Right after they convince Russia to end the war in Ukraine, right?

Face it. This is the world that the voters chose. (And yes, there has been a growing Right Wing political movement in most of Europe that has been pushing for this too.)

Disney is all: Calling it “Euro”? Let us know how that goes…

You really underestimate the trouble meta and YouTube are in. The specific rulings were barely tickets to them, but if they are upheld then follows flood gates of identical lawsuits are going to be opened up. They had millions and millions of child users in the 2010s that they knowingly served an addictive product to. If the current ruling is upheld, then there will likely be a very large class action settlement to payoff all the past injured users. But instead of changing their product going forward they want to get rid of the responsibility for their product entirely.

Stop making up fake conspiracies and be mad about that.

I don’t agree that Epstein is much of a counter point. There were lots of people taking about him, it really wasn’t that closely held of a secret, and he was arrested and prosecuted and murdered for it. Ultimately, with the files released, there really isn’t much in them that we didn’t already know.

Just to clear something up, my brand new account is only new because lemmings.world is closing and I had to migrate to a new server.

The biggest problem with conspiracy theories like this is always the number of people involved keeping their mouths shut. Anyone that has ever managed a large project knows how impossible it is to keep a large group of people quiet about something. In real life, there are conspiracies. Often very large ones. But they didn’t stay secret for long.

What is easier to believe: (1) that all these people involved, across countries with leaders of many different political varieties, all agreed to stick to a single narrative in order to cover up a deep international conspiracy to build a massive international database of people’s ages online, OR (2) Meta and other orgs are doing a normal business thing and trying to reduce their liability costs.

“There’s no mechanism that the government currently has that can track you as effectively as these age verification laws can.”

I honestly can’t tell if you were serious or not.

The governments just buy your data from Google. Do you have any idea how much information on you Google has?

I didn’t know about that. Maybe that’s plays into it too. But I’m generally a “simpler answer is more likely the most correct” type of guy.

In this case the simple answer is that Meta and others just had their “Tobacco Lawsuits” moment in court and liability floodgates are any to open wide, and they are pushing these laws to divert their liability onto someone else.

Google “Protected Processor Identification Number (PPIN)” to learn more.

It’s so funny to me how badly people want this to be some nefarious governmental conspiracy. Listen, the government already has much better tools to track you online. Your computer has, on a hardware level, sent unique identifiers to ISPs and websites since Pentium IIIs. This age requirement thing isn’t a government conspiracy to track you, they already track you.

It is a *corporate *conspiracy. It’s Meta and other major websites, games, and applications companies that want to off load their liability. Meta and Alphabet just lost major lawsuits for their negligence in protecting kids on their own websites. There is a liability dam about to break for these companies and schools and other advocacy groups start their own lawsuits. That’s what this is about. That’s the real conspiracy.

Almost all “hacks” of modern mainstream software involve users being stupid.

If you hear about a “hack” of a major corporation or hospital or something, the things that is never reported is that it likely started with someone with more user permissions than sense opening a phishing email.

There will always be sites that don’t care and won’t comply with any OS level restrictions in the first place.

And I’ll support strong laws that hold those sites accountable for negligence. I’m really struggling to see why this is so controversial.

So you are going with: Deny the problem of child sexual predators exists at all.

Do you also believe that the Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church also have no responsibility to protect kids, because doing to would similarly require collecting data on people?

(I would disagree with you if you said yes, but I’ll respect your position for being consistent.)

… And if a kid using that browser was abused because the browser lied to the website about the users’ age, then the browser’s creators should bare some consequences for lying to the website that otherwise would have put up protections. Right?

I don’t understand. There will still be porn sites for people.

The way it will work is that when you tell your browser to go to a porn site, the site will ask your Bowser for your verified age. Your browser will then ask your OS for your verified age. Your OS will respond “18+” to your browser. Your browser will tell the porn site “the OS says 18+”. Then the porn site will say “Cool, here’s the porn.” That’s it.

If you use a non-compliant OS, then your browser will say to the porn site “I asked the OS and the OS says ‘null’.” Then the porn site will say, “Well sorry. Then your OS isn’t supported. Come back when you are using a supported OS.”

That’s it.

I’m not sure what you are disagreeing with. That’s generally what I said. If you use a non-compliant OS, your experience will be “age-gated”.

Though I don’t think they will completely block access entirely. Collecting data on kids is extremely valuable to these companies, because kids grow up to be consumers. They will happily continue to let you in, but you won’t be able to go to the 18+ areas.