I wonder what would be the power consumption of a device that sits on your head and emits IR light in all directions until you turn it off, instead of just over your eyes. Similar to how microphone blockers work.

What would jewelry and hats do about cameras?

It would have to be strong enough to damage the cameras, if it’s not to be always on.

Maybe something similar to how microphone blockers work, flood a space with EM radiation outside the typical human visible range.

Or i think i’ve heard of ways to detect when someone has one of these near you (identifying bluetooth signals and such), in which case you can look around for who has glasses thick enough to hold a camera and shine a laser in their camera/eye. That could have too many false positives though.

See also: Firefox tab containers (built in feature), Temporary Containers extension (makes a new temporary folder for cookies & cache every time you go to a new domain/subdomain), and uMatrix extension (block embedded anything from any source, by domain & subdomain).

I don’t see how this could be enforcable. If i don’t let my computer automatically update (and i don’t) i could stick with one version of Debian forever. It wouldn’t be ideal, but i don’t see why all my offline programs wouldn’t work fine with no security issues as long as i’m offline.

And what about those rare operating systems that don’t do any networking? I know most people don’t use TempleOS but it does exist and would suffer little if at all from this. The bill mentions a fine (1798.503. (a)) for failing to either demand a date of birth or say “Not for use in California”, but how does that work with any abandoned OS? There are plenty that are unmaintained now for which there’s nobody to fine.

I am curious to know what the big distros (and i guess also non-Linux OSs) plan to do about this. Some might comply, there might be some “Not for use in California” stickers on download pages.

Hell, even if every OS does implement this and every user is honest about their age, that still doesn’t help protect children from anything. It is in fact false that only one person can use a computer, or only one person can use a user account on a computer. I let my kid brother play games on my computer sometimes and i know other people share too. I can honestly say i’m over 18 and there can still be times when someone who’s not is on my computer. The bill as written even seems to aknowledge this in “1798.504 (g) This title does not impose liability on an operating system provider, a covered application store, or a developer that arises from the use of a device or application by a person who is not the user to whom a signal pertains.”

Sometimes it feels like the world is falling apart at every point and i’m drowning in the overwhelming flood of bad news. ICE, Al, this shit, Ukraine has been pushed out of the news by everything else, how are they doing⸮ And the globe is still warming, people keep making benches with extra handrails and spikes, i can’t grow my own food because the air and water and soil are poison, too many can’t afford a home to not freeze in winter or boil in summer; and it’s all too much.

I’d love to change the world, but i don’t know what to do.

One thing at a time. I’m making sure i have full installer images (full, not just install-enough-to-download-the-rest) for a couple backup operating systems in case somehow this sort of thing does shoot down Linux. I don’t think that’ll happen, but it doesn’t hurt to have onhand.

What else is there to do? That’s not rhetorical. What can i do as a citizen of the USA but not California to stop this?

How USA law handles precedent (i think, i’m no lawyer) makes everything like this feel heavier. As a non-lawyer, letting some dunderhead demand any feature, no matter how ineffective at its stated goal, be implemented in all operating systems feels like a potentially slippery slope. Today, input a number ≥18 when you get a new computer or OS. Tomorrow, some other step towards dystopia. I don’t know, it’s late and i’m tired.

So, who wants this⸮ The jays who made the law and nobody else. Ask anyone, i’m pretty confident that most people will see problems with this immediately. And if they need yet more reasons, (Hacker News has pointed out plenty of downsides to this for just about everyone. But before we all get too critical, i think it’s important to have a look at the actual bill too. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043

Done reading⸮ Great, let’s be critical.

The language suggests whoever wrote this doesn’t know the difference between the Internet and the Web, maybe doesn’t know what an operating system is, doesn’t know how peope use computers, and doesn’t have a grammar checker. In fairness, i don’t have a grammar checker either. But i proofread stuff i write, and none of it is as consequential as new laws.

So Little Timmy’s computer knows he’s somewhere between 0 and 13 years old, and has to pass that information along to any “publicly available internet website, software application, online service, or platform”, which are basically defined as something that distributes programs/apps for a computer that can download apps (so i guess if you can only sideload it’s not a computer). “internet website” sounds like it’s supposed to mean a website that lets you download things. That is, every website that’s still online can be downloaded with a regular browser, and in fact must be so your computer knows what the page you’re trying to read is and what to show you. Even if this doesn’t include every website (and i’m sure it’s not meant to), how is your OS or browser to know what sites let you download applications and what sites don’t⸮

Furthermore, 1798.501 (b) (1) “A developer shall request a signal with respect to a particular user from an operating system provider or a covered application store when the application is downloaded and launched.” That is, it is the duty of anyone who maintains a website where you can download stuff to request to know the age bracket of the user. At worst, this means the owner of every website visited by Little Timmy can see that a user account on his IP address is in the 0-13 bracket. At best, this means that just people behind specifically just app stores can see that same information.

People should not write laws about topics they don’t know anything about. Beyond all the obvious really important reasons why, it makes them look like fools to those of us who do know what they’re talking about, or at least what they think they’re talking about.

This is all true. Unless someone breaks into your home to physically steal your data, offline backups will always be more secure than anyone’s cloud.

