[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.