The danger in assuming that all your customers who request support are the sort of person who couldn't empty water from a boot with instructions written on the heel is that all of your competent customers will seek out your more respectful competitors, leaving you with only those who couldn't empty the boot, thus maximising your support costs.
It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. You can see these exact same market dynamics at work in the mobile telco industry. Newer online only upstarts able to save on costs because they don’t operate a retail store you can visit to get help resetting your email password.
It’s always amazing going to these stores and seeing the support they provide for frequent “how do I computer?” questions. To me, this is like going to the water department because you need a new faucet on the kitchen sink. We make no such distinctions about who fixes what for purveyors of Internet services though.
One time, I needed this. I lost my phone with a physical SIM card and needed a replacement that day. Now I'm trying to remember the eSIM transfer flow to know if this is still an issue.
But also, which MVNO should you go to? Carriers supposedly prioritize their own customers, so it feels a bit like running on spot instances.
> Carriers supposedly prioritize their own customers
They explicitly do, even among their own customers and plans. If you Google the carrier name plus QCI, you’ll find tables where people have documented, which plans are in which priority group
I've also seen MVNOs be denied frequency bands or cells that were in the highest demand, leading to worse connectivity despite being on the same network.
> But also, which MVNO should you go to? Carriers supposedly prioritize their own customers, so it feels a bit like running on spot instances.
If you are so paranoid, just get multiple SIMs? Most phones support that these days, especially multiple eSIM. And the plans are really cheap (at least where I live).
Mint (T-Mobile MVNO) has been great for me, $20/month/line and my one experience with international travel was good ($20 for 10 days). I used to be on Verizon and the quality of service doesn’t seem any worse while the price is dramatically lower.
Mint works well until it doesn't. I travel a lot and use voice over ip(VoIP). One day I called and got an automated message that my account needed funds. It didn't, my annual payment was months away.
My call to tech support was the generic worst. He insisted there was trouble with my current cell tower and I should reboot my phone. (ignoring the fact that I was able to get automated message). I explained I was using voice over ip, but the tech support didn't seem to understand that technology. Perhaps it wasn't in the script. I was on the call for about 30 minutes and eventually gave up. Phone started working about eight hours later.
Previous issue was with their roaming in foreign countries, however with VoIP that hasn't been an issue for years. So, a couple problems in about eight years. I rank them as one of the best among the terrible options.
Insisting on saying VoIP to the Mint rep instead of WiFi Calling (the term used by Apple, Google, Mint, and practically everyone else) is asking for a bad time.
eSIM transfers are an absolute nightmare on T-Mobile. I recently did two of them and both times, the transfer started but never finished, so I ended up with no service on either device. That means no ability to call their support line and no ability to receive the confirmation SMS they use to verify you are the correct person. They also immediately permanently nuke your physical SIM card so the only way to go back to sanity is to purchase another $10 physical sim card or get one of the physical sim cards that you load eSIMs onto (I did the latter so it won't self-destruct every time I do a transfer).
1. They only do transfers through their native app, not on their website. To log in to their native app, they will do SMS verification. So I sure hope you are still logged in before they lose your eSIM and leave you with no service at all.
2. If you are able to get into their native app so you can access their tech support, their AI chatbot will flat-out lie to you and tell you that T-Mobile cannot send you a QR code to download your eSIM (even though T-Mobile's own website states that they can). If you ask politely for a human, it will resist. I've found "connect me to a human you worthless fucking bot" is the secret passcode to get a real human.
3. If you request they send you a QR code, some of their support staff will ignore that request and still try to initiate the transfer through their app, so clearly requesting the QR code is not a common procedure.
4. When you request a QR code, even though you provide the EID, they will ask for an IMEI number. They then generate the QR code for whatever EID they have associated with your IMEI number in their database, completely ignoring the EID number you sent them. They did this to me _three_ times. The only way I managed to break the cycle was I sent them an IMEI number for a phone that was never on their network so they'd finally listen to me when I told them my EID number.
I'm never buying a phone without a physical sim card slot again. There's nothing wrong with the eSIM technology but the carriers have decided to make it as miserable as possible. The hardest part about transferring a physical SIM is finding a paperclip.
> When you request a QR code, even though you provide the EID, they will ask for an IMEI number.
Everything else you say is accurate but they do not require this, T-Mobile is the only major in the US that doesn’t match EID to IMEI. I know because I use a removable esim (esim.me) euicc with multiple phones. I have to read the super long eid off to support to activate it. I cannot activate service on this card with verizon or at&t as its eid doesn’t match to an imei for them.
I think you're misunderstanding. I'm not saying T-Mobile locks the EID and IMEI together. I'm saying their tech support will completely ignore any EID you send them and instead look up an EID in their database based on the IMEI you send them. If you manage to convince the tech support to actually listen to you and use the correct EID then yes, everything will work out fine and you'll be able to move the card across devices.
I was also using a removable esim (from jmp.chat) and they did this to me three times. Each time it went like this:
> Me: Please send me a QR code to download my esim. My EID is XXXXXXXX
> Them: Thanks for providing your EID, please send me your IMEI (the first time this was just a plain message, the 2nd and 3rd time they sent me a link to a form to submit my IMEI to them)
> Me: <sends them my IMEI>
<at this point, the first two representatives initiated a transfer through their app and told me to wait 2 hours and then the transfer would finish. I told them whatever automatic transfer they just initiated will not work and they _need_ to send me the QR code.>
> Them: What is your e-mail address
> Me: My e-mail address is XXXXX@XXXX.XXXX
and then they'd send me a QR code. I'd then attempt to download it to my jmp.chat esim and I'd get an error that the EID was incorrect. Then, I'd try using the QR code to activate the built-in eSIM on the phone with the IMEI that I sent them, and it would work, proving that they were looking up the EID for the IMEI that I sent them rather than paying attention to the EID that I started the chat with.
