Comment by SeanDav
12 hours ago
Except compulsory age verification in Linux is now becoming a real threat. Some Linux distros are actively against this but many are not seemingly interested in fighting it: CachyOS, Ubuntu, Fedora and others.
Age Verification is the thin end of a much bigger wedge in "open" OS's
I thought community projects (as opposed to the corporate Fedora and Ubuntu) are exempt from such laws.
Yes time to wake up.
I really believe most "open source" big projects have been compromised long ago. We have saw all those "Foundations" taking them over with all their governance, bureaucracy and goal which do not make any sense at the first look.
One example is Fedora, which is part of "The Digital Public Goods Alliance" [0], "a multi-stakeholder initiative that accelerates the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals by facilitating the discovery, development, use of, and investment in digital public goods."
The Digital Public Goods Alliance has about every governments as member plus all the usual suspects: Gate Foundation and co.
All the leaderships have usually no background or experience in open source or even computers but are just magically placed there. But you can't say anything because they are mostly women.
You read the goals and roadmaps of those foundations and find out it has nothing to do with software or open source. It is basically there to control those projects and then have them implement all the age verification, digital id, etc.
So yes this is not a surprise all those projects are now all in absurd features such as age verification.
- [0] https://www.digitalpublicgoods.net/
the current law requires no verification at all simple attestation, you could put in _any_ age. it also does not effect linux distros as a whole, only distros in jurisdictions with the laws.
Sure, for now... I simply don't believe it will stop at "simple attestation", because we all know that simple attestation is practically useless, but once the various distros accept this "trivial" inconvenience, "Age verification 2" with harsher requirements will soon be on the way.
I would be ecstatic to be proved wrong on this, but experience tells me that is not likely to happen.
We all know it's not about age, it's about user identity. As above, it's clearly a wedge so it's not rhetorical to observe more invasive and controlling features are coming.
Simple attestation is very useful for the case where a parent gives a child access to a computer and wants that computer to block porn. That's the use case everyone is clamoring for, and asking the root user "how old is this user?" solves it in a simple, open, privacy-preserving way. Everybody wins, except the teenager who wants to watch porn. If this were not legally mandated, everyone would support it as a useful feature, but since it is legally mandated, we have to get angry about it.
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