That is a problem, I agree. But I still feel like it would be beneficial if there was some standard on HTTP or other protocols which could limit user access based on PG-rating instead of everyone developing their own approach. It could also be something like robots.txt, but for PG-rating, where client would do the verification.

And, as I already mentioned, that should be strictly local only setting and only for parental/guardian controlling what minors can and can’t do with their devices.

There is a very good argument for OS level age ‘tracking’ as a means of creating a cohesive environment for software and websites to operate without having to implement individual age verification. The biggest actual issue here is how the OS determines what the user’s age is.

I agree with you on this. I wouldn’t mind if there was a mechanism on browsers which would send ‘child/teen/adult’ (or whatever they’d be called) data to websites in request headers since they already report a ton of stuff to the server anyways. It would be trivial for adult sites to check one header and limit access based on that. But the setting needs to be local only, so that parents could easily set restricted accounts for their kids. The point where user age must be validated via any 3rd party it’s no longer about parental controls and the whole thing becomes a surveillance tool.

Also the limits should be agreed somehow on at least somewhat global basis so that it’s only used for porn/gore/horror and other stuff like that. Things like sexual education, religious topics (likely both pro- and against-), medical stuff and things like that should be left out of the filtering. But as with practically every ‘think of the children’-thing proposed for the internet it’s got nothing to do with children nor used only for that.

Well, you’re not wrong, but that would still be a catastrophe modern world hasn’t yet seen. Those millions would become refugees and absolutely overwhelm European immigration system even with mass casualties due to riots, loss of water/food/medicine and who knows what else. Current oil prices would seem pretty cheap and global economy would take a massive hit causing homelesness, bankrupts, humongous loss of crops (due to fuel and fertilizer prices) and all kinds of havoc.

Global west would suffer badly, China would become even stronger, Russia would benefit from that as well causing even more problems around Europe. Global trade with USA would practically collapse and pull USA down as well. In the global scale it doesn’t even matter that much if there’s a nuclear explosion somewhere too as results will be pretty nuclear anyways.

It seems like something so important that we’d have ironed it out, but the Constitution never explicitly laid out the terms, and it’s never been specifically answered by the Supreme Court.

I guess lots of the world have similar situations with different laws. Generally, when those are written no one really asked what if president/minister/whoever is bat shit crazy demented old guy and should the law have guardrails for that.

You can’t make a Lego drone. It’s not rigid enough.

You actually can make one mostly out of lego. Obviously not a really good one, but it can be done.

So creating an onlyfans account using Grok is profitable?

Finland has similar thing, but it is not capped. There’s a ton of 100 000+€ fines given around here. Obviously with Musk it would be a bit different, since the fine is based on actual income, not some imaginary monopoly money on the stock market.

the joke was that in the USA you can be multi millionaire+ wealthy and pay 0% tax

That is the actual joke here, agreed. If, and that’s a pretty damn big if, there was any sense on USA government they could just take our progressive steps and leave everything above 35% away from it and still have a crapload of budget to actually make their country great again.

But spending 100 million bucks per hour to demolish schools half way across the world is cool too I guess.

You don’t need to be Elon-wealthy to get those percentages. Over 500 000€/year salary gives you nice 50% tax bracket. You absolutely are not poor if your taxes are that high, but you don’t need to be CEO of Google either.

This does not apply to “installing software”.

So it doesn’t apply when I click the big button which says ‘Install’ on F-Droid app on my phone?

And it does come with risk,

Just like installing software from the ‘secure’ Google Play store.

Installing software is installing software, no matter where you get that software from. That’s it. You can try to twist that with nuances on terminology or invent new ones, the end result is that an piece of software is installed on the system and nothing more. It doesn’t matter if the software came from play store, f-droid, steam, windows store, shady google drive link or the pirate bay. It doesn’t matter if you’re a power user or never seen a smartphone before in your life.

Sure, there might differences in potential security, compatibility, licensing and whatever, but it is still a piece of software being installed.

“installing apps from outside the Google Play Store”

To me that implies it’s somehow different than just installing software. You could say ‘install from play store’ or ‘install from f-droid’ if you need to specify which app repository you should use, as that what it is. Sideloading might be an appropriate term if you need to upload apk to your device via USB-cable from your PC, which the term originally meant.

to make it sound somehow dangerous or complicated in order to justify

[Citation needed]

From the article:

This “advanced flow” is for power users and enthusiasts who “want to take educated risks to install software from unverified developers.” Google says it was “designed carefully to prevent those in the midst of a scam attempt from being coerced by high pressure tactics to install malicious software.”

Sure, the term itself comes from 1990s, but lately specially Google tries to twist that to mean something only ‘power users’ do and it comes with a ‘educated risk’.

Do you consider installing games to you PC from Steam sideloading too? What about downloading Firefox installer? It is installing software on your computer, no matter if that computer happens to be in a cellphone form factor, and always has been. Sideloading is a made up term to make it sound somehow dangerous or complicated in order to justify even bigger walls on the ecosystem garden and control how people use their own devices.

