Ferk

Parental controls means the control is done by the parents.. not by the companies. I don't need to tell any company what age bracket my kid might be, all I need is for them to tell me how can I block / restrict access to their services in my parent-controlled network (or how to allow them, if using allowlist).

Standardization of parental controls would be if routers and/or the OS of the devices came with standardized proxy settings that allowed privoxy-style blocking of sites in a customizable way so we can decide which services to allow... with perhaps blocklists / allowlists circulating in a similar way as adblockers do.

I mean, ultimately it can always be worked around... even if you were to add stronger forms of identification, a kid can take the parents card / ID / DNA sample / whatever when they are distracted and verify themselves. If a kid is smart enough to set up a VM like that they are smart enough to deceive adults. Teenagers have been finding easy ways to get to forbidden stuff for centuries.

I'd much prefer if the source of trust is in the local device, in the OS, that is responsibility of the family to control, and not on some remote third party service offered by some organization in who knows where with connections with who knows who. If parents don't properly limit the local user account of their kids, or restrict access to the places they don't want, it's their responsibility. Set up proxies, blockers and lock the OS locally, but don't mess up the internet for the rest of us.

Would they actually go after the people?

I expect the law would place the responsibility on the companies managing / distributing the OS. That's the reason companies are complying. People can always look for alternatives.. I'm sure there will always be homemade distros without stuff like this made by ragtag groups / communities without much of a corporate structure behind.

I mean.. there's nothing stopping anyone from setting their age to 100 years old. It's not like they are adding any sort of identification check, from what I gather. Just doing the minimum to comply.

It recently overtook Japan, so it's 4th now...

I agree we should have more passive forms of cooling/heating.

But I think the problem is that often these are highly dependent on the environment and are very situational.

Places that are dry and hot benefit from water and internal ventilation like this, because the perspiration and water evaporation naturally cools things down, just like our sweat does (same principle that refrigerates water in clay pots like Spanish botijo, or what makes central gardens inside buildings very common in some areas). But they need to stay dry and hot for systems like this to make sense... a cold and humid year would make this whole design pointless at best, counter productive at worst.

Exactly. Incognito mode only became a thing when the address bars started becoming smart and giving you suggestions from your own history. It's more about leaving no local trace of your browsing after using a shared computer.

It's never been about preventing third party services from tracking you or browsing "privately".

I mean, you can run python (or their own language "LibreOffice Basic") from within a Libreoffice Calc sheet.

Calc's scripting is actually more powerful than the aging VBA thing Excel uses for macros, imho.

In general, I agree that you can always use the CLI raw, but a frontend is a lot more friendly for many. It's the reason some people prefer TUI over CLI as well (some people really like lazygit and lazydocker which are just frontends wrapping git and docker CLI calls and presenting it in a TUI). A TUI/GUI can structure information in panels, it can be more context-sensitive and it can help provide visual representations of the operation.

Also, wrapping CLI commands (whether through a GUI or a TUI) means the wrapper can automatically combine the commands in whichever way it's best for a particular goal, or more conveniently set up batch processing... it's helpful for people who don't like having to make their own scripts, or craft long oneliners.

Plus: lets say you have your computer hooked to your TV and don't have space for a keyboard (but can use a small wireless mouse on the arm of your couch), a GUI wrapper that allows you to perform operations with just a mouse can be very convenient.

I don't know what kind of GUIs are you imagining, but I've hardly ever seen 1-to-1 recreations to a single individual command (unless that command is extremely complex or a graphical representation would be actually useful).

Some examples:

Gparted creates a job list of terminal commands for the disk manipulation, but it presents a graphical representation of the disks before you actually commit to executing the commands internally, so you can see what would be the result of the changes in the GUI side before actually pressing the button that actually executes parted, fdisk, mkfs, resize2fs, etc. (they do wrap the commands when it comes to executing the changes), without you needing to go through the steps and specific syntax of each of them on your own.

There are wrappers to ffmpeg for video editing or transcoding that some people find convenient for discoverability of the options available and/or to have a limited list of presets / sanitized options for those who don't want to bother creating their own scripts. Sometimes also showing video previews for the graphical representation (useful when the operation is about cropping the image, or picking the exact millisecond where to cut). An example is LosslessCut, they keep a log of the ffmpeg calls.. or maybe Shutter Encoder (press Alt+C to see the console commands).

In Synaptic, the GUI package manager, pressing "Apply" calls the appropriate APT commands as a CLI app inside a VTE with the selection of the packages you have decided to add/remove/update, which you have previously selected in the listing that is generated from the GUI view of the app. Some people like having a graphical detailed listing which might be useful for conveniently browsing packages and seeing their detailed description, while still you get the raw information and accurate log from the installation that you would get when you are just using the CLI.

Yes. But my point is that until now that has not been made explicit, so there's no reason for websites to require IDs right now, at least not until the government does mandate such a system. So I was wondering what's the minimal effort that would satisfy current mandate.

Still, the title is misdirected, and it sounds like Proton trying to do marketing.

Neither is it true that Europe is ready yet (most companies are stuck with MS products like the other commenter said) nor are all those who want to switch looking for privacy (but rather more independence from US).

The thing is that age verification in a digital world is not easy.. what exactly does the government mandate as a valid verification method?

Like.. would asking the user their age be valid enough? ... because it's not like a reliable method exist (not even credit card verification prevents a minor from taking their parents card and go through it). IMHO, until the government doesn't actually set a standard, I don't see why websites should actually give anything else than the most minimal effort possible when it comes to this.