The 4th and final time, I sent them my Librem 5's IMEI which had never been on T-Mobile and does not support eSIM. They told me that the phone was carrier locked, I assured them it wasn't and explicitly told them "it is important the QR code is for the EID I provided you. The past representatives have ignored that, leading to the error message <pasted the error from EasyLPAC's logs that was something like EID is incorrect>". THAT time they finally listened and sent a QR code for the correct EID, which let me download the eSIM to my jmp.chat card. At that point I was able to move the card across devices without issue.
Apologies on getting back late but… I’ve never had that experience. Historically I would call during day and get someone stateside. They would ask for IMEI and I would say ‘it’s not in your db but EID works’ and then they’d let me read that off, never an issue. Now I use the chat, it’s faster since they just give a portal link you drop the details to.
Call during day or you get the Philippines and they don’t understand specific requests like this as well. If you must do it at night use the chat route.
As a counterpoint (not sure if this was t-mobile, apple, or both), I just upgraded from an iPhone 11 with physical sim, to iPhone 17 with esim.
All I had to do was hold the new phone next to the old one, and it just transferred the line over and deactivated the old sim automatically. I wasn't even in the US (so not even on their network), and it was stupidly seamless.
It sounds like t-mobile support has gone downhill. Last time I had to contact support was 2020, and it was really easy back then. I rarely had to wait more than 5 minutes to get a human, and I once had an issue escalated to the "executive resolutions" team and resolved to my satisfaction the day it was opened.
You were on the happy path. I just had to get involved for a family member that broke their Apple phone and couldn't get their SIM transferred. Even after adding them as an authorized user under duress, they had to physically go to a T-Mobile store to get their phone on the network.
Apple’s system mostly works. If you need to reissue an esim without being able to transfer from an existing device on T-Mobile though need to either call in and give imei or get past the chatbot and there’s a page text support can give you to enter details. I was never able to successfully use the shit t-life app’s manage esim option.
Personally switched from VZW to Google Fi. It's on TMOs network. As you can imagine, when engaging with Google's support was hilarious when there was something I needed, but overall I don't miss Verizon and pay drastically less.
Is Google Fi particularly cheap? Their normal prices seem to start at $35/month for 30GB of data which is more than Verizon's Visible plans at $25/month. (The current 50% off offer on Google Fi does seem a good deal though.)
I ended up switching to Mobile-X since I'm on wifi so much I only use a few gigs of data a month. $2/month + $1.90/GB vs Google Fi's flexible plan of $20/month + $10/GB.
I just buy local eSIM's online when I go abroad now. Lycamobile is usually good around Europe if you land in a country with them. Their UK and Portugal subsidiaries are £5 or €4 / month with 30-50GB in country including 12GB roaming in other European countries. Order before you go and get the eSIM QR code by email. But you must be in the appropriate country to activate.
The Google Fi plans with roaming are either $65/month (100GB) or $20/month + $10/GB. I often end up using quite a bit of data abroad.
My Google Fi is $20/m for connectivity and then $0.01/Mb until I hit 6Gb ($80) at which point everything after is no cost. Most of my data is on wifi, so my bill rarely goes above $25
For those of us who have crappy coverage with TMO, Verizon themselves offer a much better alternative to their postpaid service, called Visible. It's pretty hilarious how much better of an experience it is, and you are on the same network.
I haven't had any issues with tmobile coverage (that wasn't also a problem with verizon) in well over a decade now. Hell it even worked well in the dense hilly jungles of burundi. Verizon customer service was so bad before I switched I swore them off for life....
The single place I noticed verizon gets coverage and tmobile doesn't is three levels underground in a concrete parking garage.
Coverage is very specific to your situation. I've had basically no coverage on Verizon in offices in the Bay Area where T-mobile worked fine while colleagues could only get Verizon at home.
US Mobile gets you QCI8 (same priority as Verizon postpaid) when you're on the Verizon network with a 5G device, and they let you pay for QCI8 on AT&T.
USM is the only MVNO I've seen that actually advertises QCI tiers. I had to look the term up when I was initially considering them, as I'd never even encountered it before. It was a major factor in finally feeling confident I wouldn't be giving up too much by leaving AT&T.
Those stores generally turn a profit eventually. A smaller company is just going to struggle to afford building out the stores and running ads to get people in the door.
Isn't that the opposite though? Having a store for the customer to get face-to-face support is sometimes necessary even those who prefer it all to be online. It acts as a stop gap to people otherwise low support customers.
The newer upstarts you mention are self selecting for customers who would do everything they can to never make a support call. They are just another form of having a 15 minute wait time because online only is it's own customer service barrier.
No. In the case of cell phone carriers, the only times in the past 10 years I have ever darkened the door of a retail store is times when the carrier was too incompetent to let me get my problem solved another way. For instance, there was a time at AT&T where if you had acquired a brand new unlocked iPhone that needs eSIM, you needed to receive a physical piece of cardboard printed with a unique QR code on it in order to activate it successfully.
I’ve been with US Mobile for years now and never once felt the need for a physical store.
There's a lot of reasons for this. One of them is that it tends to be a lot cheaper to have one building in Denver to host support people than to have many buildings in every city.
Besides that concept, they're selling telephone and data services. It makes sense to -- you know -- make use of them.
When we had a telephone issue back in the landline days, we didn't load ourselves up into the car and go to a store to get help from someone in person; we instead used the phone.
(That may have been done by using the neighbor's phone, but whatever. We still have neighbors and not all of them are dicks. And these days, we still have cell phone stores for those who can't empty the water from a boot. The days of brick and mortar cell phone sales are not, at this time, numbered.)
With sims switching to e-sim there's basically no reason to have in person support for cellular service. There's nothing they can do, outside of what they can already do online or over the phone. Like, if you go to an AT&T store with a broken e-sim they can't wave a magic wand. They'll probably just reset it on their end, like they could do over the phone.
