How about the government focus on taking rights away from people who have actually harmed kids, like I don’t know, maybe a giant pedophile ring in plain sight? Instead the focus on taking rights from everyone because someone, sometime, in the future harm a child.
its not even about “protecting the innocent” is about snooping on potential dissidents/ threats to the status quo of the govt.
Because it’s not about protecting children, obviously.
When someone with certain personality problems tells blatant lies, they are really only trying to convince themselves. You exist only as an introject inside their minds, you are not real to them, it does not matter if you don’t believe them because it doesn’t need to make sense to you.
It’s being exempt because the Government can’t enforce this requirement on FOSS. Linux isn’t managed by a corporation and I don’t think people realize this yet.
How about they spend their time revamping parental controls instead? The age gate stuff is clear about user data collection and nothing else.
Because they don’t give a single fuck about the kids, unless they’re pedos fucking kids, then they give all the fucks.
Exactly. Age control is obviously needed I am so glad I’m not a kid that has to navigate the social algorithms of our time.
That said this is obviously a law being pushed by the technofascist companies like meta and their goal is always more power, in this case more data. It’s crazy how many law makers just do what they are told. they are doing the same with trying to lock down 3Dprinters.
More local control in operating systems as well as parental controls in platforms like YouTube where they could have full control to turn off the algorithm, maybe even a browser api where you need admin to enable adult mode. But based on everything I’ve seem from companies like google and meta they don’t care in the slightest about the children as long as they make their bag
I’m a DevOps engineer and my employer runs a lot of Linux instances in AWS. I’d love for these politicians to explain to me how age verification of Linux web servers should work for auto-scaling environments where instances are spun up and terminated automatically based on traffic volume. I’d also like to know if I should be using the age of our CEO, the age of our company (thanks to Citizens United), or something else.
Obviously corporations just become exempt from the law. And any laws, any not.
politicians are far to stupid to know any of that. The only computer they know is their phone and maybe a laptop.
Honestly I wonder if this is why the amendment is being suggested. AI products in particular are likely to be interacting with a lot of websites that will be required to verify ages, and I’m sure California in particular is loath to make waves that might throw that revenue stream into doubt.
I’d like to see them pair a bluetooth headset to a phone.
How old is that headset ?
If it’s over 18 years old, does it automatically pass age verification
only 18 years or younger headphones qualify for consideration.
I’d love for these politicians to explain to me how age verification of Linux web servers should work for auto-scaling environments where instances are spun up and terminated automatically based on traffic volume.
Come on, can’t be that tedious. What could it be 200-300 instances tops per day? My kid sister does that many selfies.
Also, is each docker container a “computer” of its own? After all, I could use different distro base images!
You are required to have age verification. We licence our age verification on an instance basis. An instance is defined as whatever makes us the most money, or alternatively causes you the most pain.
You know. A worst case scenario.
Obviously uhhhh uhhhhhhh put your ID in a GitHub secret and uhhhhhh social security number and uhhhhhh
Yeah, I don’t even know what you’re talking about, and that makes me extra certain that politicians definitely don’t know what you’re talking about. It is nice to see them perhaps taking into account expert opinions on this subject, but 1 for 100 doesn’t make for a good average.
The govt…. Uhhh…. Finds a way (to fuck shit up)
Good points, and well put!
Does this not just defeat the purpose of this bill? My god the people are so fucking stupid.
It would still affect Apple, Microsoft, and Google.
Fuck age verification, fuck it all to hell. Not for Linux or any other OS or device.
I think that the major current closed-source OSes today are busily harvesting all the data they can anyway, and the vendors probably don’t care much about also grabbing age, but stuff like, oh…is it illegal under this law to distribute proprietary versions of older OSes now? Like, classic MacOS, say. That’s definitely not open-source. And Apple is not going to go back and do a new release of classic MacOS to add age verification to it. But…there’s still some old software that you need classic MacOS to run. So…is it illegal to distribute essential software required to run classic MacOS software in California as of the middle of next year?
I mean, you might be infringing on copyright as well, but Apple may be okay with people copying classic MacOS around, as they can’t really make any money off it today. But this is the State of California, not Apple, that would act here.
Right… But in the age of AI, data-harvesting the right data (i.e. the human/non-AI-slop) becomes very interesting to a lot of companies, “age-verification” is an easy argument (for policy-makers) of e.g. social-media companies to know whether the user is an actual human, thus the verified data is a lot more valuable.
Sure, but we can’t make the argument that everyone vouching for age verification is doing so for the same reason.
It is undeniable that there is a very large, and growing, population of parents and adults that want age restrictions for adult content. I think their concern is valid, too. However, they don’t care how it’s done.
