the Best tool at our disposal is case law. Bernstein v. United States set the precedent of computer code being written word and therefore free speech. Apple used it to tell the FBI to get bent on writing them a tool to get passed encryption. It's time for us to use it to get these laws banned before they try to implement far worse ID checks.
The law won't save us. The billionaire's who want this are in charge of every major government in the world. It's time to start operating in the shadows.
Can we finally fix the DNS problem too? DNS is the main hurdle to anonymity on the internet.
Maybe something based on tor or I2P with IPFS-style distributed file hosting.
1) Call your legislators and let them know this is basically unenforceable at the operating system level by the nature of open source design of basically all but a handful of operating systems.
2) Make it unenforceable at the operating system level by ensuring your OS of choice remains free and open source. Refuse to purchase computing devices that don’t respect your wishes.
The whole stack is predicated on time-sharing (Multics--> UNIX® (and the BSDs) --> Linux).
How will they deal with Internet cafés, public libraries, university computing rooms?
It is not about "protecting kids", it never has been. We all know this.
NK is their operating model. This is what all US politicians want. Control over you in some way; either the far left communist way or the far right fascism path. Ultimately they only want power over everything and they know a great way of doing that is complete surveillance
At least one side-perhaps large portions of both sides-has spent far too much time thinking about children and doing things to children that shouldn't be done.
I can't speak to Roman Catholic priests as I am a Protestant and we don't unbiblically deny marriage for our elders(there's actually a verse that speaks against forbidding marriage). Where politicians are concerned, not all people become politicians for the same reasons, though a majority do for the wrong reasons and might also be susceptible to being pdfs for reasons linked causally to those same wrong reasons.
nah one of those 2 options dont give a shit what people do online the ones who want it are the centrist dems and everyone on the right aside from maybe the libertarians.
while i tend to agree the also usually have a decently strong stance against surveillance for other less then favorable reasons (like wanting to debate minimum age laws or being forced to have to provide trash services so the bears stop attacking their town.)
Even Red Star OS (North Korea's premier Linux distribution) doesn't ask for government ID for its user accounts. At least, the last leaked version (3.0) doesn't.
are you currently slandering the glorious leader? Officer i think this civilian is slandering the glorious leader who doesnt shit.... ever. please collect them and all of their family and send them to a work camp.
its going to end up like that.
There has been a push to go to a federal/national id ever since the civil rights movement.
today we are almost there with the "real id" on the state issued id. This pretty much makes every state id into a federal id.
the next step in this is California's "unanimous" decision on this law.
The way I understand it is that they have made their own legal definitions for the law.
They have a new vocabulary word called an OSP. An Operating System Provider. This gets around the open source and linux is not an operating system, etc... arguments.
The OSP developers are responsible with providing the API so that the Content provider developers can verify the user's age. And their age isn't a specific number either apparently.
Their age is an age bracket of like, "under 18" or "under 16" or something like that. Each user would need to have their own account to make this work.
so idk how they would handle the "sharing" of an account or having "guest" accounts.
i do understand why this law was passed unanimously though: lawyers are going to make bank on this.
They are going to login to the computer, identify as a 10 year old. then google "Drinks" and get results for alcoholic beverages. The algorithm has already built a profile for that search id and curates its results. So they are going to go after everyone to use their "age" system for purpose of advertisements.
This is literally just another way for marketing and advertisement to market their products and the lawyers are going to love fighting them in court for it. Nobody gives a fuck about the kids. Everyone looking to get paid.
You might actually be surprised at the reply. Literally 40% of Linux users are below the age of 18, especially now with the gaming support getting better on Linux than in the past. Parents are giving g their kids computers with Linux on it so they can’t irresponsibly download crap ware on the system.
I find it hard to believe that almost as many kids are using it as professionals. If we end up with this age verification crap forced on us because of fucking gamers, I'm all for banning gaming as a matter of general principle.
You should believe it. You might not have heard of it but there’s an OS called android and another one called chrome that are both quite popular and have larger user bases of children.
Anyways what about embedded systems and IoT devices? How will they identify each user? Now I can’t purchase a soda from a vending machine without logging in and showing my government ID just in case a 10 year old might use the vending machine to watch porn??? There’s other ways to take care of kids (it’s called “parenting”) than the government just restricting everyone’s freedom.
That's the neat thing. They can't. The world runs on it. If the US implemented this, and all the distros refused, the US would be forced to spend trillions of dollars it doesn't have buying MS licenses and switching everything to MS on every server in existence.
Fun fact! If we had a magic time machine that could travel through time at the cost of $1/day, and the entire US debt was allocated toward going back in time, we could get four round-trip tickets back to the Big Bang and still have enough left over for a day trip to hang out with the early Stegosaurian species
First this just seems like a random skit about a world where photos of things are legally treated like those things next specifically banning Linux from average Joe use can’t you just fork Linux the forked version isn’t banned
They can, though.
It is as simple as "a non-authorized device may not connect to XYZ service".
It is staring me in the face rn. I've an iPhone X (almost ten years old)... it takes passable pics, has some music, I can browse the web. It makes and receives calls. Not a scratch on the screen. Battery replaced once. It is/was a solid piece of kit. Except...
Can I use my banks' apps? Can I fuck. IDK what IOS version is current, but I'm not running it. Ergo. QED. Fuck me, and people like me.
The simple fact is that you need a phone to just get along on the daily. At least in the UK, not sure about the US. Almost every town here has a different parking set-up where you need an app. Gone are the days of just putting coins in a meter.
And it will get a whole lot worse when "digital currency" becomes a thing.
----
"Build your own distro", you say. Fine. That's not easy. You may have the tech nous to do so. Good for you. What are you going to do when there is a flag built into commercial systems that lets them pass, and you do not??
(Also, package management is a right PITA if you build your own system. It truly makes you believe that Gentoo's emerge or Debian's apt (pick your poison) are engineering marvels!)
Open source is largely made possible by using copyright law to prevent people from taking the code without accepting the open source license. Copyright law can be changed by the government.
Corporations and governments would be just fine: secure-boot enabled immutable image-based distros.
But there's a real risk it kills off Linux on the desktop, hence killing developer attractiveness.
Microsoft tried hard to shutdown Linux back then and they couldn't. Free software is necessary for cutting costs. There is a reason Linux if popular among the tech community, being used in servers around the world while windows is popular in the consumer market. Microsoft can spend money on ads and developing business suites, while Linux just needs to stay FOSS and the community will adopt and develop it.
Only speculation, but yes. Not directly though. Next they’ll require websites and software to check for that age verification. If your computer doesn’t have it they’ll deny you. You’d still be able to use the OS of course, but there’d be a lot of app’s and some or none of the web wouldn’t work.
Its for the children though /s
Why wouldn't we want "government approved" operating systems and software. Governments throughout history have shown to be infallible and have never done anything that violates their citizens rights, freedoms and privacy right?
I imagine it'd be very nice to have a fully patched military level distro. Don't forget that governments around the world are sitting on a hoard of zero-days.
What about tpm with full chain of trust ? With all websites required to abide by this infrastructure. You can compile your own kernel sure but you won’t have access to most of the internet
This is besides the point of what is being asked.
The idea behind the legislation is:
* Create a standard whereby an OS verifies the user's age
* Let the OS share this information with age-restricted services
* Age-restricted services need to block users that are too young.
So if your OS doesn't comply to this standard, the result is that you will just be blocked from all age-restricted services. That's basically the legal default then.
You can totally opt out of a service like that by using Linux and customizing it to disable this service. It just means no more porn and likely no mainstream social media for you. And no age restricted movies on Netflix, maybe not even access to banking if they think they are really funny.
my legislator basically told me to pound sand when I wrote to them about the tariffs and probably doesn't give two shits about this either.
I'll remember that when the midterms come around.
The unfortunate side of this is that telling them that it's unenforcable makes it a bigger challenge to them to trample us more. It's better to point out that these laws Violate the First Amendment and should be thrown out on the grounds of them being unconstitutional.
Thanks to Bernstein v. United States 96-99 It established that code is written word, and therefore it's a protected form of speech. Then when Apple refused to write code that breaks their encryption for the FBI by using the Bernstein v. United States case as precedence claiming that the demand violates their rights as a developer as this would be coerced speech, this solidified the usage. So now it's time to use this again to get these laws thrown out.
Had bipartisan support in California too, as the bill made it through both champers of our legislature unanimously. It's just surprising that there was not a single member who understood tech enough to know why this is a terrible idea.
Pretty sure it is enforceable. See China. If the government decided that ISPs were to be nationalized, you’d be SOL. How are you going to connect to the internet if you’re not allowed to connect to the internet? It could also be hardware bound.
You could use open source, but if legislation made it required of all manufacturers and ISP to verify identity, then…you can’t do anything online.
I think you underestimate what overwhelming power policy and laws have when enforced by a large enough entity.
They can say: give me a key or else you dont get a connection at all. And that key could be tied to your OS by convention. You can even bypass how its provided to the ISP, but they would still know WHO is connecting.
No. if you explain to them why they can't enforce it, They will just amend the law until they can. That's the opposite of what we should do. What we do, is we engage in hostel compliance. California, (And other states) Say Operating systems in this state must do this, Ok, Then rewrite the license to exclude the usage of the software in those states. Of course, exclusion goes against the GPL. But we can write a new GPL version 4 adding a clause that covers user privacy. Which this violates. Half of California's infrastructure runs on Linux servers. Find out what distro they use and lobby those distro makers to revoke usage in that state. Use their own law against them. Make this as big of an issue for them as possible. That's how you get them to change it. Telling them they can't enforce it because of X, Y, or Z, will just make them rewrite the law around X, Y, and Z. That's the last thing you want to do. The language of the law is vague. Use that to our advantage. Lets copy what Midnight BSD did. get the FSF to write a new GPL 4 with a usage clause for user privacy and then revoke the usage of software in California or other states who violate that. that gives the FSF power to sue them for misuse if they actually use these Distros in that state. Make it as difficult for them as possible using their own law to do it. That's how you handle this. Politicians are ruthless. The only way to win, is to play at their level. This is a game of chess, not checkers.
