From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
Personally, I think this first response nails it.
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2026-March/043515.html
Linux is not sold. So you either need to force users to install this on their systems, or go eat rocks.
Enterprise distros on the other hand.. Need to do this.
I would also interpret it this way, though California’s government is profoundly technologically incompetent, despite being the home of “Silicon Valley.”
Knowing California, they would try to twist the word “vendor” to cover any entity that does any kind of business, similar to how they dismantled interstate commerce protections for the entire country. If that didn’t work, they would argue that donations make something a vendor.
The situation is stupid and I am long past tired of idiots pushing idiocy on others en masse.
I might have a lot of fun things that aren't legal in California. Never thought my OS would be one, but here we are.
If people went out of their way to learn a damn thing about computers, and all-consuming jobs didn't force entire generations raised without parents, and maybe they didn't let their 6 year olds on social media / online gaming / whatever unsupervised, maybe there'd be more backlash to the state and corporations trying to step in as parental figures.
...Wish that wasn't too friggin' much to ask.
Servers and data centers have zero business knowing anything about who's behind my machine by default.
I really hope they call the kernel module suck_my_ass so I can sudo modprobe -r suck_my_ass
Why not say "we won't sell to any customers in California" and be done with it? If someone goes out of their way to install Ubuntu on their system, it's up to them. Also, how is that going to work for OSes in the cloud? Will CI pipelines need to be age gated?
Canonical bending the knee already? That was quick.
But also not surprising at all TBH
I know everyone here is obsessed with freaking out over the legislation.
But I think the author is wrong, they should just add this to accountservice and Debian will pick it up in 5-10 years and that's fine.
I actually thing the tendency to over engineer this solution to make back porting easier is worse than the milktoast Californian law.
I think they should add the word "Fuck" to all age verification prompts until they, too, get censored.
Does FreeDOS need to comply with this law? After all these years, a new 21h interrupt!
Does it have accounts?
A "good faith effort to comply" with a bad faith law is to pipe /dev/yes to the API.
I mean.. there's nothing stopping anyone from setting their age to 100 years old. It's not like they are adding any sort of identification check, from what I gather. Just doing the minimum to comply.
Also showing lawmakers how easy it is means even more laws down the pipeline to really make development disgusting because "it worked before, right?"
They are building the framework piece by piece. First the API is "Honour Based" then it goes to "Prove It". For once it looks like baby steps instead of full blown head in a toilet of fresh shit like usual. Build your off line libraries, soon the only way to win will be not to play
Why is there a need to comply with foolish laws? I'm sure I type stuff on lemmy.ml or elsewhere on the internet that doesn't comply with some idiot law somewhere in like Myanmar or the DPRK. Why would I concern myself with those laws.
People who live in California, if anyone bothers to enforce it, would have two options:
It should be implemented as "This is only required if you live in California" during setup. However, this does sound completely unenforceable. If I have a connecting flight through LA, will they send a swat team to pick me up at the airport for not setting it up and using the WiFi?
Would they actually go after the people?
I expect the law would place the responsibility on the companies managing / distributing the OS. That's the reason companies are complying. People can always look for alternatives.. I'm sure there will always be homemade distros without stuff like this made by ragtag groups / communities without much of a corporate structure behind.
As a European living in Canada, it's quite annoying to think about having to do extra stuff (even if it is very minimal) because one state in America passes a stupid law.
You don't need to take remote places like DPRK. Trust me, most Lemmy instances don't follow the laws of 27 European Union countries.
This is perhaps a controversial statement from someone who is fed up with all this age verification stuff, but having the user age be set on account creation (without providing ID or anything dumb like that) doesn't seem that bad.
It just feels like a way to standardise parental controls. Instead of having to roll their own age verification stuff, software like Discord can rely on the UserAccountStorage value.
If it were possible to plug into a browser in a standard, privacy conscious way, it also reduces the need for third party parental control browser extensions, which I imagine can be a bit sketchy.
OSes collect and expose language and locale information anyway. What harm is age bands in addition to that?
In theory yes.
What's bad though is that it's meaningless. Sure the OS can say you are 10 years old or 100 years old and you can't change it... but then you open a page in your browser which runs a virtual machine and that VM now says you are, arbitrarily 50 years old. The VM is just another piece of software but put it in fullscreen (if you want) and voila, you are back to declaring whatever age you want to any application or Web page within that VM. If that's feasible (and I fail to see how it wouldn't, see countless examples in https://archive.org/details/software or https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-webtop/ even though that's running on another machine, so imagine that was a SaaS) then only people who aren't aware of this might provide a meaningful information on the actual age but that's temporary, the same way more and more people now learn to use a VPN.
