California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

Excellent. From now on all kids will become linux natives. The decade of the linux desktop is coming!

We got into this mess because people wanted Facebook to have age verification, and MZ decided to push the responsibility on to OSes.

The result looks to me like Facebook will ban access from non-approved OSes like Linux. Android will still be allowed, GrapheneOS probably not.

So is anyone going to revert the commits that jumped the gun on this?

E.g. systemd's birthdate field https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954

Hope you all are excited for the most important parts of the internet to be completely unusable by default on Linux in a few years.

So someone said something I think sarcastically that deserves a fresh comment.

"From now on all kids will become linux natives. The decade of the linux desktop is coming!"

I teach technology K-8. So I have a front row seat to observing how the next generation navigates this new digital wasteland. Due to the aggressive censorship and locked nature of their computing experience at school, think Go Guardian, they have become experts at using Google workspace to make art, comics, communicate with one another in class etc.

My point, the next generation really will become adept at using Linux IF the system is so locked down that it's all that's available. Humans adapt to their environment, no matter how harsh.

This is a silly idea since California's law was actually well-thought-out. This will actually force social media to ban Linux clients, since the social media can't be compliant in that case. The operating system won't provide an age signal and the social media isn't allowed to ask for one on its own.

I also want a permanent ban for anyone who calls the California law "age verification". It does not verify age. Period.

nobody is worried about about the arbitrarian aspects?

What if you are interested in developing your own OS (a task that would have been monumental but may become trivial with LLMs in the future)?

Why is the proper level the OS? Why not the browser or the hypervisor?

Or perhaps manufacturer should remember your age? What if hardware is resold? We would need a hardware cadastre! A global hardware cadastre would unite all jurisdictions in a power bloc eventually. It starts with daily computer/laptop, then domotics, then digital door locks, and before you know it the bloc-global hardware cadastre becomes authoritative, and the reference for property ownership.

Is there even a proper level?

this bill fixes nothing. if you wanted to prevent harm from the internet you would start with proper privacy laws. but we all know why that will never happen

This is a victory only in a very perverse sense. The silver lining is that maybe this will push more people towards using Linux (maybe Haiku will have its day). And Linux itself lives on. But what a disaster of a policy, clearly just catering to lobbyists and not the best interests of Californians.

Linux?

Or also BSD, ReactOS, hobby OS #24562 etc... ?

Aside from the fact that it is a stupid law, there should not be any sort of exemption.

I have not read the other proposed laws in this category but after reading the California law, I found it was so vague that my interpretation is that any operating system where the owner, well... actually owns the system is already in compliance. The law requires a mechanism where the OS can provide owner age data to applications. All operating systems where the owner is in control already provide a mechanism to supply data to apps, on most (mac, windows, unix, dos even) systems this is the file api, So to be in compliance with the law the owner can make a file that an application could access with the required info. No, there was nothing there about when an application needs this data, or even, like so many people assume, that it has to be out of the control of the owner.

The CA law was so vague and pointless, my only conclusion is that it is a sort of frog boiling scheme. Test the waters to see if they actually have jurisdiction.

Wow, you guys are really REALLY naive aren't you.

They made it sound like it, but this is not a victory at all, this is a temporary strategic compromise to silence the most sensitive/foreseen privacy advocator for now. But they will not stop here, instead they'll keep advancing the mechanisms, opinions and laws, so one day when the pieces aligned, they can come back to turn this tap off while having people lied to their side.

Forced age verification needs to be abolished completely and people who advocated for it punished to the point that their political career ends, this should be the baseline.

But of course, based on my understanding of everything, no, nobody will do anything effective against it. Everyone will just be "Yeah... they forced a component on my system that could act as spyware to monitor me, then have me pay for it without give me any control. But guess what, I will accept it because they said it's good for the future of mankind", like a peasant would. This is the tax you paid ended up for you, you know?

That's great and all, but what they should have done was just scrapped the age-verification stuff entirely. You can't really justify having that kind of restriction on Windows and MacOS but not on Linux.

