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Comment by wtallis | Hacker News Reader

If anyone is distributing it within Illinois jurisdiction (or maybe even distributing it elsewhere while maintaining a business presence in Illinois), they could be at risk of qualifying as an operating system provider under Illinois law.

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How does that work with data on a server outside of the jurisdiction, that’s freely available to download and re-upload? The ‘local legal presence’ thing might work, but then what if they only distribute it on (say) a thumb drive, sent outside the jurisdiction, which is then uploaded by a third party? This whole thing seems unenforceable (or worse, arbitrarily enforceable).

A court will care about what you do in the jurisdictions where it has power over you. What anyone else does is their problem, not yours.

Some oddball Linux distro really has no relevance to the larger picture that lawmakers are trying to accomplish though. The vast majority of kids are using iphone/android/mac/chromebook/windows. Basically zero are using esoteric container images to access TikTok.

But wouldn't this type of law drive youth to using more exotic distributions to get around the issue? It's not far fetched to think that kids will just live boot from tails or another distro to visit socials and circumvent this rule. Plus with unlocked pixel bootloaders it would be trivial for them to petition their parents for a pixel, hard reset it, unlock the bootloader, install grapheneos via the web installer, and then be on their way. If parents don't know how to monitor their kids I doubt they'll notice grapheneos not being base android.

What is this bill blocking that kids want so bad that they'd go through the trouble to do that... and lose blue bubbles with their friends?

The ability to receive specifically unsolicited DMs from adult strangers?

Opting in to behavioral tracking?

This bill doesn't block social media for kids... I expect their response to be simply that they keep using social media on their phone the way they already do.

Perhaps I'm just too old and don't use mainstream socials outside of HN, but when I was growing up the very act of knowing I was on a "child" account was reason to break out of it alone. I broke a lot of operating systems that way but also got good at repairing them. Jailbreaking was normal. War driving was normal. Breaking WEP just because you could was normal. Later, watching your neighbors go crazy over the fence as you deauthed their devices from their network was normal. It was just part of being a kid and having fun learning about the world.

By far the vast majority of children did not have that experience in the past, nor do they today.

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