With the same logical fallacies. Pretty telling about how transnational lobbies and their interests work.

Controlling what children do online is a solved problem: Parenting and parental control applications.

Let's say I am a generic linux developer who develops variants of Debian Linux while sitting in my basement in any part of the world.

If one country wants to ban my software because I don't ask for their age, then set up suitable protections for your citizens.

Don't force me to do that. I am not responsible for protecting your citizens.

That is like saying if Saudi wants your id to make sure only males can download operating systems, so now will I add another restriction.

At least China takes it upon themselves to ban sites that they deem harmful for their citizens rather than forcing devs.

It’s a way of socializing the losses, this time you lose civil liberties and they get to keep acting unrestricted

https://tboteproject.com/

Amazing. We the people are not engaged. It really feels like we're at the end of history or something.

> Ageless Linux is a registered operating system under the definitions established by the California Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043, Chapter 675, Statutes of 2025). We are in full, knowing, and intentional noncompliance with the age verification requirements of Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.501(a).

For compliance the os has to provide an age category to an application and an interface for the user to enter this data. We already have an api to provide information to applications. it's called the filesystem. and an interface to enter the data, that's called the shell. so everything is already there. If the user lives in california and wants to be compliant (wait a minute, let me stop laughing) all they have to do is put a file somewhere with a age category in it. if the application can't find it. well it's not their fault the law is stupid.

How is it so bad that we need some civil disobedience movement over it? On the contrary to, UK's Online Safety Act and China asking all online platforms to verify your phone number?

So it’s a nice statement but ultimately hollow because the devs aren’t at any real risk of being arrested or fined. This isn’t like Rosa Parks refusing to move to the back of the bus.

Want to make a real statement about software freedom? You gotta do something that makes the normies mad, like making an OS that explicitly helps kids do sports betting, buy drugs, watch porn, and whatever else. Then people will notice, but unfortunately you probably won’t convince them that this law is bad.

Unless Microsoft, Apple, or Google refuses to comply then I think this law is where commercial OSes are headed. But Linux doesn’t really need to worry, because nobody is going to arrest a nerd waving his arms saying, “look at me everybody, I’m breaking the law!”

History of computing and open source is full of clever subversiveness. If back in the past hackers had the same attitude crying about complying otherwise fines we would have nothing today.

There would be great rejoicing.

This is a good lesson. What is legal is orthogonal to what is moral and/or good for you.

Our distribution has no centralized legal entity in any country, and our decentralized trust model requires signatures from multiple maintainers from multiple legal jurisdictions to sign code and reproducible builds to make changes so quite literally no single person has the power to change stagex alone.

I would genuinely be fascinated to see anyone attempt to make us do anything we don't want to do. I do hope California attempts to make me. I would make it my personal mission to drag them in court and make a spectacle of proving that I literally am unable to comply due to the design of the operating system.

Legality is what is permitted or prohibited by the law. In contrast, legitimacy is based on a moral principle. And thus, it is not universal and depends on the culture and tradition of a specific region.

When concerning law, in my opinion, one does not need to ask, is it legal? Which now clearly, in California, will be legal to impose restrictions on the OS level to access content on the internet. At start it is about age. But this builds a base which can be extended on.

One needs to ask, is it legitimate? Is it legitimate to impose restrictions on computer and internet usage based on who you are?

Another question to be asked is if in democracy all laws are legitimate, as they emanate from the congress which belongs to the nation. It's clear that in non-democratic regimes legality will never be equal to legitimacy.

This email is encoded with ROT-26 encoding. Decoding it is in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS

[1] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penguin_Liberation_Front

If the California law flops, the result isn't going to be no age verification. It's going to be increasing numbers of internet services requiring that you verify their identity with them through some shady third-party you have no control over, until you effectively can't use the internet without giving away your ID.

I'd prefer to have no age verification, but it's pretty clear that's not an option. People in power are using minors accessing porn and social media as a cover to push age verification, and it's believable enough that people are going along with it. Approaches where someone attests their age on an OS or account level are our best shot at disarming this push.

Every kid knows they have to click that button to see the porn. It's not about keeping anyone out, it's about legal liability (i.e. making it easy for companies to blame you).

