I think there is a flaw in EU’s way of acting and functioning. European countries seem to be sharing the same cultural values yet there are different deeper values hidden to the foreigner from country to country. For example we look at Middle East, Africa, Asia and we easily spot cultural differences. Yet we fail to see the gaps between our countries inside EU. Holland and northern countries had for years a culture of child protection on computing devices,and not only,that 20 years ago I found strange. There is an industry for that in there and thriving. What they just did was to apply their normality to us, without them understanding the gap. They just don’t understand the issue. Controlling children like that is normal for them.
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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Privacy
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Gee. I totally not saw that coming.
These people who push for it are fascists, and the only way to deal with fascists is to kill them before they murder you.
bingo bango
so bye linux and bye anything that isn't apple or google?
The whole thing is wrongheaded in the first place; any child wanting to access adult-only content will use an adult’s account to do so; any adult attempting to access adult-only content is likewise going to use an adult’s account.
So unless they’re tying this to biometrics that are actually secure against an adverserial child, all the system really does is creates a registry of adults. And we already have those.
Creating a registry of adults and what content they access is exactly the point of these laws. Always has been. "Protecting children" is just the easiest excuse to make it seem more urgent to violate people's rights. Just like removing trans healthcare started with children and is now targeting adults.
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I think they expect the parent to secure their own account to make sure their child can't use it. And anyways, it shifts accountability. If the parent lets the child use their account, then the parent takes the blame. If the child gets addicted to social media, that becomes the parent's fault for giving the child unrestricted access.
Wasn't there something about the effectiveness of the Australian law to restrict minors on social media? Ah...
Four in five under-16s in Australia using social media despite ban, study shows
Experts say law not enough to stop children accessing harmful content online and more ‘convincing strategy is required’ . More than 80% of under-16s in Australia said they were still using social media three months after legislation banning them from it came into force, research shows.
It’s like any controlled substance ban — unless there’s a really invasive crack-down it just shifts the problem to a less safe black market.
Making things easy and safe to access with controls that are adjustable is always more effective than an outright ban that shifts the access fully into unregulated territory.
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Can't wait for EU to ban general purpose computing. At some point ,everybody is just going to get a locked down Windows tablet where only EU approved software runs.
Can't wait to become a shady dealer who sells pre 2026 computers with highly illegal software running on it such as debian
There's gonna be a whole black market for smuggling open computing platforms from China 🤣
I fear that is the inevitable whimpered ending of the personal computing era. Cory Doctorow called it back in 2011.
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They're gonna ban abacuss next, and then comes mental math, and suddenly 2+2=fish
Fuck EU.
Also fuck absolutely every politician who focuses on "supporting" incompetent parents... All this does is to allow them to become even more incompetent and then the government has to do even more parenting...
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How I see it, ocurres when the laws are made by ancients which confuse an remote control with an smartphone.
I have a solution to the age verification problem. There is a way to affirmatively prove someone is a real human adult without invasions of privacy. We can use the same ID verification system we've been using for centuries: public notaries.
Governments could hand anonymous cryptographic tokens to notaries. These contain no information on the individual. They're simply a unique cryptographic token. You can go to a notary, pay a nominal fee, show your ID, and grab one of the tokens (possibly just a code printed on a card) from a large bin of them. You can then use this token to register for any number of sites. The notary themselves does not need to note which cryptographic token you grab. The notary doesn't even know what token you received. The goal is merely to prove you're an adult human, not to create a cryptographic key tied to your specific identity.
I would then let people do this as many times as they want. You can get a hundred such IDs. They wouldn't cost much, a few dollar or Euros. This would be no barrier to individuals accessing the net, but it would make them unsuitable for mass spamming.
But then how are you supposed to surveil citizens?
It’s all silly because computers are not paired with any specific body. You could toss your “18+ accessible phone” to your kid, etc.
Unless they do implants, which is nightmare land because we know they’ll want more than just your birthday.
I didn't like the age verification law, but as it would be introduced everywhere, at least it's mandatory to search an privacy protecting methode, which isn'y not so easy, Because of this I asked Sketchapedia, which shows an zero knowledge system.
It would only work if the law mandated that this token cannot be stored or tracked across the web.
I think the idea is that you can use different tokens for each thing.
Right but people won't and if you do they can still track you by combining other metadata
It's a legit idea, and there's a thing like that, called Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKP).
IMO it's possible in theory. Like set up and managed in good faith, it can work mathematically, and you can prove it does.
My worry tho is that it wouldn't be in good faith. It'll be corrupted somehow. Or it turns out that enough other signals leak that it isn't very effective. Like fingerprinting and stylometry and w/e allow ID'ing despite the ZKP layer.
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The solution lets users prove they are over a certain age without revealing their name, exact birth date, or full identity document. To prevent credentials from being copied, cloned, or reused by modified clients, the project relies on keys stored in protected hardware like Android TEE, StrongBox, or Apple’s Secure Enclave.
The project’s technical specification requires age verification apps to use native cryptographic hardware when available. However, stricter checks like root detection, Google Play Integrity, and Apple App Attest are not universally mandated by the reference implementation and may be left to individual deployers.
So there's a chance that GrapheneOS will be supported. I mean, we can still decompile the app, modify it and then repackage it. Or someone will make a patcher app.
I would love to be wrong about this, but I don't think it's likely. Why would a government voluntarily spend money on making the app work for a minority of people running a privacy OS that politicians associate with criminals and gangsters?
Also, it's not like the wallet app will actually be open source in the traditional sense where you can fork and compile it yourself, so I think getting any decent version of it seems like a long shot
Graphene will likely ignore the EU, as will most Linux distros having no EU connections. Graphene's very picky about hardware, which is why they stick with the Pixel, but anyone with the cash can pay an OEM to make a phone to their specs and install whatever Android or Linux mobile variant they want, then make 1000 or 10,000 of them to sell.
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Disgusting
These kinds of laws will not succeed. People will choose to ignore them, like they ignore other laws, like they litter, jaywalk, drive 10 over the limit, run stop signs, etc. It will succeed in driving up prices on products from those companies who choose to comply, because they will be forced to hire in a lot more lawyers and compliance staff. These laws create lots of full time jobs in tech companies that few realize even exist. They have meetings every week, attend conferences, constantly send letters back and forth to each other. Then people wonder why their Gamepass fees went up $10 (its not actually the games)
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