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throwaway87543
jauntywundrkind
Colorado is trying to do this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47097904
It's just terrifying to think of an internet that goes from open & usable, to requiring only approved government devices & systems. Within a very brief time.
onetokeoverthe
[dead]
TiredOfLife
You could call it something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_controls
senectus1
This sounds like a very neat guideline. I'd like to see this fleshed out further, but not at the cost of freedom (ie locked bootloaders etc)
fennecbutt
Oh I would absolutely love this.
It would prove that many, many parents are incapable of being the responsible adults they should be and will just cave to their kids tantrums about their phone being unlocked so they can watch tiktoks for (sometimes more than) 8 hours a day.
Everyone in the UK is now using a vpn for everything because of these "won't somebody please think of the children" smucks. Now let's see if they make good on their end and lock their child's phone...
inigyou
OS vendors don't want to add this feature, though. That could be because they make their money from a percentage of IAPs and ads.
And when they are mandated, like in Brazil, we HN commenters hate that even more, because apparently in Brazil it's illegal to sell a phone without locked bootloader, or an OS that can run software from outside of an app store, because the user might install an OS or an app that doesn't comply with the child-lock law.
stephen_g
Well yes, they are actual real risks - a badly thought out law can literally make it illegal for a device to allow an adult to, say, unlock a device's bootloader to install open source software (EDIT: this example was in my comment before the OP edited theirs to add it there as well), because the device vendor can't guarantee that it will comply any more.
I don't think anybody is actually opposed to parental controls being mandated to ship in commercial operating systems, as long as it doesn't restrict the freedoms of adults to completely disable them or to install software that removes them or doesn't have them. The problem is when these features are forced on adults and restrict devices or computers 'just in case'.
michaelt
IMHO a better approach would be two-layered tagging to indicate traffic from children.
Firstly traffic can be tagged by ISPs/cell phone companies, at the bill payer's behest (whose name and age has already been verified). Secondly, smartphone OSes can tag traffic at the behest of parental controls (which already exist).
charcircuit
FOSS doesn't mean that you get a right to break the law. Just because software patents exists in a society, that doesn't mean that FOSS does not.
jauntywundrkind
The US also locking the bootloaders has been extremely extremely extremely saddening. Just remarkably shit turn of events.
TiredOfLife
It's a feature that has existed for years. And is built into every OS.
1vuio0pswjnm7
Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp are not "the internet"
Anything that hurts Meta's business is arguably a potential step toward more "anonymous" internet access. Anything that helps to stop the process of indoctrination of future generations into and the normalisation of what Meta does is a step toward more anonymous internet access as it allows expectations of privacy to rise to previous levels
Companies like Meta have worked to systematically destroy anonymous internet use. Anonymity directly conflicts with Meta's "business model" of data collection, surveillance and serving users up as ad targets
Meta and "anonymous internet access" are mutually exclusive. Meta doesn't collect data about and show ads to "anonymous" internet users. It forces users to create "accounts" and "sign in" with clients that run surveillance-related code on the users' computers without the user's input. It builds profiles of internet users (ad targets), even ones that do not use Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp, e.g., through the use of tracking pixels on the open web
Apple's and Google's operating systems also try to profile users. The companies encourage users to create "accounts" and "sign in". The operating systems intentionally provide a purpose-built machanism to target users with ads. If used as encouraged by the compaanies, these operating systems are incompatible with "anonymous internet access". The user is not anonymous to the companies, and the companies invite advertisers to use the computer user's internet bandwidth to deliver ads
It was not always like this; I owned Apple computers when there was no such thing as an Apple "account" and Apple's computers did not attempt to automatically "phone home" when powered on. Expectations of "anonymous" internet access amongst new internet users have greatly diminished thanks to Meta, Google and Apple
dom96
Child safety is just the tip of the iceberg. We need to secure ourselves by implementing human verification and there are ways to do this without sacrificing anonymity[1].
1 - https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h...
charcircuit
It seems a stretch to me that an operating system having an isAdult() function would end anonymous internet access. Plenty of apps want to avoid showing NSFW content to children and having an API that lets them easily do so has a lot of value. Parental controls must be trivial for an app to implement if we want it to be widespread.
0xbadcafebee
I find it amazing that we continue to let parents ruin society with their overprotective bullshit. They should be parenting, not passing the buck.
This isn't the first time overprotective parents have caused problems for everyone else. The US drug war (and the mass incarceration of poor and black people) was started mostly by organizations of parents who thought marijuana was going to kill their kids. The movie rating system introduced censorship into movies which limited artistic freedom. Game rating systems limited what games could be sold on store shelves, so most games had to be carefully censored and had limited story lines and content. Ratings on music forced major retailers to drop any music which had an 'explicit' label, making it harder for artists with 'adult' lyrics to get exposure or earn a living. Book bans are largely organized by parents' groups, a significant number of the books they want banned being LGBTQ+ books, so kids aren't exposed to the fact that homosexuality is normal. And of course you can't possibly have an app in a monopolistic App Store that has any kind of adult content; heaven forbid an actual adult wants to use an adult app.
Parents and 'Child Safety' are toxic af and we shouldn't put up with it.
computerthings
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themafia
Why would we turn to the person who created the problem for a solution to it?
gweinberg
Had to wade through a lot of text to find out that apparently Zuckerberg and OP both apparently think the internet is something you access through phones.
fennecbutt
Tbf the majority of per individual Internet use is on a phone. Countries other than America exist...plenty of Asian countries where having a phone is far far more common than a laptop let alone a desktop.
IAmBroom
Talk to someone under 30. Show them this cool "phone" app on their cellphones.
phendrenad2
Just make child phones. And make a parallel internet run and curated by, I dunno, the UN child safety task force or something. We're playing this dangerous game of "oops we almost destroyed the world in a hellish authoritarian dystopia" because we can't figure this simple thing out.
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kkfx
Which is the very target. Forcing full tractability of anyone for better conformism at the dominus will.
nickphx
sounds like a potential use for generative AI.. they can "validate" and "verify" the "biometrics" of the output from this-person-does-not-exist[.]com
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Authentication & Authorization is a OS feature. But instead of the OS collecting everyone's age, just give parents the ability to verify their child's phone is in child lockdown mode. Then the phone narc's to the website: "the user is under age". Not "the user was born on Feb 29 2001." We can rely on parenting to ensure a child doesn't have a non child mode phone. Enable parents, not control everyone.