Oh I know. But it would be worth it. Freedom is always worth it. I run a Linux distro. (Titan Linux) I'm more than willing to do this work. I feel certain that there's enough people that feel the same way. We can do this.
It doesn't matter that it excludes a group of people, in this case, RMS would be ok with it because it is actually PROTECTING freedom, not limiting it.
Think about it... If north korea required spyware to be present to use the os, do we add spyware to comply? Or simply say "oh too bad for north korea" I'll give you a hint, it is the second one.
Sure, but without it being expressly written in the license, if you ever had to challenge it in court, you would lose. It must be in the license for it to be legally binding.
My point here is, you're not thinking about it clearly.
FSF doesn't want people to add any kind of tracking/privacy invasion to software. And if someone did, they surely would not endorse it. They don't even endorse Debian simply because they include wifi firmware, for example.
Saying "this software is not legal for use in California" is NOT, not at all, like saying "this software my not be used by African Americans"
Shameless double post of my other comment:
As long as we can all just agree it should be an ENV variable
`USER_AGE=1982~3` Born between 1979 and 1985
`USER_AGE=1982/3/2~0/6` Born between half a year of second of march (We are not doing American date-syntax tradition)
Then i'm perfectly fine with this?
So long as there is no cryptography running to verify anything I'm OK with having the browser auto-detect a user account under the age of 18 and require it to add a HTTP header to that affect.
There is a danger of slippery slope, but also a need to get kids off social media.
Before anybody tellls me this is not effective. Those few that figure out how to bypass is aren't the target. The target is re-instating the normalcy/peer pressure of an entire cohort to not be drugged & brainwashed by algorithms.
Its being forcibly excluded if you fail to sign up remotely that is the problem. Not the necessity to submit 'a date'. Normies don't know the difference. IT experts will need to explain it to them, not just complain about the potential over-reach of power.
>re-instating the normalcy/peer pressure of an entire cohort to not be drugged & brainwashed by algorithms.
The way to deal with the pernicious effects of social media algorithms on children and society at large is to regulate the companies designing and operating the algorithms, not all of the devices people might conceivably use to access the algorithms.
This entire age verification regime is a push by Meta et al to avoid accountability for their actions, and thus avoid any possible reduction in their profit margins, however small.
Like most things, this is about money and power. And unfortunately for us, corporations have more money and power than our own government.
There is also government regulation about providing access for physically impaired users. You can meet this discussion where its at and say that regulating the companies by having the user self report their age automatically by an ENV variable, or you can wait until some loby organization makes a final push to have the hardware -1 ring CPU's be mandatory to facilitate cryptographic verification and have DRM enabled to file your taxes.
Stop being this defeatist. You want a "I was there and lost from the start" sticker to explain what happened in 30 years time?
These privacy complaints are things you can explain to politicians, i.e. people who need to understand this. Politicians are in the business of consuming ideas, not having them. This has always been true, and people on social media seems to have forgotten this.
If it was just a matter of fundamentally corrupt government at every level with everybody in on it, than these laws would have been instated a decade ago.
Definitely vote with your $$$, but also vote with your vote. :D Get involved with your local political groups and start writing letters. Grab some EFF verbiage on the topic, modify to make it personal to you and get it to all your reps.
This is a dumb and mis-guided attempt by the social media etc to limit their liability by pushing the slop down to us. If we don't want to live with this privacy/freedom limiting precedent we should cut the bills off before they progress too far in city/state legislatures.
Vote for who? The Texas proposed law is worse as it requires and 3rd party to validate you. Texas is republican, California is Democrat. Both sides are in favor of this madness. So who do you vote for? Libertarians? Maybe. But they've never won a national election in the history of ever. So good luck with that.
This is something I hope people devs will realize. If a distribution implements this, we will just stop using it and switch to another one that didn't. Don't do it.
And if anything, being able to use an OS able to remove that particular characteristic, it might become a feature kids might want.
This could be leveraged as a feature, instead of a bug.
This will be implemented with free and open source software. It will become a reference standard that governments can use to compare all the proprietary implementations against.
It's a good thing people share their opinion, being able to do so is what people lobbying this hate the most. Most people also have no idea what to do. Whenever you have a chance please ask them to call people from their government. It only works when people are vocal AND are willing to participate even just a bit.
Can someone please explain to me how linux will require me to "face ID" myself to prove my age? Ill just turn that feature off ... like, can someone please explain that to me?
Lock based on TPM and secure boot will leave you no choice but to comply I'm afraid. If you don't like it I think you should call your representatives first, perhaps donate to people who do legislation. This is only meaningful way forward.
Maybe this is too simplistic in thinking, or maybe not....
But how many of you posting these threads are forgetting... this is Free Software™. Free as in freedom. The entire point of GNU ever being conceived was an act of civil disobedience against authority, by a group of hackers who purposefully designed it to be freely used, copied and modified and redistributed? Don't you realize that the mere use of it is an act of subversion of authority?
So how can all the people asking "how Linux (a kernel) can avert and fight back?"
Simply don't comply. That's how. If one group decides to add code in, fork the sucker. Very simple.
We just need to make forking illegal, then. One government-maintained Linux distribution with a custom kernel with a login screen that prevents you from using your computer unless you have a functioning Internet connection to strong ID servers to rule them all. Heck, make the credentials biometric while we are at it.
ok but if they implement some gfw like china how can we possibly access this without committing an illegal act that is definitely recorded and analyzed by authorities?
Ignore the last two sentences and add in "your OS has a unique fingerprint that is added onto any file you ever touch" and you've got North Korea's \[Red Star OS\](https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7174-lifting\_the\_fog\_on\_red\_star\_os)
Define "we." I think you'll find, when you boil it down, there is no "we."
"We" (as you are using the term) would mean a "one-world government." There is none. Copyleft licenses are viral and perpetuated distribution of a system beyond any government's control.
There are no "Linux Distributions." There is only a kernel, with around 1000 variant application bundles, distributed worldwide, sometimes anonymously, and thousands upon thousands of shared libraries on top of that.
Even if some particular government found a way to lock down a particular repo like Canonical, mirrors would spring up overnight to replace them. Their market share would plummet. New distribution channels would arise. Decentralized alternatives would be made.
The entire concept of "account creation" in these bills depends on a centralized system controls user experience. This does not exist outside proprietary site, and cannot unless TPM is used to somehow anchor hardware to software, and that's a tactic the Free Software community is already aware of and is evading.
To quote Rick Falkvinge, in regards to peer-to-peer currency, "it would be like trying to regulate gravity." They have no tools to regulate this. They can try going after the largest actors. They can make as many laws as they like. But in the end, so long as you control your own computing there's nothing they can do short of sticking a gun to every user's head not to boot their machines.
Even you are missing the point.
Its not about OS. OS is just the frontend to this. Its like the location thing.
WEBSITES will be required to get your ID/age/whatever. AND to make it reliable the OS is pulled into this mess.
So if your OS does not have this ability of providing who is using it now then the website will refuse to let you use it.
Imagine reddit telling you that there is nothing for you to see if you dont login and to do so you need to give them photo of your govt ID or click "get my id from OS". Where OS will do this once (lets say you photo your id and give it to microsoft) and then tie your user login to the web identity.
That is what is supposed to be.
So, what WILL happen (because politicians dont give a shit about you or me) is that you will be able to use your linux but sites like fb/reddit/discord/instagram/BANK will basically not let you use them.
MAYBE, they will let you use them if you VPN from someplace. But I doubt.
internet becomes less free the more corpos embrace it.
MAYBE the benefit will be that less scamers will be able to use fb or mail gateways but I doubt.
Yes and no. A few people who silently stop using internet is no big deal, a few people who organize and make their voices heard is a much bigger problem.
I think it's actually better to call your representatives and tell them you don't want it. And do it a few times if needs to. That's the only way where you don't have to stop using things you like.
Let’s think about this for a second. The only way this makes any sense or is remotely enforceable is to force every operating system to make the user upload their ID or provide a valid ID number, and a face scan or other biometric, then compare that against a federal database of ID’s and biometrics. Literally anything that falls short of that accomplishes exactly nothing. Let’s say for a hot moment that they do that. 90% of Linux distros are open source, windows can relatively easily be broken, all it takes is a couple of good programmers / hackers. So do they then ban open source? Do they go on some sort of crusade against any non-approved vendor released distros, banning sites, sharing, and every other way of circumventing bullshit?
This is a fantasy made my a mix of idiotic and blatantly corrupt politicians.
My (conspiracy) theory is that it’s just bullshit distraction from Epstein, Iran, and the literal plethora of other illegal shit going on.
I see. So basically, we shouldn't have to worry (aside the fact the government is attempting to add surveillance into every bit of our digital lives) cause there's not way they can enforce this?
I mean, we should absolutely be worried lol. Even if they pass some unenforceable bullshit law, that just means they have one more excuse to arrest people they disagree with. I didn’t mean to imply it’s not something to worry about, but the feasibility of enforcement is essentially a moot point.
Gotcha. But it really is stupid. they talk about 'protecting minors' while they are the same people who've been trafficking just that in the files, lol.
When I was a kid we shouted something along the lines : "the name caller name call himself" that was our defense to bullies who name called us.
The older I get I see this behavior more and more often. Who uses kids as excuse to strip freedoms? kid abusers. Who is restricting tax evasion for common folks? Tax evaders. Who defines "conflict of interests" for random office worker? Lobbied senators and ceos. And so on.
