Software changes for compliance with age-verification laws are being pushed a bit everywhere in Linux-development; for example:

It’s interesting that it’s the same small group of people behind these pull requests, and that discussion threads in them have been locked owing to a great amount of negative criticisms.

They say “we have to comply with the law”. Which also means that if “the law” in the future will require proper verification, handling to 3rd-parties, or whatnot, then they will comply.

Well, it’s their right to. They don’t owe anything to anyone, and are under no obligation to report to users or to the community, nor to pay heed to anybody’s wishes.

If things proceed in this direction, we users may at some point have to choose between privacy-friendly Linux distributions or legal Linux distributions. People who, like me, are worried, need to start thinking about concrete actions to take before it’s too late: where to develop such distros? which channels to download and distribute them from? And so on. (And of course, more generally we need to write and protest to politicians, organize protest marches, go on strike, refuse to comply…)

It’s good to remind to those who keep on repeating the words “legal” and “illegal” that for example Nelson Mandela was, technically speaking, a criminal who did and promoted illegal activity. This happens when laws become immoral.

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
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    21 days ago

    Already a thing. We can choose between Ubuntu, who restrict your freedom and privacy in the Snap store, and have experimented with weird things like forward your desktop search to the internet or integrate Amazon into your desktop. Or you can pick a different distro. Some have telemetry, some ask you for your permission and even patch user software so it doesn’t send telemetry per default. Some were kinda illegal and distributed libcss2.

    • cbazero@programming.dev
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      21 days ago

      Your digital ID which needs to be linked with your user account. “Age verification” is the setup for this.

  • mrbigmouth502@piefed.zipEnglish
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    21 days ago

    Don’t comply in advance, that’s what I say. Unfortunately, that’s what systemd is doing, and what archinstall, xdg-desktop-portal, and Freedesktop.org are on the verge of doing.

    For the vast majority of people who don’t live in California, including myself, California law can go fly a kite.

    • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
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      21 days ago

      Doesn’t the law expect “Operating Systems” to do this? I feel like everyone should point fingers and lean on bureaucracy. Systemd should say “well don’t look at us, we’re not an operating system, we’re just an init and services system”, and Linux says “well we’re just a kernel, usermode does whatever it wants”, and Debian says “well we’re just a distro, we didn’t write any of the packages we just stick them together.”

      If the tech illiterate idiots who wrote the poorly thought out law can’t figure out who to ask, maybe they’ll do their due diligence next time.

  • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
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    21 days ago

    It’s all one fucking guy! WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS BOOTLICKER DOING?!

    Dylan M. Taylor
    dylanmtaylor

    this fucker

    • Eldritch@piefed.worldEnglish
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      21 days ago

      I can synpathize with the devs as they are simply taking the minimal steps they can. To avoid being targeted by these failing states. But yeah, what’s this guys story. Someone suddenly contributing so narrowly to such a broad slate of projects isn’t common.

  • Adubya@feddit.onlineEnglish
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    21 days ago

    Praying for us ‘I use Arch BTW’ people to have our day in the sun. Don’t fail us!