We need to divest from big tech. We can’t have our lives leveraged by companies for more concessions from us. What is even left to concede?
How does that make any sense? How is the license for a piece of software relevant to verifying age? If I make a site that is objectively harmful to minors, I can just make it open-source and I’m exempt? Or, if I make a completely innocuous site that doesn’t actually do anything but is closed source, I would have to comply?
But really, nothing should be doing strong identity verification outside of stuff like government (e.g. passports), or anything that commonly exploits identity for crime (e.g. major financial operations).
This is still bad, rollback the law
This is fucking BAD you guys. Like, we’re being dog walked into a fucking wall here.
Major Big Tech companies (and their Fortune 500 partners, and the smaller businesses they support) are ALL going to be asking for age verification for all their SaaS “cloud” offerings and be required to do so by law.
If Linux is exempt from these laws then these services which we may all still be dependent on in some form or another will not work with Linux, since it doesn’t verify age.
You won’t be able to bank or watch Netflix on Linux anymore and it will destroy adoption just as it’s going mainstream.
The law requires the OS to ask the age and provide it to applications, not verify the age. Linux can provide the same API with a static value or “no age” signal if needed.
No, you have to panic now! They’re locking Linux users out of life for vague, unstated reasons!!
You’re right we should ignore the takeover of technology from our very hands into the paws of oligarchs who will make it unobtainable so they can build their datacenters with it and once all the consumer brands have dried up they will sell us dumb terminal tablets and we will rent all software from them in the cloud, by the month.
I’d ask you to come back and tell me how right I was in say 5-10 years but a) there’s no guarantee they will succeed and b) if they do succeed, none of us will be allowed here in the first place
Man, this is some Fahrenheit 451 shit, where we’ll be in our “entertainment room” and books will be burned
Seeing this as a conspiracy against Linux users and not just patching badly written state level legislation is tin hat territory. If I’m not on the internet and using Linux in 2036 then I’m dead, and it’s not because I starved in the street after being unable to access my bank account on a Linux.
So the banks lose customers or do people capitulate?
The 2-4% of us who actually daily drive Linux will stand firm but it depends on how far the mandate goes. If you can’t access ANY financial, entertainment, or pron website without OS level age checks, how many of us will really want to do all our banking on paper?
The real plot is to stop “line go up” for Linux. They know they can’t control it, but they also know if they just kill it outright then they will make enemies.
Will normies install Linux if they can’t get on their banking website? Teenagers will say it sucks if it can no longer log into Steam. When grandma can’t verify to Gmail that she’s been an adult for the last 60 years she will want “the Windows” back.
Intelligence agencies don’t want to make big, sweeping, draconian moves; that’s how you get social unrest (ask them how they know). They’re trying to boil this frog.
Idk, do people like being able to purchase food?
This makes literally zero sense.
Why would the software license determine this? Just rollback the shit law.
They’re not going to enforce it anyway.
Cause they don’t want to have to force corpos to get age verification on the ludicrous number of IoT devices that run Linux, but cover their ass in making it not seem that way.
Oh sorry. I mean… cause they’re, like, open-source and how could you even enforce that?
Obviously our lawmakers are communist and this is a ploy to undermine the very capable and responsible software maker called Microsoft /s
This is awesome to hear. But the fact that they had to do this after the fact tells you all you need to know about how stupid and poorly thought out to these laws are.
To be fair our situation is unprecedented. Children with access to social media (for some reason) interacting endlessly with AI slop.
Research indicates we’ve already wiped out 30 years of literacy progress.
Which 30 years? Because AI or not I’m thinking certain groups have been attacking literacy for at least the last 30 years.
Good, one more reason to slowly push people out of Microsoft’s clutches.
Yeah but today’s exemption is tomorrow’s loophole to be closed.
Ay? An exemption is not a loophole.
Right, it’s an exemption now.
But the age gate crowd will call it a loophole in the future.
