You mean having to sign into your Microsoft account to get your bootloader co-signed before your legally mandated TPU 3.1 allows you to install a govenment blessed and sufficiently telemetrized signed OS to "your" computer if you are on the whitelist of not-yet-misinformation-spreaders?

+1 for local models. It also teaches users about how much energy they are using. One's perspective on 24/7 chatbots and agentic operating systems changes when you feel the heat coming from a rack of gpus.

(Spring is nearly here and my excuse about my rig also heating my house is about to end. Soon I will be paying extra to run my a/c as my rig pumps out a steady 1000w under load.)

Is api access really really so extreme that it's italics worthy? Technology should be available to us in other roles than just passive consumer using front ends that might not suit what we need, or work against us in some way. Already I am giving a credit card to openai to use the service, but in addition now I have to hand my government ID over to withpersona.com. who are they? who are their investors? will the leak my information accidentally/accidentally-on-purpose/on-purpose? Okay maybe Rick Song and Persona Identities are genuinely trustworthy, but what happens when someone wants an exit in the future and they merge with palantir and now when i generate a picture i have to worry about being added to a target list for some automated kamakazi drone kill-chain a-la black mirror. Or if this becomes standard practice .. maybe its not Persona Inc. but i have to vet dozens of these companies and it becomes too hard. Rather than guns, this is more like Identity verification for pipe purchases from the hardware store because one could use it got build a rocket.

They were also likely done with keyboards and mice. Should we require id at point of purchase for those?

This is great. I finally feel for the first time in my life that science has in fact gone too far. At this point living in the so-called "third world" to avoid digital-rape-as-a-service and the ever increasing pace of technology sounds eminently reasonable.

Why is that required? The whole point of zero knowledge proofs is that it can run on untrusted devices.

That being said, I’m in favour of parents doing the parenting, not the government.

This aspect of parenting is really hard. If your kid is 10 years old and all their classmates have Roblox, saying 'no' to your kid does isolate them socially, because all the other kids are talking about what they did in Roblox at school and play Roblox together after school. To make it worse, some primary schools even allow kids to play Roblox at school during breaks or the teachers make TikTok videos, making kids want to have Tik Tok as well (TikTok-teachers are a real phenomenon), etc. So, even when you are trying, it gets undermined by others. Trying to fight it is kind of pointless, because most other parents don't see the issue.

Same for e.g. instant messaging, it is basically Sophie's choice: you allow them into these addiction machines or you isolate them socially. It would be much easier if social media and certain types of addictive games were just not allowed under 16. Just like we don't sell cigarettes or alcohol to kids.

I also completely agree with the counterpoint that age verification on the internet is generally bad.

Luckily, some things can be done without grave privacy violations. E.g. where high schools 10-15 years ago would gloat about being iPad or laptop schools, more and more are completely banning smart phones and laptops during school time.

At any rate, it's perfectly possible to hold both views at the same time: social media and addictive games should be forbidden under 16 and the age verification initiatives are terrible for privacy.

Maybe we should just ban Facebook, TikTok, etc. no more addiction, no more age verification needed :).

> Also sorry to sound egotistical but I think I was an outlier that drifted into doing educational things, many or most kids will spend every moment they get just playing video games.

I am in the same predicament as both of you, having grown up with unfiltered internet access, and not wanting it to have went any other way (I love my life, actually!)

There is a condescending tendency when people hear what I said above, to tell me that I am an outlier, or, God forbid, a "genius", and other equally worrying conclusions regarding my character.

I agree that, today, there are millions more ways that children can fall for objectively negative things, that have been completely, and intentfully engineered to be terrible in a way which can be exploited for profit.

But also, I simply think that, with enough access to mind-numbing content, for long enough... people will simply realize that, actually, they don't want that. At least, not just that.

Adults are not a good term for comparision in the matter of less aggressive addictions, like with social media, because they already have lives they want to escape, with responsibilities and whatnot.

These are not scientifically sourced claims, but, in my experience, children have a lot more time, energy, curiosity, and will/intent to create, for one reason or another, and they have been doing those things since time immemorial.

This is just a consequence of having access to ~the entirety of all human knowledge at their fingertips, with no restrictions, and with an incredible amount of free time at their disposal.

I agree, and thank you for your comment.

However, I don't think the medical establishment will necessarily help. Or looking outside generally - this will probably only compound or defer the problem. You will have to deal with it yourself in the end. I believe everyone already has all they need in themselves to do this.

