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

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Pay08 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I thought community projects (as opposed to the corporate Fedora and Ubuntu) are exempt from such laws.

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sunshine-o 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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/

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akimbostrawman 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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SeanDav 8 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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imglorp 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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pocksuppet 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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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SeanDav 3 hours ago | parent [-]

This has got very little to do with children - that is just the excuse that sounds good. "Think of the children" is a rhetorical tactic that anyone who wants to get unfettered access to your data rolls out whenever they can. It is a tactic that unreasonable people use to influence reasonable people, because it is so difficult for a reasonable person to argue against without coming across as uncaring and/or bigoted.

	▲	pocksuppet 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		If it was an excuse to get your data there would be some data-getting involved. It may be hard for you to believe, but lots of people really do want parental controls that actually work and are bound by the force of law.