Some people just prefer going into a physical place and talking to someone in a face to face conversation they can understand. I’ll very rarely want to sit in a phone queue just to talk to “Jason” who has a thick Filipino accent sitting in a crowded support room talking through what sounds like a a 1kbps VOIP connection. And I’m never going to text chat an AI bot for help.
Contrast that to my kid who is horrified by in person interactions and thinks that the kiosks at McDonalds were the world’s greatest recent invention.
Not to mention people with disabilities that make one form of communication the only option.
People are different and good companies try to serve them all.
The person at the store has direct contact with the broken device, this is a much shorter feedback loop than telling you what to do, having you misinterpret it, having you read back the results, and then misinterpreting them.
For a few years now, I've found every support department has been trained to treat every single person as if they were a dumb 5 year old.
The condescending replies from the outset, the 'clear your cookies' first line response to every bug report, the ignoring everything you say because you /must/ be wrong, the weird need to explain that they understand your feelings and frustrations (before even expressing any frustration)...
Drives me insane. There is no breaking through it. You will continue to get LLM replies tweaked for 5 year olds.
There is no breaking through it because those LLM replies are not tweaked for 5 year olds due to managerial decree, they're tweaked for the average callers to those support departments due to cold hard reality.
If 99 out of 100 callers are wrong, are frustrated, and don't know how to clear their cookies, and then you call in, they'll treat you like those 99. Even if you're correct, just cheerfully trying to be helpful, and even if you did clear cookies literally identified the obvious typo in their Javascript that makes it work again or whatever, you're an outlier.
Maybe you can get that person to readjust their expectations for you, maybe you can't, and maybe their management can embark on a massive education and training effort to teach their customer support agents to assume that each new caller is an intelligent expert who's aware of and has already tried the obvious things, but tomorrow they will regress to the mean.
Is this not begging the question that 99 out of 100 were wrong? This totally depends if the aim is the solve problems or to reduce support costs - which are not necessarily the same thing.
If only 1% of tickets ever got past level 1 then okay but I doubt this is the case in most places. And if you already tried to fix your issue online there is nothing more frustrating than being told to do so repeatedly while on hold.
I have an issue today where a service accidentally cancelled my package but still charged me. I asked for it to be reinstated or refunded, and three times I got the same identical automated output pretending to be a person, the fourth attempt is simply a credit card charge back and a lost customer
I have a very similar issue where yesterday I found a company sent me to collections for not paying for an item that is paid for and I have the receipts and bank statements for. Trying to get the chat bot to drop the charge on my account is literally not possible, and I understand why, but why is it so excruciating to get in contact with someone to resolve this? The effort levels are totally disproportionate; they have an automated system that sends me emails and threatens me if I don't pay, but I cannot similarly have a 0 or 1 button process that removes that error.
One of the first things I did when I was involved in the set-up of online support ticket system for a GB rail retailer was https://xkcd.com/806/ compliance. If the support request body contains the phrase "Shibboleet" the ticket will be assigned to an engineer.
Equally it's not hard to teach front-line when to escalate, and ensure L2 and beyond are approachable. Even better if L2/L3 can keep half an eye on tickets that come in for anything that looks particularly interesting.
> One of the first things I did when I was involved in the set-up of online support ticket system for a GB rail retailer was https://xkcd.com/806/ compliance. If the support request body contains the phrase "Shibboleet" the ticket will be assigned to an engineer.
I get the feeling you wouldn't joke about this. I can't believe how amazing this is LOL. I /think/ I know which retailer...good to know!
> Equally it's not hard to teach front-line when to escalate, and ensure L2 and beyond are approachable. Even better if L2/L3 can keep half an eye on tickets that come in for anything that looks particularly interesting.
Right!? I did L2/L3 support many moons ago and it was very much my job to keep an eye on PFYs to ensure they weren't dismissing interesting tickets.
While I haven't heard of that idea being implemented, I have heard of the support page you're looking at determine who you got routed to if you started a support chat.
Nah, that doesn't wash. I can understand a default initial response for 99% of callers (a verbal FAQ as it were), but I do not accept the lack of breaking through. That is because managerial decree has mandated cost-cutting and chosen not to provide any real customer support.
After I exhaust the L1 flowchart I expect some real support. I've done my bit to prove it, I expect them to reply in kind.
The reality is that companies have gone on aggressive cost cutting to maximise profits, and customer support is absolutely included in that.
What next? Shrinkflation is because 99% of people expect smaller portions?
They know getting to L2/L3 support increases costs. Eg applying a refund when legally required, delivering what was contractually agreed etc.
Also, the more we accept people are 'dumb' and dumb down our interactions with them, the dumber everyone will get. Do teachers not need to believe in the capacity of children, lest education totally go to hell?
I used to work tech support. Those lines are there because they work. In only 9 months, I had a few different people tell me they were pc repair techs and knew what they were doing, and I didn't need to do the basics.
I did them anyhow because the company said so, and I found that more often than not, it fixed the problem.
If I had sent that to second-level support without making sure of it, I'd have been written up.
So yes, they're trained to treat callers like they don't know what they're doing, because they often don't. Even if they claim to.
The best thing you can do is just go along with it quickly and get it over with, even if you've already done it. There's no way around it.
But my problem and main point is that now L2/L3 doesn't seem to exist, or is way way harder to access.
When I did L1, I was trained to permit escalation. Now, it seems people are trained to gaslight people that actually nothing is broken and it's all their head.
I ran an enterprise help desk for a few years. I wasnt in the day to day, but would listen to calls sometimes. The reality is, dumb 5 year olds are often smarter.
We had a large (250k) workforce with a pretty wide variance in roles. We had probably about 100 people in the call center, although some of them did more interesting stuff too. It was a very good support organization with multichannel contact capabilities and really good, well paid staff.
