Not just Linux, but embedded OS’s too. Also, the age verification requirement is a “reasonable attempt”, so maybe a prosecutor decides full face scan checks are the minimum “reasonable effort”. Will it hold up? Who knows, but can you afford to litigate it?
Note, there are not exceptions for headless installs, or OS’s without an account.
This was passed and signed last October. Why is this just hitting the news cycle?
No idea.
More liberal fascism? No surprise.
This is actually incredible.
- Buy all the RAM and video cards. RAM and video cards become too expensive for the average person to purchase.
- Push AI for everything until dependency develops.
- Sell remote access to computing power. (AI, Streaming video games, remote desktop, etc.)
- As the “Operating System Provider,” collect all of the personal information necessary to validate that each user is telling the truth about their age.
Result: Zero Individual Privacy- Everything you compute is processed by a computer owned by a big corporation with a backdoor built-in for your authoritarian government (which is owned by billionaires) to surveil.
Anyone who says there is no plan by large groups to control people is a fool. They aren’t some secret shadowy group that will vanish into thin air the moment some obese tinfoil hat wearing nutjob with a gun flashes a flashlight at them, but they’re so incredibly obvious that it is incredible many are still in denial about it.
Yes, the people at the top are incredibly stupid, but their plan isn’t something that needs genius level intellect to work. It just needs a fuckload of money and a compliant legislative branch, and they have both.
Republicans: Full of pedophiles and pedophiles protectors. Hated by every sane person with any kind of conscience.
Democrats: Not on my watch! I can be an asshole too!
Republicans: Full of pedophiles and pedophiles protectors.
Imagine believing this is just republicans. smh.
Pretty sure they’re 100% zionist though (with the possible exception of chomsky).
bOtH sIdEs
Read the legislation. It’s not just operating systems, its applications as well! All applications, there are no exceptions. Everything from GIMP to the EHR your Doctor uses to a custom Open Claude bot on Github. ALL of them.
Good thing this will be unenforceable for open source software, or at least things can be forked if they are maintained by bigger companies that need to comply.
i was going to say, this has MICROSOFT stink all over it, or at least palintir.
Gavin Newsom should drop out of politics and stick to shitposting about trump. He’s much better at that.
gavin newsom was never effective out of local elections, hes well known for that, HES EVEn worst than biden and kamala.
His intern is, at least.
Literally
standing on a San Francisco street corner, opening my trench coat revealing 40 USB sticks
Hey kid, wanna buy illegal Linux?
It doesn’t matter if you’re, say, Debian, because they’ll just put up some symbolic “not intended for use in state X” and then continue doing whatever they were doing, but if you’re Red Hat and actually selling something like Red Hat Enterprise Linux to companies in the state, stuff like this is actually a pain in the ass.
And to reiterate a previous comment, the Democrats have a trifecta in both California and Colorado, and the legislation here is something that they are squarely to blame for. I’d really rather that they knock this kind of horseshit off so that I can go back to being upset with the Republican Party.
It makes me wonder if RHEL will get (or at least lobby for) some kind of carveout, since their intended customers are corporations. It would be really impractical at vest to try to make some headless server try to verify its age.
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Good luck trying to strongarm foss. Forks and backups included. Also making all linux servers illegal. This will totally not be circumvented. Get lost with your law. Let the parents do the parenting instead of overreaching on mass surveillance and trying to end any form of online anonymity.
My Steam account is 21 years old and can now buy alcohol. Does that count?
They don’t care. They want your face, retina, fingerprints, DNA. All for their LLMs and so they can sell you something else.
Also to blackmail you later if they think they can or just feel like it… because they will put all that shit on an insecure server and some 13 year old hacker in Turkmenistan will leak it and make a killing (literally and figuratively) with it.
wrose yet blackmail you with their ai created child pron.
Or just use real CSAM from their own private collection and place it on your machine. Or even make a deepfake using your face pasted on theirs and those of your children or young relatives or random kids pasted onto the children. If you point out that this is a deepfake and you have the technical knowledge to prove it, they will use that as proof that you are actually trying to frame THEM.
FYI, I am not a lawyer.
Have you actually read the bill itself? Nowhere in it does it mention any of the things that you mentioned. It doesn’t even mention ID cards at all.
