> A Meta employee (Jake Levine, Product Manager) contributed $1,175 to ASAA sponsor Matt Ball's campaign apparatus on June 2, 2025. Source: Colorado TRACER bulk data.

> No direct Meta PAC contributions to any ASAA sponsor across Utah, Louisiana, Texas, or Colorado. Source: FollowTheMoney.org multi-state search.

While it is true that Meta has funded groups that advocate for age verification, a lot of them also appear to have other actors so it's not like this is some pure Meta thing as some of the other commenters are suggesting.

> LIMITATION: Direct PDF downloads returned 403 errors. ProPublica Schedule I viewer loads data dynamically (JavaScript), preventing extraction via WebFetch. The 2024 public disclosure copy on sixteenthirtyfund.org was also blocked.

> Tech Transparency Project report: The article "Inside Meta's Spin Machine on Kids and Social Media" at techtransparencyproject.org likely contains detailed ConnectSafely/Meta funding analysis but was blocked (403)

The least they could have done is read their own reports and then provided the documents to the LLM. Instead they just let it run and propose connections, asked it to generate some graphs, and then hit publish.

Plus, Apple gets to be the gatekeeper for Meta and other apps which can't be good for meta, and Apple gets to know the age of its users, which in itself is monetizable.

Overall, that's the reason anti-trust laws must be applied rigorously, otherwise the normal population has no chance.

if "it" is the middle finger, for sure. "terrifying" is a great choice of word for it.

No, the way to stop it is to talk to your representatives.

You have the power. You just have to pick up a phone, and ask your friends, relatives, neighbors, to do the same. (They will, because it affects all of them.) Tell your reps to remove the legislation or you're voting them out. They don't want to lose their jobs. They will change if you tell them to. But only if you tell them. That is your power. Use it or lose it.

But sometimes very few people can make a difference.

Turns out they were right

These laws, that attempt to move "age verification" into the OS, 100% absolve Meta (and all the Meta owned "properties") from any legal liability so long as all of Meta's app's follow the law's required "ask the OS for the age signal of the user".

Any "bad stuff" which then gets shown to "underage users" then becomes "not Meta's fault, they followed the legally proscribed way to check the age of the user, and the OS said this user was 'old enough'" and Apple/Google then get to shoulder the liability (and pay out for the class action lawsuits) for failing to provide a proper age signal.

That's the "material advantage" gained by Meta by pushing these laws.

If this was somehow introduced without anyone noticing and deployed, imagine the damage it would cause.

If we're fantasizing here, I like to imagine two major OS makers trying to comply these laws, fail miserably, and let FOSS OSes and kernels more recognition in the desktop market.

What exactly do you think Linux is? I would say that Linux would be forked in like 2 seconds, a bunch of different companies would start offering "attested Linux," and all you'd have to do was change your repos and update.

I would say that, but what would really happen is that we'd find out that Canonical, Red Hat, and a bunch of other distributions had been talking to the government for a year behind closed doors and they're already ready to roll out attested Linux. Debian would argue about it for six months, and then do the same thing. Hell, systemd will require age attestation as a dependency. Devuan and any other stubborn distribution would face 9000 federal lawsuits, while having domain names blocked, and the Chinese hardware necessary to run them seized at the ports with the receivers locked up on terrorism charges.

I have no idea where the confidence of the IT tech comes from. You (we) are something between a mechanic and a highly-skilled janitor.

Update the terms to indicate that you can do what you want, but this OS is probably not compliant with states run by evil dipshits.

Cpt America in the Winter Soldier

Do you know how democracy works? There are these people called representatives. They are hired by you. They pass laws. They only get to continue having a job if people like you vote for them. When you tell them "I don't like the law you are passing", they are hearing "the people who hire me are angry with me". The more people that are angry at what they're doing, the more their job is at risk.

