The coordinated effort worked. When lawmakers finalized Colorado SB26-051, they added Section 6-30-105(e) to the text. This specific clause waives compliance for operating systems and applications distributed under licenses that allow copying, modifying, and redistributing without platform-imposed technical restrictions. Why the Section 6-30-105(e) Exemption Protects Decentralized Tech
This exemption establishes a formal legislative precedent for the tech industry. It legally shields free and open-source operating systems from hardware-level age attestation laws that closed ecosystems like iOS and Windows will soon have to follow.
It’s unenforceable on Linux. A Linux user can simply remove or modify any code running on their machine. Fedora, Debian, and Arch can’t make a user verify their age any more than they can force you to use Gnome. It’s kinda the whole point of FOSS.
There is a very easy way to force linux users to enforce this. However, I won’t give it away here, because as far as I can tell the current law makers are clueless.
And I don’t want to give them clues.
There isn’t an easy way. There may be a way to enforce it when you connect to a remote site, but that requires the remote computer to implement it, not you.
I’m already seeing that in a year or two, we’re getting blocked on websites or electron applications because of age verification just like in android with Google Play Services. Like use age verification software or get blocked for 99% the internet.
They don’t even need to turn it into law.
Whatever device based verification those websites or electron apps were communicating with can be spoofed in a system where you have complete control.
Games are cracked in weeks at most, don’t you think that whatever secure communication is established won’t be cracked lightning fast by the whole FOSS community? Once the “secure communication” between local apps is broken, a third package can mitm that shit easily. It’s a local environment.
Honestly the faster they try to lock us out of the web the sooner we can get a second, freer web with card games and prostitution.
So just like the old net before Google, Meta and Amazon :)
“Like putting too much air in a balloon!”
Like a balloon, …and something bad happens!
That’s true and I bet its a big part of the plan. The good parts for us about that approach, though, is that the bad technology is baked into the services, not the user’s software, and the system depends on the tech oligopoly remaining. Laws are more durable than trends, so maybe that could be better for online privacy long-term, because the oligopoly will eventually break up. If we’re real lucky, some of them won’t survive the AI bubble aftermath enough to participate in this.
Our current law makers are still debating if freeing the slaves was a good idea. That’s how far behind they are.
Behind or ahead? Maybe we shouldn’t respect the laws they make?
I am very glad that you have strategically selected which parts of your mind to lose.
I’m going to argue that you share it because one thing you can count on is very determined nerds to defeat it.
Every time legislators tried to enforce some sort of dystopian thing, developers saw it as damage and routed around it.
You’re not wrong, security through obscurity eventually fails. In this case however, time counts, the longer it can be cut off, the more chance of some sanity returning, of backlash building politically. The time to route around is after a law is made, preferably as flawed a law as possible.
And that’s the whole point of the amendment to that law. Their congress critters were enlightened on the futility of such an endeavor. Next is California.
but systemd has dooomed us all
waaaaaahh!
Are you referring to the userd field? That would mean nothing if the user has total control on what can be written there.