died, it just went into hiding until time to reemerge, and now’s that time, this is basically SOPA in a save the kids trenchcoat.
This coming up not a fortnight after his floundering interview with The Bulwark is some Curb Your Enthusiasm level comedy, there’s not even really an “at best” to look for in American politics, a handful of progressive anomalies that came about after MONTHS of tireless campaigning that we can only pray result in a trend toward some kind of wave but that’s it, pay the right Democrat just enough money and they’ll be dancing like a GOP worm.
Donate here: https://www.eff.org/ https://epic.org/ https://cdt.org/ https://www.aclu.org/
Get off Android if you can: https://grapheneos.org/ https://lineageos.org/ https://e.foundation/e-os/
Pick a Linux distro to try on a beater laptop (save yourself some trouble and just use Ubuntu to start): https://distrowatch.com/
If this thread is any indication, we’re cooked. If this many people are willing to give the government the benefit of the doubt, after what we’re dealing with…
This will not be benign, it will seem innocent at first, but we’ll have given up yet another seemingly simple thing that will eventually be used against us.
evidently Palantir wasn’t able to use all available data and a few glaciers to find out who was saying mean things about Important People With Money. This oughta fill in those gaps.
They’re gonna call it The Super Duper American Act
“and for other purposes” umm
I was reading a list of bills and whatnot from March the other day. They all say “and for other purposes” they all say that
This one literally just tacks it at the end of the proposal. As it gives no purposes other than “and for other”
yeah, I was following up on a bill introduced by one of me senators and was poking around this website https://www.govtrack.us/
I dont know why, but every bill has this phrase written at the end of it. It is ominous, and I dont know why theyre written this way, probablt some legal bullshit.
Its the same reason even traffic laws are written ambiguosly. It gives everyone from cops to senators the ability to do what they want and then get away with it.
This might be the most anemic open ended bill I have ever read. On its face, it has no teeth. The most well defined portions of the bill are to make sure that applications have access to age data. Making this look more like a way for corporations to gather data and verify real people as opposed to online personas.
There is zero regulation actually defined and instead they have a 180 day period to define the regulation and a year for it to be contacted and implemented. The bill could pass tomorrow and we still wouldn’t know what age verification looks like.
As scary as these efforts are, they are also a bit humorous to me. By and large software exists independently of its creator, especially in the FOSS space. There would be no way to require an individual to install an OS that supported this or even use an updated browser that supported it.
Ultimately, the only way to really enforce any sort of age verification system is to force all content providers to have an age verification step. This presents as OS level, but you have to give people a reason to upgrade in order to implement. If Wikipedia suddenly required some sort of OS based age verification protocol to access its content, it would become a lot harder to avoid.
They are putting this at the OS level, but I think this is a way to back into removing anonymous access to the Internet.
Why are the pushing Linux so hard? Many here are already on it. (sarcasm aside, ye this is not great news.)
Eh, it’s only co-sponsored by one other person who isn’t running for re-election; it’s a purely NY delegation bill. Not saying there isn’t the threat from age gating bills but this one is pretty much dead.
You can turn it around with: https://www.change.org/in-god-we-trust
That’s fucking funny
So simple? So strong? So obvious? Genius?
This is how the democrats lose the next election.
GJ snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Again
You’re a bad person for pointing this out. /s
Unfortunately, nobody really cares about this shit either way. No chance this costs dems an election, especially considering support for age verification laws have generally been bipartisan.
this is one of the examples of how electoralism can only ever give us some breathing room, but never our full liberation. even a “good” politician is still a politician. they may have entered government to reshape government, but eventually working in government will reshape them.
i encourage others to work to get the best possible politicians into positions of power, but to also work on coagulating people power in order to topple those same positions of power. here are some things you can do:
- organize a union
- learn first aid
- participate in mutual aid projects
- become acquainted with self defense and community defense mechanisms
- learn about reducing your digital footprint at protests
Liberation comes at the end of a gun.
They can’t even arrest the pedophiles in government but they want to mass surveil us for everything.
