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They added the installer to unrelated software, paid other companies to do the same, and defaulted the checkbox to on, so that unsuspecting users who didn't read all the tiny text with Adobe Reader or RealPlayer also installed Chrome.

Even if it was the most amazing browser ever written and came with a free puppy, it is shady to rely on tricking people to get your software installed, and pretending that this is just "advertising a browser" is incredibly disingenuous.

By replying to this comment you agree that I can install some of my software on whatever device you are currently using. <-- this is basically what they did.

Either the one from Microsoft or another from that era had multiple colors of cells, and an option to play competitively where before each generation you could add one cell of your color. Whether it was actually "fun" is another question.

>there's no impact to you if you just set the DOB to 1/1/1999.

Having to take an action is the opposite of no impact to me.

The problem is caused by social media companies designing their products to be addictive. This law puts a lot of requirements on parties other than the social media companies.

If you want to sell alcohol, it is your responsibility to check the age of the person consuming the alcohol. If you want to sell tobacco, it is your responsibility to check the age of the person consuming the tobacco. But if you want to push addictive social media feeds, it is apparently now the job of device manufacturers, operating system developers, and parents to do the verification work for you.

Don't you think it's a little odd that Meta is spending money pushing these bills that shift responsibility onto other parties?

>Or are you waiting for some science-fiction proposal that will be completely perfect, which you know will never happen.

Yes, I'm waiting for a sci-fi proposal like "companies should be responsible for their actions and shouldn't require other companies to do their work for them".

Yes, sometimes people shorten phrases when they communicate.

I'm sure POSIWID gets used as a reductive way to avoid thinking through things, but his examples seem just as devoid of thought. His 67% cancer center could probably cure more cancers if society invested more in cancer treatments and research, or if doctors persisted in continuing treatment instead of palliative care more often. Russia could nuke Kiev, or Ukraine's Western allies could send their own troops to push Russia back. The New York bus system could convert to all electric vehicles but that would cost a lot and have its own environmental considerations.

In the current conversation, the policy could have been based on research about where and how cartels were doing their laundering, and designed in a way that minimized the impact on non-cartel immigrant communities.

In all of those cases, the system is the result of choices that lead to the current outcomes, and I think that's the part that's worth thinking about.

> We all know parents are far more likely to tap "OK" for "Allow personalized social feeds?" than they are to knowingly falsify their kids' age.

I know lots of parents and lots of kids, and I don't think this is accurate. In my experience the breakdown is parents who care what their kids are doing online, and parents who assume it will all turn out fine because they had AOL or even Facebook as teenagers and didn't get into too much trouble. The first group is already keeping an eye on their kids and might even have decent parental controls set up, and the second group doesn't care what happens as long as charges don't show up on the credit card.

These bills punish the first group of parents and OS/device makers for the transgressions of social media companies. The uninvolved parents won't even be in the room when the age question comes up.

Right, I'm saying that if the goal is to keep kids off of addictive social feeds, it would be better to have social media have to say "this site implements addictive feeds" and then I can configure my kids' devices to disallow that. The decision should be happening in my house on the devices I control, not in a Meta data center. The current law just gives Meta a way to start building a shadow profile early.

I feel like all of these laws are being designed backwards. Content providers, like MPAA films, should have to identify what sort of content they are providing. Then I can give my kids a device configured to allow some or all of that at my discretion.

Requiring my kids' devices to advertise their age (or their age "bucket", as if that was a meaningful difference) to protect them is not doing me or my kids any favors.

If you put your unified watchlist on JustWatch, they will even notify you when something you want to watch becomes available.

A decent amount of recent issues follow the pattern where someone's credentials are compromised, those compromised credentials are used to release a malicious package, and then the original maintainer is the one to notice it but it takes them a little while to get the bad package pulled. A cooldown pretty much completely solves that problem.

Beyond that, a lot of these cooldown criticisms assume everyone will use the same length, which isn't how it has to work. There are people who run Arch because they want the latest version of everything, and there are people who run Debian because they never want a new version to break their system. Some people camp out for the newest iPhone on day 1, and some people wait to see reviews and find out if the antenna is sensitive to how the phone is held. Adjustable cooldowns let everyone choose their own balance between getting the latest features and getting something that is tested.