You can often see patterns and once you learn what is projection you see it all around you. Workplace abusers claim to be abused most often. Intolerant people will yell for tolerance first. etc...
I'm not so sure. If you look at a cross-section of operating systems that people who own and use a home PC or laptop actually use, Linux is well at the bottom. Mostly its Windows still. And the vast majority of Windows users do not care enough or are not tech-literate enough to circumvent even basic roadblocks or verifications that have already been implemented (like Windows requiring TPM or an online-only account for installation). I think when looking at the percentage of people they can target with this stuff, politicians aren't aiming for everyone, they're aiming for 'good enough' which means that Linux is probably too hard to wrangle in the end despite any efforts made.
You’re not wrong, but at the same time, given the widespread reaction to Flock, I would anticipate a little bit more than baseline disinterest. The majority of people who be susceptible to monitoring are the bootlickers and people who don’t care. Neither are likely to be a surveillance states ideal profile. My point is, it’s a lot of work for an unenforceable solution, with huge social backlash, and very limited strategic value.
The bill just requires a user inputted age or birthday, no id, no biometrics, nothing like that (yet of course lol)
1798.501. (a) An operating system provider shall do all of the following:
(1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.
It creates the structure for OS to collect and send authentication data. Basically the OS is doing fingerprinting soon enough because now is an age bracket, tomorrow the requests will multiply. In my opinion it would not be a disaster having a parental control mode on Linux that could be opt-in, but this ain't it.
Indeed but then why put it there? They have a plan and this is first step. These things dont die. I get what you mean, but that does not change anything. If this become implemented it will spread.
I think there already *is* a fairly basic parental control mode in Linux (probably varies by distro). I've never used it, but AFAIK it works like a second SUDO, locking one user out of certain applications or locations unless another user approves it by entering a password. It wouldn't be that hard, surely, to implement a similar system in a web browser where a user has a whitelist of approved sites, and access to anything else is gated behind a password.
>Do they go on some sort of crusade against any non-approved vendor released distros, banning sites, sharing, and every other way of circumventing bullshit?
they won't need to. once windows and mac do attestation and there's a critical mass of users coming from platforms that do it, they can start going after website operators. reddit, facebook, etc all have 18+ content on it. the next law will be that websites that contain any adult content can't serve requests to operating systems that don't do attestation.
Exactly! It' just like what we already have:
- no 4K streaming from a streaming provider due to open nature of Linux
- no hdmi 2.1 on AMD GPUs due to open nature of Linux
- no competitive multiplayer games due to open nature of Linux
But it risks being generalized to almost everything.
I fear that it could result in a massive push to secure-boot enforced immutable image-based distros that heavily restrict what you can modify. This in turn would kill its main attraction force for developers.
> This is a fantasy made by a mix of idiotic and blatantly corrupt politicians.
While you are right in the first part this needs to be slightly amended:
This is a preparation to embrace the internet by corpos completely and extinguish any freedom or unaccounted for traffic.
They have a plan and once again, used kids to promote their agenda.
TLDR; this ain't happening on FOSS or macOS, or Windows. It's not logistically feasible. It's fantasy hype for interest groups lobby the STATE LEGISLATURE. it'll get knocked down. The feds already have our every movement in our pocket -- this is nothing more than data harvesting and even then really really useless and redundant.
It's like that spongebob meme where spongebob breaks a clock, and squidward has a closet full of them. They might get windows and mac os, but there's hundreds of linux distros, and we'll just pump out more if need be.
Or just uninstall the spyware trash, it's still Linux and Linus still has control over what goes into the kernel releases, and I'm pretty sure that he wouldn't allow it into the official kernel release. They'd have to fork the kernel and except for maybe government mandated compliance standards, I don't think the majority would go along with using the förled spyware kernel
Yeah, that's my point, and if it is in userland, I can easily just remove it. Then it really only becomes an issue for me if websites start requiring it somehow.
At which point it will get spoofed, same thing when sites starting blocking linux users based on user agent. They are going to push canonical, and redhat, and popOS arround, maybe. The rest are just going to ignore this shit and build tooling to bypass it when needed.
Well, it depends on what kind of controls they implement. If you need a unique cryptographic that is generated through your government issued E-ID to be able to use common web sites, that might be hard to get past.
That is very hard to implement, if US sites implement it they would need a european version or lose a big chunk of its user or only do so on the US version in which case we should go buy stock in vpn companies. E-ID is cute for government sites where all the user have it but for the modern internet its a fantasy.
Here in Sweden, a lot of websites are using E-ID for login. Pretty much all banks and government websites use it of course, but a lot of others too.
It works quite well actually. And don't get me wrong, it's almost exclusively sites where you'd want to verify your identity, not stuff like social media or such.
And we are not the only EU country that has such a system. The EU is already working on a shared system too, the US is far behind on this.
The tools you would use to remove it are also in userland. If Ubuntu ends up implementing this, way have their own kernel by the way, I don't think you'll find it easy to remove.
Practically everything in Linux is OSS, people can easily fork packages. I use Arch on pretty much everything so it would be easy for someone to fork an upstream package, and then you'd just have to install it from the AUR.
Until the governments decide to put laws on the hardware manufacturers that they can only install "approved" software. It's not like that's not been considered before.
It would be economically stupid because people would either start buying from China, because free hardware would become a perfect niche, or people would immideately hack the shit out of the devices.
Remember how governments have forced ISPs to block particular IP ranges? You can get round it with a VPN, but if they force the blocking of VPN addresses it starts to get harder. Blocking access to sellers of "unlawful" hardware comes next, and each step makes it harder and harder for regular folks to maintain their digital rights.
Just as for VPNS, it's a game of whackamole nobody wins.
For every VPN address blocked, 10 more pop up.
For every non 1984ified hardware seller blocked 10 more will pop up.
China has been doing this for years
Yes and besides, they are blocking commercial VPN providers. All you would have to do is set up something like a small VPS in whatever country's network you want to access and route your traffic through that machine instead. They can introduce fiction, but unless they really cut off the connection, there will be a way. Not saying they wouldn't eventually find ways to stop that too but every measure like that would meet a lot of pushback along the way.
I think this is the way, though obviously that will be difficult, and the next authoritarian step is to block ISPs from allowing unauthorised devices from connecting.
Unfortunately this would be implemented *far* above the kernel level. The kernel is the very base, the foundation of the OS. This API would be implemented in the OS, or potentially even handled by the desktop environment (though I doubt it would actually be rolled in with a DE)
If this had to be a kernel level type of thing, then it would be even worse, because all legal action could be directed at Linus, instead of spread out over hundreds of companies and thousands of distros.
Its plausible some of the corporate run distributions have to follow the standard, which they would implement per distribution. but it won't make it into the kernel, its outside its scope anyways.
Gonna copy myself here and post a small list from a previous comment on this topic:
The only "companies" which "own" (relevant) distributions are:
* Canonical (UK; Ubuntu)
* SUSE S.A (Germany; SUSE Enterprise, openSUSE)
* Oracle (US, Texas; Oracle Linux)
* Google (US, California; ChromeOS)
* UnionTech (China; Deepin)
* Zorin Group (Ireland; ZorinOS)
* System76 (US, Colorado; Pop!_OS and Linux computer manufacturer)
* Amazon (US, Washington; AWS/Amazon Linux); and;
* IBM (US, New York; Red Hat, Fedora)
So i would presume that Oracle, Google, System76, Amazon, and IBM would likely comply, and their various distributions would likely be affected as a result.
Then there's the possibility of Canonical or SUSE buckling due to the vendors which sell devices with Ubuntu or SUSE pre-installed (predominantly from Dell, an American company). It could be possible that Dell, or another US manufacturer, might be able to strongarm a foreign organization like Canonical into implementing this so as to allow their distribution to be vendor installed.
Its also possible they create vendor-specific variants of their distribution which are sent to the vendors instead of modifying the publicly available versions (I feel SUSE would likely do this before buckling totally, Canonical would likely buckle totally though given their history).
And there's likely other avenues I'm not considering due to ignorance or lack of intense thought. But this could affect the corporate Linux world significantly.
Its why the current model is to circumvent Linux or even OS boot, asking you and force marrying the age verification/biometrics INTO the BIOS. Which, will ask for PII "for age reasons" on. Every. Single. Reset and boot. Fail to provide it? Will be coded to *shutdown* until you give it. Rhey know full damn well they cannot kill them all. So, they are going the mandatory hardware angle
There's another from the Peanuts where Lucy gets mad at Schroeders indifference to her flirting and she smashes his piano and Beethoven bust, only for him to get new ones from two closets filled to the brim with them. 😁
As long as we can all just agree it should be an ENV variable
`USER_AGE=1982~3` Born between 1979 and 1985
`USER_AGE=1982/3/2~0/6` Born between half a year of second of march (We are not doing American date-syntax tradition)
Then i'm perfectly fine with this?
So long as there is no cryptography running to verify anything I'm OK with having the browser auto-detect a user account under the age of 18 and require it to add a HTTP header to that affect.
There is a danger of slippery slope, but also a need to get kids off social media.
Before anybody tellls me this is not effective. Those few that figure out how to bypass is aren't the target. The target is re-instating the normalcy/peer pressure of an entire cohort to not be drugged & brainwashed by algorithms.
Its being forcibly excluded if you fail to sign up remotely that is the problem. Not the necessity to submit 'a date'. Normies don't know the difference. IT experts will need to explain it to them, not just complain about the potential over-reach of power.
In the Netherlands most schools now have the policy that kids must leave their phones at home.
Its not perfect, they regularly do so anyway, but it sets the tone and society wide expectations - and beside the occasional toilet adventure the kids are happy about it because now the lunch breaks people are talking again instead of being on their phone.
