This should be a post on its own in some appropriate communities. Completely agree with you.

There’s a big difference. Name and email fields were agreed upon by the community itself because they might be useful. This is not decided by the community, it’s enforced. What if the law asked for a mandatory “skin colour” field? Yeah no problem, right? let’s comply, after all we can put any colour we like there.

But we must look not just at what’s happening now, we must look at what happens later. What if the next law enforces actual 3rd-party age verification? “It shouldn’t be a problem for you Linux people, you already have an API in place after all”.

Sorry but that’s a stupid comment. What are you, 5 years old not to know how many countries pushed one “law without any real consequence” after another, until people suddenly wondered “how did we get in this hell”? And how many battles the people behind “software” have battled against unjust situations?

That memory surely also prompted this feeling. It’s just that Meta seems to be putting a lot of effort everywhere to push for this. Not so difficult to put, or corrupt, or push, people in dev communities and repos.

Something feels fishy… The user who made this pull request has more than doubled his contributions to various repositories since January (from 20–400 to more than 1100), and this is his first pull request in the systemd repo.

Another patch should be added to rename “Systemd” into “Surveillanced”.

Meta’s lobbies reach really everywhere these days.

Didn’t know, thanks for the info.

Fedora is not “corp”, it’s a community project; Red Hat is the “corp” version based on it.

I don’t know about OpenSUSE that well, but it also seems to be a community-developed distro.

In fact all major “corp distros” are based on community distros, for instance Ubuntu on Debian. If Debian ceased to exist, Ubuntu would as well.

The Cudgel

A law that the largest companies in the world already comply with, and that hundreds of small projects cannot comply with, is not a child safety law. It is a compliance moat. It raises the regulatory cost of providing an operating system just enough that only well-resourced corporations can afford to do it.

The enforcement mechanism is the point. AB 1043 does not need to result in a single fine to achieve its purpose. The mere existence of potential liability — $7,500 per affected child, enforced at the sole discretion of the Attorney General — creates legal risk for anyone distributing an operating system without the resources to build an age verification infrastructure. Most of these projects will respond by adding a disclaimer that their software is “not intended for use in California.” Some will simply stop distributing.

The law does not need to be enforced to work. It works by existing. It works by making small developers afraid. It works because the cost of defending against even a frivolous AG action exceeds the entire annual budget of most open-source projects. You do not need to swing a cudgel to get compliance. You just need to hold it where people can see it.

Ageless Linux exists because someone should hold it back.

Well done! 💪👏

We must stand united, stand our ground, protest, react, and turn the tables. The fuckers making these shitty hidden-purpose laws must be reminded that “democracy” means, literally, “the people rule”. The people: we.

The lack of consequences has been a problem for quite a while now, from before LLMs. In my opinion it’s been caused by a widespread increase in professional incompetence, together with a mutually protective network of incompetent people. “I won’t point out that you’re incompetent and won’t blame you for your mistakes, if you do me the same favour”.

They call it “imposter syndrome”, but it isn’t a syndrome: it’s a symptom.

Yes!

I’m absolutely willing to go to jail. Many human rights have been won thanks to people who went to jail to defend them. And in any case we’re already in jail. It may be a spacious jail now, but they’ll shrink it more and more.

Asking others to do so? By no means no. If they don’t want a democracy, then good for them. They only need to bow their head down and obey. And later on, maybe, they must even watch out not to protest, because that won’t be allowed by the law either.

“We have to comply with the law”. This has become Russia or China where the sheep people do whatever an oligarchy dictate. Wasn’t it a democracy? Do the majority of people really want this?

In the end we get what we deserve for being just sheep that obey.

Some respect for correct spelling, please! Microslop devs, Microslop Teams, Microslop systems.

Yeah it does :( I always have to edit it manually before sharing…

I wish the Council posted also on the Fediverse. Maybe one can point them here.

Strange, in my post the link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ without tracker I think. You get the shorter youtu.be form?

I wish one could implement “mental-age verification”. That way almost all politicians on Earth would be blocked from important technologies.

Sadly “people” and “learn” don’t go together well…