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For a project attempting to track these and coordinate technical resistance, see: https://github.com/AntiSurv/oss-anti-surveillance These bills also need to be opposed on a legal/political level. Something I realized last night is that people who lie about their age to send false signals may inadvertently open themselves up to CFAA liability (a felony ). So this is a serious matter for users who want to maintain anon…
Did that link just get taken down?
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Though the EU is at large keeping it's composure with this. My only criticism towards the EU as an EU citizen is how slow and bureaucratic the EU is and that decisions that should be made on the fly are dragged on forever. That said, government agencies have been doing a terrible job at keeping the private information of citizens safe. But it is nowhere nearly as bad as the US. My best childhood friend died in very q…
Death certificates are public records (at least in the UK) so why shouldn't you be able to get one? I think the alternative, where people's deaths could be kept secret by the state is a far greater risk than the privacy rights of the dead (GDPR type laws generally apply to the living). I don't know about elsewhere but in the UK anyone can apply for any death certificate going back to 1837.
The same sort of thing is happening for the 3d printer laws. Some company is trying to legislate its own software into ubiquity (guns first, then copyright enforcement) and then double-dip by charging both IP holders and printer manufacturers for their "services".
This was the thing the saws-all (or whatever it was called, the brake that stops you from cutting your fingers off with the table saw) tried, right? I don't know if it succeeded but the idea was a government mandate for an otherwise good idea. Everyone then pays more.
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If you look at the people pushing these bills it's the anti-trans and anti-porn activists. Not the left.
This issue looks partisan from the outset, but both sides push the same thing. They just use partisan justifications.
Age verification is merely the background task to set up infrastructure for OS to provide many many other signals about who's using the device. Age signals from the OS? Need to provide a channel of information available to applications. Applications already talk to servers with unchecked commonality. Biometric data? Today it unlocks your private key. Tomorrow it's used to verify you are the same person that was used…
O great more big money warping our lives for the worse. I’d write my senator but they won’t do shit. Is there anything that can seriously be done?
That is the most serious thing you can do, and the most effective. Do you know how democracy works? There are these people called representatives. They are hired by you . They pass laws. They only get to continue having a job if people like you vote for them. When you tell them "I don't like the law you are passing", they are hearing "the people who hire me are angry with me". The more people that are angry at what t…
What I'm confused about is how the proposed bills would apply to servers. Like, in general, a software change to add an "age class" attribute to user accounts and a syscall "what's this attribute for the current user account" would satisfy the California bill and that's a relatively minor change (the bad part is the NY bill that allegedly requires technical verification of whatever the user claimed). The weird issue…
Every single Linux kernel currently operating within the borders of any of these states should turn itself off and refuse to boot until an update is installed after these bills are rolled back. We should also update all FOSS license terms to explicitly exclude Meta or any affilites from using any software licensed under them.
Honestly, like the Left-pad incident [1], getting things to go suddenly dark is extremely effective at getting people to drop everything else to fix an issue. Ideally, getting these servers to auto turn off the day this goes into effect ("In compliance with this new law, Linux is now temporarily unusable. Please .") would be glorious for getting the bill staved off, or killed. It would hurt some productivity, but tha…
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I probably don't have all the info on the various laws across the US and EU that are being pushed, but I'm confused why Linux distros don't just update their licensing and add a notice on the installation screen that it is illegal to run their OS in places where these laws exist? Heck, Linus Torvalds should just add an amendment to the next release of the Linux Kernel that makes it illegal to use in any jurisdiction…
Because they want market share, and throwing a hissyfit over being asked to add an "I am over 18" checkbox is not good PR. If Debian starts refusing to work in California because it doesn't want to add a checkbox, it will simply be replaced by someone who adds that checkbox and doesn't throw the fit.
"Every OS provider must then: provide an interface at account setup collecting a birth date or age, and expose a real-time API that broadcasts the user's age bracket (under 13, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, 18+) to any application running on the system."