(Not sure if this is worldwide or only in some countries)
Updating to iOS 26.4DB2 will put your phone into a parental-restricted mode with adult websites blocked on all browsers, warning prompts every time you try to send or receive an explicit image on a messaging app, and all social media apps blocked on the App Store (in Australia)
The settings to disable this mode are locked off until you verify your age either with a credit card, photo ID, or though information Apple already has (like the age of your account).
I’ve been an apple user my entire adult life but this might finally be the thing that forces me off the platform. Do any other long term apple users have some tips about migrating? I’ve heard Ashai Linux is pretty good on mac hardware these days and I’ve been thinking about GrapheneOS for a while.
People in CA and CO: this shit is why people hate your states. Get better politicians ffs.
Fuuuuck with apple doing this, I wonder how long we have until this BS enters Android and Linux Kernel.
Lmao good fucking luck enforcing this on Linux. There’s no central authority to handle age verification, and even if there was, it’d take less than a week for someone to make a patched version of whatever tool they use that just… Autoreports that you’re an adult no matter what.
Well when we have to comply we can make a build flag everyone shut toggle off…
I suggest simply never complying. Anyone who does is a traitor. This is FOSS, they have no control over us, ZERO power to enforce compliance.
I suggest simply never complying.
While this is the best. it is not feasible. Not many open source projects can just pay millions on fines and not think about it. Idiots making these laws cant enforce it but they will try in the only way they know. Fine and fine and fine untill a project dies.
Is it regional? Am I safe to update in Europe?
From what I’ve read online it’s going to be worldwide
I find it odd to protect children they will stalk the hell out of us but won’t arrest known pedophiles …
I hate the world
Yeah apparently it’s fine for them to fuck kids but too immoral to risk kids seeing people fucking.
It’s not to protect children though. It’s for political surveillance.
Exactly. Governments around the world, including the U.S., of course, have made it crystal clear through their actions that they don’t give a fuck about protecting children.
Better to just hate the whole Epstein Class. They trash the world for everyone else…
We’ve had a name for them for the last 200 years: the capitalist class, or to be more precise, the haute bourgeoisie. The 1% of the 1%.
the haute bourgeoisie. The 1% of the 1%.
The painful irony being that the bourgeoisie were still below the nobles
If everyone voting for these age requirements don’t also vote to require you to use an ID to unlock the safety on a gun or remove a knife from the knife rack, they aren’t voting on this to protect the children.
Knives and guns need age verification before someone seeing Kate Upton showing her breasts.
Im going side with none of it needs age verification, and all of it needs parental guidance
At least knives have a use outside of killing
In America.
They should just be done with it and implant an id chip at birth
Data freely available to our capitalistic gods and politiciansCould someone share a non alarmist take here? I have seen posts elsewhere that apple’s “using information we already have to assign you an age-range” is better than other more invasive methods.
I (regrettably) acquiesced when prompted to use this method in order to access health insurance app. Am I cooked? permanent all powerful spyware time?
Presumably if there’s a switch to turn it on then there’s also a switch to turn it back off again.
yeah that’s a fair thought. it was more of a push notification than a switch.
i had a cursory look around and didn’t find it but i could ask apple support
Not necessarily. Write once memory, fuses, etc. can make that a one way Street
What if you sell your phone?
I’m not saying that it’s been thought through for this particular use case… Just saying that you can make one way changes
Yep
Google tried a few years back but there was pushback. Google will slowly boil the frog tho.
This is insane. They have to view your images to deem of they are explicit…
Basically a year away from a universal internet ID that will track all movements and can be restricted if your government doesn’t like you.
To get a sim card in Australia you need to show identification. There is no anonymity.
Apple already views your images for child porn.
Do they though? As a side note, I read the documentation for the proposed system of scanning and it was actually really well designed for privacy. The problem was if they were forced to expand the scope to include other material such as, for example, proof of protest against a regime.
They probably do it for people like Donald and all his Epstein friends to save and pre order.
Has this expanded from iCloud uploads? It’s crazy how using a device now requires users to allow company full access yo everything.
I guess I never believed it was limited to iCloud.
Wanted to view*
This also means they are tracking all the websites you are going to.
They already are. Well depends on who they are I guess but someone is.
That was already happening, as the option to block sending and receiving of such content was able to be turned on in your screen time settings, and you could mandate it for your children by managing your kids accounts on the family organizers device. If someone is under the age of 13 they are required to be on a family share, and if you don’t have “Ask to Buy” enabled, from what I know you won’t get a refund for anything with the excuse my kid bought this without permission.
Overall it all seems logical, but in those scenarios the ages and requirements are mostly all controlled by the parent.
Scary. I had no idea it went beyond the iCloud scans. I avoided the cloud after that celebrity image leak.
Guess we might see a rise in offline or dumb devices. I wonder how this will affect other nations that already have restrictive internet access. If the
USWest becomes more locked down where would free and accessible info go?
If the West follows into the footsteps of the propaganda they are spreading against China, I’d rather go live in China because at least there people don’t live paycheck to paycheck despite working multiple jobs. Every accusation against China was a confession.
Same with DPRK.
