Technology

Weak, half-measure. You should be fighting against that for everyone regardless of which OS they use

See you in a year or 2.

Play as old as times:

1. Company announces garbage change
2. People freak out
3. Company says ok we will only do half of the garbage
4. People calm down and forget
5. Company later does the rest of the garbage
6. Nobody cares because half of it is already there

It’s called “parenting.” Yes, it’s harder these days with the internet and literally everything “right there.” But it’s still your job as a parent.

ANYTIME ANYONE imposes restrictions “for the children” - there’s something nefarious going on. If it’s a politician-they are looking to build a database for $. If it’s your priest-he’s banging the alter boy after ccd, or hates himself so much for being gay he’s lashing out at the lgbtq community. If it’s a company-they’ve either been threatened into doing it or more likely are on the take with a fat payday. If it’s a developer adding it into Linux, they should expect fierce skepticism and backlash from the community.

It’s NEVER about the children. It’s always an alternative motive. If they actually cared about kids, they’d make sure they were fed at school, they’d invest in their education, or they’d invest into social programs to help out those less fortunate.

Tbh, this is just a massive stack of misguidedness.

First, look at what the original law does:

• OS needs to know the age.
• OS itself doesn't do anything with the age
• OS needs to provide the age to apps and services asking for it
• Apps and services need to block content based on the age provided with the OS
• If the OS doesn't provide an age, apps and services have to block as if the user was a toddler

Removing the requirement for the OS to provide an age doesn't change anything at all, because someone running an OS that doesn't provide an age will just be blocked everywhere. That's not a solution, that's a joke to appease idiots who don't know what the law does.

This is just as misguided as the backlash against systemd who added an age field to the user account to allow people to be still able to access age-restricted content.

The actually relevant part that people should be combatting is the requirement for apps and services to do age verification using the OS-provided age. The OS age field doesn't matter.

I’m a DevOps engineer and my employer runs a lot of Linux instances in AWS. I’d love for these politicians to explain to me how age verification of Linux web servers should work for auto-scaling environments where instances are spun up and terminated automatically based on traffic volume. I’d also like to know if I should be using the age of our CEO, the age of our company (thanks to Citizens United), or something else.

Fuck age verification, fuck it all to hell. Not for Linux or any other OS or device.

How about the government focus on taking rights away from people who have actually harmed kids, like I don't know, maybe a giant pedophile ring in plain sight? Instead the focus on taking rights from everyone because someone, sometime, in the future harm a child.

How about they spend their time revamping parental controls instead? The age gate stuff is clear about user data collection and nothing else.

It’s being exempt because the Government can’t enforce this requirement on FOSS. Linux isn’t managed by a corporation and I don’t think people realize this yet.

The most pedophilic government in history desperately needs to know if your children are on the computer

... For reasons

Install a router/device based content filter if you need to block children from accessing porn.

I guess, California is killing Windows without knowing.

Wild they still play the "think of the children" card while ignoring the Epstein files.

So they're basically admitting that they don't need this for any computer since if you don't need it for open source why would you need it for closed source? You think kids don't know how to download and install linux? If I could do it with floppies and a book in the 90s then kids today can do it with a USB image and LLM assistance.

But in reality they'll probably just wait for a few years and try and push it through again like how they do with most shitty legislation.

This is like winning a small fight and continuing to march on to Moscow on the winter.

They’ll keep whittling rights down until everything you do is logged with your ID and is whitelisted for your consumption (and I mean whitelisted by rich white list of folks who have the power).

Anything LGBTQ will be blocked as controversial. And teaching they don’t like will be hidden. Was slavery bad? “Well, that’s controversial. The Europeans did nothing but civilize those savages don’t you know! And our wealth justifies the whole thing!”

The proposed amendment specifically states: “Operating system provider” does not mean a person or entity that distributes an operating system or application under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.

That's one way to encourage people to move to open source software

For a moment I freaked out that they were only gonna exclude Linux and not open source in general but it seems they exclude based on the license based on this article which is a good thing. The dozens of OpenBSD and FreeBSD users may rest safely now

The controversy became particularly heated after reports suggested platforms like SteamOS could still fall under the law due to their ties to proprietary application ecosystems.

Ehhh. I think that'd be a hard argument to make. I mean, the OS is open-source. You can download it and modify it and reinstall it or whatever. Sure, it runs Steam, which is proprietary, but so does any other GNU/Linux distro.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SteamOS

The core operating system is free and open-source software, while the Steam client remains proprietary.

Like, the only way in which SteamOS differs from another Linux distro is that Valve, which makes the proprietary client, also happens to be distributing the OS.

What about steamos?

Does this not just defeat the purpose of this bill? My god the people are so fucking stupid.

To late I already implemented my own linux age verification. Every time I log in I scan my face and my drivers license and email it to microsoft, google, meta and the CCP. Get owned privacel

Wao, I am gladly surprised by this. I would have never thought this would be possible, yet here we are.