Not enough, the user may get someone else to wear the strap for them. The only solution is Neuralink(tm) with a built in secure element and DRM to ensure that content is delivered directly from the source to the age verified user’s brain, without any so called “analog hole” through which minors or non-paying users could view the content.

Depends on the jurisdiction I guess, now that we’re Balkanizing the internet.

This seems to be a shorter list than the one collected by Ageless Linux (https://agelesslinux.org/distros.html), although the GH issues seem to have the status of some additional distros.

See also https://github.com/AntiSurv/oss-anti-surveillance for a project to patch out any future age verification code.

Depends on the law. Some of them say that the age range must be provided to all applications through an API, and all apps and “app stores” must filter content based on this value. Others say that this isn’t enough and you actually have to verify the age based on some commercial scheme like CC or ID verification. Some say you have to send the age to websites. Many of these laws seem to be in direct conflict about what is allowed and not allowed.

In all cases, at least in the US, these laws violate the first amendment (as code is a form of speech), and freedom respecting users and devs need to resist them until they can be defeated in court.

Laws that are so poorly worded that they could be easily misused are bad laws.

Legislators should force future would-be tyrants to flagrantly violate the law, as this is more likely to generate popular resistance.

> Laws that are so poorly worded that they could be easily misused are bad laws.

The point is that these laws aren't badly written. There's already protections in place for what's described above.

I don’t believe this is the case, every now and then we see prosecutors using an obsolete unenforced law or an unexpected edge case of some law to come after people.

A great example is the CFAA. It has been judicially narrowed after court battles, because in its original form it was overbroad and criminalized basic, common things. Prosecutors abused it in order to get political wins until they were finally stopped.

This is unfortunately fairly common. Legislators either push for too much or don’t understand how the law might be applied, and innocent people suffer until someone wins a big expensive set of appeals.

Edit: I realize now you may be talking about the UK in particular, in which case you don’t even get this shoddy level of protection as “Parliament is sovereign” (lol).

I'm talking about the specific law that was being discussed, and the particular other law I used as an example. And the protection mentioned was the one of double jeopardy which had also been explicitly mentioned.

Double jeopardy was partially eliminated in the UK in 2003 for qualifying offenses. I don’t think this has been tested, but during a retrial, a refusal to provide a password would be a separate RIPA offense from any refusal during the first trial. So you could actually be jailed more than once for this. For qualifying offenses all that is required for a retrial is “new and compelling evidence” which is a low hurdle for politically unpopular defendants.

If that did happen you'd have a good case from the Human Rights Act because it becomes indefinite imprisonment. The UK is still following the ECHR as well.

But arguing these theoretical untested-because-they-never-happen edge cases isn't exactly pushing forward a good case for this law having been "badly written." There's seemingly no problem with it in practice.

If you “must” use those then keep a phone off in a drawer and turn it on once a day to keep in touch.

If those people won’t allow you to be offline from time to time and aren’t willing to switch communication methods as an alternative, maybe it’s not a symmetrical relationship.

Or use something like Beeper (works on Linux): https://www.beeper.com/

If your country has this problem, you’re way past worrying about phones, and you need to be acquiring arms and training.

It's illegal to have any decently good arms in Canada.

If you live in a country where the police will beat you to extract a confession, it may be time to start violating the law.

(To my knowledge this is not the case in Canada.)

> To my knowledge this is not the case in Canada.

Not yet. But with them changing the law to enlist foreigners (who, of course, will care less about Canadians and their rights) in the armed forces, it will change soon.

Thanks for building this, UX is nice and should encourage people to switch from Discord. Bsky only is a bit disappointing as it is still heavily centralized. I would love to see a system like this that can also set up channels over Nostr and the Fediverse. Fragmentation is starting to become an issue with decentralized and federated social.

We've taken a look at co-supporting ActivityPub as well actually! And yeah, the fragmentation is an issue. But I honestly think we might see at lease some level of interop between these fragments in the coming years, even if it's just some parts of the protocols and specs going in the same direction.

They should prompt the user for permission when they use a feature that requires it, explain why, and allow them to cancel if desired. Have seen this pattern used many times elsewhere.

Good idea, will implement that! Maybe a button or something to refresh your permissions when/if you want to edit your profile via Colibri makes sense.

> I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species.

To me this statement reads as both inaccurate and ignorant of human nature. Social media was actually better when it was about individual ego (Myspace/LiveJournal); as obnoxious as that can be, today everything is worse because of petty tribalism. Most conflicts on social media are inter-tribal, whether it’s racial, political, national, or feuding “stan” culture groups. The worst problems come from groups who organize on platforms like Discord or Kiwi Farms to direct harassment campaigns against perceived enemies (or random “lolcow” victims).

Simple observation of the present world and history will tell you that a platform focused on “collective improvement” will only appeal to a small subset of potential users. Of course such a platform would not be a bad thing. Places like this (such as The WELL) used to be common when the internet was dominated by academics, futurists, and tech enthusiasts. But average people are not interested in this kind of platform, and will not participate in good faith in such an environment.

> To me this statement reads as both inaccurate and ignorant of human nature

> But average people are not interested in this kind of platform, and will not participate in good faith in such an environment.

I'm not ignorant of human nature and tribalistic tendencies. The undercurrent of my comment is of an optimistic hope (or cope) that we can move past competitive individual validation programming. I'm aware that it's due to our nature, but also aware that it's exploited by dark patterns and extraction at scale through software.

Thanks for replying. I agree that dark patterns and other psychological manipulation is a problem, I just don’t think it’s necessarily ego-centric in origin any more than gambling. These companies have found very efficient methods to extract attention and money from humans by exploiting their brain’s natural reward functions. I’m not sure what the answer is, because it’s obviously a problem (again just like gambling addiction), but I do support people’s rights to engage in things like gambling.

Since we don’t live in a perfect world, I suppose some regulation of the industry would be fair, just as we mitigate the harms of gambling somewhat through regulation. I just worry about regulation being used as a Trojan horse to stifle political organization and/or open communication about corruption, cronyism, and oppression.

It may be that the future is more small platforms where conflict is limited to in-group conflict rather than global platforms where all of humanity’s disagreements are surfaced and turned into fodder for monetization.

Gambling is a great example. When I say "ego" I really mean the reinforcement of the individual pattern through survival-resource games, power play, or external validation. I'm not using it in the classic psychological way, perse.

Regulation could work, but in my opinion the problem isn't devious mastermind product people attempting to entrap humanity -- it's self entrapment in a recursive way.

Regulators could add red tape and boundaries for what is or isn't kosher or legal, but in the end can prohibition fix systemic integration with addictive technological superagonist of our own creation?

I guess I just don’t see humanity awakening to transcendent egolessness any time in the near future (if ever). Based on my experience, the average person is fairly constrained by their biological reality. We often like to pretend that this isn’t the case, and pretending may work for a while, but eventually sufficient stress causes the illusion to unravel forcefully.

Regulation isn’t perfect; in the best case all it can do is limit the worst harms. It’s still a bad idea to engage in regulated gambling, as you are very likely to lose money. Almost everyone knows this, yet many people do it, and I can’t see that changing any time soon.