Basically there was a barbell distribution with the lowest ranked people and highest ranked employees
being the worst. (Think attorneys and other special IC and middle managers. Executives had dedicated support and didn’t use this method.) The most expensive 20% of users make 80% of the calls. The high ranking ones were dumber to deal with and took more time, the low ranking ones called too often for dumb reasons but resolved quickly.
I cannot imagine the hell on earth the general public could be.
I was a programmer at a small company that had their programmers field tech support calls and there is a good reason they do this... most of the people calling in are dumb as rocks when it comes to whatever they needed help with... some called while driving for help that required you to be in front of a computer.
The real issue is that L2/L3 barely exists anymore. L1 scripts I can deal with. But when escalation just loops you back to the same script read by someone else, that's where it breaks.
At most places, 95% of the customers are dumb as rocks. And 95% of the support staff is also dumb as rocks. So they're conditioned to assume everyone calling in is an idiot, and it's very likely that whoever you're talking to is not equipped to understand what you're saying to try to convince them that you're not.
My favorite instance of this was with an ISP that rhymes with Bombast where it was very clear that the modem wasn't getting a signal. The lights indicated it, and I was also able to connect to the modem's internal monitoring and see that it wasn't seeing anything on the line. The support agent kept asking me to reboot my computer.
While I tend to lean towards libertarian the reality is that "someone will fill the market gap and customers will leave" is largely a myth. Even without lock in or other reasons the market tends to be rather shallow with only a few choices. Maybe HP is the instigator but it largely signals to their competitors that "hey you can be abusive too". This creates a casual follow-the-leader collusion then everywhere sucks and there's nowhere to go anyway so why leave.
To an extent, but with caution and charity. A lot of exceptionally good people have come from bad families - one of the Borgias was a saint, for example. A lot of exceptionally nasty people seem to have perfectly nice families.
Of course sometimes people who are, for example, brought up to be racist, are racist.
You'd be surprised how often the beliefs of the father/grandfather are those of the son/grandson, not to mention how often they feel the need to avenge for the perceived injustices or slights done to their parents
My family's first broadband internet connection, circa 2005, came with a monthly data quota of 400 MB.
The fundamental problem of journalism is that the economics no longer works out. Historically, the price of a copy of a newspaper barely covered the cost of printing; the rest of the cost was covered by advertising. And there was an awful lot of advertising: everything was advertised in newspapers. Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist were a section of the newspaper, as was whichever website you check for used cars or real estate listings. Journalism had to be subsidised by advertising, because most people aren't actually that interested in the news to pay the full cost of quality reporting; nowadays, the only newspapers that are thriving are those that aggressively target those who have an immediate financial interest in knowing what's going on: the Financial Times, Bloomberg, and so on.
The fact is that for most people, the news was interesting because it was new every day. Now that there is a more compelling flood of entertainment in television and the internet, news reporting is becoming a niche product.
The lengths that news websites are going to to extract data from their readers to sell to data brokers is just a last-ditch attempt to remain profitable.
I remember getting punishment from parents for downloading 120MB World of Tanks update over metered home internet. Our monthly quota was 250MB. It was not that long ago, 2010.
In the late '90s, a friend recommended I download some freeware from a website. It was 1.2MB. I told him "are you crazy? 1.2MB? It's gonna take a whole week!"
> The fundamental problem of journalism is that the economics no longer works out.
Yes it does, from nytimes actual earning release for Q 2025:
1. The Company added approximately 450,000 net digital-only subscribers compared with the end of the third quarter of 2025, bringing the total number of subscribers to 12.78 million.
2. Total digital-only average revenue per user (“ARPU”) increased 0.7 percent year-over-year to $9.72
2025 subscription revenue was 1.950 billion dollars. Advertising was 565 million that includes 155 million dollars worth of print advertising.
Sure operating profit is only 550 million very close to the advertising revenue, but the bulk of their income is subscriptions, they could make it work if they had to. My suspicion is that if they dropped all the google ads they could have better subscription retention and conversion rates as well.
A lot of free government phone plans supplied to homeless, parolees etc in the USA only come with 3GB of transfer credit, which is usually burned up in about 3 days, leaving them without any Internet access. (or sometimes it'll drop to a throttled connection that is so slow that it can never even load Google Maps)
> This website is produced by BBC Global News Ltd, a commercial company that is part of BBC Studios, owned by the BBC (and just the BBC). No money from the licence fee was used to create this website. The money we make from it is re-invested to help fund the BBC’s international journalism.
There was a case where UK based influencer got into FTC trouble for the CSGO Lotto gambling site. He was promoting it without disclosing he had a stake in the site.
Ignoring all the tedious 'no, you're a bad person for having different priorities and beliefs to me' comments that this will inevitably inspire, I have to ask: why does the operating system need to be involved in this? The intended target of the regulation seems to be app stores.
> why does the operating system need to be involved in this?
The goal in my mind is to have an account a parent can setup for their child. This account is set up by an account with more permissions access. Then the app store depends on that OS level feature to tell what apps are can be offered to the account.
Let say the the age questions happen when you install the app store. That means if you can install the app store while logged in as the child account the child can answer whatever they want and get access to apps out side of their age range. The law could require the app to be installable and configurable from a different account then given access or installed on the child account, however at a glance that seem a larger hurdle than an os/account level parental control features.
The headline calls this age verification, but the quote in the article "(2) Provide a developer who...years of age." Make it sound way different and much more reasonable than what discord is doing.
I would much rather have OSs be mandated with parental control features than what discord is currently doing. I am going to read the bill later but here is how discord age verification could work under this law.
During account creation discord access a browser level api and verifies it server side. discord no knows if the OS account is label as for someone under 13 years, over 13 and under 16, over 16 and under 18, or over 18. Then sets their discord account with the appropriate access.
No face scan, no third party, and no government ID required.
> The goal in my mind is to have an account a parent can setup for their child. This account is set up by an account with more permissions access. Then the app store depends on that OS level feature to tell what apps are can be offered to the account.