“This is Android’s new ‘advanced flow’ for INSTALLING apps without verification”. Sideloading is such a bullshit term made only to confuse consumers. They can wrap that in sparkling wrapper, but it’s still security theater at best and definetly misleading. Apps from F-Droid or any other app ‘store’ are not any less safe than the ones at googles own offering.

My now near adult kids have actually understood and been thankful that their childhood was ‘unfairly strict’ on what they could do on their devices. They have friends who have had unmonitored access to anything on their devices and it starts to show badly enough that even their peers notice how short their attention span is and how twisted their view of the world has become.

There are all kinds of laws regarding on how parents should treat their children and one might argue that keeping non-age appropriate material away from them is a reasonable line to draw into. For example in here with movies it’s pretty common practice (depending on a theater) to allow kids to ‘higher age bracket’ PG-rating with a guardian.

But the whole problem, at least from my point of view, can’t be solved only by either technological or legal barriers or solutions. Parenting is a tough job and from what I can see there’s really not enough support for them to do the job. “It takes a village to raise a child” used to be pretty commonly understood approach where all individuals from school bus drivers and cashiers played their small part on educating kids on how to behave and how the world works. Today it’s just rules and regulations which adults can use to hide behind and avoid taking any kind of responsibility and also, at least on some cases, the same rules say that you’re not even allowed to intervene if kids are being kids and do something stupid.

Obviously a lot of things are better now too than even in the 80s and 90s when I was a stupid kid, but I’d say something is also lost on the way.

We need to pick our battles. I don’t see much difference in paying Google for a service than having a Spotify family plan like I do. I know spotify has its own problems and my money would be more ethically spent on some other service, but with everything else going on life I can’t be arsed to switch to anything right now. For me it gives enough value for the money spent and that’s good enough for now.

If they actually worked, sure. I’ve been a parent for nearly 20 years now and at least in here there’s always been some kind of programs, information campaingns, news articles, tools and pretty much everything you can imagine to help keeping your kids safe. You obviously don’t buy porn magazines for your teens and don’t show news from war zones to your young kids and keep eye on the movies/shows they watch, but somehow every precaution is lost when it comes to the internet. I don’t know if it’s lack of understanding in general (as in what you can find from the net) or if it’s just the easy way out since you don’t need to learn how to apply limits on devices, but somehow (at least in here, based on what I’ve seen/heard) it’s not taken as seriously as PG-ratings on physical media.

And in that a system-wide setting on devices which would include allowed PG-rating on HTTP-headers (or equivalent) might be a decent solution. Obviously parents still need to pay at least some attention on the devices their kids use, but that wouldn’t require setting up a pihole on your network which blocks tiktok. However, as I said, that’s helpful tool to the parents only as long as it’s just a field on a local user account for the device, not something you’d need online services to verify.

Technically that would be pretty easy to implement and even if it’s just an extension to HTTP headers that would cover nearly all of the use cases today. Sure, the kids interested in tech could bypass that pretty easily, but that applies to nearly all of the parental controls anyways. But all those benefits obviously vanish if the age setting needs verification from someone else than the parent and it’s not stored just locally in the device. Building systems for adults to verify their age in order to look some bare nipples is a colossally stupid idea, but I’d guess nearly all of us here on fediverse already understand that.

A lot of parents sadly lack any kinds of skills to use those tools nor even know that they exist. I’m not inherently against the approach where user agent sends some rough age (allowed R-rating or something) to the website which can then block minors from accessing porn/violence/whatever. If it was just that, locally stored info if the user is minor or adult, it could be a pretty decent approach to even technically less inclined parents to give some limits on what their kids can do.

But as with nearly every ‘protect the kids’ thing, it’s a pretty damn slippery and steep slope. If adult verification requires something more than a local variable that’s the point when the whole system becomes a tool for surveillance instead of a helpful thing for parents/schools and all of these “solutions” worldwide seems to be going in that direction.

“They intentionally had schoolgirls in a school for girls that we were targeting with missiles in order to give the other guys something to whine about”. I don’t know what kind of twist in thinking you’d need to make that sound perfectly legitimate and good reason.

Age verification is one thing, but I routinely verify my id online. Banking, insurance, taxes, various other government things, car registrations, some of the kids school stuff and so on. We have pretty decent infrastructure in place here in Finland and the entities I identify myself online already has my info anyways. I can use either my banking app or mobile verification to securely prove I am who I claim to be and the systems have roughly the same user experience than MFA tokens.

Each of those are roughly zero-knowledge, the website I log in receives just “User with login token xxx is IsoKiero with SSN 123456789” and the tokens expire after a while. Also there’s restrictions in place that my insurance company can’t just sell my data to whomever unless I opt-in for their “marketing” program (not going to happen) and even then there’s some limitations on how they can use the data.

The same system could be adopted to age verification, but that’s a whole another can of worms.