That’s where big tech “saves the day” by generously offering to collect all of our IDs and tying it the our accounts. Secure, and private, age verification can be done with zero knowledge proofs. But that probably won’t happen without competent government
Agree but would rather it be enforced at the OS level than per app or site. My kid just told me she uploaded her photo to some game she plays which sucks.
How about neither. We don’t need it.

See you in a year or 2.
Play as old as times:
- Company announces garbage change
- People freak out
- Company says ok we will only do half of the garbage
- People calm down and forget
- Company later does the rest of the garbage
- Nobody cares because half of it is already there
also known as TESTING the waters, gauging public response. so they can adapt under a different scheme.
Foot in the door technique is a timeless way to get what you want. People seem oblivious to it.
I hear frogs experience the same phenomenon with hot water.
Actually they only stay in the boiling water if their nervous system is impaired
Good thing humans dont have nervous systems
Hm? Did you say something? Sorry, I was distracted.
Also works the other way around.
I mean it makes total sense the minute you think about it at all.
- some middle managers year end goals include this unpalatable feature
- they release it
- public freaks out
- pr walks it back a bit
- that managers back at work the week after trying to get that feature in because they need to justify the work they just did on it for better compensation
It’s the same with laws.
It’s very hard to get the electorate united to oppose something but if they manage to unite and oppose a bill the lobbyists are back at work on Monday pushing it by a different name.
Laboyists are the scourge of democracy. Every last one of them has a rope and spear with their names written on them.
Technology makes everything cheaper, including changing minds.
At some points it was unfeasible to abuse consumers because they’d object. Now, if it’s on a large enough scale and valuable enough, you can just pay to convince the majority of them that it’s fine.
The principle that Bullshit, sprayed around often enough, becomes Air Freshener.
That reminds me. We are quickly approaching the date discord postponed age verification to.
100% Microslop.
Are you implying that CA regulators do exactly what disgusting corporations do?!? I am shocked sir!
It’s called “parenting.” Yes, it’s harder these days with the internet and literally everything “right there.” But it’s still your job as a parent.
ANYTIME ANYONE imposes restrictions “for the children” - there’s something nefarious going on. If it’s a politician-they are looking to build a database for $. If it’s your priest-he’s banging the alter boy after ccd, or hates himself so much for being gay he’s lashing out at the lgbtq community. If it’s a company-they’ve either been threatened into doing it or more likely are on the take with a fat payday. If it’s a developer adding it into Linux, they should expect fierce skepticism and backlash from the community.
It’s NEVER about the children. It’s always an alternative motive. If they actually cared about kids, they’d make sure they were fed at school, they’d invest in their education, or they’d invest into social programs to help out those less fortunate.
I don’t think it’s any coincidence that this is occurring at the same time companies like Palantir are signing government contracts left and right and mega-sized data centers are sprouting up all over the country.
Just like it’s never really about FREEDOM™
The california law isn’t actually age verification. It is unchecked age assertion at the operating system level. He is also there specifically for the parents to fill out.When a new device is purchased. I have no doubts.It will be misused and lead to age verification in the OS with a third party verifying the age, but that isnt want the bill is now
Everything you said is correct, but at the same time: “We’re not driving off a cliff (yet), we’re just moving in for a closer look.”
- “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people!”
- “Reduce, Recycle, Reuse.”
- “Only you can prevent forrest fires.”
- “Be All You Can Be in the Army!”
- “Parenting!”
Shift all the blame. Guns? America? Fuck that, it’s the individual, not the industry.
The internet is always two things. The web, access to information on all levels (good or bad ), should be available. It needs to be regulated bc META and anything Elon is apart of, still exist.
Parents are fighting, “literally everything” ! We as a species, is losing to whatever the “internet” is. We need real regulation.
Ear me out: make tools for parents to restrict their child themselves instead of restricting everyone and rob data
Oh you mean the thing that worked for 20+ years? Are you crazy? Think about the profits and data we won’t collect.
It’s already available and parents are not utilizing it.
But I also don’t see the problem with this. As long as there’s savvy and smart children that did get educated on safety, the knowledge can propagate to those that did not.
It’s already available and parents are not utilizing it.
The parents have determined that it’s not needed. They’ve determined that trying to strictly regulate exactly what Little Johnny can and can’t see online does him far more harm than porn ever could. This hyper-authoritarian nonsense needs to die in a fire.
And the worse part, we DO have tools for parents. Either they don’t know these tools exist or they don’t know how to use them. Mostly because they’re tech-illiterate. Kudos to the parents who educate themselves.