That sounds like an OS feature that parents would like to have. Probably has some market value. Maybe just let the market figure that one out.
Or, we could have an overbroad law passed that torpedoes every open-source OS in existence. If I were MS, Google, or Apple, that'd be a great side benefit of this law. Heck, they probably already have this functionality in place.
The problem here is legally-mandated age verification, not where it is placed (although forcing it into all OSes is absolutely ...). The gains are minimal for children and the losses are gigantic for children and adults. I'm not keen to have children avoid blisters by cutting off their feet.
Put control back with the parents. Let them buy tech that restricts their children's access. This law doesn't protect children from the mountains of damaging content online.
And let all the adults run Linux if they want to without requiring Torvalds to put some kind of age question in the kernel and needing `ls` to check it every single run.
> That sounds like an OS feature that parents would like to have. Probably has some market value. Maybe just let the market figure that one out.
If there was a competitive market for OSs this probably would work, but we do not really have that. Getting the market to be competitive likely either takes considerable time, or other forms of government intervention. If there really was a competitive market then this would have been a solved problem ~15-20 years ago since parents have been complaining about this for ~25-30 years at this point.
> Or, we could have an overbroad law passed that torpedoes every open-source OS in existence. If I were MS, Google, or Apple, that'd be a great side benefit of this law. Heck, they probably already have this functionality in place.
I do not think the law does that. Either a additional feature making age/birth date entry and age bracket query available, or indicated the os is not intended for use in California, both seem to let developers continue along like normal. edit Or, I think, indicate that it is not for use by children.
> The problem here is legally-mandated age verification, not where it is placed (although forcing it into all OSes is absolutely ...). The gains are minimal for children and the losses are gigantic for children and adults. I'm not keen to have children avoid blisters by cutting off their feet.
In this case the mandate is entering an age/birth date at account creation where you can lie about said age/birth date. The benefit is the ability of an adult to set up parental controls for a child account.
> Put control back with the parents. Let them buy tech that restricts their children's access. This law doesn't protect children from the mountains of damaging content online.
This puts control in the parents hands. When they set up their child's account they can put in their child's age, or not, they can make it an adult account.
> And let all the adults run Linux if they want to without requiring Torvalds to put some kind of age question in the kernel and needing `ls` to check it every single run.
So from the literal reading of the law the age checks are only required when "a child that is the primary user of the device". It does not need to effect accounts where the primary user is not a child. Nor does it seem like any application needs to run the check every time the application is launched.
The law unfortunately does require:
> (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.
So in the case where a child is the primary account/device user. The app needs to request the signal at least once when first launched, though it is not required to do anything with it. Delegating that to the package manager would make sense, but this part of the law should be modified, apps that can not use the signal for anything should not be required to request it, 'ls' for example.
I agree. The headline says "all operating systems, including Linux, need to have some form of age verification at account setup", which is pretty inaccurate.
It's just asking for some OS feature to report age. There's no verification during account setup. The app store or whatever will be doing verification by asking the OS. Still dumb to write this into law, but maybe not a bad way to handle the whole age verification panic we're going through.
I think the answer is quite simply: Follow the money. General-purpose computing is scary to big, soulless corporations. They want you to rely on them, not to be able to do stuff yourself. (They want to keep that power for themselves.)
Age verification is the quickest road to ending general-purpose computing, because it plays on people's knee-jerk emotions. It won't do it by itself, but it'll goes a long way towards it.
Because it's the lowest common denominator between the user and every online interaction. The bill basically says provide a date-of-birth as metadata to accounts and provide an API to query the age bracket, not even the age, of the user to applications. It's a privacy-aware, mostly reasonable approach that shifts responsibility to the owner/administrator of a device to enforce it. It's basically just mandating parental controls.
I'm trying to understand how this is even a bad thing. Where is the privacy invading verification? Surely a given OS can implement the API response however it wants? If you're root, tell me your age. If you're not, (a child account), the admin (their parent) sets the age. Seems fine?
Well the problem is, there is no consensus standard. The onus is on every individual vendor to figure out how to comply. And it's so poorly written that there is no clear path to compliance. Even attempting to comply is burdensome and subjects you to a lot of legal risk. Only the largest vendors can afford to take on this risk. For others, the only winning move is not to play. Classic regulatory capture.
Even ignoring everything else, at a minimum it is backwards.
There is no reason to tell the application, and by extension their developers, how old the user is. The application should tell the user what bracket it is appropriate for and then the operating system could filter appropriately without any of the user’s identifying information leaving their system.
This is also technically superior because it moves the logic for filtering out of being custom implemented by each and every single application to a central common user-controlled location; you do not have to rely on every application developer doing it right simultaneously.
It's a lot easier to add an API that's opt-in for an application that needs it. What's the appropriate way an OS should handle an application that doesn't declare this new property? Fail open? Fail closed? It would quickly turn into a mess. IMO it's better to do it this way because the applications that need it (browsers, chat clients, etc.) will use it to provide legal shielding. This isn't a technical problem they're trying to solve, it's a legal liability one. I generally like this approach, but I think there's no reason to mandate that an application use the API, just mandate that if they do they are considered to have real knowledge of the age range of the user in question. If you provide the API, the incentive to use it is already there for the applications it's needed for the most.
So a application that wants to filter will categorize their services privately and then write custom filtering logic, but will not just categorize their services publicly? That is nonsense.
And your point about fail open versus closed also makes no sense since if there are zero repercussions to not writing filtering logic then nobody would even bother. If there is liability, then obviously everybody will fail closed and every application developer needs to evaluate and change their application to only allow acceptable usage. This is much harder if they have to write custom filtering logic instead of just publishing their data categorization.
Or just do what reasonable states do and create liability for distributing child inappropriate things to children, and require distributors to use a commercially reasonable way to validate age. The law doesn't need to say specifically how to do it, and it certainly doesn't need to mandate things on unrelated third parties like OS vendors and device manufacturers. The people who want to distribute adult content can work with OS vendors to develop acceptable liability shields for themselves.
