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It’s not all good news, and unfortunately this bill expands the censorship regime to web browsers and websites too.
So it has always been about collecting data about kids all along?
Yes.
I’m trying to understand the logic. I guess they think the kids are too dumb to use Linux.
So what if you’re running Linux on Windows? Does that qualify?
I’d imagine most kids using Linux are either being actively taught computers by a parent who’s paying close attention, or so smart that nobody is stopping them from doing anything.
Probably because you can just modify the OS to say you’re old enough. With a closed source OS you can’t.
In reality it just means you can’t use the OS as age verification, and will have to use other means if you’re into that. Personally I just slap on a VPN and go somewhere that hasn’t succumbed to this idiocy…
The logic is none of these distros would do shit to comply with this, and enforcement is almost impossible. This is just saving face.
While I do like the idea of saving face, let me ask you this: when was the last time something as mundane as reality stopped a politician?
Ummm, more then you think. If it makes them look bad then yeah. In this case I don’t think anyone (even the big players) where pumped about this law. If they could spin it as a win then yeah, reality be damned. But here I doubt they even got much of a rise from distros that don’t sell their stuff anyways.
There were some people practically tripping over themselves to add all the prerequisites needed to support age verification. Instead of waiting to see how things played out, they just rushed through changes for things like systemd.
Adding a nullable “date of birth” field on a json doesn’t seem like “rushed”. The whole thing was massively overblown, considering it already had a field for the user real name (also optional).
I don’t know what the Cali gov was thinking
But it makes sense to me, based on the commercial incentive. It’s not that FreeBSD doesn’t form the basis of products that will need to comply with the law (whatever Apple calls their desktop OS for instance), but FreeBSD itself is only for the leet.
No, you don’t have to be a genius to use it, but you do need to be very weird, in that you want to use your own actual brain to solve problems, and you want to fully understand what the thing is doing, from bootup to shutdown. If that’s you, you’re a very odd person, according to many.
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.
same fucking morons who passed the “mandatory wiretaps for 3d printers” bullshit
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
This isn’t a great thing happening, this is a slight dent being put in a terrible thing happening.
Do not confuse the two.
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.
That’s… not too far from how I got into it. My parents didn’t know how to find porn, music, or tv shows my my linux systems
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.
U can also just go to yandex.com and use the image search or any other site not beholden to U.S. laws
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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?
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.
Sure, but that happened before AI.
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Which 30 years? Because AI or not I’m thinking certain groups have been attacking literacy for at least the last 30 years.
These are '23 scores, part of it was due to lockdown. Which we’re slowly approaching the point of which, 13 year olds had their entire school period in class again.
But I do, as you do, expect the capabilities to have free further from '23 to '25
Problems started before Covid with a steep and ongoing decline in reading.
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We need more people writing laws who possess real domain knowledge. My students these days die whenever I play them “series of tubes.”
That or for them to value and seek out subject matter experts. Unfortunately the system has largely rigged itself to make it hard or impossible for those knowledgeable to hold office even if they wanted to. That last part being huge.
That’s supposed to be the point of lobbying: to inform politicians.
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
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.
state level
It’s worth pointing out that the GDP of California makes it more like a country. It’s not something that can just be ignored.
Man, this is some Fahrenheit 451 shit, where we’ll be in our “entertainment room” and books will be burned
What does this have to do with an exemption for Linux on a shitty OS-level age attestation law…?
The law is stupid for many reasons, among them being that Linux devs aren’t often even located in CA or subject to its laws, and that people can just lie about their age. Corporate takeover of technology doesn’t really have anything to do with this.
For now. When is it going to need some sort of Age Verification Authority stamp to run?
What if an asteroid flies into the Earth and splits it in two?
Edit: I’ll add more now that I can sit down and focus.
Age attestation has existed for longer than I’ve been alive. Every service with an age requirement (must be 18+ to view, must be 13+ to play, must be 8+ with parent permission or 18+ to play, etc) used user attestation. The law is stupid because:
- Age attestation doesn’t restrict. It only exists for services to cover their own asses legally.
- Age verification would be required to restrict access, but age verification costs money that MS/Apple/Google/etc wouldn’t make back (maybe MS but Android and Mac OS are free).
- Linux exists and can bypass it all anyway and often isn’t subject to CA’s laws.
This law isn’t age verification. It’s just politicians being technically illiterate imbeciles.