What it does say is operating system providers shall “Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device”. What we should look out for is that the law does not forbid OS providers from requiring IDs.
It does however require that OS providers “Send only the minimum amount of information necessary to comply with this title and shall not share the digital signal information with a third party for a purpose not required by this title.” (emphasis mine)
I wonder how much this is news outlets overreacting to a proposed bill that is not actually that bad, or if this is some marketing against the bill by some Corp.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043
No, it is bad.
Suppose it’s used to verify your age when visiting Pornhub. How is Pornhub going to trust the user’s computer didn’t lie about the user’s age? A “just trust me bro” sent by the browser isn’t going to suffice; teenagers would find a way around that.
Thr attestation will have to be cryptographically signed by some trusted party—and that’s either going to be the government, or the operating system vendor.
If it’s the government holding the signing keys: the website can now verify that you’re a resident of $state in $country and use that for fingerprinting and targeted advertising. And what if your country doesn’t participate, or if Pornhub doesn’t trust the signing keys used by the government of Estonia? Tough shit, no porn for you! It would be impractical to manage all those keys, though, so why not instead leave it up to the operating system vendor?
If it is left the operating system vendor, it’s going to end up being exactly the same as Google Play Service’s SafetyNet “feature”. If you’re not using an approved operating system (a.k.a. Windows, MacOS, stock Android, iOS) you’re not visiting Pornhub. Or a banking app. Or applying for jobs. Etc.
This bill is a poison pill for device ownership and FOSS operating systems being handed to corporations on a silver platter.
Totally a valid point.
Just to clarify I am not for this law. I do not think that this should have been passed. But also the law seems to have some good intentions and I don’t want to jump to conclusions after just reading headlines.
It feels like the law makers want to standardize and restrict how this age verification works without actually providing any guidance whatsoever on how to implement such a system.
I’m curious to see what systems companies come up with and what major flaws they will have (intentional or not) that data collectors will exploit.
I’ve only skimmed but:
provide an accessible interface at account setup
They don’t even define “account.” They have a definition of “account holder” that makes no sense.
Are all devices required to have user accounts? There was a time when home computers did not have such things.
That’s a really good point. It feels like they intended for that to be up to OS providers to determine. But really that was the lawmakers’ job to define. My assumption is that this law was rushed.
It does however require that OS providers “Send only the minimum amount of information necessary to comply with this title and shall not share the digital signal information with a third party for a purpose not required by this title.” (emphasis mine)
I wonder how much this is news outlets overreacting to a proposed bill that is not actually that bad
What do you mean, that’s horrible on its own. None of this information should be necessary to run a computer. The computer shouldn’t have to process this locally, let alone be mandated to upload it to someone’s server.
Age verification is identity collection.
Age verification is identity collection.
No shit. I don’t understand how anyone falls for this.
Also them using stuff like ‘online safety’ and ‘child safety’ in their legal titles needs to be used against them. Remember: Right-wing people NEVER use the words you want them to use, they always use their own. When copyright laws in the 90s were being reformed, many copyright/entertainment lawyers derided the laws by referring to them as the ‘Mickey Mouse copyright act’ because of Disney’s massive hand in how they were written and how they disproportionately benefited them.
Call it for what it is. Call it the survellience act, call it the child endangerment act, call it the transgender discrimination act. Don’t fucking fall for their ‘oh so you want anyone to groom children online’ talk through them, not to them. That is what they do to us anyway.
I fully agree. None of this should be required to operate a computer. We should focus on the parents that give their children free range of the internet without teaching them anything and the school ciriculum which is lacking in this department as well.
To me it feels like the lawmakers have some good intentions with this law, but it was rushed through so quickly that they forgot to ask themselves how this actually would be applied and who they are actually trying to protect.
Edit: oh. Also I just wanted to point out that outside of the title and abstract the law does not use the word verify/verification. It just says “indicate” which is way too vague.
So everyone’s windows OS will be registered to Mike Hunt born 1/1/1970. Gotcha
This actually speaks to one of the concerning things about this law. There is a section forbidding developers from collecting additional information (unless they have confident information that your age is incorrect). But there is no such clause for OS providers.