> The application should tell the user what bracket it is appropriate for
How does this work with applications that have a wide array of content of varying appropriateness, for example web browsers? The obvious thing to do is for sites to self-report for 18+ content and have the browser query the OS using this newly mandated API and refuse to download/show the associated content. You really need both sides here for this to work well.
Y'all are like Dilbert with the shock collar on, "It's not so bad." It's requiring all operating systems, apps, and online services to add age checks. It adds friction to the process of developing stuff. If there's something you do not want to do especially in California of all Goddamn places (swear to God, Wozniak would be spinning in his grave if he had one) it's add friction to the software development process with government-mandated code paths. But what do I know. This is a site actually called Hackernews, where the answer to all large-scale social problems is "that's why we need more government regulation".
Companies like OpenAI are advocating for this because it shifts the burden of responsibility off them. They don’t have to age verifying Microsoft is handling that for them.
As a startup owner, if there has to be age verification, then I'm all for doing that at the OS level. As a human with privacy concerns, I'll continue using Linux.
I think doing this on an OS level might be the most privacy focused way to do this but the issue is that this is not going to be the way this is implemented.
Like, I’m not American and in Germany we have ID cards that actually have your age encoded on an NFC chip in the card and an ID number that encodes the age. Like, age is part of the ID number and checksum.
You could totally do all of this age verification offline on device and just expose an API that offers the age of the user to applications. You’d never need to talk to the internet for this, the API just says if you are a minor or adult, the browser can pass that to websites who don’t need to collect personal data and everything is fine.
But that’s not going to happen. It’s gonna be some AI facial recognition kinda garbage that is gonna send your face in every angle to Apple or Microsoft or another third party.
As is common these days they are going to try really hard to absolve you as the user of any responsibility for the sake of protecting kids so they can’t let this be a simple offline thing where your personal information never ever have to leave the device because what if kids find a way around it? Well the obvious answer is don’t let your kids just use a computer without supervision but if people would do that we’d not be in need of this garbage anyway.
It very well might. We don't know. Secure boot enforcement of OS that comply with this requirement is not part of the law, but it is not clear how this law will be interpreted by regulators. There are certainly lobby interests that would prefer that outcome.
I know, but it's just weird that there are people who have such strong conviction that they would risk their reputation, livelihood, or lives for it. Then there are people like above who, even though they know it is a huge privacy violation, they are willing to back it because it would make their business a little more profitable. Just boggles the mind.
Where the hell did I ever say I backed any of it? You are making up shit in your head that simply is not there. Maybe you need a reality check, or go back to reddit.
What I did say was:
>if there has to be age verification
That is far, far different than saying I want that shit. I do not make the laws, and I wouldn't vote for it either, so please, get your head out of your ass.
The operating system needs to be involved because its the easiest set of actors to penalize for non-compliance.
There are essentially two desktop operating systems, Windows and macOS. Linux is a decimal point and too fractured to worry about.
There are essentially two mobile operating systems, Android and iOS. And while Android is fractured, Google still has reasonable control they can exert.
This is (weirdly) the smart way to do this type of law.
Make the consumer OS providers add an age signal. That property can be bound to an account with the inability to change it.
Behold, "universal enough" parental controls which will require only a handful of lawsuits to litigate.
Arguably the operating system (or potentially the user-agent) is the exact place to do this.
What I don't get is why it can't just all be client side. An app will just signal "I am going to show 16+ information" and the OS will either show it or not show it. No need to communicate anything.
Giving people the choice to limit a device for their children is okay by me.
> why does the operating system need to be involved in this?
Well, the politicians probably meant to say “Apple, Google, Microsoft, plus maybe Sony and Nintendo”
i.e. the companies that already have biometrics, nigh-mandatory user accounts, app stores linked to real identities, parental controls, locked down attested kernels, and so on.
If phones had workable parental controls that let parents opt their kid into censorship, that’s better than the give-your-passport-to-the-porn-site approach the UK have taken.
Of course if they have applied it to every OS, not just the big corporate-controlled options, that’s a dumb choice.
The law defines an operating system provider as "a person or entity that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system software on a computer, mobile device, or any other general computing device." If the intent were to target mobile vendors or app store vendors, I would be fine with it, but that's not the text. Of course it's the case that US lawmakers often write incoherent or extremely onerous legislation and then turn around and say, like, "Oh that's obviously not what we actually meant. We don't know what any of this stuff is, it just sounded good."
I don't know, but arguably the OS version is better for privacy, as each app can just trust the signal sent by the OS instead of collecting a bunch of personal/biometric data.
until they decide that the OS now needs to collect a bunch of personal/biometric data to avoid people lying about their age or tricking the OS into sending a different signal than the OS should.
> until they decide that the OS now needs to collect...
It doesn't. The device (not the "OS") is registered with government authorities. The device is associated with a single human for the purposes of age verification. And it's a one time action at the time of association.
Probably because the OS is the only layer that's both upstream of the app store and (in some ecosystems) in a position to provide a standardized, system-level signal
Because that's the first layer that deals with user accounts, and subsequent layers commonly base off of identity information stored in there. Just like how and why every other shared interface exists.
The goal is to lock down anonymous computing and increase control of government and reach of the surveillance state. It isn’t to save little Billy from seeing a titty.
After I got Indefinite Leave to Remain (permanent settled status) in the UK, I had to buy a new phone that had NFC, because the new eVisa system required me to scan the chip in my passport to link it to the system. In general, the UK retains its mildly chaotic character - the 'disorderly order' that Kate Fox frequently mentions in her book Watching the English - but the immigration system is very much being tightened up due to political sentiment.
As problematic as it is to need a contractual relationship with a US company to interact with the UK Government, I'm sure that if you spoke with someone in the Government Digital Service who was involved with this, they'd tell you it was the least bad option.
