If you can feel a very small tinge of existential horror when you read the words “try to”, congratulations, you’re a true *nix devotee.

If legislators get grumpy about this, just gently thwap them with your handy copy of The Unix Haters Handbook and tell them you’re working as hard as you can under the circumstances.

  • brokenwing@discuss.tchncs.de
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    20 days ago

    I recently read an article from the creaters of PopOS. In that they raise a vaild point. If a child installs a virtualization software (say with the concent of an adult for educational purposes), then they can but browse internet through the VM, with them being the root user, pretending to be adults. It defeats the whole purpose of such verification methods. So their plan would to stick with ID based ones.

    I think this was never about age verification, but to uniquely fingerprint every person using internet and to keep accountability.

    Lets face it, the internet you knew is dead.

    • CosmicTurtle0 [he/him]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      20 days ago

      These laws are not written by the technically literate. They are written by attorneys based on the whims of old legislators who think that Siri is a real woman that they are talking to.

      While the people who write the laws are competent, the legislators are not.

      At the state level, it’s even worse because they are often given legislation carefully written by lobbyists and special interest groups.

      If you have any inkling to run for office, please consider doing so because we need smarter people in every branch of government.

    • DreamButt@lemmy.world
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      20 days ago

      I’ll just do what I’m always done since I was 10

      “How old are you?”

      “115 years young of course”

  • DaddleDew@lemmy.world
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    20 days ago

    The problem with that whole situation is the way the law is written the developer is the one held responsible if a child circumvents the check to access adult content. Therefore, developers will have to pay hefty fines unless they:

    -1: Have a way to positively make sure the person enters their age is telling the truth; and

    -2: Lock this value from being changed by the user afterwards.

    Or: Region lock the OS.

    One can see how incredibly problematic this is for both privacy and true ownership and control over your own machine. There is also a lot that needs to be figured out in the law such as what will happen when someone inevitably finds a way to hack the system to circumvent it, especially the region lock. Ultimately, big tech has deep pockets and can shrug off the fines but small nonprofit open source projects will be killed by them.

    This law is specifically designed to kill nonprofit-run and private software like Linux.

    • Yardy Sardley@lemmy.ca
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      20 days ago

      All of this seems impossible to enforce in the FOSS ecosystem. People can just fork the software and remove any restriction they don’t like. That’s kind of the whole point of free software. Users are free to use their devices however they like, including in ways that are not intended by the devloper.