this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
693 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
82518 readers
5726 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I really don't understand what the value they see in putting age checks on operating systems. Like where is this coming from? Who whispered in their ear that OS age checks are something that need to be done?
Palantir
They have unique digital fingerprints for everyone already pretty much, but they are not linked to official government IDs so there is still uncertainty I think over identification.
This makes everyone's digital fingerprint linked on a government ID. Voila, now every person in America is known by Palantir and the government at all times (more or less). Great for genocide and targeting your political opponents and voters to set up sham elections.
It also tries to stop poors who don't have drivers licenses in America from organizing as they can't verify.
Now with Flock surveiling most of the US: Jaywalking or littering and a Democrat or worse, leftist? You are a criminal and intelligible to vote. Incoming trump 75+% win for an illegal 3rd term or Vance.
Thiel famously said "what if there was a way, through technology, to achieve your political goals without having to beg and plead to convince people who will never agree with you anyway"
Just want to clarify something about your comment since it feels like you have not had a chance to read the law yet.
(this is in reference to the Cali law but I am told the Colorado one is basically identical). The Cali law does not, in any way, require ID verification, it only requires that a parent attest to the age of their child when setting up an account for them.
This is not my argument for this exact law or any of these laws. I just want to make sure we all understand what we are talking about before going for the pitchforks.
Bit by bit have been common for way too long, you know that this is not the end goal
From what I can tell, the 'age' part is misdirection. They want to restrict computer use to the "good" people, to make it "safer".
Using age restrictions first allows legislation to be passed "for the children" using the idea of potential harm to theoretical children. However, in practice, legislators expect the implementation of the age check to be capable of checking anything else they want to about your identity, as a prerequisite for access. Probably using a combination of face scans and ID scans.
I don't even understand what good this is. what does this do for them? The government has a database of identities and now it's going to have a database of identities with computers? for what? Steven uses Windows, Susie uses Linux.
if you're using internet at home or on a cell phone, they've already got your online identity or whatever. what is it that I'm missing
You arent going deep enough. Its about building a web of all of your online identities to crush dissent and influence public opinion. Susie frequents anarchist.nexus under the user the_cloaked and there she seems to interact with another user, lilanarkiddy, a lot. Steven's windows computer also reported that he frequents the site, under the user lilarnarkiddy. And you see where that will lead to.
It isn't even just the government, big tech wants this too. They want to be able to track everything you do with your computer, and that's more easily achieved if OS level identification is required. Big tech wants it for data harvesting and ad targeting, the government wants it for surveillance and narrative control. The end goal is government verified digital ID that will be required to use any operating system. There will be no anonymity anymore. This creates a panopticon effect in which people police themselves because they know they are always being watched. Furthermore, the information you receive in your social media feeds and web searches can be silently curated based on what is known about your political attitudes. It can all be managed by AI.
they already have digital fingerprints. they don't need OS level anything to do this. smartphones are doing it all
To an extent, yes, but they could do it much more easily and accurately if there was a unique, biometric identifier associated with all your actions across your devices which cannot be disabled.
This is just the slippery slope argument.
The California law does not require verification. Only attestation.
California, as of today, does not require any kind of verification to install an OS (how it's always been).
This law gets passed, now they require "attestation".
A year or two from now, they're gonna push for for actual age verification.
A year or two after that, the government will make a new law saying that your drivers license is no longer a valid form of identification, they're gonna need a retina scan or some other form of "bio" identification.
Next thing you know, you'll be pressing your dick imprint on your PC's automated Cock-Scanner-v4 encryption tray that pops out of your laptop like a cd-rom drive every time you need to check your email.
Slippery slope, indeed.
Can you provide any sources for these? Maybe a california legislator saying they plan to do this? Or a proposed law? Otherwise it is just the slippery slope fallacy. While that doesn't disprove what you said it does not provide a valid argument for it either.
no, i cant provide any sources because that's just what i'm assuming will happen. don't get me wrong, it is totally fair to ask for hard evidence of these claims, and the fact is, right now, that doesn't exist.
but just based on my past experience with how the government likes to do things and hypothetically putting myself in their shoes, that's my, we'll call it "hypothesis", on what's gonna happen. my belief is that, at the end of the day, the government and big tech want to collect as much information about the public as they possibly can, and this is the order of operations that they are going to take to achieve that.
What do you think their intentions are, and why?
The intentions for the law?
This ia a quote directly from the author of the bill link for reference.
Now of course the obvious question many people might ask is "are they being truthful?" But that is a question that people will have to answer for themselves.
Yes that is a large part of what I meant by what are their intentions. If you can reasonably conclude that their that their intended goal will probably involve progressively restricting this area of legislation (whether through implications from their statements or the possibility of them not being truthful), then it is not a slippery slope fallacy.
Are you pre or post 9/11? It is very obvious that the slope is slippery.
Non-fallacious forms can also exist. It is fairly obvious that it is warranted in authoritarian regimes to expect progression (regression?).