They do what the lobbyists say because somebody else is doing the work, and they get paid (by the lobbyist). But they won't have a job to get paid for if the voters don't vote for them again. So your entire defense against tyranny and bad laws is you speaking out. If you never talk to your reps (or vote), you're telling them you don't care what kind of government it is, and they really will do whatever they want.

You have to tell them how you feel, along with all the rest of us. That's the only power we have.

In addition to that, tell everyone you know. Your friends, family, coworkers, the dude running the local gas station. Explain to them why government-mandated surveillance of everything they do on a computer is a bad idea. Ask them to talk to their reps.

You have consumer activist brain. Next you're going to suggest that we complain to the manager or start our own government and compete in the marketplace.

> The only thing that talks is money

No, the only thing that is talking is money. Money wants this. You're busy pretending like you're going to do a boycott; they're going to boycott you.

Complain about the internet? They'll just blacklist you from it. Complain about the phone? Well now you can't use one; try smoke signals. Complain about the landlord? They'll settle the case, kick you out on the street, and blacklist you among all private equity landlords and the management companies that service small landlords. You'll just go to a small landlord that doesn't use one of the management companies? Well they won't have access to a bunch of vendors that have exclusive contracts with and share ownership with the management companies; now they can't make any money and have to sell to private equity.

You've been fooled into thinking that being victimized is a moral failure of the victim. The perpetrators taught you that. They taught you that the only appropriate action is to beg and threaten to leave, and they shut down customer service and monopolized the market. But, again, the worst thing they trained you to do is to blame the victim.

Heck, Linus Torvalds should just add an amendment to the next release of the Linux Kernel that makes it illegal to use in any jurisdiction that requires age verification laws.

This would obviously cause such a massive disruption (especially in California) that the age laws would have to be rolled back immediately.

This seems like a no-brainer to me but I am admittedly ignorant on this situation. I'm sure there's a good reason why this isn't happening if anyone cares to explain.

Ideally, getting these servers to auto turn off the day this goes into effect ("In compliance with this new law, Linux is now temporarily unusable. Please <call to action>.") would be glorious for getting the bill staved off, or killed.

It would hurt some productivity, but that is a risk these lawmakers taking donations are probably willing to make.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident

I've wondered if FaceID and the Android counterpart are actively creating an extraordinary labeled dataset for facial expressions at the point of sale.

With users trained to scan their face before every transaction, tech companies could correlate transactions to facial expressions, facial expressions to emotions, and emotions to device content. I can imagine algorithms that subtly curate the user experience, selectively showing notifications, content, advertising to coax users towards "retail therapy".

This is a non-issue because it's almost certainly going to be gated behind a permission prompt. There are more invasive things sites/apps can ask for, and we seem to be doing fine, eg. location. Moreover is it really that much of a privacy loss if you go on steam, it asks you to verify you're over 18, and the OS says you're actually over 18?

>Biometric data? Today it unlocks your private key. Tomorrow it's used to verify you are the same person that was used during sign-up -- the same that was "age-verified".

Given touch id was introduced over a decade ago, and the associated doom-mongering predilections did not come to pass, I think it's fair to conclude it's a dud.

The biggest shocker to me has been just how "cheap" a lot of people are to buy off. Mandelson is complaining about air miles FFS. So much of this is a few thousand here, some fancy tickets there, a jet ride elsewhere, etc. In my mind it was always much, much bigger sums that people were selling their countries & souls out for, sadly, it turns out a lot of people, even in really high positions, are shockingly cheap.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_of_Peter_Mandelso...

Because it's hopeless? It's been proven time and time again there's nothing the average person can do to fight this sort of thing.

It's just better to sit back and watch as everything gets ruined.

What you have in the EU is this: https://noyb.eu/en/project/dpa/dpc-ireland

> Now that the mask has fully fallen, we have to take every step possible to root out American influence.