Seeing people squish at a young age - and I am not being flippant here - helped reduce my teen "I'm immortal! I'm unstoppable!" phase.

I saw very quickly that what separates a live person from a very deceased flat person was a moment of sillyness/forgetfullness/stupidity. "I didn't SUSPECT that is even possible to happen to a person!" - "We're....fragile?!" - "Ah, bike helmet... I think they're REALLY GOOD idea...."

PSA's just aren't listened to by teenagers. But something that's real - that happened, with the security camera timestamp in the corner... kids learn safety.

I don't see how this "child protection" enforcement would help in case of small obscure websites with porn and gore? No way their admins gonna comply. I doubt ISPs would go that far to DNS whitelist compliant websites only.

For me, it didn't mess up my brain at all, it showed me a much broader range of what humanity really is, which is exactly what I wanted to understand at that time. I understood the depravity humans will exact upon others, or those they see as lesser (such as the treatment of animals, or prisoners, "the enemy" whoever/whatever that may be). I also saw unfiltered sharing of valuable knowledge, science, tech stuff, software, games, music, culture...

The uncensored internet taught me more than I could ever have been taught in school, and I'll be forever grateful for that. It didn't take me long to understand that I could generally hate no ethnicity or people or country, and the people who do are manipulated by their government or other powerful figures in their life (or disproportionately swayed by experiences in their life). Humans are pretty much all the same, we all have far far more in common than we do differences. I have a stronger perspective of this than my immediate ancestors (demonstrated over and over throughout my life) and I do credit my exposure to the open internet for a huge amount of that.

There is one huge and problematic difference now, though: the uncensored internet of the 90's is nothing like the disinformation-saturated internet of today.

As a kid, I know that it is pretty easy to avoid those websites(because I do).

What did it do to mess up your brain? What were the lasting negative effects?

Messed up how?

There will always be some form of underground.

What's different is that, for a while, the early Internet age (and a little bit earlier - Usenet etc) made that underground very accessible. Now we're reverting back to the original situation where it was very much shunned and criminalized.

We won't save ourselves. We might slow the process, but the information environment is permanently altered and we can't put it back.

The information asymmetry between individuals and the powerful is permanently reversed.

Thinking about it in terms of the monopoly of violence being the root of power negotiations; typically a resistance movement has more information about the state/colonizer than vice versa, because power has to be visible - guerilla warfare thrives on this.

That's gone. The powerful will have complete detailed information and automatic analysis.

The medium is the message.

> and I hear the same "Well I have nothing to hide" more and more with my younger family at least.

Which is funny as thats what I heard from my older family growing up. Except it's a lie and they have plenty to hide!

"Pass me your phone, I want to screenshot a few things and post on social media".

And the overwhelming majority of anything running Android.

That was almost 5 years ago. Lately, though, I see more people have stopped tolerating these attacks on freedom. See pewdiepie, louis rossman, deflock, piracy ressurection. Uk petition against digital ID becomes one of the largest petitions in history.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194

HN is mostly for people with entrepreneur spirit, not hacker spirit - entrepreneurs who want to be known as hackers. The difference is vast.

You can be in favor of privacy while simultaneously thinking porn, gambling, and advertisers shouldn't be targeting children. The age verification bills I've read have steep penalties for retaining information, so that seems fine since that's literally more protection than you get in person.

It's really more just concluding that those corporations should be liable for their behavior. It also has nothing to do with "the Internet" which is largely unaffected. Except of course ideas for forcing OS behavior coming out of California which are obviously bad.

I actually think things could be a lot simpler if we just made the laws like alcohol: it's illegal (with criminal liability) for a non-parent adult to provide <restricted thing> to a child. Simple enough. Seems to work fine as-is for Internet alcohol purchases. Businesses dealing in restricted industries can figure out how to avoid that liability. That's entirely compatible with making it illegal for businesses to stalk everyone, which we should also do!

> They haven’t lived in a context where they need to care.

You might believe you don't need opsec, and then new laws are passed, or your national supreme court overturns the case that gave you your rights, or someone invades; and now suddenly you're wanted for anything from overstaying a visa, outright murder, or simply existing.

USA, right now, peoples lives are being destroyed because the wrong people got their data. Lethal consequences exist in Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran.

Certain professions per definition: Journalists, Lawyers, Intelligence, Military.

Certain Ethnicities. (Jewish, Somali) ; Faiths...

