balsoft

None, sadly.

The requirement to check age is on the provider.

Well, if you're going that route, there are a whole bunch of other issues (apart from absolving parents from responsibility for their kids digital wellbeing). Either the provider just asks the user for their age (which is what we're doing now, and it's just 100% useless), or there would have to be some way to prove one's age. Presumably it would be via a government-issued token of some kind, ideally as a ZK proof. While there are some european countries where this is somewhat feasible, for most of the world issuing every resident a smartcard which can attest if one is an adult or not is just not possible. So, you'd be forced to either give out gov-signed certificates of age as files (which will be easily reused by kids to access stuff which they shouldn't), or you have a centralized server which can issue time-limited certificates on the fly based on some ID (which will tell the government that you wanna watch adult stuff), or you just have to upload your ID to the provider directly (I hope I don't need to explain why this is bad).

Meanwhile, what we are discussing right now is just a basic extension to parental controls. Notice how the field is not mandatory, you can just leave it empty, and I'd argue everyone who doesn't have kids should just do that. As it is implemented right now, the machine administrator decides if they want to use this or not and what to set the date to. Even if some distro complies with the stupid law and make it mandatory in california (which I'd argue they shouldn't), you can just enter 1970-01-01 and be done with it, because you decide what to put in that field during account creation.

This means any website can ask for your birth date. Then they store it, and use it for tracking. Private browser? HAH! Not your birth date!

Well, first of all, for now browsers don't even support reading userdb at all, and there's no way for website to request it. Then, I hope when it is implemented it will be hidden behind a website permission so that kids can decide if they want to share it or not (i.e. "this website wants to know you age: allow/deny"). For adults (if the california law gets implemented), I hope that "privacy" browsers will have a feature to return a random date (more than 18 years ago) every time if the field is not set in userdb, or you can just write a cronjob/systemd-timer that changes the date randomly every hour.

There is a question of random apps now having unfettered access to your child's birthday. This is indeed an issue, and poettering's approach of "just containerize it" is not very cool. It would be nice to have a way to gate userdb access behind a user prompt, similar to what I'm describing for browsers. I guess for now flatpaking everything you don't 100% trust not to read userdb is the only option.

Eh, this would make it 100% useless though.

I think it's fairly reasonable for adults to want to ensure a 10-year-old doesn't get mental health issues by being served hardcore BDSM porn unsupervised, or get scammed by a pig butcher on social media. Of course a curious 10-year-old can't be trusted to enter their real birth date. So, adding this info to a root-managed userdb kinda makes sense. At this point there's nothing to suggest that this age will be verified in any way, other than "the person entering it has write access to userdb". So in the current form it's just another tool for parents to control what their child sees (provided any apps actually use this field in the future).

However, I'd argue just the birth date is the wrong approach to this and it needs to be more granular.

Europe is SO small

Depends on what you count as Europe. If you include Turkey, Caucasus and/or the western part of Russia, it is fucking huge (~7500 km drive from Vorkuta to Cabo da Roca). Even if you only count EU countries, it's still not that small (~5000 km drive north-to-south). And it's also way denser than the US so there's more to see overall, you're not even covering any small country comprehensively in two weeks time.

"Will not affect power users at all" is just not true. I will now have to wait an entire day before I can start using my next phone. Well, either that or android-translation-layer advances enough for me to switch to a Linux phone full-time.

I guess the only thing that reads most of those is one poor regexec(3) in a loop.

Relevant xkcd

NixOS is definitely not as corporate as MacOS or ChromeOS. It's also not as mainstream as RHEL. I'd say RHEL should be one square to the right, NixOS should go where RHEL is now, and Guix should share the square with Gentoo.

In the previous century japan and germany were strong contenders. This time around it's closely contended by israel and russia as a distant third.

From what I understand there sadly has been a more conservative shift from the government in recent years. I don't think there are any openly discriminatory laws, but LGBT media is being censored, dating apps are removed from appstores, etc. I feel like it's another case of severe overreaction to a threat of "western influence", similar to Xinjang.

To be fair the (real and sometimes horrifying) human rights abuses of modern-day China kinda pale in comparison to what the US is doing (and has been doing since its founding), so I think on balance it's good that more people support it over the imperialist hegemon.

To be honest most popular youtube channels are slop, whether they are AI or not. There are a lot of gems in there as well, but their monetization model pushes creators towards high-quantity low-quality content with clickbait.