Saw a comment on an article about this specifically.

"All the "age verification" bill are unconstitutional 1st Amendment violations and can be struck down in court.

Code is expressive conduct under Bernstein v. DOJ and Junger v. Daley.

Compelled creation of expressive content is still compelled speech (Wooley, Hurley, Janus).

Age verification mandates require developers to author, maintain, and deploy expressive logic they would not otherwise create.

The state cannot force a private actor to speak, design, or encode a message or system that expresses the state’s preferred policy. "

So it seems, if this is sound, that an open-sourced software, being from a private entity, cannot be compelled to implement something like this without infringing on free speech. Maybe they go after the first amendment, but that's an entirely other legal struggle than this looked initially and would be significantly harder to do.

Remember, today’s compromise is tomorrow’s loophole.

Yes, I definitely worry about that as well, or they are going to try and plant someone to make the changes and push them like the fool with the age stuff in systemd.

The voluntary overcompliance weirdos.

Yeah, even if they exempt it, commercial platforms may push for using a machine that can verify age, reducing Linux machines to hobbyist only activities.

They would've just made it the default for everyone. This is borderline accelerationism; it's better to not burn down the house. They weren't going to learn shit, it would've just spread and gotten worse from there.

Think of all the great stuff that's banned and restricted right now. Do you see people learning lessons?

Yep, how is it even supposed to work with OSS? Can't use those websites?

I still think it should be the other way around. It should be a setting on the device/OS that an adult could tik and lock with a password or something that would mark the user or the device as a minor.

It would be an easy thing for a parent to do and to everyone implement, and I doubt anyone would get angry over that.

afaik it's straight up the opposite for the california law. I didn't read it myself, but from what I read online about it, they require a boolean "adult/minor" and forbid any other data collection related to age

This. This is everything. Youth, adults, elders, everybody. Computers are everywhere and dammit people need to understand at least the basics of the machines that run the entire 21st century.

Dropping computer literacy classes in schools because "BiG tEcH rEpS toLD uS diSpOsAbLe tOuChScReEnS aNd ChRoMe aRe TeH fUtUrE" was such a freaking trap.

We're experiencing a "Whole Language Reading" fiasco of technology education right now, and we need to correct it for everyday people. Linux proliferation to the people can absolutely be that gateway.

Otherwise, we end up with the same stupid class gaps Big-Capital always ends up creating: The hyper-specialized technical-managerial class, and the ignorant, helpless, paying consumer.

When people are educated they can grasp the extent of their freedoms, and they're more willing to fight for their rights.

(And yeah yeah, inb4 doomers be like "We're already there, we're cooked bro, we're done, game over man , we're dogmeat pal!" Heard it all.)

To paraphrase Nick Fury: "Until such a time as the world ends we will act as if it intends to spin on."

short of individually policing the software installed on every individual personal system or instituting new hardware requirements and making the use of non-compliant hardware criminal?

Quit giving them ideas!

It absolutely is the win we think it is. These are separate from mandating open source to include age verification.

Assuming PCs don't get wiped out as a platform first, which between AluminumOS being a thing and parts being made intentionally scarce and expensive, I wouldn't be shocked if that happens.

Can't control what people do with their PCs? Just kill PCs as a platform in favor of thin clients tied to cloud subscriptions that you can control or glorified Android phones.

3. With AI becoming stronger and stronger, it's just a matter of time before the part of the internet without OS-level attestation tied to government issued IDs is going to become completely unusable. At some not too distant point anyone with a Claude/ChatGPT/etc subscription will be able to instruct it with things like "Invent 20 different personalities and create accounts on different Lemmy instances for them. Write neutral comments for them for a few weeks, then gradually begin to subtlety promote X. Use your psychology skills etc. to manipulate other users to support X and coordinate the accounts to shut down anyone criticizing X. Always post in character and never reveal that you are an AI." Then multiply that by a million people trying to push their ideas, products, politics, conspiracy theories, etc.

Some euro countries are doing the same shit amigo.

Systemd's change is inconsequential. If you really care then you should also fight to remove full name and address from user db.

Also there are still other jurisdictions that have these sorts of laws.

Well if they don't someone else will

Hopefully it pushes people to adopt open source operating systems, which would now have another big advantage

Darwin (macOS core system) is open-source. So this is actually possible.