I’ve thought about keeping a copy of my own assorted data on a hard drive in a safe deposit box, though i don’t know how much that would cost. If you’re really worried about people getting into these anyway, there are ways to protect entire drives with a password.

Does Invidious work?

You can try to not use a search engnie at all, but the Web relies a lot on them. If that’s really what you want, you’re limited to surfing. Go to a site, follow links, and hope you get where you need to go. Surfing is great for finding things you didn’t know you were looking for, and not so great for finding particular things you need information on. For that, either try whatever libraries you have access to or cave and use a search engine.

There are plenty of search engines that aren’t Google. Some don’t use the same search index (big list of web pages that it shows you when you search stuff). I currently use Qwant as my primary engine, and before that i used Startpage. I’m also fond of Marginalia when a big, normal engine isn’t giving me helpful results.

Or you can ask people, like you said. Forums, chatrooms, whatever Lemmy is, maybe email somebody if you think they know stuff about whatever field you’re interested in. Or you could sit down in a coffee shop with a sign that says “Tell me about electrical engineering” or whatever it is you want to know, and see how that goes.

Wikipedia is good, if you don’t mind that it has a search bar with an index consisting of its own pages. You shouldn’t trust everything you read there, but every good article (and most bad ones) cites sources, and you can follow those citations.

A few things.

A laptop with 2-way HDMI, so i can plug it into a game console and use it as a small TV. Note that i’m aware that HDMI might not work like this.

A wearable soundboard with speakers and batteries hidden in my pockets, and controlled by chorded buttons in my shoes. Use cases include crickets, canned laughter, the Seinfeld theme, and audible air guitar riffs.

A handheld computer that:

• Has physical buttons instead of a touchscreen
• E-ink display for all the benefits of that – Physical light switch for a backlight for the screen (my phone is e-ink but i have the backlight turned off by default, a side effect is i can’t see the screen to turn the backlight on when i need it) – Button to refresh the screen, instead of relying on automatic refreshes (Light Phone II) or updating what’s on screen to get it to refresh (Sony PRS 505) – Solar panel, if the OS is light enough to permit it. Ereaders are totally low-power enough that if one had a small solar panel like a calculator you’d almost never need to charge it. A full handheld computer could probably also benefit from this.

A music player / DAC that:

• Has physical buttons, non-touch screen, & light switch for screen backlight like the above wish.
• Lets you mark some files as audiobooks/podcasts, so it remembers your place in those
• Isn’t just an Android phone that can’t make calls
• Has a reflective or transflective display, so you can use it outdoors without fighting the sun
• Can listen to the radio, if you unfold or plug in an antenna
• Has a headphone jack There’s more to this one because i’m planning to actually make it someday, simply because i don’t expect anyone else to make one that does what i want it to.

Somewhat ergonomic keyboards in laptops. I know split keyboards are hard because the screen has to be about as wide as the keyboard, but i’m sure there’s a way and i intend to someday prove it. I know we can do better than typewriter shaped keyboards with QWERTY by default, even ortholinear boards would be an improvement because layouts can be done in software.

An electric notebook with a touchscreen that instead of using OCR to turn handwriting into text, stores handwriting as vector graphics as a middle ground between OCR and images with huge file sizes. Probably with a slider for how much to simplify lines, and an option to select areas of a page to convert to text via OCR so you can still have diagrams and doodles alongside plain text that’s easy to export and edit.

A device like a generation I pokedex, but for real world animals and plants. This one probably won’t happen because stuff like this is only done as smartphone apps anymore, not as standalone toys.

HUD goggles that are the display of a full portable computer.

• Keyboard input could be done through a split keyboard that hooks onto your belt, with half on each thigh
• Mouse input could be done with a trackpoint / trackball on the keyboard (simple option) or with a bracelet that emits IR light from multiple points so it can be tracked by sensors on the goggles (if you don’t understand what i mean, kind of like a Wiimote and sensor bar), with a ring that goes around your middle finger attached by a wire to the bracelet. When you tug the ring down by bending your wrist or fingers down, that’s a mouse click. (complicated option)
• Two or more hot-swappable batteries, so you can change one out without the device having to lose power
• Transparent LCD over one eye, so the background of the image is just what’s actually in front of you
• Gyroscope somewhere on the head part, so you can turn your head to access different windows like it’s a VR headset. Imagine there’s a bubble around your head with program windows projected onto different parts of it. Large windows look curved around the surface of the bubble. You can drag them around with the mouse, or turn your head to move them relative to your eyes. Probably also makes this good for AR stuff.
• Headphone jack and bluetooth for audio, but not necessarily built in speakers This one might never happen, apparently making any kind of HUD is very hard and expensive and this one is asking for a lot. But it would be so cool. It would finally be a portable computer with a good input system (keyboard) and a display at the same time.

And there’s more stuff i want to exist that doesn’t fit the question. Software (why hasn’t anyone mad a 3+ D spreadsheet program?) and non-technical products.

A lot of dumbphones have pretty small screens. My Light Phone II is about half the size of my old Something-Or-Other brand smartphone.

But if you want a small pocket supercomputer that can make calls, someone else already linked to https://www.unihertz.com/