You have literal rogue states in your union that neutralize the entirety of it, as the above shows. It's a joke. The EU is a joke. A single country is enough to mean US tech can do whatever it wants, similarly a single other country is enough to mean Russia can largely do what it wants.

The others are of course in on it too. Which is why for all the empty EU talk on US big tech you've never heard them talk about the Irish DPA and what they all enable. Strange right? Would think that this would be a priority. But it shows that even if the rest weren't in on it, just one country would be enough. And it could even be a tiny place like Luxembourg.

Laws and regulations aren't worth the paper they're written on if they're not enforced. The current ones aren't enforced at all, why would any new ones be? Did you know that there was a long period where hosting European citizens' PII on US-controlled servers (like Amazon instances in Europe) was illegal, after the "Privacy Shield" was deemed unlawful? No one cared. Did you know that this is currently the case again, because the thing that replaced it has once again had its basis ripped out from under it by Trump? Once again, no one cares, and indeed EU governments and corporations are _still_ making migrations _to_ US clouds.

Not that it matters, within a few years RN will be running France and AfD will be running Germany and you don't have to pretend any more as the "mask will have fallen" just as much.

You're not missing anything. It's just an AI generated summary of the original GitHub link https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings

I found the original article much easier to read anyways

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_website_authenticati...

I remember from peak net neutrality discussions during trump 1 maybe around 2017-2018 ant saw an article on theverge.com (that cannot find now) and biggest sum to individual politician was around $200k, when median values were much much lower.

Politicians are selling tens of billions of dollars (if not hundreds of billions) worth of revenue to ISPs for couple or dozen million. Literally 1000x return on investment (if successful).

I remember local politician (I am not from US) got caught taking 100k bribe from a company for helping with alleged highway construction procurement. Project was valued ~1B - 10 000x return on investment (if they wouldn't have been caught).

[1] I am sorry, not "corruption", but "lobbying".

In the end, all the little people are just collateral damage or occasionally they get some collateral benefits from wherever the munitions land.

(Maybe some unspoken element of concern over social media bots, too - as they evolve from spamming copy+pasted comments to being near-indistinguisable from actual human accounts?)

Ideas? Time to spin up a local LLM for some editing advice.

In the real world, professional media organizations regularly expose corruption. More often than not? No idea. But to pretend they only engage in cover-ups is cynical fatalism.

It's to save the kids.

We care about the kids. We don't bomb them.

Just because you're a pessimist doesn't mean you have to be coy. :)

And you seem to have been fooled into thinking all victims are powerless.

A "Linux distro" is not the Linux kernel. It's possible for some distros to add such license terms to their distribution media, but others like Debian and Debian-based ones adhere to the GPL so no go.

Also keep in mind keystroke dynamics can probably do that too and has been a topic of study in one form or another since the nineteenth century vis-a-vis telegraph operators.

Never stopped people overengineering :P

> Nobody stops the government from sending goons to your door right now for a snarky comment.

This is just dumb. They literally don't know who wrote it, and have to assign somebody to track you down. The fact that they're putting infrastructure on your computer and on the network to make this one click away for them matters.

The auth server would lie in Colorado. The FS server, in New Mexico. The CPU server, in Nevada. The terminal (the client), in Alaska. Shut down and repeat at random. Watch the lobbies collapsing down tring to sue that monster.

That's a wildly low sum of money for a 5 minute personal call, let alone even a modest intervention.

You literally live in a Democracy. There's 5.8 billion people on this planet who wish they had the kind of power you have. If you give up your rights without a fight, you don't deserve them.

What do you mean? They still need people purchasing software and hardware.

You can argue effectiveness, but if enough people say no, then a boycott is extremely effective. The issue is always on awareness and making people take hard actions.

If it's not (fully) your code, you aren't free to set the licence conditions; Linus can't do that without getting approval from 100% (not 99% or so) of authors who contributed code.

What one can do is add an informative disclaimer saying "To the best of our knowledge, installing or running this thing in California is prohibited - we permit to do whatever you want with it, but how you'll comply with that law is your business".

