Our president is fucking children, and you’re telling me I gotta verify my date of birth to run Linux, in the name of “Protecting the Children”?

Get the fuck outta here.

You guys are asking the wrong questions.

How is Linux going to do this? There’s no server for the os to send the information to report the age of its users, no way of forcing its user base to comply and no single person or entity to fine, arrest or otherwise force into compliance.

They made a law they cannot enforce.

Since people aren’t reading the article and the headline is misleading. The law requires:

• The OS ask the user their date of birth on account creation (kinda like the Steam date of birth prompts)
• The OS provide an API that returns which of four age brackets the user fits in
• Companies notified by the OS that the user is under age may be liable

It was explicitly written by the authors not to mandate ID or facial recognition checks. You can lie about your date of birth. This basically creates a standard set of parental controls for parents configuring kids devices.

I think that this might actually help with the whole discord facial recognition issue in places other than the UK by allowing them to offload the issue to parents setting up devices rather than collecting kids biometrics.

That would be a completely unworkable law since devices may not even have internet connectivity, or a user interface. And even if they did, it would have a chilling effect on software development in California.

No biggie. I got ready for this in minutes after hearing about it.

#!/usr/bin/env fish
read -P "Are you old enough?  (yes/no)  " input
if test "$input" = "yes" -o "$input" = "Yes"
echo "Proceeding..."
else
echo "You are not old enough.  Exiting." 
exit 1
end

… What? … Why are you all looking at me like that?

No matter how hard they try, you can’t legislate parenting.

This is a whole new level for system level fingerprinting

No doubt in response to Europe making its choice for software open source. Expect targeted attacks on FOSS to increase

It’s just a simple DoB input, which can be local afaik

Even if they could enforce it which I highly doubt, this law is clearly a “Fuck you and your free software”.

Like if a “too young” user have the skills to update the OS to change or even remove the age verification, who will be responsible? Yeah I don’t know either, but both will be bad.

microslop and or palintir stink all over this, mroe than likely its the latter.

Is this only for Californians? Only Americans? Or everywhere?

its impossible to enforce. ca suck

“Age verification” is a big umbrella. Claiming that merely checking an entered birth date is the equivalent of uploading an ID is disingenuous and just fishing for clicks.

Yes, there are tangible connections to other concerning privacy violations in this space… but come on. Steam asks you for your birth date before you watch an R18+ game trailer. I’ve been lying on that form for over twenty years, since before I was 18.

Getting upset over this feels like the beginning of getting your panties twisted over everything. “Oh no, someone pressed a button on a keyboard, that’s how nukes are fired!”

This feels like a non issue.

Simple solution. From now on Linux distros should ship with a big message “NOT FOR USE IN CALIFORNIA”.

You want to force age verification? No server in all of California will run. Period.