Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
a2ff6eeb0 | on: The UK's war on anonymity has come to America
Is anyone that cares going to put on a suit and talk to the people passing laws?
tangotaylor | parent | next
Yeah we definitely have. Here's me and another dev opposing AB 1856 (would have criminalized open source in the name of age assurance): https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/hearings/279266#t=10...

And here's like ~120 of us who showed up to oppose AB 2023 (the 3D printer spyware bill). It was incredible. https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/hearings/279741#t=19...

I think the easiest way to get involved is to become an EFF member. They'll keep you up to date on all the censorship and surveillance bills. Then you can contact your legislator, sent letters to the CA legislature committees, or show up to the hearings in Sacramento.

loading story #49255506
dyauspitr | parent
What you don’t realize is most people want this. The social media bans across Western Europe, and Australia are heavily supported by the vast majority of the population.
speedstyle | root | parent | next
You could make it easy to ban on children's devices, rather than having websites do it. At the moment you either have a small set of allowed applications, which is fine for younger kids, or domain-list filtering which is unreliable, hard for parents to set up (and not that hard for kids to get around). There are many ways to improve the situation – I think websites should have to attach metadata about the content being served, browsers should use this to apply a device policy, and devices should make it easy to configure basic rules on first setup. People aren't asking specifically for hardware-attested facial scanning
dyauspitr | root | parent
There’s no such thing as children’s devices. Everyone uses the same smartphones. Optional on device restrictions don’t matter as long as your peer group is on the platform, kids will not stop using it. People are not asking for biometric scanning, but I believe the vast majority would be OK with some sort of ID based authentication system. Now there are ways we can do that in a decentralized way where neither of the parties have total information and I fully advocate for that.
loading story #49253853
ColdStream | root | parent
Yep, here in Australia you almost never hear anyone mention it. The silence is deafening, especially with how quickly people just rolled over on this stuff "For the children".

That said it was funny, yesterday Microsoft said I had to age verify my account. I went in basically with the intention of backing out of it at the first sign of over reach.

First step was, 'provide you email for this account'. So I did that and then... approved! You are certified over 18+. That is the flip side of this, some of these companies will put up some of the weakest barriers on this stuff.