I mean, ultimately it can always be worked around... even if you were to add stronger forms of identification, a kid can take the parents card / ID / DNA sample / whatever when they are distracted and verify themselves. If a kid is smart enough to set up a VM like that they are smart enough to deceive adults. Teenagers have been finding easy ways to get to forbidden stuff for centuries.
I'd much prefer if the source of trust is in the local device, in the OS, that is responsibility of the family to control, and not on some remote third party service offered by some organization in who knows where with connections with who knows who. If parents don't properly limit the local user account of their kids, or restrict access to the places they don't want, it's their responsibility. Set up proxies, blockers and lock the OS locally, but don't mess up the internet for the rest of us.
Standardized parental controls would be great, actually. But it should be proper parental controls, not whatever this is. Because at the end of the day, the parent* should be involved in what their child is up to, and allow (or not) based on what the child needs and/or wants, instead of whatever we are doing now.
Or, to put it another way, if your teen has read Games of Thrones (the physical books), I don't see much of a point in forbidding them from going to the wiki of it, and I'd be hard pressed to justify stopping them from talking about it online with other people who have read the books. The tools should allow for this kind of nuance, because actual people are going to use it and these kind of situations happen all the time.
* some parents are awful and would abuse this, see LGBT+ related things, but that's a social issue, not a technological issue.
Currently it's self reported, but if it's complied with and then they inevitably say now it needs id they can just block all the self reports until id is provided. This is the same tactic of marginally moving the line that has been happening for years
Sure. But at that point distros can just say "no use in California lol" and enjoy the free market share from disgruntled totally-not-californian Windows users.
I thought similarly that a minimally privacy invasive set up like sending a "I'm over/under 18" signal that didn't require verifying government ID/live face scans/AI "age approximation" would be a good idea, but I now think that this system would fall over very quickly due to the client and server not being able to trust each other in this environment.
The client app, be it browser, chat, game etc, can't trust that the server it is communicating with isn't acting nefariously, or is just collecting more data to be used for profiling.
An example would be a phishing advert that required a user to "Verify their Discord account", gets the username and age bracket signal and dumps it into a list that is made available to groomers [1].
Conversely, the server can't trust that the client is sending accurate information. [2]
Even in the proposal linked, it's a DBUS service that "can be implemented by arbitrary applications as a distro sees fit" - there would be nothing to stop such a DBUS service returning differing age brackets based on the user's preference or intention.
This lack of trust would land us effectively back to "I'm over 18, honest" click throughs that "aren't enough" for lawmakers currently, and I think there would be a requirement in short order to have "effective age verification at account creation for the age bracket signal" with all the privacy invasive steps we all hate, and securing these client apps to prevent tampering.
At best, services wouldn't trust the age bracket signal and still use those privacy invasive steps, joining the "Do Not Track" header and chocolate teapot for usefulness, and at worst "non verified clients/servers" (ie not Microsoft/Apple/Goolge/Meta/Amazon created) would be prevented from connecting.
The allure of the simplicity and minimal impact of the laws is what's giving this traction, and I think the proposals are just propelling us toward a massive patch of black ice, sloped or otherwise.
Having said that, I can't blame the devs for making an effort here, as it is a law, regardless of how lacking it is.
[1] I realise "Won't someone think of the children!" is massively overused by authoritarians, give me some slack with my example :) [2] Whilst the California/Colorado laws seem to make allowance for "people lie", this is going to get re-implemented elsewhere without these exemptions.
I can see the slippery slope argument, however it overlooks the fact that countries/states are already willing to implement the non-privacy systems.
If these systems take off, it will give privacy advocates the ability to point at California's system and say "look, they have a system that is as effective as the strong assurance stuff but without the people sending you angry emails."
I see it as almost a "reverse slippry slope". A way for people to push for less strict verification.
Yeah countries and states are relatively happy with the non-privacy systems as they "work".
My principle problem is I cannot see this system "working" to the satisfaction of the seemingly incessant voices who don't want a child to see something that they shouldn't, where "something" is nebulous and seems to change with who you ask and at regular intervals.
I'm probably very jaded - I'd love to be proven wrong and this system works as a least worst option, but I'm in the UK and we recently seem hell bent on choosing the worst option offered.
My condolences - I'm in the UK as well and wouldn't wish that on anyone.
If I may offer an alternate perspective: Politicians don't actually care about any of this, they just want votes. California's system allows them to say "Look, we solved child safety!" without having to deal with people complaining about privacy. If there's an existing system in place, it's easier for politicians to say "we already solved this!" and ignore those voices.
It also puts the guilt on parents. If this system in place, and you complain about your child seeing tiddy online, the question is going to be "why didn't you set the age correctly then?".
... Of course this might be me just being optimistic. I really hope we, as a species, grow out of this new age puritanism and government overreach.