It doesn't need to be quite this dramatic though. But you might accidentally have broken some laws and don't even know about it yet. Caught a fish? Released a fish? Give the wrong child a bowl of soup [1]. Open the door, refuse to open the door. Signed a register; didn't sign a register. The list of actual examples is endless. The less people know about you, the less they can prosecute.

[1] A flaw in the Dutch Asylum Emergency Measures Act (2025) that would have criminalized offering even a bowl of soup to an undocumented person. The Council of State confirmed this reading. A follow-up bill was needed to fix it.

I have the right to my own senses, my own observations, my own memories. I have the right to photograph what I can see with my eyes, and to write down what I can remember. Unless enjoined by a specific duty of care (doctor/patient, attorney/client, security clearance, etc) I have the right to discuss my memories with others. This obtains even when using electronic tools and even when working in association with others.

I don’t intend to give up or accept limitations on these rights because you consider yourself to have “privacy rights” or ownership interests in my records, my memories, my perceptions, or the reality in front of me. I find the notion of the government or another person interfering in this process, the perception and recollection of reality, to be creepy and totalitarian by itself.

In 1984, it is not only that the government is aware of Winston, but that it routinely tampers with or destroys evidence of the past & demands to control the perception of the present. I do not think we should let a government do that, even for a good reason like “protect your privacy” any more than we should let it destroy general purpose computing “for the children.”

There are many people rights people don't have and they're okay with that and even support not having the right to stab people, not having the right to steal from a store, not having the right to take nude pictures of children... What if this one is like that?

It should be prohibited outright. If you allow a loophole for corporations then they will just sell it as a service and we will never be free of it.

Companies create the environment - the government is supposed to be “small” - and it must remain small so the US “consumer” can be leeched from

Yes - you buy the house in the bay, and companies will lock you in with the vesting schedule. Just another 3, 4 years and you’ll be rich enough to afford a second one, or retire early. Some people can self justify what they do, or pretend because they work in a “nicer” part of a company than the core revenue part that it’s all okay that what pays their checks is mass behavior manipulation. I don’t like ads or social coercion, at all.

I live in extremely fire prone areas.

Many of us are pretty damn okay at beating back the flame and controlling the flow of the worst of things away from homes, but nobody is perfect.

We don't expect every family and parent in these areas to have fire fighting skills, self evacuation is recommended.

Parents every where now find themselves surrounded by the delibrately laid gasoline of addictive social media and grooming risks et al. and it's infeasible to expect every parent be skilled in defensive cyber secuirty.

It's reasonable to expect communities to want simple barriers and means of protection, the existance of reasonable control and throttling options for parents.

Some of them clearly are - the one in California.

> Isn't it a stretch to round off "trans content" to "LGBT+ content"?

Not really. Do you think the people attempting to ban trans content are otherwise fine with kids being gay/lesbian/etc? Do you think they view gay/lesbian identities as legitimate, rather than unnatural perversion? It’s the same rhetoric in my experience, we’re all just deviants making choices. It seems like casual uninvested people just got used to gays being in the public eye and anti-gay people lost the ability to get anyone to care about that position. Turns out they’re just normal people trying to live their lives.

> Immigrants being lynched is certainly a subset of "anti-immigration", but it's still misleading

I don’t think your analogy works unless you believe that transgender people are uniquely extreme compared to other identities. If true, I think that more shows your prejudice than anything. Maybe if enough trans people end up in the public eye, casual uninvested people will stop thinking negatively about trans people generally too. Maybe one day they’re realize we’re just people trying to live our lives.

Hi, I've been openly queer for over 20 years. Using trans people as a wedge to pry apart the entire LGBTQ community is a tale as old as time. This isn't theoretical or a slippery slope argument; it's recent history. It's effective because it sounds "reasonable" on its face, but it's a ploy.

Just one of the many, many, many reasons that trans rights are human rights.

Read this[1], law makers have made it very clear that they mean all LGBT content, and not just the content you feel like reducing it to.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/rep-finke-was-right-ag...

Trans content is first, it'll be gay content after that.

The idea that even a single person in the world is trans because of "trans ideology" is what's absolutely insane here.

If you think you could be convinced by anyone that you're not living out your true gender identity, I have news for you... Most people, children too, are not having those thoughts unless there's actually a journey waiting for them.

Firey take there, but I know a few people who are trans and neck deep in the kool aid. They will tell you that 25-30% of population is trans, and just haven't been liberated/are in denial.