<great thing happens>
Moaners: this is terrible because there’s no guarantee it will remain this way in perpituity
it’s not a ‘loophole’. it’s not an exception, either. it’s a time bomb. if it becomes widespread, it’s a literal death sentence for linux and foss on users’ desktops.
A literal death sentence? Ok mate.
New reason to use Linux: You’re seventeen years old and want to watch porn.
U can also just go to yandex.com and use the image search or any other site not beholden to U.S. laws
I remember installing Ubuntu when I was like 14 because my parents had so much shit on the xp partition they used. This was on dial-up and Ubuntu 3 or 4 or something.
There are plenty of people at Microsoft that also help support OSS. A number of developers there also frequently contribute to FreeBSD.
True but that’s like saying that your spleen is you. I met that guy he’s an asshole or maybe I was thinking of the sphincter. But I digress. There absolutely are people, good people at Microsoft that do contribute a lot to free and open source projects. But Microsoft as a company has been horrible for 40 years. Never good for anyone unless perhaps you are working for them?
We need more people writing laws who possess real domain knowledge. My students these days die whenever I play them “series of tubes.”
That’s supposed to be the point of lobbying: to inform politicians.
Surely systemd is going to roll back Dylan’s change, right?
Can you explain in detail, what exactly that change did?
They added a voluntary field for date of birth. Very controversial. Not at all like the address field that had been there for years or realname. Those are completely uncontroversial somehow. Unfortunately it got added during all this uncertainty with all the user I’d government overreach. And people lost their everloving minds claiming it was some sinister forced Id check. It was not. But all the craze around it launched tens of already dead systemD forks.
Worth mentioning that California’s and Brazil’s age verification laws were cited as a motivating factor in the pull request, the pull request author works for Microsoft and he also did similar pull requests in other open source projects.
the pull request author works for Microsoft and he also did similar pull requests in a other open source projects.
So he made several mistakes as part of a co-ordinated jumping the gun on boot throating, AND he’s getting paid to make open source software worse?
It wasn’t the timing. People love to hate systemd for the dumbest reasons.
Probably doesn’t help there’s also the existing fault line of ‘an init system shouldn’t be doing x’, systemd was always a magnet for partisanship.
Certainly. They set the precedent that open source software should capitulate immediately to any authoritarian demand.
EDIT : I guess people haven’t read facing fascism :
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/revoluciana-facing-fascism-sabotage
specifically https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/revoluciana-facing-fascism-sabotage#toc3
are they going to keep the exception if everyone installs linux now
Yes, but they’ll rule that using free open-source software is terrorism.
No they’ll just rule that services need to verify age; and since Linux doesn’t do that now it’s incompatible with the services people rely on.
This exemption is no better than the Winona councilman who interviewed with CNN and heavily implied that all they had to do was wait until the people moved on from caring about flock cameras and then “it wouldn’t be a problem anymore”.
They don’t give a fuck what we want, they want to implement verification as a stepping stone to real user ID and they will let Linux fall into irrelevance if it doesn’t comply. They think you will all calm down now since they appeased you with their “exemption”.
Underrated comment.
What I want to know is what about Haiku? BSD? AROS?
Apparently, if they’re distributed under GPL, MIT, BSD, or Apache license, they’re exempt
Good to hear though time will tell.
Why? That law was stupid in the first place but now it is completely idiotic. It isn’t coherent even with its original sick logic.
My guess is they figure it will make little difference due to network effects, and by making this exception they can remove a meaningful source of political resistance to the change. If the vast majority of users are running operating systems that declare underage status, then websites and apps will be able to use those signals to sidestep legal liability for actually doing anything meaningful to protect underage users, and new laws can be passed that assume the use of those signals is possible. That it isn’t 100% doesn’t change that very much.
That’s far too many laws to be fair. So totally normal unfortunately. A true (Situation Normal. All Fucked Up)
I knew they wouldn’t chase down stuff like Linux.
Maybe this will someday, if the year of, on the desktop, truly arrives for normal people.
So android doesn’t need verification?
I guess its better than the exemption not being there. Best would be no age verification though.
