Dangerous download blocked yt-dlp_win_x86.zip is not commonly downloaded and may be dangerous. [Discard] [Keep]

My wife and I had many troubles (delays due to additional security checks, endless request for documents) in visa and all immigration-related applications in the US. We cannot even find a government official to complain. Email inquires all end up with boilerplate responses. Many agencies do not have phone services, and even if some do, you are connected to an unhelpful call center worker who can only provide generic info and have no permissions to discuss your problems. And lawyers told us we could do little because all the procedures are legitimate. We may (and we did once in the past) sue the government but only after an "unreasonable" delay, at which point much harm is already caused.

This week the US consulate emailed me to ask for official documents about a minor past civil suit against me in China, including "a police certificate", for my visa application. Why the heck does the US visa have anything to do with a civil suit, and in which country does a civil suit involve police?

I do want to note that this California law alone doesn't say anything about content restriction. I won't be surprised if there was/will be another bill to assign the responsibility (which may be more controversial). But the current law is only about the age gating mechanism. And on the positive side it removes the need for actual age verification (like using ID) which other regions still insist on.

So the app requests a signal (like, calling an API), and the OS returns the signal (returning the age group).

Regarding API vs installation lock, TBH I don't think the law concerns that level of details. An OS or app-store installation lock that checks app ratings can be considered as a valid implementation.

Actually I had some terrible experiences when asking the agent to do something simple in our codebase (like, rename these files and fix build scripts and dependencies) but it spent much longer time than a human, because it kept running the full CI pipelines to check the problems after every attempted change.

A human would, for example, rely on the linter to detect basic issues, run a partial build on affected targets, etc. to save the time. But the agent probably doesn't have a sense of time elapsed.

I don't even get why people think lobbyists hijack the law. It might be too left/progressive/socialism/or whatever. But, basically, the only major org opponent of this law is Google: https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab...

And "not for use in Louisiana": https://legis.la.gov/legis/Law.aspx?d=1428944

And maybe Brazil, Australia, Singapore and Utah as well (not checked): https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=f5zj08ey

First, let's admit the push for age verification laws isn't a partisan or ideological thing. It's a global trend. This California law has bipartisan sponsorship and only major org opponent is the evil G [1]. While age verification is unpopular in tech community, I imagine a lot of average adult voters agree that limiting children's access to wilder parts of the Internet is a good thing.

On this premise, the discussion is then who should be responsible for age verification. The traditional model is to require app developers / website owners to gatekeep -- like the Texas and Ohio laws that require PornHub to verify users' IDs. But such model put too much burden on small developers, and it's a privacy nightmare to have to share your PII with random apps.

This is why we see this new model. States started to believe it seems more viable to dump the responsibility on big tech / platforms. A newer Texas law is adopt this model (on top the traditional model) to require app stores to verify user age (but was recently blocked by court) [2]. And this California law pretty much also takes this model -- the OS (thinking as iOS / Android / Windows with app store) shall obtain the user age and provide "a signal regarding the users age bracket to applications available in a covered application store".

While many people here are concerning open-source OSes, and the language do cover all OSes -- my intuition is no lawmaker had ever think about them and they were not the target.

[1] https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab...

[2] https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/05/big-tech-won-in-tex...

First, let's admit the push for age verification laws isn't a partisan or ideological thing. It's a global trend. This California law has bipartisan sponsorship and only major org opponent is the evil G [1]. While age verification is unpopular in tech community, I imagine a lot of average adult voters agree that limiting children's access to wilder parts of the Internet is a good thing.

On this premise, the discussion is then who should be responsible for age verification. The traditional model is to require app developers / website owners to gatekeep -- like the Texas and Ohio laws that require PornHub to verify users' IDs. But such model put too much burden on small developers, and it's a privacy nightmare to have to share your PII with random apps.

This is why we see this new model. States start to believe it seems more viable to dump the responsibility on big tech / platforms. A newer Texas law is adopt this model (on top the traditional model) to require app stores to verify user age (but was recently blocked by court) [2]. And this California law pretty much also takes this model -- the OS (thinking as iOS / Android / Windows with app store) shall obtain the user age and provide "a signal regarding the users age bracket to applications available in a covered application store".

While many people here are concerning open-source OSes, and the language do cover all OSes -- my intuition is no lawmaker had ever think about them and they were not the target.

[1] https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab... [2] https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/05/big-tech-won-in-tex...

> did you fight it?

I talked to university lawyers (and LLMs) regarding another issue with DHS. For the sake of national security, they have the legal authority. There isn't much I can do. Unless I can prove they discriminated against me due to my race, national origin, etc. -- which may be the case but how can I prove that. I requested FOIA from DOS/DHS. What I got was basically no more than the original applications I submitted.

No indictment. Nothing physical. But a lot of headaches like delays in visa/immigrant application :shrug:

I was in one of these published NSLs issued by FBI a few years ago. I was notified by Google after the nondisclosure period.

Technically this can be implemented in Anki as an addon. But only the desktop version supports addons and the default UI is a bit too complicated.