At the very least, if this passes, the resulting court challenge will provide precedent that shuts it down in all 50 states at once.

The downside will be riding out the intervening months before the court decision comes through. Stock up on ISOs and full git clones of your favorite OS sources.

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eek2121 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

You are assuming that courts will shut this down. Guess what? The Supreme Court is responsible for these laws: https://publicinterestprivacy.org/paxton-age-verification/

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iamnothere 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

There is precedent that indicates otherwise, as this is a clear First Amendment violation.

Requiring commercial services to adhere to certain guidelines is constitutional, even though the Texas law is a bad one and I think a different court may have slapped down the law. Mandating speech (code is speech) is clearly not, especially for noncommercial projects.

I think the key would be getting the right person to explain how this would be like requiring all authors to include a certain sentence in their novel.

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wavemode 3 days ago | parent [-]

I kind of doubt that most judges are going to agree with a "code is speech" argument. I think it's more likely that the courts view code as a mechanism, and so this is more like requiring cars to have airbags.

Though this does bring to fore the issue of enforcement. Nobody can stop you from building a custom car which has no airbags. Where enforcement happens is when you try to get it registered (thus making it legal to drive on public roads). That's when the government would stop you.

Curious how such enforcement would work for operating systems. We could all just mod our OS's to remove/bypass age verification. The government doesn't (currently, yet) have a legal nor physical mechanism to prevent this.

	▲	chainingsolid 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Even if code is mechanism and not speech, I'd hope being forced to tell anyone you ever interacted with online your age would be compelled speech..

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Longlius 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Paxton's decision was incredibly narrow (because it specifically targeted sites that served pornography and only pornography) and it's unlikely the court is willing to grant anymore ground.

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codazoda 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

intervening years