You're funny. Tell me, how many under-13s do you think are on FB, despite not being allowed? Hint: All of them.

And I'll be sure to let the offshore scammers know it's illegal, I'm sure they'll be quaking in their boots.

It's more a case of the fox being in charge of the chicken coop; or bank robbers gaining control of the bank.

The job of the press in a democracy is to hold officials up to scrutiny.

It was. The problem Democracy was not designed to address is a completely different one. To trust Democracy, you have to feel you benefit of it. For a long time, living in a democratic country meant improving your standard of living, slowly but steadily. Respect for the current system of government comes from the system of government benefiting you. It's aligned with the Golden Rule: Don't do unto others what you don't want to be done to you. The system of government sets boundaries of things you can do, and you respect them because you don't want the same things happening to you. You respect Democracy, because if the current government does something you don't want, you can always publicly complain, elect different officials or run for office until your grievances are addressed.

Several decades without real improvement of the standard of living for the average citizen has shaken the support for Democracy, because people feel Democracy has failed them. They no longer insists on upholding the rule of Law, because there is the impression that the Law benefits the wrong people. Decades of sentiment, reiterated in countless movies, novels, documentations and opinion pieces, have consolidated to the general view that government officials and politicians are either incompetent, grifters or blocked by countless laws and regulations to do something for you -- and this view is now so ingrained that people don't expect anything anymore from Democracy and are ready to try something else. The U.S. has broken the promise of your pursuit of happiness, and the pundits explain to you it's your fault. Throw out the rule of Law, throw out the balances of power, throw out elections in general when all they apparently do is benefiting the wrong persons.

Actually, it was. The whole point of a democracy is to have non-bloody rules to get rid of an unpopular government. The more hoops you have to go through, the less democratic a system is. At the end of Dashiell Hammett's "Glass Key" (the novel, not the movies), Paul Madvig comments that this time, the other side will win the election, and he will lie low for four years until the next vote. And yes, Paul Madvig is a self-serving grifter.

Okay, I'll feed the troll: I choose to comment on Slashdot. I also choose not to use less privacy-respecting platforms like Facebook. And make no mistake, I'm under no delusion Slashdot-the-company has been anything more than yet another data harvesting endeavor since CmdrTaco sold it.

I do not have a choice in whether or not Flock misreads my license plate and I'm arrested at gunpoint as a direct result - Or worse, which will eventually happen; and Flock somehow magically bears zero liability because hey, their contract admits they're unreliable and requires users to do their own due diligence. Which absolutely none of them do.

Sorry - To be clear, I wasn't disagreeing with you. Quite the opposite, I was basically expanding on "There is something dodgy going on".

Peace, friend!

Yeah, the products were better under Cook.

And your problem is apparently an inability to figure out that two plus two equals four.

First, those age brackets are necessarily dynamic or the OS would be out of compliance the day after installing - Because y'know, people tend to age one day per day, at least until we have space stations orbiting Sgr-A*.

And second, if you visit Facebook the day before you turn 18 and the day after, whaddya know, they magically now know your actual birthdate without ever needing to be explicitly told. This ain't rocket science, dude (space stations orbiting the nearest supermassive black hole aside).

That's really the biggest question in all of this - What means of enforcement on the end-user will end up attached to this?

I suspect the vast majority of us are just as fine with lying to Microsoft as we are with lying to Facebook. And as a privacy freak myself, the law itself honestly sounds about as tame as we could have hoped for (short of no law at all); but almost guaranteed Microsoft / Apple / OEMs are already rubbing their hands together and cackling with evil glee over having not just an excuse, but a near-mandate, to demand a license or passport merely to activate a new install.

And what about preexisting installs? At what point is MS itself effectively going to ransomware the very PCs we own for a pic of our license, and what recourse do we have when they invariably brick some fraction of those? Because it will happen.

Nobody's paying a few grand just to steal a similar few grand in hardware; and the booth bunnies / bois couldn't care less about having a few work laptops stolen, insurance would cover it and it's not a personal loss anyway.

Rather, this is 100% about stealing what was on those devices, and the potential value could be hundreds / thousands of times higher than the cost of the lost hardware itself. Imagine a pre-release build of GTA VI, almost certainly without the DRM baked in yet so it doesn't embarass the vendor at exactly the wrong moment, and you have the right idea.

When you use that many italics to emphasize words it's a good sign you need psychiatric help.

PII comes in two types: direct identifiers and indirect identifiers. Direct identifiers are unique to a person and include things like a passport number or driver's license number. A single direct identifier is typically enough to determine someone's identity. Indirect identifiers are not unique. They include more general personal details like race and place of birth. While a single indirect identifier can't identify a person, a combination can. For example, 87% of US citizens could be identified based on nothing more than their gender, ZIP code and date of birth. (emphasis mine).

"Do you know how empowering it is to realize that after 25 years away from coding, you can"...
...Force a subordinate to do coding tasks for you and take credit for it?

Sweet $Deity the lack of introspection in this waste of flesh is strong!

It's appropriate for a Chess.com story given their app now has ads by sketchy, low-class companies

All I'll say is, they're not calibrated anywhere near as accurately as you seem to believe; and that I'm not talking about after-market add-ons, I'm talking about the OEM markup on sub-$100 hardware.