This is a benign example, but I was talking with a fellow parent about our dislike of Paw Patrol and told them I had to remove that as an option in Netflix. They were shocked that was possible and I could see the gears turning in their head with that new info. Granted I’m not parenting a teenager yet, but it seems like most of the functionality in bigger platforms generally exists, people just don’t know it’s there and to set it.
Or we regulate the use and teach how it properly works. Tools for parents are get but it’s not a fix.
We as a species, is losing to whatever the “internet” is. We need real regulation.
And none of that regulation will have anything to do with age, if you want real effectiveness. A teenager seeing a dick and a dick, a vagina and a vagina, or a dick and a vagina, being mashed together isn’t concerning in the big picture. The stuff that is worrying about the internet affects adults just as much as children, like social media.
You missed the point completely. My example was Meta and Elon’s companies not teens fucking.
Age verification is pointless. The post I responded to, was talking about it is the parent’s (individuals) job not the government’s (regulation). That would be wrong.
And none of that regulation will have anything to do with age, if you want real effectiveness.
That is an extreme view and I believe a dangerous one. Regulation like not experimenting on teen females which caused some to take their life. That seems pretty age related.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/facebooks-dangerous-experiment-teen-girls/620767/
The only way to “protect” or “target” any demographic is to first identify everyone to see if they’re in that demographic.
That’s almost always the only reason it’s done.
Thats not the case here.
The controversy became particularly heated after reports suggested platforms like SteamOS could still fall under the law due to their ties to proprietary application ecosystems.
Ehhh. I think that’d be a hard argument to make. I mean, the OS is open-source. You can download it and modify it and reinstall it or whatever. Sure, it runs Steam, which is proprietary, but so does any other GNU/Linux distro.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SteamOS
The core operating system is free and open-source software, while the Steam client remains proprietary.
Like, the only way in which SteamOS differs from another Linux distro is that Valve, which makes the proprietary client, also happens to be distributing the OS.
Tbh, this is just a massive stack of misguidedness.
First, look at what the original law does:
- OS needs to know the age.
- OS itself doesn’t do anything with the age
- OS needs to provide the age to apps and services asking for it
- Apps and services need to block content based on the age provided with the OS
- If the OS doesn’t provide an age, apps and services have to block as if the user was a toddler
Removing the requirement for the OS to provide an age doesn’t change anything at all, because someone running an OS that doesn’t provide an age will just be blocked everywhere. That’s not a solution, that’s a joke to appease idiots who don’t know what the law does.
This is just as misguided as the backlash against systemd who added an age field to the user account to allow people to be still able to access age-restricted content.
The actually relevant part that people should be combatting is the requirement for apps and services to do age verification using the OS-provided age. The OS age field doesn’t matter.
I wish people actually read the california law, it’s rather short, and covers a lot of the “gotchas” people are coming up with (e.g. No it doesn’t apply to servers).
I don’t like age verification laws (Especially since I live in a jurisdiction with one already in effect) but at least argue against the law itself rather than a strawman version people heard about via social media.
This is so common online.
Bad Thing happens.
People argue against Bad Thing incredibly fucking badly. Just abysmal. They don’t understand why or how the Bad Thing happened. They didn’t read the document containing Bad Thing. They don’t know who or what is involved with Bad Thing or where. Nonetheless, they vehemently argue against Bad Thing, using only their imagination as source material.
Someone with more experience fighting Bad Thing shows up in the comments, tries to argue against the misinformation, only to inevitably be accused of defending the Bad Thing.
Under the original law, operating systems would be required to request a user’s age or birth date during device setup, then expose an “age bracket signal” to apps and app stores. The law, which defined brackets such as “under 13,” “13–15,” “16–17,” and “18+,” immediately raised questions about how such requirements would apply to decentralized, open-source software ecosystems.
I kind of wonder what software running as a service on Windows is supposed to identify itself as if it’s non-interactively downloading software.
A lot of unanswered practical implementation questions surrounding this. Questions like how and why about a lot of things.
A question I have is why all the separate age brackets would be necessary. If the purpose is keeping kids from accessing porn or other “adult” material, why do they need any other categories aside from under 18 and 18+? Those age brackets read more like the kind of demographic categories advertisers, data brokers, etc are interested in than a simple age verification check.
So BSD will have to implement age verification?
Article says open source OS so BSD should be safe.
To late I already implemented my own linux age verification. Every time I log in I scan my face and my drivers license and email it to microsoft, google, meta and the CCP. Get owned privacel
The most pedophilic government in history desperately needs to know if your children are on the computer
… For reasons
American states are not at all like provinces.
California’s government is not synonymous with the federal government.




















