Age verification is just paving way for things a lot worse: globally unique identification.

They ( politicians ) will weaponize the inefficiencies in this implementation to push for an online verification later on.

And of course Peter Thiel will be somewhere in the middle

It’s not about age. It’s about uniquely identifying everyone who uses a computer.

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.

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.

By definition of this new law, is Linux an OS? It is technically just the kernel. At what layer of the software stack does the responsibility of age verification lie at?

Akahually at my work we used a third party authentication PAM module that uses the gecos field for username mapping.

export AGE=OLDENOUGH

"Must be outside of California, Colorado, and Brazil to download or use this install ISO"

Pass.

Its my computer, I own it, gtfo and let me use it how ever I want.

Using linux is not proof enough?

We don't comply, is what we do. We ignore stupid fuckin' laws made by idiots who clearly have no idea what consultation is. It's time open source tech starts to diversify where it keeps its HQ and base of operations.

Or maybe we shouldn't do age verification

I wonder about all the little IoT things we have that run Linux but have no interface other than a button or 2. My garage door opener, a picture frame, my lawnmower, my vacuum, my switches, my modem, my cameras....

The best part is that this can be POSIX compliant too!

Just set up an audio based check, prompting the user to make dial up modem connection sounds into the microphone. If you do it well enough, you're good and old.

#/etc/nixos/modules/age-verify.nix

{ config, lib, pkgs, ... }:

{

services.age-verification = {

enable = true;

age = 18;

};

}

My age is a literal comma

Or you can just refuse to operate there, if enough developers do that It'll force them scrap it.