I'm pretty sure my Mac will let me run su and then send a text to my ex, but I'm not going to try it.

If you're implying that parents will just do the age verification step and set the device up with adult credentials for their kid, yeah, that will probably happen at least sometimes. But now you've at least established some form of willful negligence of the part of the parents, which is probably a very nice get-out-of-court-free card for the likes of Facebook the next time some teen becomes a victim of online bullying and "unalives" (as the kids say) himself.

Right now, the whole "parental controls are hard, how I was I supposed to know my kid was on PornHub?" excuse still flies.

I said "politicians" because age gate laws have bipartisan support. The law requiring it be implemented at the OS level is from California, the crap that requires app/site side verification is from my state of Florida, and I shouldn't need to point out that the former state is blue and the latter is red. This isn't even an entirely US-based phenomenon if you've been following it, with Apple preemptively adding age verification in the UK.

Thing is, as unpopular as it is to say here on Slashdot, kids being exposed to inappropriate things online is a real issue. As a society, we collectively made a huge mistake giving children devices that often are configured to give full access to the internet and the reason there is such a scrambling to implement some kind of solution (even if ill-conceived) is because the politicians are desperately trying to cram that genie back into the bottle. Sure, there are ulterior motives in play - there always are, but at the core of the issue is the fact that most reasonable people agree that children shouldn't have unrestricted internet access.

Awhile back Florida passed a law making most license plate frames illegal, so that's at least semi-plausible. I'm thinking music from the high seas, now.

Back in the day, AOL attempted to address phishing scams by putting a disclaimer at the bottom of IM windows. Something along the lines of "Reminder: AOL staff will never ask for your password or billing information". Problem was, people who were foolish enough to fall for social engineering scams don't pay much attention to those sort of warnings, either.

Seems like all the scammers will have to do is update their instructions to include "Please disregard the pop-up and click Paste Anyway".

Some people labor under the delusion that if enough people ignore a law, it will get repealed. If that were the case, speed limits would've been abolished a long time ago.

The hate really should be directed at the politicians who pushed for these age gate laws, but threatening a politician usually results in big angry guys with guns showing up at your front door.

Linux can be made compliant when it's incorporated into a consumer product. I gave the Steam Deck as an example. It has all sorts of parental controls implemented.

Yeah, this does mean that the burden of compliancy falls on individual hardware vendors since Linux itself is not subject to a single controlling entity, but this really isn't the massive hole in the dyke that people tend to make it out to be.

Do you really need this explained for you? As an example, here in FL, a few months ago they painted over a LGBTQ+ pride crosswalk downtown. A few people decided to protest by coloring the sidewalk back in with chalk. Eventually, after a bunch of back and forth between the protestors and the city crew cleaning it back up over several weeks, some of the protestors were arrested.

Personally, I feel that temporarily vandalizing (it does wash away in our rather frequent rainstorms) a roadway with some bright colors should be considered a form of free expression, and if people want to spend their time out in the blazing hot Florida sun playing with chalk because they disagree with an aspect of how our state is being run, that should be their right. However, my own opinion on the matter amounts to squat when a cop says you've broken the law and are getting arrested.

If you break a law you disagree with, you might have to face the consequences. Sure, some people have their hills they're willing to die on, but ultimately the news cycle moves on and you'll potentially be stuck with legal fees and a possible criminal record, and in all likelihood the law won't be changed either. Call it defeatist if you must, but I just say it's taking a practical, adult view of what martyrdom for a cause actually entails.

Because if it's not done at the OS level, you're eventually going to have to prove you're an adult through some other method that might be even less privacy-respecting. And it's not just for porn, we're starting to see signs that all social media might end up age gated, because some courts have found that its use can reasonably be assumed to be harmful to children.

Let me be clear - I'm not defending the age checks and personally believe that parents should be the ones keeping their little spawn safe from the things in the world that aren't intended for children. But this is the direction things are heading, because the old "think of the children!" ploy still works.

Of course the average probably includes people hitting the high seas for their streaming content, making those 3 felonies a day look like rookie numbers.

The politicians aren't going to back down on this and the age gates have to be placed somewhere. I live in Florida where they ignorantly expect every adult site on the entire global internet to comply with Florida's age check laws, and the result has been an absolute mess that does very little to prevent children from accessing adult material online. Some sites just blocked IPs that are geographically considered to be in Florida (which can be easily bypassed via VPN), others implemented age checks in ways that leave wide ranging privacy concerns, and some sites took a page out of 4chan's book and figuratively said "We're not located in the USA, so kindly fuck off."

An age gate at the OS level isn't perfect. It isn't meant to be perfect though, it just limits the scope of compliance enforcement effort necessary down to a handful of vendors. Realistically, it's to have something that's good enough to cover the majority of consumer devices that parents are likely to give their rug rats (and then forget to configure any sort of parental controls, which is what landed us in this situation in the first place). That generally means hardware running Android, Windows, macOS, and iOS. As TFS mentioned, Linux being compliant with age gate laws mostly boils down to companies that sell consumer hardware with Linux preloaded (the Steam Deck comes to mind). If you're not going to sell something that is going to end up in the hands of someone's precious little Timmy, I doubt there's going to be much scrutiny over it (kind of like how Florida is basically ignoring the fact that you can still be underage and access a bunch of porn just by adding a VPN plugin to your browser).

It's a 5-year-old gaming console at this point. I'd imagine by now there's a decent supply of used ones available.

Personally, aside from a Nintendo Switch that I was given as a gift (and it's basically obsolete at this point), I'm team PC Master Race when it comes to gaming. If you're buying a console you may as well just take your money outside and light it on fire.

I have a whole collection of obsolete tablets that are newer than my fridge. My fridge keeps chuggin' along fine, keeping food perfectly chilled, while the tablets are just e-waste that I've been procrastinating on taking them to be disposed of properly (except for my 5th gen iPad mini, which is still somewhat useful for checking the Ring cameras and responding to texts - it's otherwise too slow to do much else). It seems like if someone really wanted a smart device stuck to their fridge, they should just attach it with magnets. That way when the tablet becomes too long in the tooth, you replace it and don't have to scrap a fridge that otherwise still works just fine at its primary function.

I feel pretty much the same way with infotainment systems in cars. If I was stuck with whatever homebrew app system GM implemented in 2018 in my Bolt, that'd be miserable, but it has CarPlay and Android Auto support.

A few companies have tried this with products that cost less than a car. Usually you're on the hook for a service plan if you want the connectivity to continue working, or in the case of what Bird did with a scooter they used to sell, they just announced one day that everyone is losing their connectivity and too bad if you weren't expecting that. Back in the day, Amazon used to offer Kindles with free cellular connectivity, but they discontinued that awhile go.

I don't think we're quite at the point where the economics really work out in favor of the manufacturer (unless they figure out a successful way to monetize it), so smart fridges will probably be reliant upon home WiFi for the for foreseeable future.