That’s because we are dangerous (to the rich’s interests)
The rules have always been for us, not for them.
The police are enforcers for the elites, they don’t stop crime, they extract fines from people and provide a deterrent to anyone standing up for themselves.
I know but we outnumber them a million to one so we don’t actually have to put up with this
Yea so you quit taking badly about the pedophiles in government.
Those are not contrary, but complementary things.
That would require them to arrest themselves, because everyone in the roles that deal with that are themselves pedophiles.
still have no idea how they will implement this, with phones that can be rooted or running something like lineageOS or others.
But in any case, I am glad I am not from the US.
with phones that can be rooted
… for now. Samsung removed the ability to unlock the bootloader in an update.
And yes, there are other options. But Google is also cracking down on the openness of Android. I certainly can’t take the ability to root as a given.
Phones like fairphone will always have an unlocked bootloader
Unlockable, hopefully. If Google doesn’t crack down further on it.
Earlier generations of the Fairphone simply had a root toggle in the settings, but they removed that.
(typing this on a fp6)
Google cannot tell them what to do?
They can if they want Google services.
There may have been concern from banking apps and the likes as well? Though it’s been a while since I’ve looked it up.Edit:
The Strategy
In general, it is difficult to balance the needs of the average user who benefits from Android’s built-in security mechanisms and the user who wants more freedom. Companies like Google and application developers expect their code to run on a trustworthy device and will only provide their services on such devices.
Fairphone has made the conscious choice not to offer an option to root the device on its Google-services enabled software.
The EU is pushing very similar things…
Literally Meta has been caught paying people through shell orgs all around the world to pass this kind of legislation.
But in any case, I am glad I am not from the US. Windows is made in the US. I wouldn’t be surprised if they push this crap to the rest of the world too. Same with Android and IOS.
We need to start planning the transition now! Keep a burner device for internet, and the rest of your devices offline.
kill your rights to device ownership and what’s left of free speech and expression.
I hate this shit as much as the next guy, but can we cool it with the exaggerations, please? There is no more free speech and expression in the US now because of this? What? When it comes to free speech, we’re crying wolf at this point. I agree that this bill is terrible and a move in the wrong direction, but it’s not exactly killing off free speech. I mean, come on. People can’t take us seriously when we talk like this.
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.
This is just the first step. Soon you’ll need a government ID to operate your network card, then they’ll control what you post, the thoughts you can have.
Try thinking for yourself while you still can.
… thats a nice tinfoil hat you got there
This post was unironically made a year after the start of an American authoritarian government, concentration camps, public executions and genocide.
God some of you people are stupid.
The whole point of free speech is that it is free. If you need to hide anonymously, then it’s not free, it’s simply bypassing censorship.
Suppressing online anonymity is very problematic, but free speech is absolutely not one of them.
Free speech as a right is an ideal. In practice, any given government of a country that purports to grant its citizens freedom of speech will have types of speech that it wants to censor (despite its legality) and will use whatever means available to subvert that right. As such, speech is only free insofar as it can be protected. Online anonymity is one such protection.
Once upon a time, people were against social security because they believed the government would use the individual numbers assigned to everyone as a form of identification…
History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes.
It may seem like that if you’ve been walking through the last couple years with your eyes closed.
Most people in this thread have no clue what free speech is apparently. But Yankees love talking about how much freedom they have, so if that’s what it takes to rally them, so be it I imagine?
Exaggerations? Either we put them in a simulation of hell, or they put us. That’s where we are at.
All means are justified!
There’s a host of other reasons people can’t take Americans seriously, and I assure you that acknowledging reality is not one of them lol
You stole my exact comment.
How can anyone not trust that face!? I’m sure this is all very well-intentioned!
The app “5 calls” is free, free of ads, and free of tracking. It will provide you with the phone numbers and emails of your representatives and senators. It will also provide you scripts so that you can speak directly on each potential topic. You can also set up daily, weekly, or monthly notifications to remind you.
No script for this topic