Look, it's cool to be trans, no problem. These women I know are good people and net contributors to society. But they are off the ideological deep-end, and would happily spend 3 hours at the family BBQ lecturing an impressionable 13 year old about how those weird body feelings are very likely gender dismorphia. They're just as drunk on their flavor of delusional social media as any other religious nut is crazy about God.

Gender dysphoria can be medically studied, is not an ideology and is not a disorder. Hope this clears things up.

That's not my understanding. This is what the bill says: Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies [the age group].

So the app requests a signal (like, calling an API), and the OS returns the signal (returning the age group).

Regarding API vs installation lock, TBH I don't think the law concerns that level of details. An OS or app-store installation lock that checks app ratings can be considered as a valid implementation.

Would the content rating be per HTML element and the browser would delete the elements with bad ratings from the DOM, or how would it work?

> the API requires every service to implement it and that's not happening

No it doesn't. A browser/appinstaller with parental/age controls enabled would fail as unavailable if there was no age rating on the website/app. This is exactly the solution we should be aiming for, as it keeps the incentives lined up instead of turning them upside down.

One big problem with the laws currently being pushed is that it leaves the decision for what sites are "appropriate" for kids completely in the lands of corporate attorneys. For example, Facebook will happily make an "under 18" site that uses LLMs to censor posts, but still contains all of the same dopamine drip mechanics. Whereas keeping the decision process of appropriate under the control of the end-device means parents could straightforwardly go beyond what corporate attorneys decide, and block Facebook regardless of the age rating.

I'm responding to another comment of yours here since HN loves the rate limit. In that comment you were talking about locked down bootloaders. But bootloaders are already thoroughly locked down, and most devices are still essentially usable. The current looming threat is remote attestation, which makes it so that websites (and other services) are able to prevent you from running software of your choice when interacting with them! The backwards legislation being currently pushed is all but guaranteed to end up in more demands for remote attestation, whereas the correct direction of information flow (sites/apps publish headers saying they're suitable for <18 etc) would not necessitate remote attestation.

How would you make a website that can be over 18 or not, such as a social media feed? Would it become over 18 as soon as your following list contains a porn star (who may not have been one at the time you followed them), and then if you're under 18 you can't unfollow them because you can't load the page?

ZKPs don't buy anything, since an online service can sell them by the thousand and you're just trusting the client that it belongs to the actual user. You might as well just do "User-Age-Category: 18plus" then and save a headache.

I disagree with almost all of your political opinions, and some of your positions I very much hate. But we should be free to have the argument, without the thread of handcuffs or the threat of starvation. Although I use my real name here, sometimes I prefer not to, and that should be allowed.

The right to actual real privacy is the same thing as the right to actual real freedom of speech, and we should harm anyone who is trying to take that most basic foundation of all rights away.

I agree with Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

> ruin political candidates, powerful CEOs, and wealthy people

This is mostly fantasy propagated by works of fiction. In the real world release of any evidence of sins has practically zero impact on the wealthy people and when it very occasionally does have an impact it just happens in cases of people who weren't wealthy enough for the circumstances.

You've accurately described what could happen with right-wing authoritarians in power. You've not described what could happen with left-wing authoritarians in power.

Don't be fooled that your team doesn't have people with the same impulses. Privacy and civil liberties exist to protect us from abuse of authority on all sides.

- "Oh I see John is connected to this account. I really don't like this HN comment and opinion he posted, I find it deeply offensive. Put him on the bank KYC fail list."

- "We'd love to give you this mortgage backed by the US government, but why didn't you post the right flag in support of the new hip thing?"

- "Before you login to your retirement account, how much wealth are you secretly harboring there from this job we think you unfairly got due to your privilege?"

- "If you just let us monitor your activity and the ideas you see, we'll stop you from wrong-think and will create a utopia"

Good luck, man. Nobody cared in 2012, and even less people care now. The west is lost. 1984 is already here.

How about the first country to ban social media for kids, Australia[1]? So far as I can tell the PM/party leader was not in the files. Of course, if you make your inclusion criteria absurdly wide (eg. anyone who voted or advocated for age based restrictions in any shape or form), you'll probably find some pedophiles or even epstien island visitors from sheer luck alone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Amendment_(Socia...

These laws were passed almost exclusively by the party of self-proclaimed free speech warriors led by Epstein's best friend.

