See, it’s very important that every minor online tells everyone they’re a minor, so predators know to stay away.

That’s if i’m thinking of the same proposed California law from some months ago that looked like it was written by someone who doesn’t know what a computer is.

I know the site but i never payed that much attention to the text size because i’m not learning Chinese. Yes it’s weird that everything is an image. I started using this Chinese handwriting input site to get characters as text, but that’s obviously impractical if you need more than a couple characters.

The text size can be improved by zooming in the page. On Firefox (default in in mostt DEs, i think) you hold control and scroll up or press the plus key.

I wonder if the site is so old that it was written before there was a better way to display Chinese in HTML. I don’t know any of its history tho.

You can also add it without installing anything by going to about:preferences#search, clicking “Add search engine”, and filling in the link as https://www.ecosia.org/search?q=%25s

Didn’t work, but thanks anyway.

I know you’re right, but that’s how it feels when they seem to keep removing the settings people have been using to fix this.

Testing this on Firefox is a good idea, and i would do that except i’ve given up. Thanks anyway.

This is possible but now that i’ve seen some more limitations of New Tab Override, i might just stick with a blank page and only have my custom page for new windows. Thanks anyway.

Where would that piece of code go? One of the three configuration files i mentioned, or somewhere else?

I’d like to just use local files for this so i’m not downloading anything for a new tab, whether stuff is cached or not.

HTML with embedded CSS isn’t a huge problem. Embedding any image that’s not an SVG is more of a problem. Regular <img> elements don’t work so everything has to be actually embedded in the page. Loading an image from an HTTPS address works, but again i don’t want to have to re-download things every time.

I currently also use a blank page and bookmarks. It’s just not as good as a completely custom page could be.

Given that there’s apparently no way to stop people from having a robot generate code and then plagiarizing that, Proposal E seems like the best option to me. Tho it still doesn’t address legal issues with code Frankensteined together from the entire web regardless of original license.

Thanks!

I wonder what would be the power consumption of a device that sits on your head and emits IR light in all directions until you turn it off, instead of just over your eyes. Similar to how microphone blockers work.

What would jewelry and hats do about cameras?

It would have to be strong enough to damage the cameras, if it’s not to be always on.

Maybe something similar to how microphone blockers work, flood a space with EM radiation outside the typical human visible range.

Or i think i’ve heard of ways to detect when someone has one of these near you (identifying bluetooth signals and such), in which case you can look around for who has glasses thick enough to hold a camera and shine a laser in their camera/eye. That could have too many false positives though.

See also: Firefox tab containers (built in feature), Temporary Containers extension (makes a new temporary folder for cookies & cache every time you go to a new domain/subdomain), and uMatrix extension (block embedded anything from any source, by domain & subdomain).

I don’t see how this could be enforcable. If i don’t let my computer automatically update (and i don’t) i could stick with one version of Debian forever. It wouldn’t be ideal, but i don’t see why all my offline programs wouldn’t work fine with no security issues as long as i’m offline.

And what about those rare operating systems that don’t do any networking? I know most people don’t use TempleOS but it does exist and would suffer little if at all from this. The bill mentions a fine (1798.503. (a)) for failing to either demand a date of birth or say “Not for use in California”, but how does that work with any abandoned OS? There are plenty that are unmaintained now for which there’s nobody to fine.

I am curious to know what the big distros (and i guess also non-Linux OSs) plan to do about this. Some might comply, there might be some “Not for use in California” stickers on download pages.

Hell, even if every OS does implement this and every user is honest about their age, that still doesn’t help protect children from anything. It is in fact false that only one person can use a computer, or only one person can use a user account on a computer. I let my kid brother play games on my computer sometimes and i know other people share too. I can honestly say i’m over 18 and there can still be times when someone who’s not is on my computer. The bill as written even seems to aknowledge this in “1798.504 (g) This title does not impose liability on an operating system provider, a covered application store, or a developer that arises from the use of a device or application by a person who is not the user to whom a signal pertains.”

