There are certainly some governments around the world that have considered requiring age verification for chatbots. Not sure any such laws are already in effect.

I don’t even want to express an opinion whether I find that worse or less bad than doing so for social media.

IRC prank from the 2000s: if you type /quit playing games with my heart you’ll hear a cool pop song.

2020s: if you type quit into Google it will understand this as an AI prompt.

It just has more of the web in its index than competitors do, so there are good practical reasons on occasion.

I actually dislike the term “social media” in the first place, only used it above for convenience…

I (seriously) discovered that there were websites that allowed the general public to participate in the mid-2000s when I was a preteen. I immediately liked that concept and started to participate on such sites (first forums, later wikis) myself and found that fun.

Then around 2008, everyone started to insist that such sites were now called “social media” and the most important ones were Facebook and Twitter, both of which I hadn’t heard of until around that time, and both of which didn’t seem like very fun or appealing places at all.

Now I keep hearing about the horrible things apparently caused by “social media” and wonder, what do you even mean, what could possibly be wrong with web forums.

Hurray! People stop doing stupid shit!

you certainly have a high opinion of your own activities, eh?

I agree that the kind of “social media” that is popular among the general public (i.e. sharing information about one’s own life) is fairly stupid. But Lemmy too is “social media”, any support forum is “social media”, even wikis are “social media”, and I do not think that those are stupid things to do, at all.

set it to sorting by “new comments”, it’s what I did to make sure I see somewhat different things most of the time I refresh it

So you’re agreeing with me that this was supported by both parties…?

(I’m actually Austrian, not German; I have however read enough about US politics that I’m fairly confident in my statement above.)

Garuda Linux will not implement any age verification measures, since Garuda Linux’s legal jurisdictions have no laws mandating age verification.

Yes. That’s how it should be, that on the Internet you only have to comply with laws where you or the servers you are hosting things on are based, and all other places can piss off when it comes to enforcing their laws.

And it’s how it mostly used to work, but we now live in this world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel_Durov

One of my childhood dreams was to run my own successful web forum. Now that we live in this world where that means countries might prosecute me because my users have been doing things that are illegal somewhere in the world, that dream is officially dead. >:(

The big deal is that it’s on the heels of age verification bullshit that fascists are pushing through with the help of tech bros, so that they can eventually push all of us into a scenario where we have zero privacy.

That’s a bit difficult to argue in a world where the most prominent of such laws was passed in California, where Democrats control the entire legislative process.

I have not looked up the voting record for it, but would suspect that, like most of the worst laws in the US, it was enthusiastically supported by both parties? Am I wrong about that?

Yes. There are several sections on gnu.org that talk about this, these are the ones I was able to quickly find.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

You should also have the freedom to make modifications and use them privately in your own work or play, without even mentioning that they exist. If you do publish your changes, you should not be required to notify anyone in particular, or in any particular way.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html

The freedom to make and distribute exact copies when you wish. (It is not an obligation; doing this is your choice. If the program is free, that doesn’t mean someone has an obligation to offer you a copy, or that you have an obligation to offer him a copy. Distributing a program to users without freedom mistreats them; however, choosing not to distribute the program—using it privately—does not mistreat anyone.)

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html

Free software is a matter of freedom, not access. In general we do not believe it is wrong to develop a program and not release it. There are occasions when a program is so important that one might argue that withholding it from the public is doing wrong to humanity. However, such cases are rare. Most programs are not that important, and declining to release them is not particularly wrong. Thus, there is no conflict between the development of private or custom software and the principles of the free software movement.

Nearly all employment for programmers is in development of custom software; therefore most programming jobs are, or could be, done in a way compatible with the free software movement.

because it rejects the basis of capitalism, which is private ownership of the means of production (which in this case would be software)

No, it doesn’t. Companies developing software for internal use, including as part of a “means of production” (e.g. robot firmware at a factory), and keeping it secret from the public is completely compatible with free software. It’s only when software is distributed to other people/entities that the free software movement insists that the recipient should also have freedom (including to run a business with it or any modified version of it).

No. I’m staunchly anti-communist and also a staunch supporter of free software. It’s also possible to have another combination of beliefs on these things, but these are mine.

I suggest reading the section “Why Don’t You Move to Russia?” of this: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.en.html

By contrast, I am working to build a system where people are free to decide their own actions; in particular, free to help their neighbors, and free to alter and improve the tools which they use in their daily lives. A system based on voluntary cooperation and on decentralization.

Thus, if we are to judge views by their resemblance to Russian Communism, it is the software owners who are the Communists.

I agree with that. Free software is about building a society more strongly based on individual rights. At least Marxism-Leninism certainly isn’t about that, though anarchism can be argued to be to some extent.

The way I remember it, on old phones before smartphones, speakerphone was a very obscure feature that many users didn’t know how to turn on. I certainly didn’t (I was a child at the time) unless someone showed me.

On modern smartphones it’s very easy, maybe that should be changed again. 😁

I use speakerphone a lot in my own home too when no one is around. It’s just more comfortable to hold my phone in front of me instead of to my ear. Never in public unless specific other people need to hear it.

I am not. I am from a country whose constitution starts with the statement that it is a democratic republic.

I would find it very sad if they were a majority, anywhere. :(

I really didn’t hear anything about it until recently

Yes, I expressed the same sentiment here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/55959326/24302621

Is our entire information “ecosystem” so broken that we only pay attention to bad things after they’ve already happened, not before when there is still a chance to stop them?!

OK, that’s about the elaboration I was looking for…

Somehow I don’t think this is the central reason. I think governments are perfectly capable of doing bad things completely without billionaires having an interest in it. It especially doesn’t explain things like the California law that will regulate how we can or cannot program operating systems (hint: software code is a form of speech, meaning that this ought to be struck down as a violation of free speech), because no age verification services are involved in that.

Billionaires certainly are people, but these laws don’t even serve billionaires in any meaningful sense, so that’s hardly an explanation without more elaboration.

In my youth I was taught that democracy meant that the government served the people.

What do any of these laws have to do with serving the people? Do they have anything to do with the will of the people?