My gut reaction to this is that there is something seriously wrong if special clauses are required. Why should open source get special treatment, to me that just highlights that the law is utterly ridiculous.

I remember the good ol' days when our parents told us what we could and could not use or buy. If Johnny's parents let them do something, Johnny's parents would get admonished for it and we just wouldn't see Johnny anymore.

I still think it is a better idea to ban children from the Internet altogether, but without enforcement. Then the parents can decide and if things go south, the parents are to blame and not whoever runs a website.

This is technically good news sure, but its just a matter of time just like everything.

"Everything already tracks you anyway, so what's one more thing?"

I haven't checked the status in a couple months but Colorado had a similar carve out for open source in their legislation.

Rest of the headline: "software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses are exempt"

And then further into the text it's clarified that there also isn't a specific list of open licenses, as the terrible headline would have you believe, but instead a description of what is considered open

With the caveat that I haven't read the actual legal text, this seems to be an eminently sensible law (it'd be better if it weren't needed, but here we are).

In summary: not a Linux exemption, and not an exemption for a specific list of licenses either.

So GrapheneOS is exempted–that's good they won't bother them, GrapheneOS wasn't gonna add it nayway.

How Linux is relevant to age-verification again? What was the question exactly?

Lawmakers unanimously are going to be sleeping when it gets dark at night.

> (2) “Operating system provider” does not mean a person or entity that distributes an operating system or application under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.

Where does MacOS and iOS fit then? The core of both those operating systems (darwin) is open source (APSL licensed).

what a whacked out thing to celebrate, this law is a disaster

i still think this should be solved at the protocol level. if you want to access the adult stuff, you have to staple a non-identifying zk-proof-of-age to your http/spdy/etc requests, otherwise it all just operates as usual.

Can someone the exemption for browser extensions and other contained software? My best guess is that the OS > Browser are reporting the age already, and the browser extensions will also use that "signal". Is this close enough?

" third carve-out excludes storefronts distributing extensions or add-ons that run exclusively inside a host application, which takes browser extension stores out of scope."

Illinois residents should consider forwarding this to their representatives.

IMHO a blacklist would have been better than a whitelist

All Android phones then too, right?

I'm confused. If I was a kid, I can still get my cigarettes at the Linux store? (By analogy with eastern Europe where age checks are lax.)

Or is the idea that the Linux store is not allowed to sell cigarettes anymore?

So Android is exempted since it's opens source?

What's to prevent Apple from making iOS and macOS free to "copy, redistribute, and modify"? The OS is free already, and the platform does cryptographic signature verification before allowing its installation. macOS already automatically finds local caching servers, which amounts to redistribution capability baked in.

They can just claim that the user is free to turn off SIP and "modify" the binary bits, or that kernel extensions amount to modification.

> In addition, lawmakers inserted a new provision prohibiting anyone from requesting an age signal from an OS provider or app store unless required by law. That closes off potential abuse of the age API that could have led to it being used as a general-purpose data collection channel even when age verification wasn’t required.

Honestly hate all this. This is just a "geeks shut up" law. Excluding things that are not part of commerce (FOSS) probably even gives it some protection from constitutional challenges.

And the quoted part above indicates that it is purely a government ID system - run the thought experiment where you were a conscientious person in 2005 deciding to start a social network, and this law had been passed in 2004. You wouldn't be allowed to use it to exclude children. And where will it be "required by law"? Since the pretense was to target social media and porn was just a bit of moral backwash, it will be required by law on arbitrary sites that allow any users to post.

Geeks will shut up because they love how specific it is. And even as GrapheneOS is being banned already from being able to use websites and services, they'll be shocked when their unattested FOSS machines aren't allowed on the network at all.

It passed unanimously because it means absolutely nothing, and politicians were getting shit from their rich loudmouth programmer constituents who will go back to spending time on their YIMBY activism.

Now if the guy that just created his own renderer for SwiftUI can port it to Linux instead of WASM we can have a Linux Mac replacement analog we just need someone to port the Metal GPU API over to Linux.