Stop attacking this as a software problem to be technically solved and perfect. It doesn't exist, nor is it the goal that non-IT people are aiming for. Parents and teachers want social support to prevent kids from harming themselves and stunting the development of yet another generation.
This law doesn’t just impact kids. It impacts everyone.
In 2027, it’s just getting you to jot down your age. In 2028, it will be face id verification. This is not good for privacy, which I believe is an implied fourth amendment right.
The fact that they have to do this implies that some privacy measures DO work.
For those reasons, I think this law would actually be worth striking down by the Supreme Court.
I dont give a fuck about your argument that starts at the bottom of the slippery slope. You're just ensuring that politicians hear about idiot radicals instead of constructive solution they can use to solve the problem that the parents keep bringing up.
If you don't start thinking in terms of solutions, the Hollywood/NSA lobby is going to do it for you.
You are just being unreasonable for your LARPing offgrid fantasies.
The law just has to say something to the effect that companies serving HTTP requests without the user-age header are to be treated as underage users and granted limited access where appropriate.
You want to host your own porn for you and your friends who don't want their browser to add a single HTTP header? Nothing is stopping you, as long as you're not making money off it.
You know - like a liquor store has to do a reasonable check but fake ID's exist.
Oh, I normally do, but sometimes it's fun to poke the underdeveloped and indoctrinated to see if there are any cracks in their programming.
It makes living amongst them slightly more tolerable.
The problem is... Why kids should have a phone? Kids should be raised without phones.
The point is so many lazy parents use the phone to shut up the kid and so much people say their children are no screen and there are no schools with that kind of parenthood. And if you have a no screen kid in a class of screen kids he will be the freak.
And the same if you lock everything. The lazyness of most parents makes your kid the freak.
Blocks from the government are like when they block half internet just trying to end with football piracy. The income of the channels don't grow and it is affecting to so many people with small business with the site on cloudfare. Kids always will find the way to ignore the blocks and there is a high risk of many of them end on the dark web looking for a way to jump the block.
Kids are just the excuse to hide the real reason, stop a future rebelion.
The future looks really bad maybe world war III, maybe the IA makes a huge amount of unemployment, maybe a huge economic crash...
Well because if your a parent and your kid is 14 and they aren’t allowed text messages or discord your being overprotective which isn’t healthy for most kids.
Not everyone needs to be sheltered.
Plus, some kids actually can handle internet. We don’t need to treat every 12 year old like they are 5 years old.
Parents can prevent harm by being parents. If you don't know how to manage time spent online, don't block certain sites, and don't have conversation with their child about online safety then why the hell are they letting them on the internet in the first place? It's just silly. In addition, I can 100% bet you if you offered one of those schools the ability to bring phones to school once agian a majority of students would agree to it. Giving up and accepting are not the same an happiness and excitement.
I get it. You're American. You think freedom means a society where an abstractly ideal man lives an abstractly ideal life protected by paying just enough taxes to fund the police to fill a for-profit prison system.
What would happen in that perfect libertarian society, is that the people who create these platforms/apps/phones would force the schools their kids go to, to ban them.
We know, because its happening now. The parents working at a place like Facebook know that shoveling immediate happiness and excitement into brains is bad for their future. But you want everyone else to pay the price for not figuring this out.
Cool.
Or, crazy out-there idea, we could legislate selling drugs to kids.
I believe parents should be parents. I think if you have a child you have a duty to take care of it, protect it and to teach it. I think that applies to the internet as much as it does everything else. I also think a government needed to see your id for something you don't need to be a certain age to do is stupid. Also, as many other people here think, its just another safety risk. Also I don't align with any political party, I am a human, my views change and often times the political party changes. Also the phone thing was just how I felt lol, they did ban phones at my school when I was still in high-school like 4 years ago.
American syntax tardation? Can you legit explain to me how starting with a day then proceeding to a month is makes more sense than starting with the month in question then the day off said month. Seriously, if it's actually better if like to understand why.
Your image looks so kind of messed up but I guess that's because I don't picture reading things from the bottom up, I see it as reading from the top down in which American logic would be this month, on this day of that month, in this year. Which seems perfectly logical to me. I am open to ideas as to why listing other ways is better and wish someone would put forth a valid argument.
Why force all this shit onto the industries and consumers that aren't responsible for the core problem?
> Kids need to be kept off social media?
How about social media needs to be regulated, preventing their manipulative, preying practices? Require social media companies to increase transparency. Require they be subject to oversight.
Your solution, their solution (of "age verification"), is not targeting their cause. Its permissive to the damaging practices, and so the damage will continue.
I'm a parent of two. They are teenagers.
Kids off of social media is a parenting thing.
Boost and support parenting and child protection services. Locking internet behind an identity verification is just controlling people, nothing else.
But you're not locking the internet. You're locking the companies selling your kids' attention.
We can make a difference between the internet and the freedom to connect to any IP address and exchange anything, with the businesses setting up shop to make money off the services they provide.
The comment suggested to become a millionaire and lobby against this shit. I'm just pointing out that millionaires are the new middle class and can't lobby against shit. A million dollars/euros is just not big money anymore
They are forcing Linux distributors to implement age verification or pay significant fines. This might not affect you as an skilled individual, that can have a fork without that feature or remove it. But for small companies or public organizations who want to use Open Source these regulations can have a significant impact.
My conspiracy theory is that presidents are just the face of their countries and they actually have little to no say when it comes to decisions, illusion of choice, everything happens backstage via a group of people
This is being done at state level though. Newsom, Polis, and apparently NY is getting behind this so Hochul (who is also attempting to regulate 3D printers).
**They aren't stupid they are aware of exactly what they are doing. Legislators are a controlled opposition. The U.S. government isn't for the people or by the people, it never has been.**
It's such a horseshit objective. The onus lies with companies like Facebook and their products, not the damn operating system. I hate how stupid everyone is so goddamn much.
I hope Facebook loses all their lawsuits, especially the one in California about feeds being addictive.
A product or a service that has an age limit must bear the burden of enforcing that age limit. Nobody and nothing else.
> The onus lies with companies like Facebook and their products
it actually doesn't. it falls to parents to monitor their kids behavior and correct it when it's wrong.
Exactly. We've had 18+ paid TV channels since decades, nobody thought of adding some kind of age check or card that you need to tap to prove your age. It has always been the responsibility of the parent, and this has NEVER been a problem.
But now the screens are smaller, they stay close to your face instead of on the wall, and suddenly you need to identify the person using it. Stupid af.
I'd agree, but really Facebook needs ripped out too.
I think it's reasonable to say that a platform where you supposedly make a profile and everything should have to verify its users are of age.
What to do if root is under 18?
Question. How is a distro supposed to treat a root user thats under 18? Like, what if root authorizes install of a dirty game from Steam or something. Does the system comply or does it deny root's command due to age, like some kind of neurotic techno nanny? I mean, what is the purpose of a Linux system if its not to do the bidding of root without question or complaint? Are Linux distros going to have to start second-guessing their admins now if they have not been on this Earth for some arbitrary number of years? How would a system even implement such a policy? Furthermore if a system can deny commands from root then what even is it's reason to exist in the first place? And in this case, who is the real (actual) system admin... cuz it's no longer root; that's for sure.
Also, how is Linux age verification even compatible with the GPL? If I'm not mistaken, the GPL forbids discrimination on who can and cannot compile and use your software once it is released/published. How would age restriction of end users not violate this clause?
Anyway, just some thoughts from a one-person "distro" developer. Have I discovered a legal Linux paradox?
[https://ps3linux.net](https://ps3linux.net)
Build a bot hooked to an llm that calls your senators and congressmen with a different voice every hour and give it a specific script with a bit of leeway about how you oppose this heinous and downright uneducated attempt at removing digital privacy and that on a fundamental level this is not enforceable since the OS on gas pumps and atms cant verify age
Ultimately, if they really push this through... they're going to have to enforce TPM on all new hardware and only allow signed kernels (that also make the kvm hypervisor parts to require signed kernels) and then keep the keys out of your hands. Going after full-userspace hw emulation would be a nightmare though...
If it is anything like kernel-level Anti-cheat, then I assume that it will disable people from being able to use computers for anything.
We live in interesting times.
I don't know why they are trying push this so hard considering most banks and government facilities use Red Hat to "get as little people involved as possible", so despite them using it I don't know know why they insist on fucking us over.
By forking a Linux distro to not have it. Since you aren’t selling the distro then it is not a commercial product and therefore can’t be regulated, it’s essentially a hobby.
The only way this could possibley affect Linux is if it’s a commercial/entreprise direction run by a for-profit company.
They couldn’t regulate you from using your own homebrew OS that your write yourself right? Like Temple OS lol. Linux/GNU are essentially just homemade hobby OSes except on a large organized collaborative scale. With volunteers contributing code.
I think it's just going to be a strapped on thing full of sec vulns. On windows i think it's going to be bypassed instantly. On mac it might be more difficult, but on any linux distro they're probably just going to put it there by default and it's going to be easily removable. Idk the details of the law, but they might even serve different versions of the same distro.
I don’t really get why people are upset with this, yes it’s dumb but it’s the same as a website or steam asking your age and you just put you were born sometime in the 1800s
Upset? Because why TF should I / we have to provide ID to use an OS?
You do realize its a Zionist Mossad company behind this (Palantir), they want to hoover up everyone's data, your ok with that?
I am not. And i imagine the majority are not ok with it either.
Stop licking the boots of people who don't give a flying fk about you, your family or any 'rights' you think you have.
Your smart thermostat has an OS, should it ask about your age, what about the TV in your living room, your calculator? And what about Linux systems that don't belong to big companies like Red Hat? And what about when they start thinking that internal verification isn't good enough and start requiring 3rd party verification? 95% of my systems are offline, have a completely offline smarthome won't be doable if systems need internet based age verification. What about common area computers and systems at work? That's the big deal, stupid requirements and scope creep.
