[shadowgovt]

You have made some fascinating assumptions about the person you are addressing. I recommend refraining from that in the future and instead asking why a fellow American takes a position other than the one you hold.

Two guys built a website to try and help people curb their undesired sexual proclivities and because they were bad at security, their users' personal information (including their own logs of their sexual proclivities) is leaked. They will see no consequences other than "oops, oh well, I guess we're going to shut down our website now and, probably, build another one."

Why is that okay? We've de-facto operated as if it os okay for decades under a notion of "user beware," but that notion is increasingly incompatible with the goals of treating Internet access as a human right because if you let everyone on, you are definitely letting people on who lack the capacity, knowledge, or savvy to beware. And we lack a framework for holding "two guys who just told the world how often you jack off" accountable for their violation of confidentiality.

Individual users become nodes in botnets. Individual users have their identities compromised. Individual users are talked into being kidnapped by anonymous victimizers. Individual users are, increasingly, everyone's concern the moment they connect to a shared network. And, perhaps most significantly to this topic: the Internet does not distinguish between two guys building a hobby app and a professional service.

This specific notion, age-gating access, may not be the right step. But we should be a lot more serious about taking more than zero steps. The time of effing around and pretending there are no consequences to these technologies is over.

[GoblinSlayer]

What they really fear is general purpose computers that can run free software (free as in not enslaved) without approved backdoors and vetted gatekeepers. Cyberpunk dystopia is coming and is enabled by smartphone cartel: phoneposters don't care what's going on.

Their reason: https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/government-mand...

[hypeatei]

> But we should be a lot more serious about taking more than zero steps

No, we shouldn't. There is no inherent need for government regulations in every part of our lives, let alone a computer. Sorry to be flippant, but this idea that everyone needs to have a "serious conversation" about something is laughable and inevitably leads to mountains of government legislation with unintended consequences.

Thanks, but no thanks. We should resist all of this bullshit and try not to become Europe 2.0 where it's illegal to offend people with your speech because some idiot thought that'd be "reasonable" regulation.

[Apocryphon]

In America, we simply have private individuals sue each other in civil court for that rather than state prosecution in criminal court. Close enough.

[hypeatei]

You still need legal standing for a civil case and the defendant isn't being threatened with jail time or men with guns. Yes, frivolous cases are a thing but it's both unlikely (because money) and not in the same league as criminal prosecution.

[mothballed]

Stuff like the clean air act says that you don't. That's why "physicians for a healthy environment" were able to sue the diesel brothers for emissions delete hardware despite the fact they weren't able to point to standing for $760,000 in damages to themselves, unless by some insane legal stretch you want to argue literally everything anyone does has a tiny effect on you thus you have standing because a few molecules of whatever that actor did floated to where you are. In the end they even managed to put a "diesel brother" in jail despite the fact that a judge who examined his circumstances of being jailed for 'civil contempt' were bogus.

[iamnothere]

The consequences of the Wickard v. Filburn mistake will continue to haunt us until that decision is finally overturned. (Slightly different area of the law but similar principle.)

[Apocryphon]

Even if the federal government won't sue, state and other jurisdictions could. The Diesel Brothers also ran afoul of Utah’s State Implementation Plan of the CAA. This whole story is about state law.

[iamnothere]

If you’re an American and you want to change this, feel free to propose and pass an amendment. That’s the allowable process for changing what the government can and can’t do regarding individual rights.

Edit: removed part of my comment because misunderstood your rambling point about that website, and I guess I have no idea how it relates to OS regulation. Websites are not operating systems. Your ability to tell me how I run my systems stops at my door, especially if I’m not hosting commercial services. Again, that’s just a question of fundamental rights.

[shadowgovt]

Conversely, you're an American and you want to change this, feel free to propose and pass an amendment that makes regulation of OS as a product the concern of the federal government, as opposed to (as per the 10th Amendment) a state government concern. These regulations are state affairs for the same reason that glyphosate is known in the state of California as a carcinogen (but not other states). Product standards are, generally, a state-level concern. I agree this is inefficient, but the burden to modify the Constitution is on those who would change that inefficiency.

I appreciate the grace in taking a step back on my other comment; I phrased it poorly. Here's my point in better summary: I think we have an issue right now where our hobby has two things that are true that have significant negative societal outcomes. And to be clear, I'm primarily responding to this comment: "Who is providing them with legal indemnification since they are now apparently subject to fines for a fucking hobby if they do it wrong?" Because the answer to that is "If these things are true, it doesn't matter."

1. There is very little daylight between professional and hobby coding. That has been one of its virtues: a person with the right idea can garage-hack way into becoming Fark, or Slashdot, or Craigslist. But the flipside of that coin is that a kid messing around in their garage can cause real consequences for real people they will never even meet. How many websites are falling over from people experimenting with AI crawling right now (at disregard for the existing best-practices for crawling)?

2. A lone actor misusing the machine can have large-impact consequences on strangers. A kid in their basement doing script-kiddie garbage can exfiltrate confidential data, steal someone's electricity to mine Bitcoin, or even just wreck their machine remotely, for fun. A lone actor with no malicious intent but simple negligence can drop a machine on the Internet with all the ports open and become a botnet node. When we have sitautions like that in the past, we often use licensure to ensure some minimum standard of care when using the shared resource.

In fairness, what may want to be licensed here is using the Internet, not installing an operating system. I think that's a fair point and state governments trying to move the issue to the OS, not network-connectivity level, are making a mistake.

[iamnothere]

State governments cannot pass laws that violate freedom of speech. Code is (written) speech, despite attempts to attack this.

If you want to push really hard, we can come up with something extremely verbose (worse than COBOL) that is VERY obviously speech. “Define a variable named x. Set the value of x to 3. Add the value of y to x.”

Outcomes take a back seat to rights. Bad outcomes are sometimes the inevitable consequence of liberty.

If you want to try and license use of public Internet infrastructure, like public roads, go ahead. But most of the Internet is private. Free association and free speech rules, regardless of the occasional difficulties it creates.

[shadowgovt]

Code is speech, but installing an OS someone else wrote on hardware you own is not code.

I think you're making a good argument for why the regulation should be at the network-connect level and not the OS-account level, though, if the real issue is that networks are a shared resource with consequences for other people (which seems to be the issue). At that point, the OS collecting the data is just a convenience to satisfy the requirement for network access, not something that needs to be mandated.

> most of the Internet is private

True, but automotive licensing still applies to one's right to operate a vehicle on turnpikes. I believe the analogy here is that you might not need a license to set up an intranet.

[iamnothere]

> True, but automotive licensing still applies to one's right to operate a vehicle on turnpikes.

I wonder if this has ever been challenged? Driving on most private roads does not require a license or even a tag.

My rough understanding is that turnpikes are a special case because they were established by legislative charter, but it would be interesting to see the specifics. I don’t know much about the legal history.

[Apocryphon]

If code is speech then isn’t the regulation of encryption as a munition unconstitutional?

[iamnothere]

Yes, see Bernstein v. United States.