Yes.

Probably because you can just modify the OS to say you’re old enough. With a closed source OS you can’t.

In reality it just means you can’t use the OS as age verification, and will have to use other means if you’re into that. Personally I just slap on a VPN and go somewhere that hasn’t succumbed to this idiocy…

I’d imagine most kids using Linux are either being actively taught computers by a parent who’s paying close attention, or so smart that nobody is stopping them from doing anything.

The logic is none of these distros would do shit to comply with this, and enforcement is almost impossible. This is just saving face.

I don’t know what the Cali gov was thinking

But it makes sense to me, based on the commercial incentive. It’s not that FreeBSD doesn’t form the basis of products that will need to comply with the law (whatever Apple calls their desktop OS for instance), but FreeBSD itself is only for the leet.

No, you don’t have to be a genius to use it, but you do need to be very weird, in that you want to use your own actual brain to solve problems, and you want to fully understand what the thing is doing, from bootup to shutdown. If that’s you, you’re a very odd person, according to many.

I think it’s actually a common sense exemption comparable to things like the FMLA having a carve out for small persons with a small number of people. FOSS operating systems bring a lot of value to businesses, higher education and presumably California’s government, but the many devs who make contributions that create this value on a volunteer basis could feasibly determine that they will either simply refuse to comply with it and pull these OSes from California, or that even if they did want to comply, they have an argument that compliance is simply an insurmountable burden for them to develop and maintain, in addition to maintaining the other features that actually provide the majority of the value.

On top of these, as others have pointed out, it’s a trivial for a sufficiently capable user to modify an open source program to circumvent this. Furthermore, there are a ton of FOSS OSes where development is not based in California, and it would be a ridiculous waste of time and money trying to enforce the law on them. I kind of doubt Canada is going to extradite the OpenBSD devs (or at least the folks your donations to the project go to) to face trial in the US on this, for example.

In a way, it’s an unusually aware law that lets legislators avoid the egg on their face of passing a toothless law when it comes to FOSS OSes, while still letting them please the “Think of the children!” crowd and squeeze more data and money (in fines) from Microsoft, Google and Apple, who will be subject to the law.

The overall goal of the law is still terrible, but the way they went about making this exception shows a rare understanding of technology for legislators, even if it was due to public backlash and relevant technical input, rather than the legislators suddenly understanding the tech they want to control themselves.

First off, we’re talking about operating systems and not websites.

Second, if it’s open source, the users can just edit out the age verification, no matter how it’s implemented. And if it’s open source, you simply can’t prevent that behavior.

In theory, the closed source systems make that more complicated, to the point where we can “rely” on those safeguards.

There’s a logic here, even if I totally disagree with the premise of the OS needing anything to do with the user’s age. Parents need to parent and we’ve had solid enough parental controls for a long time now that make this type of monitoring and control easy.

But really, nothing should be doing strong identity verification outside of stuff like government (e.g. passports), or anything that commonly exploits identity for crime (e.g. major financial operations).

FYI the article title (and the name of the law) are both misleading. The law does not require age verification, only age attestation.

Does that make the law even dumber? Probably, lol.

But if lawmakers didnt constantly push out completely ineffective laws that cause problems, then what else would they do with their time? Effectively govern? Fucking nonsense.

Good, one more reason to slowly push people out of Microsoft’s clutches.

To be fair our situation is unprecedented. Children with access to social media (for some reason) interacting endlessly with AI slop.

Research indicates we’ve already wiped out 30 years of literacy progress.

We need more people writing laws who possess real domain knowledge. My students these days die whenever I play them “series of tubes.”

I think you are confusing something. A tech company running proprietary code can and will ask for age verification. It does not matter if the user runs Windows, Linux, iOS, GrapheneOS.

The law here makes sure that services, which are basically also open source, are not required to do the age verification check.

So, you install Windows? Age check. You install Linux? No age check. Before even opening a browser. Then on Linux you open Netflix? Age check.

So I fundamentally saw this actually as a good news.

The law requires the OS to ask the age and provide it to applications, not verify the age. Linux can provide the same API with a static value or “no age” signal if needed.

So the banks lose customers or do people capitulate?

Sexual slavery, chattel slavery, blood sports.

None of these is that far off.

Big tech read cyberpunk dystopias and thought they were instruction manuals.

It can definitely get worse.

Cause they don’t want to have to force corpos to get age verification on the ludicrous number of IoT devices that run Linux, but cover their ass in making it not seem that way.

Oh sorry. I mean… cause they’re, like, open-source and how could you even enforce that?

They’re not going to enforce it anyway.

Obviously our lawmakers are communist and this is a ploy to undermine the very capable and responsible software maker called Microsoft /s

Why would they?

Can you explain in detail, what exactly that change did?

My guess is they figure it will make little difference due to network effects, and by making this exception they can remove a meaningful source of political resistance to the change. If the vast majority of users are running operating systems that declare underage status, then websites and apps will be able to use those signals to sidestep legal liability for actually doing anything meaningful to protect underage users, and new laws can be passed that assume the use of those signals is possible. That it isn’t 100% doesn’t change that very much.

That’s far too many laws to be fair. So totally normal unfortunately. A true (Situation Normal. All Fucked Up)

Yes, but they’ll rule that using free open-source software is terrorism.

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