Do any of you realize this is being pushed by Palantr, worldwide?
A Zionist (aka MOSSAD) wall kissing POS owned company that is meddling with many governments around the world
WITHOUT ANY FKIN PUBLIC CONSULTATION!!!!!
WAKE UP.
Laws are as strong as the people enforcing it. Piracy has for now 2 decades been a joke in my country. You might get a letter from a lawyer but if you *don't* engage in it, it means nothing.
It doesn't have to be all that complicated. It just needs to be an option for a parent that sets up a computer for their kid to have a way to set their age. Everyone else can just press the "skip" button during setup, and get flagged as an adult, which can be the default for all users without anything else set. Parents could also be allowed to set various limits, such as screen time and use in evenings before a school day; if the system sends stats say on a weekly basis and this stops the parent will know they've installed a different system or circumvented the controls some other way, so can take away the computer. The parent of course retains the root password and SELinux can be used to lock down the system.
Use Linux: get the distro build, build it without age verification features, dd(1) into USB (other alternativs exist for the more technical people), put in USB stick, reboot, boot into USB stick, install.
Why do you need age verification for an OS? Do 12 year olds usually secretly buy $1000 computers, without their parents knowledge just to install an OS, and connect to the internet and watch over 18 porn?
Lobby internally to add rules to the Linux kernels licensing.
Any state/country/governing body/etc that rules by law that any forced verification, tracking, surveillance or similar, to any os using the Linux kernel, loses its right to have any system at all using linux in its entirety. No more webservers, supercomputers, IoT devices, smart controlled, data centers etc.
Force one, lose all.
We dont need to. That is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE WITH LINUX. 😂
That would be the Equivalent to Papyrus trying to catch Frisk in Undertale. Just walk past the bars!
i wonder if someone would be willing to make guides on how to make your own distro/fork/derivative, and how to compile the kernal and theoretically how to remove age verification and etc 🤔
Currently no state law on this subject ( other than NY's proposed law ) requires age verification I.E. You do not need to use a state ID to create a user account. The requirement is for just giving an age.
These laws will be struck down on First Amendment grounds anyway, so perspective is nessary.
The real answer to making change happen in favor of the people and not the wealthy and powerful is not something you can openly discuss, unfortunately.
Really doubt the first part, do you have any sources saying that?
I heard something about us doing this, only the us, and not even the whole us, so it barly matters for most of us.
Be ungovernable. Just don't comply, and if the OS does comply use a different one. This is by definition unenforceable. They literally have no way to compel OS makers to comply, that would mean every PC, every Mac, every smartphone ever. Not going to happen.
We should start making our own operating systems and just start calling it something else. It's not called an operating system, it's called a Manager or some shit. I know it won't work, but that's all I got.
How about a check box during installation “are you an adult?” Now hear me out here, the have a pop up with some legal mumbo cross your heart confirm button. There solved, you’re welcome
This all just nanny state garbage. This type of legislation is not going to see the purpose of protecting children in online spaces. There is no way some people got together and thought implementing this at the OS level was the way to go. It seems some other goal was in mind. Parents all know this is not how you protect kids online. This isn't in the government's scope, or at least it shouldn't be.
Brain dead boomers writing laws.......attack the root problem if we're protecting kids. Now if we're installing a survallience state, that is unconstitutional IMO.
Wait, but since there isn't one global distributor of Linux, the age verification laws cannot be applied technically becase the kernel is Linux, the userland is GNU or busybox, so it is not like windows where the one thing is by one company or organization.
Just don't use distributions that implement that stuff, or rip it out. The government can't dictate what software you install on your computer. Furthermore, publishing source/distributions, even if those don't comply with legal requirements in some states, is constitutionally protected free speech.
In Germany it is illegal to spy on your kids using disguised tech and it should be this way everywhere. They have a right to not be spied upon just like everybody. This will teach them from a very young age, that it is ok if the powers to be violate your privacy. The result is ... whatever became of the usa
Tattling via API isn’t really spying. If a kid is on a device owned and administered by their parents, then they have other means of seeing what they are doing already.
Right, and that really goes to the heart of the problem here. Good parents can already monitor their kids, and do. They do not need the OS to ask their age, because the parents presumably already know it. The only world where we need an OS to know this, is a world where the parents aren’t parenting.
That’s the world we live in today. This doesn’t solve a single thing it’s attempting to solve.
does that include firewalls/filters or other "parental controls" which restrict access to targeted content?
Because, those are legitimate oversight mechanisms for youth and people in general in certain situations.
No, preventive measures and access controll are allowed. This is only about monitoring activity. Especially if mics or cameras (like these kids watches where you can listen to what they say) are involved
This law mandates an API for apps to use to ensure that children are getting a user experience deemed appropriate for children. It doesn’t involve monitoring.
I answered to a specific comment (not to the general discussion about the law). This comment was talking about a "snitch api". I guess the commenter meant it is ok to spy on kids (because "OH my god, what about the children!!!") but not on him. I don't agree with that
I used that term "snitch API." I'm talking about a means of access control that allows an administrator to "snitch" on accounts to applications, ensuring that the child account cannot download age restricted applications and receives a special, age-appropriate user experience for applications that want to go that route. The API does not snitch on children to parents. It's a means for parents to "snitch" on their child to application stores and applications.
I realize now that this is not clearly worded, but I was speaking off the cuff. Access control API is much more clear.
If monitoring means a third person (like the parents) can see their activity, then that is illegal.
Parents can set up restrictions before the kid has access, they can use the device with their kids together (I know, shocking. But you can spend time with your kids) or they can not let their kids access the device at all. Giving them unrestricted access and then invading their privacy is not an option though
We'll be telling our grandkids about how when we were kids the internet was free and open.
We could download Linux isos all day and no one would care.
We could visit any website anonymously, using a VPN, in an incognito browser, and it wasn't even that hard to do.
We could sit outside of a library (a public building with books) and use their wifi legally.
"Ok grandpa, let's get you back to the home."
Won't happen
US state laws are not internationally adopted, especially when they are stupid and unenforceable.
For that to happen, a large entity such as the EU would have to do it, or another group of several countries.
And even then, it would not necessarily be enforceable in reality.
Good luck trying to apply that to operating systems such as Linux.
California has already passed a bill into law that goes into effect 1-1-2027 requiring this. Red BSD pushed a notice excluding California citizens from using their OS until they "figure out a solution" and when California does something in tech or in general the rest of the US is bound to follow eventually, Colorado already followed suite with their own bill. California bill- AB 1043 (Digital Age Assurance Act). If all of the united states begins to comply and follow, it will gain traction in other places in the world.
In the UK a similar thing has already happened, UK's Online Safety Act (effective July 2025, fully enforced in 2026), websites hosting pornography, violent content, or unmoderated forums must implement strict age verification. Users may need to provide ID, use facial age estimation, or use credit card checks to access these sites, aiming to protect children.
This type of control and oversight is already a trending idea around the globe.
1 US ≠ the world
2 unenforceavle laws can be voted they are still unforceable
3 UK's Online Safety Act is about porn and social media not OS AND is nothing new, we have laws about that in many countries and it's only now theyr try to enforced it, with little success
4 you can't compare a website asking for IDs and OS asking for IDs, if you did you clearly don't know what you're talking about
5 in conclusion it won't happen, and even if it happens it won't be enforceable in any way
They're not, though?
Unless I missed some huge announcement, the only one requiring it is california and even then no ID is (currently) asked for.
Not to say the won't do it later, but right now they haven't.
Distros should not implement it, and wish luck to all the californian companies with migration from linux on all servers. Bet after week they will lobby for revert the law
Is it even technically feasible to build an open source age verification module for the Linux kernel? It doesn't make any amount of sense to build a separate system for every distro.
These laws would be a massive handout to Microslop if enforced against Linux.
A New York bill, apparently.
The California bill that everyone is up in arms about does not actually require any form of verification, despite having “age verification” in its title.
It's not my responsibility to pander to your weaponized incompetence. Look it up yourself, maybe actually read about the topic so you have a real question. This is lazy. Boomer shit
IMO by not complying and restricting these specific states, for instance GPLv2 allows geographical restrictions on software distribution. Then if they cannot legally get a proper OS running on a server they will face the consequences
Where in the GPL v2 does it allow for geographical restrictions? I mean, sure, you can decide for yourself who you want to distribute Linux to, but you can't restrict who other people distribute Linux to.
Terms and conditions for copying, distribution and modification, point 8, "If the distribution and/or use of the Program is restricted in certain countries either by patents or by copyrighted interfaces, the original copyright holder ... may add an explicit geographical distribution limitation excluding those countries"
True, but I'm pretty sure that we could make a similar license based on it that would add a clause for cases as this one where redistribution of a program is prohibited by law
You just... don't comply.
If they fine you, don't pay it.
If they imprison you, go on hunger strike.
These people are standing on the heads of children that have been violated and wronged because of a failure on the PARENTAL side.
This is not safety.
This is the first steps of you will NEVER have privacy.
That you will NEVER have the right to have privacy ever again.
That you will NEVER own what is yours.
That what you do in YOUR HOME WILL BE MONITORED AND PUNISHABLE.
These fucking boomers have NOT THE SLIGHTEST IDEA about the EVER-EXPANDING world of SHIT that they are building BECAUSE THEY WON'T HAVE TO LIVE IN IT!
What states are asking for age via ID?
There is a lot of fearslop about California but there is no ID requirement at all, it's a pretty reasonable law.
