Ferk

That's true. The way China treats people as if they should be protected from bad news that could be perceived as negative or destabilizing (at least without some "massaging" of its statistics), is the reason why they have always good news and high approval rate.

Personally, I feel that being in either of the extremes when it comes to reports of satisfaction is a bad sign. I feel a healthy relationship always requires acknowledging the failures of its own government and being critic on the things that are not being done right... and there's always something not being done right...

By "this mess" are you referring to Ch. trafficking? I'd say the responsible people for that are the ones running the criminal rings... but the responsibility for prevention (beyond just plain law enforcement) should still ultimately be with the parent, imho. Since they are the ones with the most power and control over the environment the child is exposed to (I mean, it does not matter how many authentication layers you add, ultimately a child can pass it if they use the parent's ID...).

If by "this mess" you mean the risk of leaking private information that everyone is concerned about, I don't think that's really caused by the "leave it to parents" mentality.. if anything, that's caused by the "parents shouldn't have the responsibility" mentality, which is pretty much the opposite...

only understand the concept and know where to find a VM.

That's already smarter than most of my relatives.

I'd argue that controlling / monitoring where a kid goes should already be responsibility of the parent.

If it's all in the browser then the unprivileged user is at the mercy of whatever rules the installed browser establishes for allowing them access to. So it's a battle between the parent (helped by the OS) being smarter at setting up local restrictions / monitoring history and the kid being smart enough to break them / act undetected.

I think the idea here would be that the OS would be able to tell the browser (or any app) that the user is only allowed content of a particular target age group, and then the browser (or whichever app) would apply any appropriate restrictions (which could include restricting virtualization primitives like WebVM, other js APIs or even network-level filtering if that's what it takes).

You can also advocate for making use of the "guest wifi AP" many routers already provide to ensure the access to the internet for their kids is done in an allowlist basis. To the point that the kid would have to be "smart enough" to break through the WPA encryption of the main wifi access point (or find out some other social engineering way to get access to that wifi) in order to have fully free access to the internet and visit websites that allow them to circumvent age restrictions.

Imho, that's a slippery slope argument. Like arguing that communities should have no moderation at all (not even when it's fair) because it opens the door for unfair moderation too...

One might as well argue a slippery slope in the opposite direction, the more you reject parental-control methods that you can control, the more incentive they'll have to instead promote methods where you'll have no control. So you can equally say that rejecting this method will make their case stronger for proposals that would, progressively, give you less and less capacity for control (or in particular, capacity to actively be disobedient against).

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.

If a web service wants to offer a highly restricted and actively moderated kid-friendly version of their service, they are the ones who need to provide facilities to us so WE can make the filtering (say.. they can use a separate subdomain.. or make use of special http headers that signal for kid-friendliness), not ask personal information from us just so THEY can take the decision on our behalf...

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.