Watch as apps refuse to work when you deny them permission. Also the OS (and “privileged apps”) don’t ask for permission, they have full unfettered access to everything already.

lol.

> Moreover is it really that much of a privacy loss if you go on steam, it asks you to verify you're over 18, and the OS says you're actually over 18?

Slippery slope, but an interesting argument. While SteamOS is a thing, Steam isn't my OS.

> Given touch id was introduced over a decade ago, and the associated doom-mongering predilections did not come to pass, I think it's fair to conclude it's a dud.

Really? You think that things built decades ago can't be further built-upon in the now or the future?

The linked post talks about the effectiveness of AIPAC but fails to mention how much is spent by say, Palestinian interest groups. Perhaps there's a good reason for this: do Palestinian groups have any money to spend on US elections? Try fundraising in Gaza right now.

Likewise, business interest groups have a lot more money to spend on elections than, say, environmental groups. The latter have to beg for small donations from individuals just to stay afloat. Thus, it's relatively easy for business groups to outspend environmental groups. To win an auction, you just have to be the highest bidder.

No, enforcing privacy is not hard, all it takes is imposing penalties _much greater than_ those financial incentives.

AutoModerator on /r/linux is set up to automatically remove posts after a set amount of reports.

she ended up resigning in a scandal caused by her husband accepting a boat (or work on the boat..i don't remember). the scandal was caused by the amount of the bribe. it was too low. the Turkish people could understand some corruption, but to be able to bribe the top leader for $50k. Unacceptable. If it would have been $100 million, it would not have been a scandal.

Why?

It also helps when you take an offender to court. If I contribute to a project but don't assign copyright, then they cannot take offenders to court if my code was copied illegally. The burden is on me to do so.

Of course, all code released prior to the change still remains on the original license.

    6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.

https://opensource.org/osd

    5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups

    The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.

Rocket is obvious and spectacular. Those are for amateurs.

A journalist got beaten up to the brink of death and will never walk again by 'unknown perpetrators'? Well, it's a dangerous country, and he had it coming, maybe some concerned citizens went a bit too far, but our dear leader cannot watch over everybody.

Scaling: do you think other journalists will not take notice?

And he will still be alive to reminder them how they may end up.

If you want to see how far imagination can go here, look up Artyom Kamardin and think how would you behave after hearing his story .

You mean non slippery slope?

>Really? You think that things built decades ago can't be further built-upon in the now or the future?

If there's no deadlines for predilections, how can we score them? Should we still be worried about some yet undiscovered way that cell phones are causing cancer, despite decades of apparently no harmful side effects?

They don’t need you to purchase hardware or software any more. We’re moving to centralized economic planning, where resources for datacenter buildouts are reserved for people with sufficient political loyalty (and come from tax dollars), and the only products are surveillance and collective punishment.

If you don’t want that to happen, then you’ll need to help build an alternative.

"Every OS provider must then: provide an interface at account setup collecting a birth date or age, and expose a real-time API that broadcasts the user's age bracket (under 13, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, 18+) to any application running on the system."

Debian, Ubuntu, etc., they'll all fall right in line because the clear and immediate losses will outweigh any PR issue.

I know. That's exactly the point.

In such situations where one party (Meta) has enough money to lobby and is playing dirty, it's a massively asymmetric situation. In such cases, if you really want to make sure you're heard (which I'm not sure distributers want or care about tbh), you've got to play the game too.

Malicious compliance, if you will.

PS: For a "practical" variant, simply a warning might be sufficient - given how many hospitals/critical infra uses linux. For eg "There is a chance this server will fail to work on x date due to this y law. Not as glamorous/all-guns-blazing, but probably much more sensible and practical.

PPS: For an even more "safer" variant, one could go "Post x, please note that using linux/this server is a violation of law y. Please turn off the server yourself manually. Failure to comply with these instructions and violating the law will be borne entirely by the (no informed) sysadmin/manglement.

