The site and an idiotic bill Topic is solved

[frostknight]

My thanks again to Moonchild for answering those further questions.

To build upon Prough’s comment, since there are important US American developers for the Pale Moon project, and the bill is ambiguous, it is prudent to consider, as we have been doing, possible hazards for those developers if their involvement with a non-commercial browser and website is misunderstood by a dimwitted judge or prosecutor who is incapable of grasping what open source means. His report on Floridian developments mentions that a judge is soon to evaluate whether this family of law is legal by US American law. The results of that will be interesting.

Do you know of any online petitions to tell New York's leaders to back off on this stupid law? I would sign them in a heartbeat

[Mæstro]

Do you know of any online petitions to tell New York's leaders to back off on this stupid law? I would sign them in a heartbeat

Sorry for the delay! It took me a while to find something to answer the question in the affirmative. If you visit the bill’s official web page, you should find a box asking ‘do you support this bill?’ Selecting ‘nay’ will require you to register and include a physical address which is not apparently verified, presumably to distinguish New York residents’ comments from others’, but you should then be able to comment about this. Happily, the bill has made no progress since being referred to a committee in February.

[frostknight]

Sorry for the delay! It took me a while to find something to answer the question in the affirmative. If you visit the bill’s official web page, you should find a box asking ‘do you support this bill?’ Selecting ‘nay’ will require you to register and include a physical address which is not apparently verified, presumably to distinguish New York residents’ comments from others’, but you should then be able to comment about this. Happily, the bill has made no progress since being referred to a committee in February.

Appreciate it, done.

[athenian200]

My take on this is that I'm actually not that worried about the bill at the moment.

The courts usually soften the more unconstitutional edges of these laws. It's worth noting that in the US... laws are usually written to be as broad and aggressive as possible, with the intention that the more controversial stuff will be challenged in court. The reason is because politicians want to look tough, and also want to be able to blame the courts for their laws not going as far as they wanted, when they knew full well that the law as written wasn't going to stand. The people who opposed the law also like striking down a law this way, enjoying the thrill of a win in court and going through the effort of raising money and awareness through campaigns to "stop the law." There's a lot of... how do I put it, grandstanding and drama when it comes to stuff like this in the US. It's one of those catch-22 situations a lot like tipping... on the one hand, if you don't tip, you're making someone's life harder and being unfair to that individual, and if you do tip, you're contributing to a morally questionable system of tipping and helping keep it alive. I think choosing whether to ignore or push back aggressively in an angry/paranoid way against these kind of overreaching laws that courts are relied on to reign in is the same sort of catch-22. Either you contribute to the problem by playing your expected role and being the "outraged activist," or you risk actually letting things get out of hand because you weren't loud enough to make the judges think (and the legislators re-think about edge cases and affected constituencies). I will just put it this way, I think deep down there's just something in American culture that lends itself to courtroom dramas like Judge Judy and similar shows...

Now, I'm not dismissing the possibility that the courts would just let these laws stand and not protect our constitutional rights. But I also feel like if that happens, we all have much bigger problems that go well beyond Pale Moon. If laws like this did start holding up in court, it would be the legal solidification of something that was already being hinted at by the way things like OAuth2 or Google's Developer Verification on Android were handled. And basically it would be an unambiguous declaration by courts and legislatures that small, indie projects are not allowed to exist in any meaningful way, programmers will be treated like other industries where you have to be licensed, bonded, maybe part of a union or at least a certified company to actually do work without liability headaches, and the entire concept of just being an independent developer working on something for free semi-anonymously, is just disallowed for all practical purposes.

As it stands, the expense of code signing certificates and the existence of things like OAuth2 are practical barriers that effectively keep small programmers out, but still allow them to exist in a fairly contained ecosystem of curious or desperate people who don't like what the majority like. If the laws go in this direction though, then sooner or later it effectively amounts to independent developers being regarded as little better than software pirates or hackers if they're not working for an established organization with a compliance team.

[Mæstro]

When you put it like that, there is truly nothing to fear. Software pirates have hardly been stopped by their respective laws. Why should independent developers fare worse?

[Bilbo47]

When you put it like that

So you're saying you're okay with every non-corporate developer being an outlaw? Or laws don't matter anyway? Or somewhere in between ...

[Mæstro]

If I were truly neutral or welcoming towards the prospect of such a legal climate, I should never have made my original post at all. What I have said, more explicitly, is that I doubt these laws are capable of suppressing anonymous, open source development, just like how the law and enforcement in the rich countries are no more than mild nuisances to the serious file-sharer. Hence, I am optimistic that, even in the worst case, life should go on as before.

[frostknight]

If I were truly neutral or welcoming towards the prospect of such a legal climate, I should never have made my original post at all. What I have said, more explicitly, is that I doubt these laws are capable of suppressing anonymous, open source development, just like how the law and enforcement in the rich countries are no more than mild nuisances to the serious file-sharer. Hence, I am optimistic that, even in the worst case, life should go on as before.

