Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | throwaway87543's commentslogin

Authentication & Authorization is a OS feature. But instead of the OS collecting everyone's age, just give parents the ability to verify their child's phone is in child lockdown mode. Then the phone narc's to the website: "the user is under age". Not "the user was born on Feb 29 2001." We can rely on parenting to ensure a child doesn't have a non child mode phone. Enable parents, not control everyone.

Colorado is trying to do this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47097904

It's just terrifying to think of an internet that goes from open & usable, to requiring only approved government devices & systems. Within a very brief time.


Oh I would absolutely love this.

It would prove that many, many parents are incapable of being the responsible adults they should be and will just cave to their kids tantrums about their phone being unlocked so they can watch tiktoks for (sometimes more than) 8 hours a day.

Everyone in the UK is now using a vpn for everything because of these "won't somebody please think of the children" smucks. Now let's see if they make good on their end and lock their child's phone...



This sounds like a very neat guideline. I'd like to see this fleshed out further, but not at the cost of freedom (ie locked bootloaders etc)

OS vendors don't want to add this feature, though. That could be because they make their money from a percentage of IAPs and ads.

And when they are mandated, like in Brazil, we HN commenters hate that even more, because apparently in Brazil it's illegal to sell a phone without locked bootloader, or an OS that can run software from outside of an app store, because the user might install an OS or an app that doesn't comply with the child-lock law.


Well yes, they are actual real risks - a badly thought out law can literally make it illegal for a device to allow an adult to, say, unlock a device's bootloader to install open source software (EDIT: this example was in my comment before the OP edited theirs to add it there as well), because the device vendor can't guarantee that it will comply any more.

I don't think anybody is actually opposed to parental controls being mandated to ship in commercial operating systems, as long as it doesn't restrict the freedoms of adults to completely disable them or to install software that removes them or doesn't have them. The problem is when these features are forced on adults and restrict devices or computers 'just in case'.


IMHO a better approach would be two-layered tagging to indicate traffic from children.

Firstly traffic can be tagged by ISPs/cell phone companies, at the bill payer's behest (whose name and age has already been verified). Secondly, smartphone OSes can tag traffic at the behest of parental controls (which already exist).


FOSS doesn't mean that you get a right to break the law. Just because software patents exists in a society, that doesn't mean that FOSS does not.

It's a feature that has existed for years. And is built into every OS.

The US also locking the bootloaders has been extremely extremely extremely saddening. Just remarkably shit turn of events.

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is only within the US (controlled by Larry Ellison). You still get ByteDance.


Some people seem to want to believe that true thought is spiritual in nature. They will never accept that something physical and made by man could do it. They would stop believing humans are intelligent if given conclusive proof of how the brain works.


Pardon me, didn’t Apple win the exact same suit by Epic? Apple’s app store is fine, but Google’s isn’t?


The system is still working, just slowly. Conflicting rulings from lower courts in very similar cases will be appealed and get put before the Supreme Court, whose ruling will apply to everyone


If they even deign to hear it. Do the supremes even know what a smartphone is? I've never seen a more out of touch bunch of people with so much power.


Half the court are in their 50s, it isn’t 2016 anymore for better and worse.


It's always leg day in Chief Justice Alito's kangaroo court.


John Roberts is Chief Justice.


That's my impression as well. Beyond messed up if true, Android as least allows sideloading.


Two different cases, 2 different juries (OK the Apple one was a bench trial but you get my point) and neither one is binding precedent over the other.


But can Epic appeal then against Apple?


I imagine Google will appeal, and the whole shebang will be decided by the Supreme Court, applying to everyone.


This is probably where it is going. And yeah, it may cause some type of regulation of OS-integrated app stores and payment systems.


Were I Google I'd be appealling on the grounds Apple got away with it.


Did Apple pay companies not to deploy their own app stores? Oh, right, they were restrictive about even an app that had the same functionality as an Apple-made app, let alone competing app stores. This might get interesting.


They tried to use the apple case to get this suit dismissed. The judge already declined to dismiss the Google case


Well, if Google is willing to stop licensing Android to third parties and only sell Pixels, I’m sure they could


Both sides started appeals in July, iirc.


No, the cases were very different. Mainly because Google had a whole bunch of emails and contracts with other companies that Apple just doesn’t make.


Came here to say something similar.


Other than assembly, which barely qualifies as a language, what programming language is lower than C?


It does not need to be a relative statement in order to be correct.

The statement "C is not close to the instruction set of a modern CPU" does not need to be validated by specifying examples of languages that are closer.


But if you're going to say that "C is not a low-level language", then yeah you kinda do need other languages beneath it.


Well, firstly, I'm not saying it.

But no. That is what I meant when I said this is not a relative statement.

If the title said "C is not the lowest-level language" then your objection would be valid... but it doesn't and it's not saying that.

But before I go into some lengthy explanation: have you read the article, or are you responding to the title alone?


In general terms, any language aiming to be lower-level than C should

- have an "abstract" machine that is more concrete than C (and by extension less portable)

- be easier to lower into optimal assembly (especially loop ops)

- give you strong and precise compile-time guarantees about memory layout (padding, bitfields), variable sizes, register spilling, stack usage, etc.


Plenty to chose from since 1958's introduction of JOVIAL, when one cares to research what has happened in the world of systems programming outside Bell Labs, and UNIX/C taking over the server room.


Forth/joy maybe?


LLVM IR


Fortran, maybe?


B


Or T3X9, if you're prefer Algol-style syntax.


I think there is an argument that Brainfuck [0], et al, is lower than C, given that it eschews variables and functions.

[0] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Brainfuck


Low level means close to the processor, not small in scope.

You could argue brainfuck is machine language for a theroetical infinite tape machine, but such a machine can only exist when implemented in high-level software.


But is it possible to extract that much energy from the tides with current techniques? That starting point in their math may be invalid. But it is good to know that not very much energy is available from the tides.


If its not possible then we really shouldn't be very interested in it because it can't get us very far, 1% is a rounding error towards solving the CO2 PPM causing climate change.


You missed the part where he assumed that energy demand will increase 400 million times and took 1 percent of that


The difference any individual (or even a single small to medium sized business) can make is never more than a rounding error either - I'm not convinced that means we shouldn't be interested in such changes.


Looks like every time a lemmy instance gets posted, that instance gets nuked off the planet. Maybe if you want to post something from lemmy, you should find the mirror on lemmy.world or lemmy.directory and see if that can handle the traffic.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: