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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Personally, I think this first response nails it.
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2026-March/043515.html
Linux is not sold. So you either need to force users to install this on their systems, or go eat rocks.
Enterprise distros on the other hand.. Need to do this.
I would also interpret it this way, though California’s government is profoundly technologically incompetent, despite being the home of “Silicon Valley.”
Knowing California, they would try to twist the word “vendor” to cover any entity that does any kind of business, similar to how they dismantled interstate commerce protections for the entire country. If that didn’t work, they would argue that donations make something a vendor.
The situation is stupid and I am long past tired of idiots pushing idiocy on others en masse.
I might have a lot of fun things that aren't legal in California. Never thought my OS would be one, but here we are.
If people went out of their way to learn a damn thing about computers, and all-consuming jobs didn't force entire generations raised without parents, and maybe they didn't let their 6 year olds on social media / online gaming / whatever unsupervised, maybe there'd be more backlash to the state and corporations trying to step in as parental figures.
...Wish that wasn't too friggin' much to ask.
Servers and data centers have zero business knowing anything about who's behind my machine by default.
A "good faith effort to comply" with a bad faith law is to pipe /dev/yes to the API.
Also showing lawmakers how easy it is means even more laws down the pipeline to really make development disgusting because "it worked before, right?"
They are building the framework piece by piece. First the API is "Honour Based" then it goes to "Prove It". For once it looks like baby steps instead of full blown head in a toilet of fresh shit like usual. Build your off line libraries, soon the only way to win will be not to play
I mean.. there's nothing stopping anyone from setting their age to 100 years old. It's not like they are adding any sort of identification check, from what I gather.
Why is there a need to comply with foolish laws? I'm sure I type stuff on lemmy.ml or elsewhere on the internet that doesn't comply with some idiot law somewhere in like Myanmar or the DPRK. Why would I concern myself with those laws.
You don't need to take remote places like DPRK. Trust me, most Lemmy instances don't follow the laws of 27 European Union countries.
Can you share an example which laws and in what way are broken?
I support Palestine Action. From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.
There: I've broken British and Australian laws.
You're not an instance though
Non of these countries belong to the European Union.
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure they don't follow the GDPR (and I don't think it would even be possible given the federated nature).
As a European living in Canada, it's quite annoying to think about having to do extra stuff (even if it is very minimal) because one state in America passes a stupid law.
People who live in California, if anyone bothers to enforce it, would have two options:
It should be implemented as "This is only required if you live in California" during setup. However, this does sound completely unenforceable. If I have a connecting flight through LA, will they send a swat team to pick me up at the airport for not setting it up and using the WiFi?
Would they actually go after the people?
I expect the law would place the responsibility on the companies managing / distributing the OS. That's the reason companies are complying. People can always look for alternatives.. I'm sure there will always be homemade distros without stuff like this made by ragtag groups / communities without much of a corporate structure behind.
It's one more tool in the bag that the State can wield against us. My more conspiratorial thinking as this as an accidental part of the frame work of how they create the slave knowledge worker class since anyone who actually works in tech will disable this. That way they can sweatshop devs into fixing bad AI code without paying them.
Canonical bending the knee already? That was quick.
But also not surprising at all TBH
Why not say "we won't sell to any customers in California" and be done with it? If someone goes out of their way to install Ubuntu on their system, it's up to them. Also, how is that going to work for OSes in the cloud? Will CI pipelines need to be age gated?
Does FreeDOS need to comply with this law? After all these years, a new 21h interrupt!
This is perhaps a controversial statement from someone who is fed up with all this age verification stuff, but having the user age be set on account creation (without providing ID or anything dumb like that) doesn't seem that bad.
It just feels like a way to standardise parental controls. Instead of having to roll their own age verification stuff, software like Discord can rely on the UserAccountStorage value.
If it were possible to plug into a browser in a standard, privacy conscious way, it also reduces the need for third party parental control browser extensions, which I imagine can be a bit sketchy.
OSes collect and expose language and locale information anyway. What harm is age bands in addition to that?
Currently it's self reported, but if it's complied with and then they inevitably say now it needs id they can just block all the self reports until id is provided. This is the same tactic of marginally moving the line that has been happening for years
Sure. But at that point distros can just say "no use in California lol" and enjoy the free market share from disgruntled totally-not-californian Windows users.
Standardized parental controls would be great, actually. But it should be proper parental controls, not whatever this is. Because at the end of the day, the parent* should be involved in what their child is up to, and allow (or not) based on what the child needs and/or wants, instead of whatever we are doing now.
Or, to put it another way, if your teen has read Games of Thrones (the physical books), I don't see much of a point in forbidding them from going to the wiki of it, and I'd be hard pressed to justify stopping them from talking about it online with other people who have read the books. The tools should allow for this kind of nuance, because actual people are going to use it and these kind of situations happen all the time.
* some parents are awful and would abuse this, see LGBT+ related things, but that's a social issue, not a technological issue.
I know everyone here is obsessed with freaking out over the legislation.
But I think the author is wrong, they should just add this to accountservice and Debian will pick it up in 5-10 years and that's fine.
I actually thing the tendency to over engineer this solution to make back porting easier is worse than the milktoast Californian law.
I think they should add the word "Fuck" to all age verification prompts until they, too, get censored.