Developers shall not “Request more information from an operating system provider or a covered application store than the minimum amount of information necessary to comply with this title.”
Or
“Share the signal with a third party for a purpose not required by this title.”
This means that discord could not collect IDs or face scans without confidence that your age is incorrect. But windows can still require whatever they want.
But I guess silver lining is that neither of them can sell or even share the data with 3rd parties. Pretty minimal silver lining though.
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It saddens me that someone who is willing to stand so strongly against an oppressive law would work to discourage discussion about those laws on free social platforms.
I hope you can consider your words next time and we can enter into a good faith discussion over the merits and demerits of any law.
This will immediately get struck down in court even if it passes, though everyone should make their voices heard in saying this is complete nonsense.
Yet another case of antiquated politicians not understanding technology whatsoever.
This will immediately get struck down in court even if it passes
According to you?
No doubt the law is hopeful and leaves out many details in regards to how such a system could/would/might be implemented.
But I am not seeing anything in the law that would be unconstitutional. But I’m not a lawyer so what do I know.
Not a lawyer, but deeply involved in the law from the tech side for many years at various deeper levels from the engineering side and bridge to product and so forth.
It doesn’t need to be unconstitutional to be struck down as the constitution doesn’t cover all laws, especially not state and local laws. All you need to do is prove that the language or intent of the law is either:
- impossible to enforce (ex: software processes cannot be patented or controlled/patrolled)
- the language is too broad (ex: What is an OS exactly?)
- it violates a prexisting law or creates a verifiable conundrum (ex: this would violate California’s own data privacy laws)
- it creates an undue tax or burden on existing technology (ex: devices out in the wild can’t be retrofitted to comply, which sort of fits with #1)
- it DOES actually violate a constitutional right (ex: 4th amendment)
Being on my side of things, the legal team would most likely start a case with something like “So you say the OS needs to be locked with age verification. Does that mean every TV, router, public computer, tablet…blah blah blah”, so it’s very likely to get tossed on #1 quite easily because these folks have no idea what an OS actually is, and that every piece of technology you interact with on a daily basis has an OS. The lack of specificity alone would get this tossed in a heartbeat.
If that failed, they’d argue there is no way to police or enforce this law because sites who rely on this rule existing are putting themselves in legal jeopardy by simply allowing any traffic from California to access their services. What if someone from another state or country is in California and wants to watch porn in their hotel, or play a game with friends on Discord? Police have zero right to verify that any device entering California complies with the law, so the provider of the service would have to be on the hook to do the verification, which means they would just block any device from California that doesn’t meet whatever flag is sent to say it safe. THEN you have the infrastructure that is required to ensure those devices…blah blah blah.
It’s just a stupid idea by dumbass technically illiterate people. It won’t go anywhere.
As soon as these idiots figure out what an OS is, this is dead in the water because of the above.
I appreciate the insight. And you are right, that was my lack of understanding about how it could be struck down in court.
I do want to talk briefly on your point about these other devices where the law might actually apply since I have seen a few people bring up this point.
I the definition of an OS provider the law asserts that an OS is “computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.” (emphasis mine)
To me this clearly excludes those other types of devices because routers, tvs, etc are not general purpose.
As far as public computers I think that is a really good point and speaks to the vagueness of the law. There is no clear direction on how that works in such a common use case.
Coming from the engineering side as well and I’ve put more time, thought, and effort into project proposals than it feels like they put into this law.
Solid point on the “single purpose” nature of some devices, but that’s also the legalese going to work here in that “Depends what the meaning of IS, is” sort of way 🤣
Making laws with vague definitions will get challenged, as you point out.
the legal team
What legal team? The people with money are supporting this. They’ll continue to do what they like as always.
Even if this particular law doesn’t pass, they’ll continue to waste resources on more and more violent control. That’s how we got here.
Linux, Gimp, etc. aren’t going to assemble and afford a legal team AFAIK.
Appreciate your explanation!
You’re right. I had the same thought about the definition of “account”.
My first thought was maybe this will work for us. Can you imagine how many of these ancient fuckheads who vote for shit like this are going to die every day because they can’t figure out how to log in to their pacemakers and verify their age?
Lol, get rekt
