Sadly, most of this is unwise with respect to a mandate controlled by
politicians instead of developers.
* This abomination absolutely should NOT be integrated into any existing
service, since that makes it both harder to disable and harder to update
when the laws are patchwork-wise changed and likely made worse.
* Putting it in a separate (cursed) system daemon, ideally written in a
popular interpreted language instead of a compiled one, eases the
process of both centralized and per-site development of the service for
logging and other reasons.
* The separate package for this (cursed) system daemon also makes
it trivial to remove in places that have not been caught up in this
type of legislation.
* Given the high likelihood that an authoritarian administration will
expand the "age signal" to be an opaque data chunk, one per user,
obtained from the government through a website or some other mechanism
... it would be unwise to place any built-in limits on the potentially
opaque payload in terms of ASCII limitations or size.
Before anyone protests that these "age signals" are Good, pay attention
to the fact that these create a NEW MECHANISM through which your
computer (or other devices) expose information about you (and children)
to anyone, including hostile actors that queries for, currently, an "age
signal".
The safest child on the Internet is an anonymous child, not one who's been
put forward as a victim for targeted advertising or worse. Not one who's
had that young age combined with a physical address through dataset
accumulation and sales between data vendors on the Internet.
Don't even get me started on how incredibly vague, expansive, and
ambiguous these laws and bills are. By their failure to define basic
terms, it's impossible to tell if the bills apply to nearly every computer
(that down download anything) or to none (the exemption for use of
a physical device).
My opinion is that the extreme lack of care in making these somehow
both brief yet profoundly vague laws clear exposes the real purpose:
creating a new mechanism, that can be subverted by authoritarian
actors.
So I recommend any implementation be fully segregated from all other
services, the easier to be monitored, removed, etc, as the case might
demand.
--
Alex. North-Keys, Talisman.Org, Spatial Environments Research
url "http://www.talisman.org/~erlkonig/";
voice 512.249.7121, cell 512.404.3344, pager url + "contact/"