    State             | Effective Date | Legislature Control
    ------------------+----------------+----------------------
    Alabama           | Oct 1, 2024    | Republican
    Arizona           | Sep 26, 2025   | Republican
    Arkansas          | Jul 31, 2023   | Republican
    California        | Jan 1, 2027    | Democratic
    Florida           | Jan 1, 2025    | Republican
    Georgia           | Jul 1, 2025    | Republican
    Idaho             | Jul 1, 2024    | Republican
    Indiana           | Aug 16, 2024   | Republican
    Kansas            | Jul 1, 2024    | Republican
    Kentucky          | Jul 15, 2024   | Republican
    Louisiana         | Jan 1, 2023    | Republican
    Mississippi       | Jul 1, 2023    | Republican
    Missouri          | Nov 30, 2025   | Republican
    Montana           | Jan 1, 2024    | Republican
    Nebraska          | Jul 18, 2024   | Nonpartisan (unicameral)
    North Carolina    | Jan 1, 2024    | Republican
    North Dakota      | Aug 1, 2025    | Republican
    Ohio              | Sep 30, 2025   | Republican
    Oklahoma          | Nov 1, 2024    | Republican
    South Carolina    | Jan 1, 2025    | Republican
    South Dakota      | Jul 1, 2025    | Republican
    Tennessee         | Jan 13, 2025   | Republican
    Texas             | Sep 19, 2023   | Republican
    Utah              | May 3, 2023    | Republican
    Virginia          | Jul 1, 2023    | Divided
    Wyoming           | Jul 1, 2025    | Republican

Zuckerberg?

https://mashable.com/article/tech-ceos-epstein-files-musk-ga...

I don't like the "those in power" framing because it implies that they all participated and that such a homogenous group even exists.

I might be misreading you, but are you saying that the whole Qanon thing isn't a baseless conspiracy theory?

>we simply can't pretend that there isn't rampant CSA by those in power, because we've had proof of it despite their best efforts

What's "rampant"? The news coverage provides no shortage of people, but ringing off 100 (or whatever) people that are in the files doesn't say much, even if we make the questionable assumption that inclusion in files implies guilt. I'm sure that everyone would prefer the amount of pedophiles that are in power to 0, but if it's the same rate as the general population that can hardly be considered "rampant", or a "conspiracy". Given some neutral inclusion criteria (eg. members of legislative bodies), is there any evidence they have disproportionate amount of pedophiles?

>the leader of the United States right now was friends with the supposed ring-leader...

You conveniently omit the fact that they broke up 5 years before he was first convicted. From wikipedia:

"Trump had a falling out with Epstein around 2004 and ceased contact. After Epstein was said to have sexually harassed a teenage daughter of another Mar-a-Lago member in 2007, Trump banned him from the club. "

>Useful idiots, perhaps?

So basically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness?

> Wanting to protect their own power and gain more?

How does adding age verification help in that? Are they blackmailed by the shadowy cabal? Are they just doing what the voters/lobbyists want? If so, what makes invocation of this reasoning more suitable than for any other political issue? Is everything from tax policy to noise ordinances just something pushed by pedophile elites, helped by useful idiots and people who want to "protect their own power and gain more"?

>Who exactly is influential & organized enough across many western countries to push legislation that no one is asking for?

The anti-social media sentiment has been brewing for a while now, not least due to books like The Anxious Generation (2024). It's also reflected in opinion polls and media coverage. Unless you want to imply there's some massive conspiracy by The Elites™ (ie. not just a few lobbyists Meta hired, but those in academia and media as well), it's probably organic.

> I'm not sure it will work out that way.

why? If age restriction get legislated into the OS, it puts a damper on further attempts on adding restrictions to sites, because they can point to the existing legislation and claim it's enough.

They're pushing for an API at the system level, where they can query the age

Such an API can then be extended to provide location data to "help the police find bad guys", track purchase histories to "prevent fraud"; all the stuff that Apple and Google blocked fb from sniffing from user devices

It's circumvention of these privacy protections with added vengeance since now Google and Apple will be sitting with the cost of implementation and the liability

They would be no longer responsible for doing it.

My kid had classmates as young as 8 using it. Facebook knows this.

Think of how many quadrillions of hours under-18 spend online. Ads for verified 18+ are more profitable.

So simple, just get various Christian, Muslim, atheist, traditionalist and progressive, sane and insane parents to all agree on a common set of what is appropriate and inappropriate. And then enforce that on all of their children. Why didn’t I think of that? That should go great.

The California law is the one where parents select how old their child is and apps must respect that as a child lock.