We've seen tonnes on HN recently

2. Are the pile of assertions they're making (which sound like legal arguments and stipulations to me) against Debian's interests?

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...

This is the same pattern we keep seeing everywhere in society (and it links together with the pattern of enshittification): set the compliance floor at exactly the level that Apple, Google, and Microsoft already meet, make the definitions broad enough that everyone else technically falls under them, and let the liability created by that do the rest. You don't need to ban hobby distros. You just need to make maintaining one a legal risk egregious enough that no volunteer is willing to or even can afford to take it on.

76-0 in the Assembly. Ask yourself when the last time was that 76 California legislators unanimously agreed on anything that didn't have a well-funded lobby behind it.

Seriously, we in the tech industry can help stop this 1984 stuff.

1) develop good systems for completely anonymous age verification.

2) now, potentially, use this in the places you think need age verification.

Why are people accepting 2 before 1?

Y'all are so pavlovian that you see Zuck/Meta and instantly rage.

The alternative to OS based verification isn't no verification. It's cloud-based verification

The cloud verifiers have all the interest in the world to making you hate the idea that this problem could be solved at the OS level without any third party involvement

[0] I have no credit card and it won't accept debit cards. It also won't use the fact that I've had an Apple account and spent 10s of thousands in my own name at their damn shops, online and real life, over the last 2 decades (and Apple/partners have done at least one credit check on me in that period!) But that's fine, there's an alternative! A driving licence (don't have one of those either) or a national ID (also don't have one of those.) Can I use my passport? NOPE. Absolute farce.

That said, the failure is shared evenly with the tech industry's refusal to work with governments to implement viable solutions.

Legislators favor their corporate benefactors, the tech industry favors its ideologies and freedom of developers and engineers. But who looks out for the regular individual? Who is making sure their interest is enforced first and foremost?

Consider these facts (and correct me if they're wrong):

1) it is possible to issue hardware to the public that verifies to computers and internet services alike the age of the bearer without disclosing anything else about the bearer.

2) Age verification laws for other things like drinking, smoking, and gambling all primarily require the seller to authenticate that the person has authentic identification, and their age is lawful for the activity.

3) The secure method of authenticating users requires MFA, a FIDO2 compliant device like a Yubikey is the most secure means of the 2nd factor of authentication. It requires knowing a secret, and physically touching the device.

Knowing all this, it is possible to issue the public devices that receive a challenge from a government operated server, require the user to tap on the device, and then enter a pin to respond with a signed version of the challenge, to verify they possess the device. The device could be sold or given to the public without any registration, the only thing required would be showing and verifying your valid ID at the point of sale (from a government office ideally).

This is just one solution, but the burden could be passed onto the government, and the tech industry to implement solutions that work with that.

If we had that, I wouldn't agree with it, but I would also not have a problem with requiring insertion of an age verification device to start installing Linux -- of course the installer wouldn't know it's in California, it would rely on the people installing it to tell them it is. And when selling devices in california, by default they could require inserting this device to proceed, but I see nothing preventing users from installing their own custom OS lawfully if they too the device elsewhere, and how can the device tell it is at "elsewhere", even if it has a GPS there is no law requiring GPS to be turned on for that purpose.

---

The key thing you should all consider is that this is the will of the people to the most part. Most people agree that access to tech should be age restricted, although to what degree is a different story. This isn't the 90s, using an OS is not a novel or special thing you do, it is similar to driving a car except we depend on these devices more than cars!! Things the public depends on, things a country depends on, will always require regulation of some sort.

Forget about what it was like for you in your nostalgic days of experimenting with Linux or whatever. These are not those days. this is happening. if you can stop age verification laws, please go ahead, you have my full support. But I don't see that happening. We will get shitty situations where third party companies bribing politicians collect our physical ID scans, and we'll be forced to not only disclose our identity to everyone and their mother on the internet, we'll be forced to let these 3rd parties and the government track every site we visit at this rate.

Corrupt lawmakers are one half of the problem, technologists refusing to adapt and make best of the situation and propose privacy preserving solutions is the other half. I'm glad so many are willing to go all-or-nothing and die on their hills, but there is no reason they have to drag everyone else with them.

We get it, you’re against the government and big tech

How about "age-agnostic Linux"? Just work?