281–290 of 408 posts
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 th…
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Yes also BSD and friends. From TFA > These amendments redefine the term “operating system provider” to exclude any person or entity that distributes an OS or application “under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.” Any software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses satisfies that test, which removes the likes of Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and the…
It's kind of weird though. Is VxWorks (a proprietary embedded OS used on some of the Martian rovers) going to require it in case some underage Martians try to use Facebook?
The fact that these bureaucrats think they have a right to add age-verification to information is ludicrous in the first place. This should be as much non-news as 'Lawmakers unanimously decide death is legal'.
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I believe the comment was in reference to the frequency of school shootings in the United States vs the rest of the world.
457 deaths in US history. 1200 deaths a day from diarrhea in India. Put it in perspective.
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But if Ubuntu bundles an Nvidia graphics driver that is not open source does that disqualify it? It's normal for there to be a mix of both open and closed source code in an os.
A better example is: I install Debian and later, somehow, the Google Play Store. Maybe that’s the only way to get some driver. Who is responsible for asking my age: Debian or Google?
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?
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457 deaths in US history. 1200 deaths a day from diarrhea in India. Put it in perspective.
A larger number of people dying from an unrelated cause in another country doesn’t make these deaths insignificant. By that logic, virtually no problem deserves attention because you can always find something that kills more people.
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.
It's an operating system, and they are making it mandatory for operating systems to collect user's age, it's mentioned in the article.
(had to rewrite my slightly angry comment earlier, this was basically my point.)
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
That commit message mentions laws from California, Colorado, and Brazil. Today’s article is only about how the Californian law is inapplicable. It seems to me that the feature is still valid.
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.