Tools: Powerful System76 On Age Verification Laws
There were two things I yearned for in 1990. As a ten year old kid in the backseat, road trips from Colorado to Illinois meant hour after hour of staring at row after row of corn stalks. The boredom was palpable and the corn possibly responsible for a slight obsession with orderliness. If only there was a little TV that could help pass the time.
Oh, and how Encyclopedia Britannica must contain the answers to so many questions about the curious world out there. Were city streets really full of black-leather clad people standing around metal drums, garbage ablaze? (Rocky was particularly memorable.) What else lurked in the oceans and bounded across the savannas I saw when PBS’s Nature series happened to be on at the same time I sat in front of the TV? Alas, encyclopedias were too expensive for us.
36 years later, my under-13 kid struck up a conversation about the life spans of jellyfish. He said there were immortal species. Skeptical, I pushed back. His confidence didn’t waver because he “did his research.” He was right and I learned about the Turritopsis dohrnii.
They know more than I could have ever dreamed at that age.
Last week in Cabo, Mexico, an adult friend thought it would be hilarious to add El Mencho to a picture of our dinner outing, text it to his parents, and tell them we met a new “friend”. He asked ChatGPT to add El Mencho to a photo. It refused. My under-13 child said “oh, I got this”, found a photo of El Mencho, asked ChatGPT to add the person from the photo to the dinner party photo and voilà, we’re enjoying drinks with El Mencho. Our friend's parents asked what’s wrong with him. I was an impressed Dad.
Kids are smart and easily learn how to work around restrictions.
The best intentions can produce unintended consequences
Colorado’s Senate Bill 26-051 and California’s Assembly Bill No. 1043 require operating systems to report age brackets to app stores and web sites. A person who creates an account on a computer is supposed to be 18 or older and attest to the age of the user they’re creating for themselves or their child. In practice, this means anyone under 18 isn’t supposed to create a computer account on their own.
Most System76 employees installed operating systems and created accounts on their computer when they were under 18. They did this out of curiosity. Many started writing software. Some were already writing operating systems. I’m sure the story is similar at most tech companies. Limiting a child’s ability to explore what
Source: HackerNews