[You can read California's yourself; it is short.](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043)
Regarding [New York's version](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S8102/amendment/A), it has this concerning passage:
1. "AGE ASSURANCE" SHALL MEAN ANY METHOD TO REASONABLY DETERMINE THE
AGE CATEGORY OF A USER, USING METHODS THAT REASONABLY PREVENT AGAINST
CIRCUMVENTION.
Unlike the CA one which even states that no OS is responsible for circumvention and only self-declaration is needed.
It's funny the NY one is actually bad then but everyone is hyperventilating over the CA one which is pretty much just enter your DOB when you create a user account that the NY one is being missed.
Currently the biggest lobbiest apparently track back to Meta that just got hit with a huge fine for storing minor's data in a way that was illegal. The thought is they are making this the distro/store providers issue to minimize risk to them.
Once it's there it's not like we won't see usage expand in a freedom limiting way....
It's a garbage law that doesn't solve anything, forces every os on phone, home desktop, server or toaster, to have useless check steps and only makes sense as a first step to put essentially every electronic device under surveillance "for the kids". The law is so badly written that you could get fined for downloading and installing a distro that doesn't include this garbage.
We bypass the age verification dbus service https://github.com/HaplessIdiot/ageverificationbypass or we move to distros that resist like openmandriva ghostbsd Garuda artix
I don't see how this law could possibly survive its first challenge. What constitutes an operating system that would be obligated to comply under this law? Will maintainers be forced to pull images of past OSes that don't comply? Will it be illegal for users to uninstall the packages that support the feature? What's stopping maintainers from providing the exact same OS without compliance in another region or country? If I fork an OS and remove the feature and make it available am I liable as an individual? The vagueness and unenforceable nature of this law seems like it would crumble if ever taken to court.
They don't need to worry about old installs. This is only step 1 in a long game. Eventually most, if not all, websites will be required to perform an age verification check or face massive fines. They were able to pull off requiring consent on websites with GDPR, no reason they couldn't use the same strongarm to require the same with age verification. Not going to do you much good with a non-compliant OS if you can't get served any websites on the Internet.
They're already carving out exceptions to that for age verification.
[https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/02/ftc-issues-coppa-policy-statement-incentivize-use-age-verification-technologies-protect-children](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/02/ftc-issues-coppa-policy-statement-incentivize-use-age-verification-technologies-protect-children)
Part of me wants to do the 2s complement to unsigned math and pretend that I read that a far flung year as if it was an unprotected int to uint cast.
But I'm on my phone and lazy.
And when they update the laws to require a digitally singed certificate(were only big tech has the keys) to be sent in every network request and if not, then your isp doesn't allow the request to go through?
well probably many privacy activist groups and more are gonna push hard against this, which is great. There is still a little less than a year till this becomes a law in some states.
Use a distro mainly based outside the US bloc. They can force Canonical and Red Hat to comply. But true community projects could be pretty resilient even though they might lose their US contributors.
I love my second world shit economy country. Something like this would be seen as treason and the heads would roll down the city square just like when Nazis attacked the country. No one would dare to utter a thought of legalizing this, let alone bring the idea into the Houses or the parliaments.
Make them fear the ordinary people again. Thats how you get rid of this.
The law states that users have to tell their age when they make an account. Im guessing this is an online account like Microsoft uses. So it doesn't apply. (Eats more copium.
Make it option during setup, with a text telling you to consult local legislation first.
So, the test follows the law, but the test becomes up to the user.
Then orovide optiions for restricting which programs has access to that info, as well as options to report a different age to certain programs. The OS still knows, but won't tell.
Next, make presets the user can apply for this to meke it completely toothless.
Also, provide builds without it for other locations, then let the user decide which to download. There'll always be some location where it is still legal, even if it is some unrecognized micronation.
It will be tough. From what I've heard Canonical/IBM(RedHat) plan to add is in to dbus which would essentially mean nearly every distro would inherit the basics. Whether the installer or add-user apps would ask (and what it would do with info) is another case.
You have to imagine that the top distro providers don't really care. It's a small ask to an enterprise sales focused company. If it means they get to be on a short list of approved vendors - absolutely they will take it.
I'm perhaps more worried about the forecast made by the System76 CEO where once the age attestation flag is required, a phase 2 is sending it as a network connection (~http) header with laws backing customized experiences per age bracket.
> It will be tough. From what I've heard Canonical/IBM(RedHat) plan to add is in to dbus which would essentially mean nearly every distro would inherit the basics.
The nearly every distro is compromised. Use distros that don't.
TBH the whole push from Colorado, New York, and California to demand ID requirements in tech reeks of hypocracy.
It's just a means to deflect civil liability, which is funny coming from people who would refuse to think of having someone present an ID at a voting booth but are somehow fine with demanding someone prove they're 18 before using a C compiler.
Where’s the id upload info coming from? The California bill just requires a user inputted birthday/age. Not saying it’s better, it could very well be the first step to more oversight, I’m just wondering if this is actually factual
1798.501. (a) An operating system provider shall do all of the following:
(1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043
Next steps is to force app stores (i.e. apt-get/yum/etc.) to query this interface before allowing downloads, and force user authentication for any means of distributing or using of software.
And then they will add ID verification requirements. Then comes the ban on anonymity.
Technically if you don’t ship a damn thing but you have to compile it piece by piece from source nobody could be sued over anything right? Plus we could all agree that linux distributions are not operative systems but runtime environments or something like that, and that’s it, the law is void
Only company-backed distros will be affected really, and they should just be able to say "we don't allow you to install this in California" on the download page and do literally nothing else? Might clash with some OSS license but I don't think the FSF is going to go to court on this.
What passed in California seems like an effort to ward off the most insane of these. It requires a GUI switch which is basically a checkbox that says "I am over 18." If it's clicked, everything continues as normal. If a parent, school, or whoever sets up the device says no, it provides an API for blocking non-compliant apps. The target user is parents and schools setting up IOS and Android devices for kids. If that's not you, you're good.
Ubuntu, Redhat, etc. are discussing implementing it as a systemd service that ties into the default desktop. The workaround is to use something else.
Silicon Valley lobbyists along with the EFF managed to get something passed that's technologically and protects privacy. Because it's California, that's what the commercial OSes will be implementing by default.
There's obviously nothing that can stop a teenager running FreeBSD who knows how to use wireshark an curl from watching porn, and frankly, power to him.
I wish cool Internet handles came back.
Like a dude can introduce himself as AssEater3k and someone would say the same ass eater who ate the Pentagons firewall back in 97'???
Have something that could do the ID auth for Linux, but like really and working. BUT make it so it's not mandatory for the system to work, so if you want you can just disable/uninstall it.
I read the California bill, it is a hand wave motion. The requirement is to report the age set by the user in their profile on the OS. And for OS developers to make an API available to be queried. It doesn’t ask for any verifiable evidence and it acts similar to asking if you’re 18 when going to an adult website.
I think the end goal is to orchestrate legally compromising situations for service providers who find themselves in ambiguous compliance scenarios. If a platform fails to restrict access properly, regulators can argue negligence; if they over-collect identity data, they risk privacy violations and data liability. In other words, the burden is intentionally pushed onto the platform to prove they did “enough,” even though the underlying mechanism (self-reported OS age) is weak by design.
Practically speaking, this means operating systems become the first point of trust in the chain, but without a strong verification mechanism it’s mostly a signaling requirement rather than a technical control. It looks more like regulatory leverage than an actual solution to age verification.
They wont stop at self reported OS age, sooner or later they will make it mandatory to provide some ID or facial age recognition. Kids security is parents responsibility parents responsibility.
Age verification is a bad idea because putting age infrastructure into the OS creates bigger problem than it solves.
Good privacy design follows data, minimization, collect the least data necessary And I think those bozos who are making law implicitly assuming platforms as iOS and android but it’s gonna hurt the adults who are using Linux custom rooms or community driven OS projects.
What happened to the spite of my great grandparents where they entered this country. Most of the shit they say here is cowardly. Tell them to try us, tell them we won't obey your stupid fucking law because it's unjust. Sue us, we will win.
I expect there to be a toggle in /etc for distros even attempting to comply, requiering an ID check to boot each server in a new server farm would be ridiculous.
This is just an absolute mess.
If all linux distro just didn't do it, it would be a large enough push back stop this sort of thing to some degree. Sadly, the corporate (for lack of a better term) linux distributions, will just do to this to be conformant. How much of their implementations will get upstream of their distributions, who knows. The only practical concern in the short term is the major commercial (non-open source) applications for linux changing to expect or require them.
Looking at the [the CA law](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043), is horribly written by people who just don't understand how computer/operating systems work.To give an idea, some sample definitions form it:
> (g) “Operating system provider” means a person or entity that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system software on a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.
>
> (h) “Signal” means age bracket data sent by a real-time secure application programming interface or operating system to an application.
>
> (i) “User” means a child that is the primary user of the device.
>
By the way, this is as close to a definition of "operating system" it includes^1. The authors see computers as devices that interact with online software stores to get software. The model of OS kernel, OS userspace, distribution creation/management, software packaging and developers are all operating independently is not something they are remotely cognizant of. Crafted broadly enough one could twist it to so that a distro's package manager would fit under the category of application store, but just aren't crafted that way. Unless they get some people that understand computing to help write these laws, there will be holes that are trivial to work around.
For example, [the CA law](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043) under 1798.503:
> (b) An operating system provider or a covered application store that makes a good faith effort to comply with this title, taking into consideration available technology and any reasonable technical limitations or outages, shall not be liable for an erroneous signal indicating a user’s age range or any conduct by a developer that receives a signal indicating a user’s age range.
Which given the technically poor definitions in the law, leave a truck sized hole for a trivial work around, or malicious compliance.