Sometimes it feels like the world is falling apart at every point and i’m drowning in the overwhelming flood of bad news. ICE, Al, this shit, Ukraine has been pushed out of the news by everything else, how are they doing⸮ And the globe is still warming, people keep making benches with extra handrails and spikes, i can’t grow my own food because the air and water and soil are poison, too many can’t afford a home to not freeze in winter or boil in summer; and it’s all too much.

I’d love to change the world, but i don’t know what to do.

One thing at a time. I’m making sure i have full installer images (full, not just install-enough-to-download-the-rest) for a couple backup operating systems in case somehow this sort of thing does shoot down Linux. I don’t think that’ll happen, but it doesn’t hurt to have onhand.

What else is there to do? That’s not rhetorical. What can i do as a citizen of the USA but not California to stop this?

How USA law handles precedent (i think, i’m no lawyer) makes everything like this feel heavier. As a non-lawyer, letting some dunderhead demand any feature, no matter how ineffective at its stated goal, be implemented in all operating systems feels like a potentially slippery slope. Today, input a number ≥18 when you get a new computer or OS. Tomorrow, some other step towards dystopia. I don’t know, it’s late and i’m tired.

So, who wants this⸮ The jays who made the law and nobody else. Ask anyone, i’m pretty confident that most people will see problems with this immediately. And if they need yet more reasons, (Hacker News has pointed out plenty of downsides to this for just about everyone. But before we all get too critical, i think it’s important to have a look at the actual bill too. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043

Done reading⸮ Great, let’s be critical.

The language suggests whoever wrote this doesn’t know the difference between the Internet and the Web, maybe doesn’t know what an operating system is, doesn’t know how peope use computers, and doesn’t have a grammar checker. In fairness, i don’t have a grammar checker either. But i proofread stuff i write, and none of it is as consequential as new laws.

So Little Timmy’s computer knows he’s somewhere between 0 and 13 years old, and has to pass that information along to any “publicly available internet website, software application, online service, or platform”, which are basically defined as something that distributes programs/apps for a computer that can download apps (so i guess if you can only sideload it’s not a computer). “internet website” sounds like it’s supposed to mean a website that lets you download things. That is, every website that’s still online can be downloaded with a regular browser, and in fact must be so your computer knows what the page you’re trying to read is and what to show you. Even if this doesn’t include every website (and i’m sure it’s not meant to), how is your OS or browser to know what sites let you download applications and what sites don’t⸮

Furthermore, 1798.501 (b) (1) “A developer shall request a signal with respect to a particular user from an operating system provider or a covered application store when the application is downloaded and launched.” That is, it is the duty of anyone who maintains a website where you can download stuff to request to know the age bracket of the user. At worst, this means the owner of every website visited by Little Timmy can see that a user account on his IP address is in the 0-13 bracket. At best, this means that just people behind specifically just app stores can see that same information.

People should not write laws about topics they don’t know anything about. Beyond all the obvious really important reasons why, it makes them look like fools to those of us who do know what they’re talking about, or at least what they think they’re talking about.

This is all true. Unless someone breaks into your home to physically steal your data, offline backups will always be more secure than anyone’s cloud.

I’ve thought about keeping a copy of my own assorted data on a hard drive in a safe deposit box, though i don’t know how much that would cost. If you’re really worried about people getting into these anyway, there are ways to protect entire drives with a password.

Does Invidious work?

Things were mostly broken (i couldn’t get fluxbox to start) until i used tasksel to install Cinnamon so i could use a browser to look some stuff up (i only have one computer). I removed Cinnamon but whatever it left behind fixed my system enough that i’m now typing this in LibreWolf with not too many weird graphical issues. Some stuff doesn’t work at all yet, like my laptop’s function keys for things like brightness and volume.

So all in all, better than i thought this might go.

Thank you for that last bit. “Just do it” out to be the advice i needed.

That has occurred to me. My current computer has enough storage (assuming i don’t lose hundreds of GBs to system log files like i did back in Mint) and i already have dependencies from several DEs from when i was trying some out and didn’t know how to fully uninstall the ones i don’t want.