@Suiseiseki @yrrsinn @cy @jpaskaruk

> If you give the government a mm, they always take a km - the government *will* jump right in and make it illegal to enter a untrue DoB and also demand that further spying is implemented.

If that happens, we should complain about that. To complain about an OS offering the *feature* of setting a user DoB is silly. It's like saying an OS shouldn't have an audio stack because what if the government uses it to spy on people's private conversations. An optional DoB field that allows applications to query it and block access to websites that advertise a minimum age via an HTTP header, is just a very simple feature that increases freedom by giving parents more capabilities.

> The age of the user is none of the websites business and would allow for enhanced spying - such malicious feature must never be implemented.

The browser doesn't have to tell any website the user's age. All that happens is that the HTTP response includes a header such as "Min-User-Age: 18" and then maybe the client happens not to make any additional HTTP requests to the server because the user was blocked, and the server can't even tell this apart from the case of the user deciding to close the tab after looking around on the front page.

> Maybe that would be a good idea.
> It really isn't that hard to be there and appear at random so browsing ends up supervised.

This is silly. Parents are often busy, burnt out, etc. and may get some well deserved respite while the kid is surfing the web to watch silly Mr. Beast videos (OK, maybe those should also be blocked, but you get the point) or playing Fortnite with friends. Sorry, of course I mean Freenite, since the kid shouldn't be using proprietary games, but you get the point. Kids can also use the web for research.

> I am dubious of that claim - most of the revenue seems to come from adults, who have a credit card, that are stupid enough to actually pay.

I've had an LLM generate some slop since I'm lazy (see screenshot) and it claims that up to 25-30% of the total industry revenue is still from ads. It's not unreasonable to think that ad revenue from minor site visitors accounts for up to 5% of the total revenue of the entire industry. That's enough to make them not want to do anything against it. Why would a soulless corporation willingly give up a few percent of its revenue for some moral reason that's not enforced?

> The chance of addiction is pretty much exactly the same as addiction to anything else.
> Wait, when did it go from proprietary pornography to violence?

A lot of porn is very violent, and sexual gratification is a huge dopamine hit. Mix in bad parenting / immoral family values and you get an extremely dangerous person. There are cases out there in which minor teenage boys are gang-raping little children, forcing the victim to perform acts they saw in porn. It's hell out here, and porn is making it worse.

> It's far greater than 0.001%. [share of kids turned away by simple "are you 18" popups]

Come on now.

> If the code is only useful for malicious purposes, it matters that someone has gone and written it.
> You're liking enhanced mass surveillance more and more?
> Your age is a large privacy cost - that data point alone can narrow things down massively and allow you to be precisely identified when combined with other metadata.

Nothing malicious: Just a more feature-rich free software system, completely under the control of the owner of the computer, so parents gain additional capabilities to prevent their kids from accessing harmful content. And even when the parents use it, the age of the kid doesn't even need to be revealed to any server; the server just passively informs the client of the age limit and then everything is handled silently at the client side.

> The real solution to the problem is to teach children right and teach them not to run proprietary JavaScript on their computer.
> As proprietary porn sites don't show anything without proprietary JavaScript, children taught right will avoid those sites.

I appreciate you sticking to the bit. :blobcat-extremejoy: