I live in the UK. By default your ISP will block "mature" content and you have to contact them to opt out. iOS, Android, Playstation, Xbox, Switch all have parental controls that are enforced at an account level.
A child with an iPhone, Xbox, and a Windows Laptop won't be able to install discord unless the parent explicitly lets them, or opts out of all the parental controls those platforms have to offer.
The tech is here already, this is not about keeping children safe.
Parts of discord are not safe at all for 13 year olds and currently there isn't a mechanism as far as I am aware to restrict a 13 year old from accessing them.
The solution to that is obviously some sort of Parental features, where a parent can create accounts for their kids with restricted access and/or monitoring capabilities. The solution isn't to require an ID from everyone just to "protect the kids"...
No, it's about corporate and government control. Thankfully, the UK government is clueless about tech, which means these controls can be bypassed relatively easily by using your own DNS or a public DNS server like Quad9.
The corporations in this case are fighting against this. This is about your government and its desire to squash opinions they don't like. They are already going so far as to jail people for posting opinions they don't like. This has absolutely nothing to do with children, children are just the excuse.
[Any] task is much easier if you have the tools. Do/did you have a baby monitor? A technological tool, that allows you to "monitor" the baby while not being within an arms reach.
Do you have an A+++++ oven with three panes of glass? It's [relatively] safe to touch and instead of monitoring if a child is somewhere near the oven you have to monitor if the child does not actively open the oven. That's much easier.
I remember how my sister and I set up Google Family and fully locked down my niece her phone with app restrictions, screen time restrictions and a policy of accountability when we need to extend the screen time.
It worked really well up until she got a school managed chromebook for homework with no access controls.
Can't your router block by Mac address? Just limit the Chromebook to allowlisted sites. And also school-issued computers are known for Spyware and even worse. It should probably be segregated in a separate network or vlan.
over 10 years ago, I had an intern from Harvard CS tell me that privacy is irrelevant unless you're doing something that you want to hide. I was gobsmacked that someone would not cherish their privacy but since then I've realized many don't care at all and have the same attitude that "I don't have anything to hide."
- they will honestly tell you that they'd be very happy to see you dead when you impose restrictions upon them (people who are older will of course possibly get into legal trouble for such a statement)
- they will tell they they wish you'd never have given birth to them (or aborted them)
- they will tell you that since they never wanted to be born, they owe you nothing
As a father of 3, one thing the wife and I had to learn over the course of the first two is that the modern world holds parents to impossible standards and a "fuck off" attitude is required for much of it.
We've had pediatricians shame us for feeding our kids what they're willing to eat and not magically forcing "a more varied diet" down their throats at every meal, despite them being perfectly healthy by every objective metric. There are laws making it technically illegal for us to leave our kids unsupervised at home for any period of time in any condition, even a few minutes if one of us is running slightly late from work/appointments.
Your not-quite-2-year-old is too tall for a rear-facing car-seat? You're a bad parent, possibly a criminal and putting them at risk by flipping the seat to face forward, a responsible parent spends hundreds of dollars they don't have on several different seats to maybe find one that fits better or have their kid ride uncomfortably and arguably unsafely with their legs hyper-extended up the seatback.
Miss a flu shot because you were busy? Careful you don't come off as an antivaxxer.
And all of this and more on top of changing diapers, doctors' appointments, daycare, preschool, school, family activities and full time jobs?
Yeah, when my kids are old enough to engage with social media I will teach them how to use it responsibly, warn them about the dangers, make myself available to them if they have any problems, enforce putting the phones down at dinner and and keep a loose eye on their usage. Fortunately/unfortunately for them they have a technically sophisticated father who knows how to log web activity on the family router without their knowledge. So if anything goes sideways I'll have some hard information to look at. Most families don't have that level of technical skill.
I was almost certainly never going to be a parent for other unrelated reasons, but you have just given me a whole other list of confirmations for that decision that I hadn't thought of before.
There's a law going through in some state that want's to do this, but also put the onus on the OS developers to detect age aligned behavior. How do you do this with Linux? It would kill the open computer and kill ownership over computing.
Why would it be a problem to do this sort of thing with linux? Linux allows for oauth, proxied networking, what have you -- unless they're using some super-secret-unpublished-protocol, linux will be fine
I'm against these age-verification laws, but to say it's impossible to comply with open-source software isn't really true.
The point is that you won't be able to just install a Linux distro of your choice in this world - your computer will only run approved OSs that have gone through some kind of certification process to make sure they enforce age-verification content. If, say, the Debian foundation doesn't want to add these mandatory controls because they feel it goes against the spirit of Debian (not to mention the huge issues with the GPL), then your new computer just won't be able to run Debian anymore. And something like Kali would be right out, of course, since anonymity is not compatible with age verification.
Or, Conversely, these systems won't be able to verify age and will just be shut out of adult content. Which is fine, just keep a windows machine around for porn and do your actual work on a real computer
But it isn't fine. How long before that's no longer an option?
A few years ago it was "Apple won't let me side load apps, which is fine, I'll run android" now that's coming back and getting locked down even more.
How long before normal computers will all have signed bootloaders with only the OEM's OS of choice allowed to boot, 4 chains deep of verifying signatures on hardware security chips?
A child with an iPhone, Xbox, and a Windows Laptop won't be able to install discord unless the parent explicitly lets them, or opts out of all the parental controls those platforms have to offer.
The tech is here already, this is not about keeping children safe.