I wonder what is the reasoning for this.

Because Linux is not an OS.

I love that Microsoft is committing a crime by continuing to let me use Win10

Parents: “ok but why is instagram showing bouncing asses, drug use, dead bodies, political activism, and pharmaceutical ads to my 9 year old”

The 1%: “Let’s just monopolize operating systems. Everyone should have to either use ours or give us theirs!”

Parents: “ok but the ads the drugs the butts”

The 1%: “Huh? No you just pay.”

Parents: “oh pay to not see ads?”

The 1%: “Huh”

Does not matter? Can they just say that if a website cannot determine your platform is Windows or MaCOS you can not get access to any particular website? Sure, you can set up your laptop with Linux, but you can't surf the web.

I am wondering how much this could hobble GrapheneOS...

I find it hard to believe these people would just create a huge loophole for only smart kids to get through rather easily.

People celebrate too early.

A court at a later time may find that this situation is unfair to windows users who have to submit to age sniffing. So this will easily be overturned at a later time - age sniffing will never be given up by the lobbyists groups paid for by Meta and others (and the USA also wants that information).

Cool now let's exempt hobbyists from the 3-D printer must certify you are not printing gun parts pending legislation.

Now do it with all open source licenses, not just the most popular.

This seems like a hollow victory. "No signal" will quite soon become a vanishing minority of users, and websites will simply reject anybody that isn't providing the signal. These laws mostly just prime the pump to get the corpos over the activation energy of coordinating a conspiracy to make browsers start doing this on their own.

I'm not an attorney and haven't read these laws, but here is an interesting question: if Linux is exempt from legally needing to supply a user's age for verification, but websites require an age to be presented as a condition of access, can browser developers on Linux send a pre-programmed age for interoperability purposes and be legally in the clear? It seems legit to me.

Of course, since the whole point of these laws is to absolve Faceboot (the laws' sponsor) of liability, Faceboot (et al) will then move on to demanding remote attestation to make sure users are on proprietary operating systems that are legally required to send a faithful signal.

I do wonder if there is an angle here for pushing back against the ever-growing surveillance industry. What if instead of sidestepping the age requirement by choosing an "old enough" age, we chose "too young" ages instead. A signal saying "I am 12" and all the COPPA requirements start to apply, including to embedded ads. Probably easy enough for most sites to flat out reject access. But some sites can't / won't - think government sites that currently embed corpo-surveillance crap like recaptcha etc, or sites that serve neutral content and don't care themselves but use cloudflare. Or perhaps browser extensions could even mix and match which signals they send where - "over 13/18" to the main site, "under 13" to the subresources, etc? I suppose by the time you've gotten there you might as well just be running best-in-class adblock extensions that work based on lists of hostile sites. But I think there might still be a core of an interesting aspect to a well-known way of telling websites that you're under 13.

Hey so uh... Did anyone notice the word "accessible" here?

> Provide an ACCESSIBLE interface, at account setup,..

I wonder if the biggest effect of this bill will be that proprietary operating systems will have to have accessibility features built-in, and will be subject to ADA compliance lawsuits if it's deficient in some way.

Now do FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD... =p

This law is still worthless. A burden on those who follow it, an excuse to attack those who don't, and completely ineffective at best. You think every child doesn't quickly learn to click "I'm over 18"? I've been doing that since I was 13.

"Protect the children" is the most common refrain of fascists across the political spectrum. It's used, uncritically, to attack your rights, to take away your power, with a fragile appeal to morality. Just like the war on terror. And the war on drugs. And the war on poverty. Funny how all of these efforts have failed while increasing government interference in our lives. We never get the rights back, and we don't improve the situations on any of the above.

A reminder that the fear mongering around children is just that. It is the safest time for children in history: https://www.chadaldeman.com/p/the-world-is-safer-than-ever-s... https://www.unh.edu/ccrc/trends-child-victimization

[dead]

[dead]

[flagged]

[flagged]