We’ve lived through an entire internet without age checks, why is it different now? There aren’t more creeps

I think the big difference is ease of access. For millennials growing up, accessing the internet basically required being at the family desktop in the middle of the living room. Phones weren’t connected to the internet, and cell phones weren’t even common yet.

And kids still got groomed, even when their only access to the internet was in a shared family space. And that began to get more prevalent as devices became smarter and more portable. Now, any 8 year old can get groomed in their own bedroom, while simply playing a video game.

I actually disagree, because hardware-level verification is basically the most privacy-conscious method of accurately verifying a user’s age. Rather than fighting age verification entirely, I think it’s more productive to start assuming users are under 18 until proven otherwise… Age verification is inevitable, (if you don’t like it, tor is always an option), so we should at least figure out secure and private ways of doing so. Rather than resisting it outright, present them with secure and safe ways to do it. The internet is a dark place full of a lot of creeps, and services like Roblox have proven that they will enthusiastically become nesting grounds for predators unless they’re forced to add safeguards.

Sure, it’s easy to say “just monitor your kids” but no parent can be present 24/7. And in fact, oftentimes parents end up using screen time so they can do other things like chores, without needing to watch their kid. So the “just watch your kids” argument is diametrically opposed to the reality of why parents tend to rely on screens. Sometimes you just need 15 minutes to wash the dishes, without a kid demanding your constant attention. Even I, a child-free person, can understand that. And it becomes increasingly difficult to monitor them as they grow into teens and (reasonably) start expecting their own privacy.

I’ve been saying for a while now that we need to shift to hardware verification. Your device (or for shared devices like desktops, your user account) verifies your age once. And then it doesn’t need to do so again. All of the various sites and apps can simply ask your device “hey, is this user over {age}?” And the device responds with a simple true/false. You’re not needing to give your PII to every single site you visit, and the device isn’t needing to report back to the government every time an age verification check happens. It’s all done locally. The handshake could even be cryptographically secured, to prevent tech-savvy kids from MITM’ing the age check. And then protecting kids online is as simple as not age-verifying their device (and protecting your own password on shared devices). Hell, devices like cell phones could even have the age bracket set by the parent directly, since the phone would be on the parent’s phone bill. Similarly, parents could create child accounts on their shared devices, so kids can access age-appropriate content. It won’t stop kids from getting a prepaid phone, but it’ll at least prevent them from easily verifying that phone.

And it’s also the most elegant for the user experience. As far as the adult user is concerned, they never even see an “are you over 18” verification when they visit a porn site. They simply get access to the site. And kids simply get redirected back to Google’s home page (or more realistically, a page on the porn site saying “hey you failed the age check. If you’re over 18, be sure you do that with your device before trying again, because this is the only page you’ll be able to access until then. Or if you’re under 18, click here to return to where you were before” explanation) as soon as the age check fails.

Hardware age verification is basically the best of every world. You don’t rely on a third-party service to verify your PII (which will inevitably leak it, like Discord did). You don’t need to verify with every single individual site and service. The government doesn’t get a record of every site that asks for verification. And kids are automatically prevented from stumbling across adult content.

I agree that Colorado democrats are typically the “if we cozy up to the right they might stop being mean to us” candidates. I think this bill is a poor implementation, but it’s at least done under the right premise. If we could force hardware manufacturers and/or OSes to support native age verification, it would solve a lot of the current issues that we have.

Yeah, this is my preferred way of doing it. That way I always have a nice compiled list of IP addresses, and if I ever need to change any of them, I have them all in a single menu instead of needing to access each device individually. Just let the server use DHCP, then assign it a static IP in your DHCP server.

Appeals aren’t an infinite thing. Each appeal goes to a higher court, and eventually will reach the SCOTUS. And at any point, the respective appellate court can refuse to accept the appeal, essentially saying that they agree with the lower court’s ruling and leaving it in effect.

Each step of the appeals process basically asks if the lower court applied the corresponding laws correctly. And if they did, the appellate court looks at whether or not that law is constitutional. If both are true, (the law is constitutional and was applied correctly) then the appeal fails. Appeals are actually fairly hard to win, especially for laws that have lots of precedent. If a law already has lots of precedent and the lower court was simply applying the law the same way that other cases did, the appeal will almost certainly be shot down.

That’s why lots of the big landmark “court strikes down law as unconstitutional” cases are from laws that were recently passed. There is no long-standing precedent for the recently passed law, so the lower courts have to set the precedent, and the appeal is actually what is deciding whether or not the law is constitutional.

Yes and no. The hardware companies have already said that they’re not interested in expanding production. They know it’s a bubble, and don’t want expanded production now to cause a glut in the future when the inevitable pop happens. So prices may not actually drop, (even after the pop), because the companies still won’t be producing more hardware than they currently are.

My best guess is that we’ll have some dark data centers sitting around collecting dust, but the hardware they bought won’t actually flood the market and crash prices. If anything, since the US dollar’s value is essentially tied to Nvidia and OpenAI’s market share, a pop will only make the dollar less powerful and will counteract any potential drops in prices that may have otherwise happened. The companies will get a trillion dollar bailout when the pop happens, (because they’re too big to fail) then nothing will change about the current hardware prices.

Yup, they’re 100% trying to shift towards cloud computing. It has already been happening with gaming, and many players have decided that they’re okay with a slightly worse experience if it means they can run their games on a potato PC. Tech companies see the blood in the water, and know that there is money to be made in cloud computing. Everything is shifting to SAAS, so it only makes sense that hardware will be a subscription next.