That’s why I said “Age Verification Authority stamp” versus age attestation. How long before tech giants are able to convince Congress that the only way to keep kids safe is for them to issue certificates following identity verification? It won’t be long before Google phones won’t let you install APKs easily without a dev certificate which requires submitting your information to Google. It’s not farfetched to say. It’s a wet dream for politicians that want to be able to track everyone everywhere, too. How long before motherboards can’t be sold without it? How long before building your own PC isn’t an option? It’s already the norm for most hardware to have closed source code somewhere. That’s generally accepted as something that’s or worth working around except for the most dedicated of free software enthusiasts.
This is all super important shit. Blowing it off like “this is just tech illiteracy” doesn’t do anyone any favors. We aren’t going to be able to fight these things by laughing about it. With that mentality, an asteroid might be the only way to actually stop this shit from happening.
The trend in America is towards a conservative, puritanical, surveillance state. Flock cameras everywhere. Flock execs looking at children’s gymnastics classes in my state, while they say it will help find missing children. Abusers saying it will stop abuse. My state passed a porn ban and has had heartbeat abortion bans. We’re not going to get any wins by blowing this shit off and laughing about it. We’re not going to beat this shit if everyone wants to laugh and think everything is a slippery slope fallacy or just a random bullshit comment.
So what exactly are you saying to do here? Because I already write to my representatives and advocate against these things. The reality is that lawmakers don’t care what people want, only what’s going to make them the most money.
In any case, the point I was making was that this law isn’t age verification, and spending energy fighting against this when you could be battling the myriad actual age verification bills and laws is a waste of energy. In CA, there’s also the 3D printer BS around scanning and blocking print jobs.
There’s also the ALPR issue, data centers, and so on that have shown that representatives would rather put up a democratic facade than actually listen to their constituents.
I think you are confusing something. A tech company running proprietary code can and will ask for age verification. It does not matter if the user runs Windows, Linux, iOS, GrapheneOS.
The law here makes sure that services, which are basically also open source, are not required to do the age verification check.
So, you install Windows? Age check. You install Linux? No age check. Before even opening a browser. Then on Linux you open Netflix? Age check.
So I fundamentally saw this actually as a good news.
So the banks lose customers or do people capitulate?
Idk, do people like being able to purchase food?
does cash and card not work?
does cash and card not work?
How do people get paid, @jumping_redditor@sh.itjust.works ? How does a card transaction clear? When was the last time you went to a brick and mortar facility to check your balance?
I get paid with a check I either take to the bank or mail to the bank, I do think it should be required that employers offer for no additional charge payment in cash though.
Sure. Right after you provide ID.
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.
“The tighter your grasp, the more systems will slip through your fingers.”
Right now crypto is pretty much only for libertarians and money laundering.
Video piracy is pretty much only for people who can’t stand a little bit of ads.
Porn sites just ask if you’re over 18 and then show you whatever you want.
Increasing the barrier to exit allows these services to enshittify further, but also gives normal people an actual reason to switch.
This is still bad, rollback the law
But if lawmakers didnt constantly push out completely ineffective laws that cause problems, then what else would they do with their time? Effectively govern? Fucking nonsense.
I’d like medicare for all, a 50% reduction in military spending, and for the wealthy to pay taxes and be held accountable. Please and thank you.
Mamdani is ruining the grading curve.
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).
I think it’s actually a common sense exemption comparable to things like the FMLA having a carve out for small persons with a small number of people. FOSS operating systems bring a lot of value to businesses, higher education and presumably California’s government, but the many devs who make contributions that create this value on a volunteer basis could feasibly determine that they will either simply refuse to comply with it and pull these OSes from California, or that even if they did want to comply, they have an argument that compliance is simply an insurmountable burden for them to develop and maintain, in addition to maintaining the other features that actually provide the majority of the value.
On top of these, as others have pointed out, it’s a trivial for a sufficiently capable user to modify an open source program to circumvent this. Furthermore, there are a ton of FOSS OSes where development is not based in California, and it would be a ridiculous waste of time and money trying to enforce the law on them. I kind of doubt Canada is going to extradite the OpenBSD devs (or at least the folks your donations to the project go to) to face trial in the US on this, for example.
In a way, it’s an unusually aware law that lets legislators avoid the egg on their face of passing a toothless law when it comes to FOSS OSes, while still letting them please the “Think of the children!” crowd and squeeze more data and money (in fines) from Microsoft, Google and Apple, who will be subject to the law.