And turns out power-tripping men offered raw power over other humans on threat of violence is something they like.

And ICE? Remember J6 and Three Percenter's and all those right wing militias? They ended up in ICE. Same reasons.

If you can't trust the OS, you have bigger issues than it knowing whether you're 18 or not. At the very least it has a camera pointed at you at all moments you're using it, and can eavesdrop in all your conversations.

Fuck Reddit

Rinse and repeat. Unless, politicians band together and say "we need the full ROI of your project, and NONE of us will even talk to you unless we get half the profits, and you can't primary all of us at once"

Which "most of Europe" would that be? Switzerland and handful of northern countries? Because it is definitely not Germany or several "you can't access half of the internet during times when twenty men kicking a ball on a field" southern states.

And responses to some common criticisms of the idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46459959

I also forgot to mention in my original post that the token issuer is not a monopoly. Any company that wants to participate can do so, just like there are many brands of tobacco and alcohol. Require websites to accept at least 5 providers to ensure competition.

To be clear though if it's being used as wedge for privacy violation then it should not exist at all. And from reading TFA preventing that may need a similarly coordinated counter-effort.

Yes, I agree.

>They don’t need you to purchase hardware or software any more.

Need? No. But they still want as much money as possible. That's why a boycott/strike will still be effective. They don't need money anymore but will still bend over backwards for it.

>If you don’t want that to happen, then you’ll need to help build an alternative.

I want to help. Not sure what I can do to help, though. Seems like simply calling my reps is talking to the wind.

If your OS prevented encryption, because one of the anti-encryption laws got passed, would you still trust its privacy and security?

Gulf states have little to nothing in common with Palestinians. Citizens of most gulf states are born into relative wealth merely by the fact their countries are rich in petrodollars. They build lavish cities and have standards of living (for their citizens) that increasingly put the West to shame. They are "diversifying" from oil by building massive AI datacenters and essentially catering to Westerners who want to live unencumbered by Western pretensions of civic duty, avoid taxes in their home countries, etc. They make deals with the Israelis and have for over a decade now, even if under the table. They buy American weapons, their elites have frequently been educated at the most exclusive British or American universities. They like expensive Italian cars. Money is money.

Meanwhile Palestinians are born poor, in a failed state with no autonomy. Some UAE crypto influencer is yolo gambling away more money than most Palestinian kids will see in their lifetimes. They live under an occupation and have basically no rights in that regard. They are poor. Just google image a picture of Gaza vs the UAE. It just doesn't even compare. Maybe on some level they are both Arabs. But the same rule applies. Money is money.

The gulf state governments gave up on trying to care about them many many decades ago. They realized it was cheaper (and more prosperous) to go along to get along with the United States and Israel. If they hadn't, their capitals might look like Tehran right now. Over the years it became easy to blame other people for the problem - Iran, even the Palestinians themselves. They have long since washed their hands of caring.

Don't conflate the Gulf States with Palestinians, or associate them with anyone on the losing side of anything when it comes to money and power. They are as corrupt and bought-in to this system of wealth/might makes right as anyone.

They may on paper, but of course a lot of money goes to dividing us up come election time. What you are suggesting is no shortcut - it would rather be almost like inventing an alternative political party.

I do think there is a stronger case against the next under-18 Aaron Swartz, who will get hit with 200 felonies for setting his age wrong (one felony per app/service) after pissing off someone important.

The absurdity here comes from the fact that this is only illegal when one convinces a group of wetware about the dangers of porn addiction and LGBT, even more absurd this can only be done through misinformation since neither LGBT grooming rings nor porn addiction are real.

I see the absurdity in pushing for laws in the hope of preventing a disease that only exists in your mind? Can you? I believe you can if you step out of idpol and look at the cold data/dollars.