I would half like to move back to the UK, but I'm terribly worried that after jumping through all the hoops so that my EU citizen partner could come with us and be a part our children's lives that Reform would get in and throw out all the "undesirables" (basically anyone without a British Passport at first, sure they won't stop there). I'm really not sure how likely them attaining power is, but it sure looks like a terrible but possible future from afar. :(
All of my EU friends living in the UK have now applied for citizenship.
The risk profile for "I have indefinite leave to remain" has moved from "this won't be an issue at all" to "we have no trust in the government on this" in a few short years.
I really cannot understand why people who are permanently settled in a country would not apply for citizenship.
It is not a matter of trust. Unless you are a citizen your right to remain in a country is always subject to the approval of the government and rules can change. it is the point of the distinction between "indefinite leave to remain" and citizenship.
> I have noticed that only white people commit to living in the UK without becoming citizens.
Alas, you've not discovered a hidden pattern, except maybe a hidden pattern in the kinds of people you socialize with. Chinese nationals cannot hold dual citizenship, and renouncing their Chinese citizenship creates very serious complications, including around property and inheritance when parents die, which you would be aware of if you knew any Chinese person well enough to have had this conversation with them.
Based on gov.uk immigration system statistics data and tables, among those with indefinite leave to remain, the most likely to seek citizenship are British Overseas Citizens, Austrians and Lithuanians. The least likely are Moroccans and Venezuelans.
Weird in the Venezuelans case, as there is no restrictions for double nationality and having only Venezuelan citizenship doesn't have many advantages. I would guess that it is because most Venezuelans living there already have an European passport due to parents/grandparent, so no need/can't get a third
Cannot only if the other European country does not allow dual nationality.
If they are permanently settled in the UK surely it would be better to have British citizenship rather than that of a country they do not live in?
The nationalities listed are all very small groups in the UK. maybe they are not really permanently settled? Someone who moves somewhere for work might end up living there a decade (and in the UK that would mean getting indefinite leave to remain) and then returning.
I admit not knowing a lot of Chinese nationals, but I do know a very wide range of people. Of course, issues with property and inheritance only apply to people who have sufficient for it to be a major issue.
Could you link to the stats showing that? What about all the other countries? What is the position of BNOs?
Indefinite leave to remain is not the same as permanently settled - there is a difference between long term and the rest of your life.
Apart from the fact that some countries don't allow dual citizenships so you would loose the other one:
- cost: ~2k
- time: 2 exams
- paperwork required to keep other nationalities in some cases
- after feb 2026, you can only re-enter the UK with a British passport (more cost) or with extra paperwork to enable your other passport (more costs ~500)
Countries that do not allow dual citizenship is a good reason, and maybe the cost and paperwork required by other countries (although, unless you really cannot afford it its worth getting it to cover yourself in case rules change). I did it myself.
The same goes for the cost of British citizenship. once you have it its just the cost of renewing passports (about £100/decade at current rates) for the rest of your life. That £2,000 is much less than the cost of renewing some types or residence visa and gives you the security of being a citizen.
Some countries don't allow dual citizenship, which means you'd no longer be a citizen of your country of origin, you know, where your family might live.
I have plenty of friends who otherwise would apply, and ILR should be sufficient in a democratic government following social and political contracts.
Yes: Austria and Slovakia still do, possibly others as well. And Germany only stopped preventing it within the last year or two.
The UK will help circumvent this for current British citizens when they acquire new citizenship in one of those countries (eg. America famously makes you hand over your old passport, but the UK will happily ship you a replacement in an unmarked envelope), but that doesn't really work so well in the other direction.
this was true until a few years ago for Italy and France too, getting one nationality would instantly lose you the other. I think this isn't true anymore, but I do have a friend who lived in the country for decades and never picked up the nationality because of this.
It does seem scarily likely, but he still has a few years to really screw things up before we get there. Fingers crossed.
Without a large-scale cock-up, I don't see Starmer as inspiring enough to stop him unfortunately. Lets hope someone else steps up to the plate with a bit more charisma.
I think you are worrying too much and a lot of this is media hype. Their main focus is small boats and people entering the country illegally. If they do restrict them more you are almost certainly better off getting your partner a visa before (but I think you would need to marry to get a spouse visa though).
> Reform would get in and throw out all the "undesirables" (basically anyone without a British Passport at first, sure they won't stop there)
I think that is an exaggerated view from a distance. I see no evidence they can do that, or want to. At the time of the Brexit campaign Farage said he wanted skilled immigrants (he gave the example of Indian doctors immigrating in the 1970s as the wort of thing he wanted). Nor can the country afford to lose skilled people. Its worth remembering that Reform would not agree to what Elon Musk wanted in return for funding so I think its safe to assume Reform would not be as extreme as the current US government.
I am of foreign birth, as is my younger daughter (she was born abroad) and I am not particularly worried. I would worry if Rupert Lowe's Restore party started making gains, or Ben Habib's Advance party.
> I'm really not sure how likely them attaining power
They are doing well in the polls now but my feeling is they are peaking. Letting on too many Conservative defectors makes them look at lot less of an anti-establishment party (a huge part of their appeal) and they are becoming too extreme (I think in reaction to the splash, mostly on social media) made by Advance and Restore (one of those is what Elon Musk endorses, so that gives you an idea where they are).
The government can very easily change your status from "legal" to "illegal" by flipping a bit. And the newspapers, who are driving this, don't care about skills, they care about the raw numbers. The members of the public driving this don't even care about immigration status, but skin colour.
They can change people's status, but I am saying they will not. It is not Reform party policy (as Rupert Lowe keeps pointing out!) and it would be disastrous to do it.
The net immigration numbers are falling!
I disagree about the public. Its very clear that the opposition to immigration is almost entirely about small boats and illegal entry.
As for skin colour, of the tiny number or racists I have heard of in real life, one comment repeated back to me made it clear the person involved preferred at least some Asians (those with skills etc.) to Eastern Europeans.