I see three main avenues to combat this, in order of increasing long term effectiveness
1. Relicense open source to exclude jurisdictions where these laws apply
1. Maliciously comply with the laws to make them useless.
1. Legally challenge every law like this -- through organizations like the [Software Freedom Conservancy,](https://sfconservancy.org/) [Open Source Collective](https://oscollective.org/), or the [Electronic Frontier Foundation](https://www.eff.org/)
For #3, once one of these organizations starts taking strong stances against these laws, and show they will fight them in court, we need to start pouring donates into them. Complaining about these laws on forums isn't likely to accomplish much, but getting strong, and well funded, groups challenging these laws will.
Finally, we need to come to a consensus as a community (a community of communities may be a better model for open source), on how to actually provide what these laws are trying to legislate^2. Assuming^3 there are users that want this feature - let's just provide it. It should be an optional feature, of course. More importantly it needs to be a well thought out, technically practical, and sufficiently secure solution, which a system administrator can choose to add/enable. Having such a feature available for people to use (only) if they want to will take the teeth out of approaches to mandate such things.
From a technical prospective, this is just a secure system for adding a piece of arbitrary metadata to users (for those of an appropriate role), which applications have a well defined interface to query. If we just label "age" or "age category" as arbitrary (i.e. meaningless to the system) metadata attached to some user accounts, are we talking about anything more involved then add a field to LDAP schema?
Providing an central and singular way for applications to get user data, that is in part of locking down how applications collection data about users, might be something we can see as a opportunity not a problem. Blocking as much as possible personal data scraping and mining of users by a web browser by forcing them to exclusively get user information though a dedicated secure interface, seems like a Good Thing™. Use all these "what about the children" laws to force applications to this new singular (administrator limited) mechanism to get user information.
----------------------------------------------------------
1. This law, or other similarly intended ones, might be ripped apart in the courts for vagueness, once you get an expert witness on operating systems or computer science, to sink any attempt by politicians to craft a law that properly covers "operating systems"
1. In theory at least, this would be a way for an administrator to set proper age values that are outside of a non-admirative user's control, with a mechanism for that value to be queried by a web browser or software distribution program.
1. I think such users exist. How many parents are willing to learn the technology and set it up to provide age-based gateways for their children - no idea.
Somebody time ago taught me not to blame malevolence when something is easily explained by incompetence. This looks like the case of Incompetent legislators, not north Korean kind. They don't understand it, open-source nor anything close to it. Their kids configure their iPad. Instead they have a hot potato in the effect of internet and social networking in the minds of your adults.
Enter some IT behemoth lobbyist..." I cannot decide the age of anybody connecting to my service and I'm not going to be the bad guy bearing blame for that. This is properly implemented at the os level if you force them to do it. (now I will get proper age information and somebody else will bear the blame of it and pay for it, I'm not nortg Korea, they are)
And we get these shit. And we think politicians are evil and write endless posts about North Korea and China while the incapable IT behemoths are poor guys just trying to be good citizens and follow the law.
I’d be really curious what pushing Linux to enforce ID verification would look like.
It just doesn’t seem feasible given the decentralized nature of Linux’s development and distribution system.
IMO this is a campaign talking point they are using as a platform and know they don't have a clue what they are talking about nor how to implement nor enforce.
They won't and don't want to do anything about corporate overreach and half of them can't copy paste.
This is unenforceable and they clearly have no interest in enforcement.
Their first suggestion was stick a warning label of socmed sites, like a pack of smokes. They got lold for that. But in avoiding actually doing anything of use this was their option; a mythical silver bullet. How's it work? Computers wooooo wooo
Unfortunately some of them are also mouth breathers who wont like a crisis go to waste especially if they can get a pay day in the process of doing something fkd.
You guys wanted to take back the community, how many of you gave that talk, expounded this keynote. Then went back to compliance immediately after?
Want to take the community back, want to get back to roots, well if there's ever been a better dumpster fire of various incentives to do so, we've got it.
Now there's only what we do. Which has always been the bottom line.
Age verification will probably fade pretty quickly but it's bs on repeat, opportunities abound. Fckd shit a plenty.
You don't have to do it for a good reason, you can do it for a selfish one, ensuring your ass stays behind you where it belongs.
There's good reasons to do the right thing and bad ones, also completely benign ones. But I could give a rats ass why at this point. A win is a win. Age verification thats an easy win. I mean really most people in this sub don't have to do much if anything. But there's people out there who can't.
I'm proud of the way many in this community have stepped up lately. Honestly firing thousands of techs who have nothing better to do than pad their resumes with admirable projects will probably be in hindsight a critical miscalculation.
You can waste it with boring oit projects, or you can remember what you love before you sat in your cubicle shifting sql queries, wondering why lunch can't come fast enough.
And some for too many of you this is a chance to clean up the mess you helped build while bored in the cubicle, pretending to like it.
Just ban sales of transistors to minors if everyone is so worried about pr0n. We do it for tobacco, alcohol, porn, so why make computers a more complex process?
It started as a shower thought but I’m kinda still liking it.
I’d argue that “needing” computers for school is a bit of a stretch. And you’re right: some adult is deciding to give a computer to a minor, and it is therefore THAT ADULT who is responsible for controlling their child’s behavior when using those transistors.
I would like to switch to linux. I freaking hate windows and cannot stand what MacOS has become. I have an old Mac Laptop that id like to switch over to linux. is there a good tutorial vid that yall know of? tia
This [subreddit will help you](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_on_mac/) , I would install a light distro like Linux mint xfce or [mx linux xfce](https://mxlinux.org/) or fluxbox since your hardware is old.
Será que não vai dar para tirar a verificação de idade modificando o código fonte?? Porque tipo, é open-source, mesmo que tenha verificação de idade, podemos mudar isso no código e instalar normalmente
lol the lightweight distros are actually perfectly suited for this adversarial environment. Forked OmegaLinux just to mess with this.
But also, I shouldn't have to remind you this is r/linux. We download alt kernels, DEs, WMs, because why not or we were bored.
Not like it's hard.
You want out of the box Windows is right over there loaded with bloat and conducive even encouraging of the harm it brings to its users whether they are aware of it or not.
Ubuntu of course is on its BS again
You could try to set your location to a place that doesn’t require this? Not to mention that you know because of the open source community being what it is, that there will likely be plenty of distros that won’t add this in because they’re maintained by smaller groups. They also can’t force you to be conntected to the internet for an install, so you create your profiles offline and then connect when the install is done. There will likely be software to circumvent this.
You can also put together your own distribution builds through the use of automated tools.
A lot of things could happen with this. But there will always be some type of work around. Most likely and official one.
Case in point, anyone who has ever worked in government contracting (talking USA here) in either segregated (air gapped networks) or fully classified networks already knows.
Some people are foolish and think that Microsoft got rid of offline activation. They didn’t. Some people are foolish and think that Microsoft stopped making standalone versions of the standard office suite. They didn’t.
They made the information harder to find, but I promise you it’s all still there.
So going back to age verification, it would have to be some kind of local ENV variable stored somewhere.
You can argue the slippery slope all day long. But I’d rather waste brain cells on other things personally.
Brazil is trying to save their economy with their law. The fine is $9.5 MILLION USD per seat for non-compliance. They want to drain Silicon Valley of every cent they have.
I think from a Linux standpoint, unless they somehow bake it into the repo, there isn’t really a way to enforce it. I’m not installing any state (I.e California) package on my box. This shitshow has a lot of questionable parts. Do you need to show your age if you are accessing a site hosted in California? What else is this package going to do? How often will it be updated? Is it a one and done? This is a gateway issue that can rapidly get out of control. Bit like those drunk driver starter interlocks. In the end, this is an idea from people who don’t understand how computers and networking work. After this Brainworms will want you to show a DR report to say you can get into you IoT fridge because your too heavy and bought the wrong kind of milk.
This encroachment by degree. They want control of everything including the Internet, what you can access, what devices you can use to access it, and you will definitely have to pay for all of it. It's the end of the Internet.
The problem is that Linux is essential and basically runs the entire internet and 3/4 of the phones on the entire planet plus a lot of these AI models. So they can't get rid of it...so they are planning to legislate it into submission. Everything you read, view and write is and will be tracked.
Don't sound very "American" to me....but then the US govt keeps trying to do this shit over and over again for those who are old enough to remember. Clipper chips?
The pro-democracy movement in the US is actually massive. You can hook into 50501, Indivisible and mobilize huge groups of people. You can join and direct these large groups of people at the enemies. Ask for help! Join! They've been out fighting for a year for democracy, decency and a future worth having, they got room for one more issue.
But you will have to get off your asses and join the fight (if you haven't already). If this is your issue, this is your line in the sand. Politicians need to know this is not cool.
This means huge groups of people have go to local politicians offices and homes and their phones need to ringing off the hook and you need to support local progressive politicians who can primary the idiots.
Also, you have to reach out to distro developers and call them out if they're being cowards and tell them in no uncertain terms they have to stand up too. This means you gotta go march outside redhat and the like.
You can use your influence to support distros who stand up to fascism and help people to switch distros that don't. Distros won't cooperate if cooperating means they lose money. Look at Disney...like a 3 percent drop in quarterly profits from all the cancelled subscriptions caused them to panic.
For the rest of the world..... do you think this shit is going to stay here in the US? It isn't! Already, it's spreading to Europea and will corrupt where you live unless you stop it. Here and now.
Lastly: an opensource Internet alternative needs to be built out: ala Cory Doctorow's X-net. Local mesh network technology has been developing by leaps and bounds and equipment you just have laying around can be repurposed into a robust distributed network they can't control.
California, housing loads of datacenters including Azure, Google, and AWS, totally kneecapping itself in terms of using the cloud with Linux, is the most hilarious thing to me.
I e seen videos of people who claim they read the whole document pertaining to the change and it’s being hyped up as this all mighty anti privacy legislation but in reality it’s a prompt that asks if you’re over a certain age, you input your age and done.