What a weird picture... but yeah, I am glad you did make the original post and that you showed me a place to complain.

[Moonchild]

What I have said, more explicitly, is that I doubt these laws are capable of suppressing anonymous, open source development, just like how the law and enforcement in the rich countries are no more than mild nuisances to the serious file-sharer.

I think you're missing the point here, which is control. The point of laws like these being made is not to go after every file sharer or open source developer, but to create the control and leverage to be able to do so when it is advantageous to them. It creates yet another situation where independent development can be suppressed if it is considered a threat (even a minor one) by the industrial-political complex. Most independent developers can't defend themselves in the US legal system because of the cost involved in litigating anything in the USA, and having a near guaranteed win for the plaintiffs if backed by this kind of law will absolutely guarantee that they can push beyond the initial stages and magistrate courts to make it a long and expensive case for defendants who are likely to lose in the end.
In a nutshell: it's setting up the system for unfair advantages and practices to further the levers available to big entities.

[Mæstro]

You are quite right, and there have been dramatic cases for decades. Open-source developers (may) enjoy the anonymity of King Kong in the jungles of Cambodia, and we know how that defence worked out. Perhaps I am just so used to watching the mice scurry into the earth that I ignore those the cats seize- My underlying motive has been to be the voice of optimism. These laws are abominable, but I do not consider open source doomed by them.

[athenian200]

I think you're missing the point here, which is control. The point of laws like these being made is not to go after every file sharer or open source developer, but to create the control and leverage to be able to do so when it is advantageous to them. It creates yet another situation where independent development can be suppressed if it is considered a threat (even a minor one) by the industrial-political complex. Most independent developers can't defend themselves in the US legal system because of the cost involved in litigating anything in the USA, and having a near guaranteed win for the plaintiffs if backed by this kind of law will absolutely guarantee that they can push beyond the initial stages and magistrate courts to make it a long and expensive case for defendants who are likely to lose in the end.
In a nutshell: it's setting up the system for unfair advantages and practices to further the levers available to big entities.

I completely agree with you on this one. When I say I'm not that worried about this particular law, what I mean is that I think age verification itself is a distraction from whatever we should actually be worried about. My thinking is that they may well fully expect the laws to be struck down... but it doesn't matter because we get a lot of consequences that are useful to some parties even in that instance:

1. It creates fear, a lot of developers may give up or abandon projects prematurely before the courts even settle the matter. A lot of users may also doubt the ability of smaller developers to keep up with legislation like this as it comes up and favor programs produced by companies that can afford to retain lawyers. Therefore, if the goal is to create FUD and centralize control, the law doesn't need to stick around to do it, the threat is enough, and may even be the point

2. It provides cover for projects that want to do this anyway. Without the bill, people would blame the projects themselves for even trying to implement such a thing. But now that it exists, anyone that complains can be pointed to this law or a similar one anywhere in the world, and told that it's a "legal risk" for user information not to be collected. And once the system is in place, even if the law is struck down, the bias will be towards keeping it around "just in case," with excuses made whenever someone asks for a build-time flag to disable it.

3. While we're all talking about this, it's taking up attention that might otherwise go to something else. That is, they knew this would be controversial and generate a lot of pushback, and did this now so everyone would start talking about this and panic, while they turn around and do something much more insidious (picture someone creating a lot of pointless legal drama and threats pointed at one target everyone focuses on, while making preparations to seize power in some other way behind the scenes). Perhaps even relying on this bill being struck down as the public sign that "the system is still sane/reasonable," while in reality hundreds of worse things snuck in while the watchdogs who normally would have caught it were all focusing on age verification.

4. This could be intended to create an instance of a "decoy effect," that is to say it will make whatever comes next seem reasonable by comparison, with people going, "at least it isn't as bad as age verification, we are lucky we didn't get that, be grateful." So, let's say the actual intention is maybe to require something like developer verification, something that says a developer cannot write and publish a line of code without providing their real name and registering with the government. They propose a law like this to protect kids, get push back because it would reveal personal information of children, seemingly back down, then the "compromise" is that it's developers and software publishers who are called upon to be the adults in the room, forced to disclose their identities, register, certify and promise certain things before publication of software, rather than inconveniencing children or users with a complicated account system or similar.

5. If the goal is not really age verification, but actually just to make things harder for independent software developers, then the failure/success of this particular bill may not mean much. If the legal system fails as a lever, they have others they can pull that will never be reviewed by a judge.

So I guess it's somewhat accurate to say... I may not like what the bill represents, or the pattern it's a part of, but also kind of think it's pointless to play whack-a-mole with individual proposals like this. The only thing I think could make a meaningful difference is something like a digital Bill of Rights that guarantees certain freedoms. Without some kind of framework or foundation that prevents unreasonable laws from being proposed, we're always a judge having a bad day away from something truly awful. Rather than just fight against someone else's vision, we (that is, anyone who doesn't like this sort of system) need to sell our own vision. I don't know if that's likely to happen or not, but until it does, even bothering to actively resist and rail about a law like this is just treating symptoms without curing the illness.