If you can feel a very small tinge of existential horror when you read the words “try to”, congratulations, you’re a true *nix devotee.
If legislators get grumpy about this, just gently thwap them with your handy copy of The Unix Haters Handbook and tell them you’re working as hard as you can under the circumstances.
The problem with that whole situation is the way the law is written the developer is the one held responsible if a child circumvents the check to access adult content. Therefore, developers will have to pay hefty fines unless they:
-1: Have a way to positively make sure the person enters their age is telling the truth; and
-2: Lock this value from being changed by the user afterwards.
Or: Region lock the OS.
One can see how incredibly problematic this is for both privacy and true ownership and control over your own machine. There is also a lot that needs to be figured out in the law such as what will happen when someone inevitably finds a way to hack the system to circumvent it, especially the region lock. Ultimately, big tech has deep pockets and can shrug off the fines but small nonprofit open source projects will be killed by them.
This law is specifically designed to kill nonprofit-run and private software like Linux.
All of this seems impossible to enforce in the FOSS ecosystem. People can just fork the software and remove any restriction they don’t like. That’s kind of the whole point of free software. Users are free to use their devices however they like, including in ways that are not intended by the devloper.
You’re right. Computing devices need to be locked down in such a way that prevents consumers running software that isn’t signed by an approved/licensed software vendor owned and/or favored by an oligarch and existing general purpose computers need to be made illegal. We don’t need “hobbyist programmers” anymore, humans have no place writing code.
As usual, Cory Doctorow foresaw this fifteen years ago (transcript here).
Making the vendor culpable for a user bypassing a software lock is absurd but then again so is this entire bill.
I do not know if that is true. Most of the political hacks writing these bills have zero understanding of computers and do not even consider Linux in the equation. They see Windows, iOS, Android and macOS.
This is more aimed at mom and dad with three children who have tablets for all the shits and take no responsibility for what the kids do with the devices.
Linux devs will just step back from releasing code packaged with installers and users will have to compile and set any given program up themselves.
I use MacPorts and Homebrew for what I need.
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You are correct that they have zero understanding of computers. But what you are missing is that they are consulting “experts” who are essentially just big tech lobbyists.
And when you say consulting, you mean that they’ve been legally bribed with a few mils.
Meta literally broke the record for the most legal bribery in a year over shifting the liability from platform to app store (as they’re facing tens of billions in fines). Apple and Google have been pumping tens of millions to counter it.
The political hacks are just reading what the corpos wrote for them…