I think the first thing is - distros shouldn't acknowledge the law exists, at all. Especially if they're not based in a state with these laws.
To make my life easier - for the rest of this post whenever I say "California" I really mean any state with age attestation laws. California was the first but Colorado has passed similar laws.
Some distros are considering making a terms of service stating their distro can't be used in California. I understand they're trying to cover their ass but it can backfire.
Say you somehow wind up in trouble in California (and I'm really glossing over how you'd get in trouble if you don't live there). Having a "don't use this in California" website lets prosecutors make the claim "hey - this person knew their software was illegal in California and they let people in California download it anyway. This was intentional"
The law doesn't have any kind of exemption like "well if they took reasonable steps to block California users that's ok" - it's a black and white, you're breaking the law or you aren't. So you're better off not acknowledging it to hopefully weaken the neglect vs intentional argument.
Writing software is considered an expressive act protected by the first amendment (Bernstein v. United States). And we've also determined that the government can't compel speech (West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, Wooley v. Maynard).
I honestly think there's a good argument that writing a law this broad, forcing all operating system developers to write age attestation software, could violate the first amendment. You're making developers write code they don't want to write.
If you rush to implement California's age stuff that can be seen as voluntary compliance, and weaken the argument that they're forcing you to write the software.
I am not a lawyer and if you develop operating systems and live in a state with these laws *definitely* talk to a lawyer.
At the very least, it’s a way to show more targeted ads to people based on their age. To me, that’s bad enough because the age brackets they’re looking for are various stages of childhood.
If it was really about protecting kids, why not just make it “under or over 18”?
Install kali and put on a hood of the hoodie.
When asked your age tell 'em 6/6/1966.
They'll sweat, say "dam, we should avoid this hacker" and run away
What really pisses me off about all these data harvesting and spying laws pretending to be "child protection" laws, is that the premise of the lie is also a lie. There are *already* robust systems in place to limit website access to children that require no additional information than that which your ISP already has. You just go to your ISP, tell them to activate their child filters, and boom. No porn etc sites without a password. And you can add sites to the block list. IOS and Android already have parental controls built in, as does every streaming service. It would be trivial for sites like Facebook to add an identical feature. Operating systems (yes, even Linux) also have parental control systems to restrict access to certain applications or file system locations.
But no, lazy parents who refuse to use the tools available to them, and companies who don't want to cut in to their bottom line by limiting how much of our data they can harvest, will champion another step towards a total surveillance state.
They will have to enforce age validation at the hardware level to achieve what they want. All communications hardware-stamped by a "secure" device, on order to ~~monitor us more efficiently~~ protect the children.
It's going to be impossible to enforce on some distros.
Nixos for example will be impossible, there's almost 1 million commits of the OS without age verification that you can just clone and checkout
maybe we can win this fight... but in the future they can ask for age verification on browsers or apps , and if u dont have age verification on your system u cannot access to that. idk where r we going as society
Stop being the product, accept inconvenience.
If I have to give my ID online, I don't use it, simple, on mass that impacts the big players, the ones with the money and contacts to make a difference.
The majority of devices with operating systems aren't even owned by individuals, think atm's, electronic billboards, traffic light systems, surveillance systems, the entire internet infrastructure, pos devices, and so on
Never ever happening on any linux distro. The US bs govt can try all they want but it's not happening in FOSS.
My bank doesn't have to ask for my govt ID so why does anyone else ask? Not to mention how Logistically this is implemented.
by not using any distro that implements it, and you can remove any verification they put in as long as its not hw level. as long as a user can remove or edit files, they can remove any verification or restriction.
This is one of the things I called before Trump was elected. This is just phase 1 of America's Big Beautiful Firewall. First it's to 'protect the children', then it's to 'monitor domestic terrorists' or 'protect against the enemy'
"A **fork** in software development is a copy of an existing project's source code that is developed independently to create a different version with its own changes or direction."
Well, these are the same folks who can't figure out how to add a printer, or how to convert a PDF, or even what their password is for Gmail so my suggestion - just say "yep, we did it". Then show your id to the monitor and press enter at the login prompt and viola! We're done with that.
Use community run distros instead of those made by US companies. US companies will be forced to comply no matter what. With Arch for instance there's no way for them to force me to install any age check software, unless of course it gets built deep within the linux kernel or smth. But in that case I will just compile my own I guess.
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers"
Dick the Butcher. Henry VI, Part 2 —Shakespeare
If law is being used to enforce tyranny. Anarchy might be better.
Oh man, I get really sad to see those government obedient bitches.
Come on! Just don't use any bloated garbage OS. Use pure Linux. You are in control and there is nothing they can do about it.
As long as we can all just agree it should be an ENV variable
`USER_AGE=1982~3` Born between 1979 and 1985
`USER_AGE=1982/3/2~0/6` Born between half a year of second of march (We are not doing American date-syntax tradition)
Then i'm perfectly fine with this?
So long as there is no cryptography running to verify anything I'm OK with having the browser auto-detect a user account under the age of 18 and require it to add a HTTP header to that affect.
There is a danger of slippery slope, but also a need to get kids off social media.
Before anybody tellls me this is not effective. Those few that figure out how to bypass is aren't the target. The target is re-instating the normalcy/peer pressure of an entire cohort to not be drugged & brainwashed by algorithms.
Its being forcibly excluded if you fail to sign up remotely that is the problem. Not the necessity to submit 'a date'. Normies don't know the difference. IT experts will need to explain it to them, not just complain about the potential over-reach of power.
Shit! The new flock camera I got for my bathroom says I need to scan my face to prove I'm old enough to operate it, but the camera OS won't boot without a bodily fluid sample... and I'm so dehydrated...
How would they add age verification to linux? Isn't linux a kernel and wouldn't they need to add this to like 800 distros?. Ive been thinking what if someone fully anon made a distro and refused to add the age verification?
An app can use the OS API in conjunction with location data to collect the home address of any minor who uses it and save it to a database. Then this data can fall in wrong hands. It should be possible to build such an app as a pretense game, challenge, etc.
However I'm not sure how to demonstrate that without becoming a criminal ourselves and taking part in the dissemination of such data.
I guess I need an ELI5 here. They are requiring an OS to ask for age verification and then do what with it? Is there a specific site they are required to send the data to? Or use it in a specific way?
The california law just requires an age field to exist on profiles set up on any OS & for the OS to provide the age bracket of the user as an API call. No external verification needed. There will likely be other laws requiring apps to know the age of users (using this API) and enforce some restriction for child accounts.
What about my Linux powered AI smart toilet? It may have several users, even underage ones. And if I drop some cat litter in there, will the cat need an account, too? Then what's the cat's age of consent?
> There is a thing called parental controls
You can block sites in the firewall and refuse to install apps, but is there anything more fine-grained than that?
Right now, if you want to restrict what your child sees on, say, Discord, your options are to use Discord’s built-in parental control system, or to block Discord outright. Same for every other service. The idea is that you could set your child’s age (bracket) once and every app would configure itself accordingly.
Make a good plan, organize, press every lever in government with negative feedback about it, start a petition within the jurisdictions, campaign to remove/repeal/replace/amend the laws, find some viable cases to champion that have a judicial chance of reversing the law.
Offhand, do the operating systems of smaller devices technically also have this requirement now? Like, printers, cameras, dump phones, or specialized equipment (especially those used by the government), ATMs, vending machines, kiosks, self checkout machines, etc, etc? Maybe find some such fringe case to highlight the absurdity/unreasonable burden upon businesses/draconian overreach.
DNSs and CDN's should be smart enough to identify who is living under one of those damned places, so that people like me don't have to adhere to stupid surveillance on FLOSS.
**Remove the age verification implementation from the source code of any package it's added to or the distribution, and don't use any software that requires the age API to be functional on the system.**
It's shit like this that sparks technological advancement. Some influential lazy prick will always try to make money off your idea. We just need to keep having better ideas.
Makes zero sense for any OS which you have the source code, can compile and install yourself, and also is not inherantly tied to a online account on a cloud platform of some kind.
You aren't gonna be able to, in practice, enforce such restriction to Linux. Or TempleOS for that matter.
It's exactly the same problem with trying to regulate 3D printers like some other US states are trying to. A 3D printer is a handful of stepper motors and a couple of big old resistors plugged to an arduino. They are stupid robots that respond to commands from a serial port.
If you can build the software or the hardware with a few hours of free time by yourself, then \*shrug\*.
Before the idiots pass the laws, contact the people that represent you and explain to them why it is a bad idea *first* then why it's actually useless to pursue the bad idea.
If the user has a government email address, make them verify their age every time they run a command, open a window, use the mouse or keyboard, etc. Make it as annoying as possible. After all, your age keeps changing, and we need to make sure it hasn't gotten smaller.
Make its package that is packaged with the OS at install, and give the user the option to uninstall it while going through that process. This will allow them to satisfy the government requirements, and give the users a way to tell them they don't want it.
I'm also starting to wonder if this is like the current version of CISA where basically anyone or anything "they don't like" is subject to legal repercussions or fines/litigation.
Hackers can't really fight back on our own.
We need to mobilize people in general to educate them about the follies of these laws.
And Americans (I'm not one, so I can't help here) need to partner with organizations like the EFF and ACLU to challenge the constitutionality of these laws.
Everyone who just wants to use a computer will probably just age verify because it would be more trouble than it's worth to bypass it. Instead of "hackers" who decide to "fight back" (by hacking the NSA? idk), you'd have tech-savvy people (who have a good understanding of how computers actually work) manually set up their OSes and know that a law this crazy is just fundamentally impossible to implement. To "fight back," you'd have to go through political channels, which are... yeah. good luck with that.
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