> Its very clear that the opposition to immigration is almost entirely about small boats and illegal entry.
No, that's just the current talking point.
A decade ago, small boats not in the news, somehow managed to still be a big talking point on Brexit campaign. Worse, part of the Brexit campaign was scare-mongering that the EU had made it so the UK had no control over its borders, no control over its immigration laws, and even had one poster further scare-mongering that the UK would be forced to allow in the entire population of Turkey* even though Turkey wasn't actually in the EU nor did anyone think it would get in any time soon and the UK had a veto on expansion anyway (plus the more fundamental pretentiousness in thinking they'd want to come en-masse anyway, given that Turkish people are like everyone else, in that almost none of them really care for the idea of moving to the UK).
Even for "unlawful entry" of asylum seekers who were still allowed to lawfully claim asylum, the UK was part of the Dublin III system, which oh-so-conveniently meant the UK could argue that all the other countries most people would need to go through to get to the UK should have taken them first, to which I'd like to say this:
J'ai obtenu la note D au GCSE de français, et pourtant j'ai étudié la langue à l'école. À votre avis, comment un demandeur d'asile lambda originaire de l'ancien Empire britannique va-t-il s'en sortir?
Most asylum seekers do, in fact, stop at the first safe country; the UK has always only had a tiny fraction of the total, and loses its collective mind anyway.
Have you ever spoken to any member of the public in support of Reform to base your opinions on, or is this just similar to when every single brexit voters (millions of people) was assumed to be racist and uneducated
Almost everyone voting Brexit was uneducated on the issues, a fact rapidly borne out by actually speaking to them. Actually "uneducated" is quite charitable as quite a lot are racist also. I don't know how anyone can claim otherwise with a straight face.
Which issues were they uneducated on? How many did you speak to, and I'm not talking about the engagement-bait bots on places like the Trending side of Twitter
A lot of Republican supporters would have, and still might, insist that the US's current purge is focused on "criminals" despite the quota-driven shitfest it's become. People say a lot of things, and they rarely line up with policies in practice.
They have missed the EU settled scheme so its going to have to be a normal visa - so either the partner has to be skilled or wealthy enough to qualify, or it has to be a spouse visa.
Ah right. Well there are changes incoming shortly for that which could either be favourable or not depending on partners circumstances. Eg there is a high earner thing that shortens path etc
If (more likely when but gotta stay optimistic) the fascists do take power there will be people that fight. There already are so many people standing up. My recommendation for a non-brit would unfortunately be to avoid moving to anywhere that could be classified as Little England. I'm fortunate enough to live in the bubble that is the "UKs happiest city", and while you cant pretend racism / xenophobia are extinct here, people do stick up for eachother and mind their own businesses. The UK is great, even so for immigrants, its just finding those pockets of tolerance and kindness in an ever growing sea of shite. British people need to focus on rebuilding our strong local communities that were smashed by Thatcher, and then this too shall pass.
Its funny how all the racism is happening somewhere else in the country, but very few people experience it themselves. Survey data supports this.
I have lived in several parts of the UK, have friends in many more. I currently live in a very white village. I am visible ethnic minority. I see no sign of racism. I know of a few overt racists at second or third hand (they know someone who knows someone I know).
There is lots of racism on social media, but even most of that is in reaction to ragebait posts, some posted by people who are not even British.
That's great for you! Not sure a single anecdotal experience outweighs the measurable rise in race related crime and the systemic issues that have long been present. Add onto that the sheer number of people who voted reform at the last election, and their pretty stellar local election performance thats forecast to only improve. Then cherry on top it with the anti-migrant rhetoric pushed by the majority of British news firms that has undoubtedly ended up influencing some pretty diabolical policy decisions (Rwanda, changes to student visas, leaving the EU when the leave side campaigned on an almost solely anti-migrant platform). And I guess were just ignoring the actual fascist marches in London over the past couple of years? Or the burning of hotels housing refugees? You can bury your head in the sand if you want, and I really am glad you're not suffering, but people are. Them today, you tomorrow.
> As problematic as it is to need a contractual relationship with a US company to interact with the UK Government, I'm sure that if you spoke with someone in the Government Digital Service who was involved with this, they'd tell you it was the least bad option.
They might tell you that, but that does not mean its true. IMO they do not care about dependence on American services. It is very much Somebody Else's Problem.
The difference is that at the strip club, you show your ID to the bouncer, who makes sure its valid and that the photo matches your face, and then forgets all about it. Online, that data is stored forever.
The principle of online ID checks is completely sound; the implementation is not.
The implementation is sound. Instead of getting an ID, the bouncer gets a serial number from you, he calls his government contact who tells him you are of age. The serial number is meaningless to him.
This would be impractical in meatspace, but works perfectly fine on the internet.
Instead of checking your ID, the bouncer sends you over to the shady broker, who takes a video of your face, photograph of your ID, checks you in the various databases (who knows, maybe you've been a bad boy previously), and only then gives you the permission slip to enter the club.
The data stays with them[1].
I think you grossly underplay the current practices.
[1] there's no hard, irrefutable proof companies like Persona (intimately connected with known law abusers, ie US government) keep their promises or obey the law.
Where in your metaphor are the club next door using Persona instead of that implementation, and the EU's reference implementation requiring a Google Play integrity check to acquire a serial number in the first place?
You're proposing that every porn site on the planet pings a user's government's API to see if they're adult or not? In other words, that any random site is able to contact hundreds of APIs.
Huh, interesting. Do you know if the government sees the identity of the company and the person being verified?
[edit] I did a little reading and it sounds like the company does not query the government with your ID. You get the cryptographic ID from the government, and present it to a company who is able to verify its validity directly. My source is mostly this: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/age-verification-europ...
Explanation: It's just that... you have all these squishy parts, master. And all that water! How the constant sloshing doesn't drive you mad, I have no idea.
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