The overall goal of the law is still terrible, but the way they went about making this exception shows a rare understanding of technology for legislators, even if it was due to public backlash and relevant technical input, rather than the legislators suddenly understanding the tech they want to control themselves.
So why not target that? RHEL and Ubuntu are big corporate distros. Plenty of other big corporate software is open source too.
Because, as I already mentioned, the companies behind those distros are based in North Carolina and the UK, respectively, not California. It makes no sense for them to comply with a silly law in California, when they could just as easily rent servers outside of CA to their clients based there for whatever business needs they have, tell their clients to figure out compliance for the clients on their own, and ignore the law. Otherwise, they would have to take on the perpetual responsibility of maintaining compliance not only for their own contributions that they pack in their respective distros, but also for any upstream contributions that would be subject to these laws by upstream contributors they have no control or influence over. If some dev from Poland comes up with a great new idea for the kernel and it gets widely adopted, but doesn’t comply with this law (because why would a Polish dev waste their free time adding this?), now Red Hat or Canonical would have to either forgo those new features that their clients will be hearing about, or waste time and money reviewing all these commits to make sure they don’t miss any contributions that would touch on something covered by this law and updating and supporting their updates to ensure compliance.
Even if they did want to comply with the law to be able to sell their OSes in California, it would open up a huge can of legal liabilities for them that is nearly entirely dependent upon the actions and work of individuals they don’t control, and they have plenty of trivial ways of circumventing California’s jurisdiction if they decided doing so was the better course of action.
First off, we’re talking about operating systems and not websites.
Second, if it’s open source, the users can just edit out the age verification, no matter how it’s implemented. And if it’s open source, you simply can’t prevent that behavior.
In theory, the closed source systems make that more complicated, to the point where we can “rely” on those safeguards.
There’s a logic here, even if I totally disagree with the premise of the OS needing anything to do with the user’s age. Parents need to parent and we’ve had solid enough parental controls for a long time now that make this type of monitoring and control easy.
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).
FYI the article title (and the name of the law) are both misleading. The law does not require age verification, only age attestation.
Does that make the law even dumber? Probably, lol.
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
authormerger works for Microsoft and the author also did similar pull requests in other open source projects.Edit: it was the PR merger that works for Microsoft, not the PR author.
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?
The author does not work for Microsoft, nor he did add this field to “other open source projects”: https://dylanmtaylor.com/posts/2026-03-25-my-first-contribution-to-systemd
People just love to hate anything systemd related.
The author does not work for Microsoft
My bad, it was the PR merger that works for Microsoft, not the author.
nor he did add this field to “other open source projects”
Yes he did. He did several PRs using/collecting that field:
- archlinux/archinstall. This one is for a required field at install, not an optional one.
- canonical/ubuntu-desktop-provision
- another one in the same repo.
- yet another one in the same Canonical repo
- accountsservice
People just love to hate anything systemd related
Agree, and I actually like systemd, but I don’t see the relantionship between that and my comment.
Well, yeah, because they added it because of the law. That’s not speculation, they said that’s why they did. I agree, if it was there before it wouldn’t have been out of place, I totally get you, but they said that it’s something they should add because it might be required by law in the future.
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.
There will always be people thinking X shouldn’t do y. But you’re not wrong. Plenty of people absolutely just look for any reason to attack
Not to mention death threats and whatnot
It wasn’t the timing. People love to hate systemd for the dumbest reasons.
I wonder if Linux had been included in the law, would it have criminalised lying in your profile demographics
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
Fascism is when I can input fake birth date into my init system
What a shocker, such an optional date field indeed seems like a grave menace to all of the freedoms. You should make a merge request with an optional field for an user’s income, so that we may hunt the billionares and exterminate that vvermin with such powerful optional fields.
Why would they?
This makes literally zero sense.
Why would the software license determine this? Just rollback the shit law.
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?
Corporate stuff and things like IoT devices were already exempt from the law, they didn’t need any changes.
Obviously our lawmakers are communist and this is a ploy to undermine the very capable and responsible software maker called Microsoft /s
They’re not going to enforce it anyway.
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?
Sexual slavery, chattel slavery, blood sports.
None of these is that far off.
Big tech read cyberpunk dystopias and thought they were instruction manuals.
It can definitely get worse.
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)
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.
Because then browsers don’t have to do it?
So android doesn’t need verification?
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I guess its better than the exemption not being there. Best would be no age verification though.
