zlacker

>>mmaria+(OP)
This is one of the times where law is outrunning technology. Apple and Google are both working on anonymous attestation but they're pulling the trigger before it's ready.

But that's not what laws like these are about. In the US at least these laws are driven by Christian Nationalists are setting up a situation where PII of porn users is able to be leaked. That's what they're counting on. They also want to have political control of platforms by continually holding a Sword of Damocles above any publisher's head.

>>Velila+se4
I have to disagree with the "Christian Nationalist" characterization.

https://www.politics.co.uk/news/2025/07/29/nigel-farage-taki...

>"Nigel Farage ‘on the side of predators’ with Online Safety Act criticism, says Labour"

Is the UK's Labour Party now Christian Nationalist?

The end goal here is digital ID and censorship. Compare this to the perennial efforts for encryption backdoors. If there is a characterization that accurately encompasses this, it is the illiberal, statist, authoritarian impulse. Sure, they used a sex-panic to advance their agenda. However, this is merely symptomatic of the larger illiberal trend towards authoritarianism and the expansion of the state.

>>palmfa+Sk4
Strictly speaking the law was passed under the conservatives, albeit in collaboration with Labour (it's bi-partisan). But I would agree that the drive is more authoritarian and it just uses moralistic arguments to shame people into siding with it.

The law could mandate that retail device OSs ship with a turnkey child safe mode complete with app and extensive site whitelists and run an educational campaign on the subject. But instead they've gone the needlessly invasive route which is telling about the true motives.

>>captai+GA4
Requiring device side child safe modes would be far further reaching and likely mean your cannot run your own software anymore. Requiring providers of adult content to check id is much more limited in scope.

>>ndrisc+0E4
Not if it is enabled by the buyer, which I took to be the point.

Mobile phone subscriptions in the UK go the other way: By default they filter some content. If you tell the phone company to turn it off, they do. It's less invasive than this law because you don't need to tell them why you want it turned off, but still more draconian than if we could turn on a child safe mode that e.g. then required a pin or something to disable.

>>vidarh+eJ4
The requirement that such functionality be available is likely to preclude FOSS. e.g. in the US, California has a bill[0] that would require anyone distributing software to ensure it hooks into an age verification API in the operating system, and requires device manufacturers to provide such an API, which appears to me to say computer manufacturers can't let you install Linux and developers of any software including FOSS must do these checks.

I can't imagine that it would pass as-is since on its face it seems to apply to all computers and all software including things like nginx or nftables that the entire modern economy relies on, but who knows?

[0] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

>>ndrisc+5Q4
It's possibly some badly written requirements would, but there's zero reason why it'd need to preclude FOSS if such restrictions are written to be under the buyers control presuming they demonstrate age, as all they require is a way to restrict reinstalls and replacements of whatever software produces sufficient controls without an unlock code.

It doesn't need e.g. code signing or anything else of the sort.

To be clear, I think all of this is a massive overreach - my point is only that you can achieve the claimed aim with far less invasive means.

That, if anything, makes the chosen idiocy even more troubling to me, as either they're incompetent, don't care at all about the implications, or there are unstated aims.