Removed by mod
Cool ableism now get in the pit asshole
how the fuck is that ableism
Telling me I am “insane” for saying I would rather live somewhere that has housing and health care mandated by the state.
Go fuck yourself. You are falling for racist propaganda against a state designated enemy and need to fucking educate yourself.
Here in “enlightened America” I have the privalege of giving most of my income to a landlord and don’t even get a fucking kitchen.
Fuck you and every other racist capitalist apologist like you. Literally I would not shed a tear over your death if you did not first repent and admit you have been lied to and are perpetuating racist imperialist propaganda because you can’t be fucking bothered to the bare minimum of investigation on the matters on which you speak.
I would never call you “insane” because that would imply some inherent mental defect. No you are a product of western propaganda and it is your responsibility to fucking educate yourself. I am working overtime doing three+ jobs just to fucking survive so figure your shit out and fuck the fuck all the way off. Get back to me when you have investigated your own claims.
No investigation no fucking right to speak motherfucker.
I think if you can’t admit the obvious problems with the DPRK then there is no conversation to be had here.
China, I understand. North Korea? I do not.
I certainly do not think that calling me racist out of the blue is helping your case, either.
China, I understand. North Korea? I do not.
Well congratulations you are getting less racist. Now keep going and examine what you have against the DPRK. By the way, the fact that you call it “north Korea” is inherently racist. You should listen to the Blowback episodes about the Korean war. What you understand as “south Korea” is not a separate country but is a dictatorship in an occupied region set up because the west cannot allow the legitimate government of the DPRK to survive because of old holdovers of “containment” during the cold ware where anything and everything was “justified” as long as it prevented the horrifying spread of communism (aka good things that threaten global corporate profits).
I’ve never seen any western propaganda against the DPRK that wasn’t at best implicitly racist (and it’s often explicitly so), so the people that watch it and swallow it without question are likely to be racist in the same fashion.
shut up cracker
You can’t live paycheck to paycheck when you don’t have a paycheck ;)
Bruh I am a communist we don’t want paychecks we want our basic needs met.
You are so deep in the lib capitalist realism you can’t imagine anything outside it.
I don’t give a shit what children see.
They’ll live.
Stop spying on adults.
I mean some shit you find online is pretty grim but when I was a kid I knew the internet was for adults and didn’t expect everything to be catered to me. Now the status quo seems to be “every website must be kid/advertiser friendly and PG13 by default, everything else must be locked behind a verification prompt”. How did we get here?
We let 5 companies control the internet. Instead of being the distributed thing it was dreamed up to be we allowed it to consolidate.
And it’s not like servers have gotten harder to run! Pirates serve terabytes of data that’s straight-up illegal! Your fuckin’ commercial connection should be plenty for any damn thing you want.
It’s just a facade to justify mining more data for power, influence and money.
Simple as that.
After commercial OS have age verification they will remove it from the programs because the age was already verified, right? (Padme asking Anakin)
Nope, the CA/CO legislation requires that all applications utilize the OS-level age verification API!
When I first decided to switch to Linux, I started exclusively using apps that were available on Linux. This way I was able to gradually transition my workflows one app at a time without any rush. When I was ready to install Linux, I did it on a new computer so I still had access to everything on the old computer and there was no risk of going computer-less if the installation went sideways.
Also, keep in mind that Asahi only works on M1 and M2 Macs. (If you have an old Intel Mac, you can just run normal Linux without Asahi)
Oh and Veronica Explains has a great video about her experience with Asahi.
This might be a stupid question but when using ashai can you run any normal linux software or does it have to be specifically built for arm64/apple silicon?
It’s gotta be built for arm64
Can you use the makefile and compile?
Yes, you can. It’s just an ARM64 computer. The only special consideration is that the kernel uses 16K pages instead of 4K pages, but that’s not something I’ve encountered problems with.
I’m pretty sure you can. I never did because I ended up having to go back to macos on the machine I had.
I hope someday any normal Linux software will be usable in Apple hardware. Unfortunately, there are hurdles.
One of the biggest hurdles was getting code accepted into the Linux kernel.
This became very frustrating for the previous Asahi Linux lead developer. He would push upstream code and the Linux developers would not accept it.
Why didn’t they accept it? Because it was written in memory-safe Rust and not in memory-unsafe C. Old Linux developers don’t want to deal with Rust. So they just refuse to include Asahi Linux updates into normal Linux software.
you’re losing a lot of nuances here, just want to add for other readers.
there was and are good reasons for why code wasn’t accepted
Good, I am waiting on my brand new Fairphone 6.
Thank you, Tim Apple, for making 2026 the year of the Linux desktop (but not necessarily the Ubuntu, Fedora, or Mint desktop).
I have a Macbook air now. Do you recommend me to buy a Lenovo thinkpad? Qubes os is the top pick, I heard.
(but not necessarily the Ubuntu, Fedora, or Mint desktop).
Rut. Thanks for ruining my day, sigh. That shit better be a patch away from removal / spoofing…
I’m hoping the implementation is something like ‘check this box to confirm you’re over 18,’ and nothing more.
The example of the age of your account made me realize I’m old
Wow I just checked when the first purchase was made on my Apple account, turns out it’s old enough to vote
