Posts by PeriSoft

Linux may get a hall pass from one state age-check bill, but Congress plays hall monitor

Man, I grew up on Are You Being Served, Red Dwarf, and Keeping Up Appearances. I think I have as solid a grasp of British humor as any yank does. But if that was sarcasm, it wrapped back around on itself *so* dryly and *so* thoroughly that I fear it may not present itself in the way intended.

"Big Tech and Big Government consider that a feature, not a bug."

I'm not so sure about big tech; they tend to want the freedom to make money how they see fit, and repeal of 232 would be, at best, a giant pain. But I certainly wouldn't expect *El Reg* to consider it a feature, which is what was surprising about the last paragraph of the article.

Age verification rules as currently laid out are catastrophically bad; as one tiny example, my business needs to pre-install and pre-configure Windows PCs in order to deliver our products, and as it stands, proposed state laws would make it illegal for us to do so.

Getting rid of section 230 is the opposite of a good idea. It wouldn't just kill big social networks; it would kill *everything*. Every car forum, every niche PHPBB, every comment thread, every mod hosting website, everything that lets anyone say anything or express any idea would instantly be an impossible liability. And it goes without saying that requiring all online (now, defacto, all *period*) communication to be linked to verified IDs and real-name accounts would be anathema to free expression.

I'm hoping (assuming?!) the last paragraph is some kind of in-joke or veiled commentary. I haven't followed El Reg in many a year; maybe I'm missing the context. If not, it's a truly baffling take.

US state laws push age checks into the operating system

Another perspective: I'm a New York based manufacturer of sim racing gear, and the proposed NY law as-written would prevent us from shipping usable systems. They all have onboard PCs, and of course these run operating systems capable of connecting to the internet. If the OSes require verification - as the NY bill says - that means ID, since they don't have camera systems. If we bypass with our own IDs, we're breaking the law and risking personal IDs being leaked every time we ship a piece of hardware; if we use a VPN to activate in a different state we are likewise circumventing the law and presumably open to prosecution. So our only option then becomes to ship un-activated hardware, which will range from an annoyance (for private clients who will need to take longer to get up and running) to a showstopper (for commercial clients who require turnkey systems that fire up and run immediately on site with a custom software stack).

Am I expected to effectively shut down the commercial side of my business and piss off all my non-commercial customers? If the bill passes as written, I guess so. Thank goodness we're preventing impressionable children from... driving GT3 cars at Spa.

This is *in addition* to all the obvious other reasons this is an incredibly bad and pointless endeavor.