But generally speaking, online age verification is one of those issues where the left-right ideological divide doesn't map neatly. People support and oppose it for various different reasons. Much like the assisted suicide issue.

QWAC certs are only for "high value" sites: banks, government services, etc. They can only be issued by "Qualified Trust Service Providers" (e.g. digisign, D-TRUST, etc -- not governments), and cost many hundreds of euros. Your blog and mastodon instance and 98% of businesses just aren't affected.

People operating in "high risk" sectors that need access to payment infra (porn, drugs, etc) are, as always, going to have a hard time. That's a worthy conversation, but nothing about QWAC or eIDAS is about "the government not issuing certs to people they don't like".

Are you serious? Because this comment doesn't make it sound like you're serious.

EULAs and the like allow adults to simply click "I accept". That's apparently the way contracts work these days. Speaking of contracts: children aren't allowed to sign contracts. So those apps that children are using with EULAs? It's absurd to allow adults to simply click "I accept". We need to have "acceptance verification" laws to prevent this kind of abuse.

It's also absurd to allow children to simply enter a church. Churches teach dangerous thoughts. Have you read their books?! Those books have sex, murder, theft! Think of the children! There's many kinds of religions and we need to track the religion bracket of our children. It's absurd to allow a child to simply click "I am Christian." Nowhere else works like this. We need to have "religious verification" laws to prevent this kind of abuse.

What you want isn't conducive to a "high trust" society [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-trust_and_low-trust_socie...

"Disabled spending" already happened to the people in the ICC that acted contrary to Trump's diktats[0], without the need for a digital panopticon, both the banks and the government know who you are.

[0] https://www.irishtimes.com/world/us/2025/12/12/its-surreal-u...

That was from a quick search, no doubt there's more. Now it gets down to trust issues on reporting.

Secure Boot is just a technology for those that need it, until Microsoft decides it's mandatory for everyone.

On a spectrum of options, no verification is the least privacy intrusive. Baking it in at the OS level or forcing passport uploads are the most intrusive. My proposal is in the middle.

A determined actor could maybe follow you to the store when you purchase your verification code, take a quick picture with a powerful camera (or bribe the store to do it sneakily) and unmask you online. But there's no way to do it at scale. And if you buy the code from a reseller (ask a panhandler to buy one for you, perhaps) then it's even more robust.

Meanwhile, regular cops have been doing the same awful things that they've always been doing, literally at the command of Democratic mayors who are pompously declaring that they won't enforce immigration law in speeches. They'll send cops to throw your shit into the street when your rent suddenly doubles, and won't report an illegal immigrant felon (whose history we know nothing about) to ICE.

Organized white supremacists are nobodies with no power, they're all over the military, the cops, prison guards, and ICE. Meanwhile, Parchman Farm in Mississippi doesn't even report the people who are dying there, and has plastic all over the floors because the roofs are open to the elements. That's just legal American black people who this country actually owes something to, though. That was trendy like five years ago, it's so over now.

If I get arrested for lying about my age, when I'm of age, then they could probably get me on a whim already anyway. No point in trying to fall in line.

I think there might be a way to make it work, however you would have to be very aware and plan for a way to not reinvent the same losing dynamics. It might not be possible.

Now you obviously shouldn't set social justice aside, and given the choice, I absolutely prefer the capitalist hellscape where my friends and I are not being rounded up and killed, but that's a REMARKABLY low standard I've had to settle on as a voter.

The Democrats and Republicans both are different approaches for the same billionaire class.

They're not "opposite sides of the same coin". Instead, they're more akin to 2 sock puppets. One wears red, and the other blue.

Like the Trump tariffs? They were initially Biden's tariffs that Trump increased and extended. Different clothes, same game.

But I'd be willing to try a good run with democratic socialism, or hell, communism. What we have is the cushy gold-parachute socialism for the elite, and unabashed hardcore capitalism for the poorest. And that fucking sucks. Burn it down.