[jwitthuhn]

It is an admission from the writers that this law is unrelated to safety and people should very loudly and frequently point that out.

If OSes that don't verify the age of their users are a genuinely unsafe for children, why should they be allowed just because they are open source? That doesn't seem to mitigate dangers associated with age in any away I can identify.

[unparagoned]

I think it just means that people using those OS simply won’t be able to access adult content.

[likeclockwork]

All content is "adult content" unless specifically marked otherwise.

[anigbrowl]

Have you considered that the writers typically have legislative but not technical skills and are just trying to placate upset voters, without really understanding what the optimal solution could be? Reading this and other threads you can see therea re plenty of highly technical people who struggle to articulate what kind of policy they want or what kind of parental controls they want to set up themselves?

It's kind of a hard problem and legislators are inclined picking the lowest hanging fruit. Their primary concern is to not be smeared as child predators by their political opponents at the next election, eg "jwitthuhn voted to give gambling websites, pronographers, and pedophiles easy access to YOUR children - s/he OPPOSED age verification laws on internet sleaze!! Who's jwitthuhn really working for - you, or the people who want to exploit your kids?!!"

One can point out that such electoral pitches are dishonest bullshit until one is blue in the face, but the fact is they work on a lot of voters because most of them are not smart and don't have the energy or inclination to research every issue. And it is true that there are a lot of hustlers on the internet who are willing to either passively or actively exploit kids, and the anonymity, non-locality, and technical complexity of the internet makes that relatively easy to do and hard to prosecute. Legislators offer simplistic solutions because that's what a most of the public wants, and people often make their voting decisions based on emotional factors rather than cold rationality.

You don't need mustache-twirling villains saying 'let's impose burdensome techn regulations that perpetuate oligopolies and allow me to make another trillion dollars, a few million of which I'll send your way, mwhahahaha' to get shitty legislation (which is not to say they don't exist). It will emerge naturally by default if other conditions are right.

[jwitthuhn]

"One can point out that such electoral pitches are dishonest bullshit until one is blue in the face"

This is what I intend to do. To just let lawmakers get away with passing bullshit because "of course they will" is a defeatist attitude that I don't advocate.

That is why it is so important to be loud about this incredibly obvious disingenuous behavior. Make sure everyone knows the people advocating this do not care one bit about children's safety.

[anigbrowl]

First of all, that probably won't work, second of all it likely won't work because you are attributing made-up motivations to people you are pissed off with. Hence my use of the word 'paranoid'.

[dotancohen]

  > One can point out that such electoral pitches are dishonest bullshit until one is blue in the face, but the fact is they work on a lot of voters because most of them are not smart and don't have the energy or inclination to research every issue.

That sounds like a suggestion that democracy should be limited only to intelligent or educated people, or people who have researched all relevant issues. I know that was not your intent, but it is an easy conclusion to come to from your stated perspective.

Democracy, like the free market, is viable only for informed participants. But once a certain large mass of participants are no longer informed - willfully or not - the system fails for all participants.

[NewsaHackO]

I don’t know, one could say that “being informed” is itself an inherently biased argument. What is being informed? Is it that they agree with you (or whatever controlled opposition to your point in your mind)?