How some Linux developers defeated (for now) the new OS age-verification laws. Long live those Linux developers, who “heavily criticized the mandates”, made public statements, and contacted the legislators.

Because other Linux developers, instead, immediately bent over backwards to start implementing changes towards accommodating those laws; for sure they didn’t heavily criticize the mandates, nor make public statements, nor contact the legislators.

Funny, seeing as EU itself is a loophole in democracy.

It was exactly as you said; a difference I didn’t know about. Also confirming that Kubuntu apparently installs them system-side, even if flatpak install ... is called without sudo, again as you inferred. I don’t know how I managed to install them user-side in one laptop, but now they mirror each other :)

For others interested, these two commands show the difference, as explained by another user in a cross-post:

flatpak --user list
flatpak --system list

Thank you!

It was as you said! Thank you so much for explaining the difference and showing the commands 🙏 I wonder how I managed to install user-side on one laptop, since the standard flatpak install ... (without sudo) seems to install system-side anyway. But now I’ve managed to have an identical setup :)

It goes deeper than that, though. Why is the person talking about this with a chatbot in the first place, rather than with some professional?

It shouldn’t be a chatbot what prevents suicide in the first place. Something has gone horribly wrong with society – and it has already been normalized too.

Thanks for sharing. I’d be happy if you posted updates on other stuff that works or that gives you problems after the OS change.

It is actually not so difficult to see this for yourself in a much simplified setting. One can easily build a “Small Language Model” that extracts correlations between only three consecutive words. On the web there’s plenty of short scripts that do this; here and here is one example. The output created by such a SLM can have remarkably long sentences with grammatical meaning (see the examples in the links above); this is remarkable since all it learned was correlations between triplets of words.

Now you can take a large amount of output from such a SLM, and use it to train a second, identical or even better SLM, then check the output generated by this second one. You’ll see that the new output is less coherent than the one from the first SLM. Give the output of the second SLM to a third, and you’ll see even less coherent text coming out. And so on.

They aren’t out of context, and you have just said the same thing. Data processing can help in removing noise, but it can’t help in creating information or extracting information that wasn’t there in the first place. In fact – again as you said – it can end up destroying part of the original information.

LLMs extract word correlations from textual data. Already in this process they are losing information, since they can’t extract correlations beyond a certain (yet large) length, and don’t extract correlations at shorter lengths. And in creating output they insert spurious correlations that replace (destroy) some of the original ones. This output will contain even less information than the original training data. So a new LLM trained with such an output will give back even less.

Yes it does. Indeed it is a mathematical theorem from Information Theory, called the data-processing inequality. Quoting from two good textbooks on Information Theory:

“No clever manipulation of the data can improve the inferences that can be made from the data” (Cover & Thomas, Elements of Information Theory §2.8).

“Data processing can only destroy information” (MacKay, Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms exercise 8.9).

You’ve read the stances of all different people. I agree with most and I’m a bit more conservative: I switch to a LTS (even-numbered) release only when its main non-LTS (odd-numbered) upgrade is out; and skip all non-LTS.

I agree. I’ll actually contact the national Consumer Policies department and ask if this is at all legal.

The fundamental problem is that age verification is bullshit. So let’s not normalize it. It must be fought, on all fronts, including the FOSS front.

Indeed I wonder if that kind of keyboard check is even legal - personally I feel it as a breach of my privacy, none of their fucking business what kind of input method I use. (If anyone here is knowledgeable about such matters, please let me know!)

I’ve been having similar turd-kind encounters with bank apps even within Android. I use the egregious Heliboard from F-droid, and my bank app refused to start because I use an “untrusted keyboard” – funny as it’s way more trustworthy that Gboard or Microslop board apps. Turns out the apps of all banks in my country are like that. So now I simply access the bank via the browser instead. Fuck their apps.

But I understand that the browser solution may not work for everyone :(

Partly this problem comes from incompetence of the app’s developers, partly for shifting responsibility: it seems to me that they let Play Store do the checks, so if any hacking happens they can blame Play Store. And there’s also the modern motto: “if you want to make an app secure, make it unusable”. Even better I’d then say “don’t make it at all”! – there, security-problem fully solved.

Put pressure on banks would be best. Possibly one could also play a “disability” card: I must use such-and-such app or OS owing to visual impairment, say. Or collect signatures for a petition… but I imagine we’re a very small minority.

As a protest in my case I changed bank a couple of times.

But thank you for the USB-ADB tip! I’ll use it when I switch to GrapheneOS.

I understand. Be aware that this can be quite a limiting factor, more than you think. The need to think about home servers starts to clash with the statement that

It was built from day one to be usable by anyone, with zero tech background required.

Possibly. That’s up to your distro. However, consider that EU as well is starting to speak about age verification. It’s quite clear that the whole “West” aspires to be more like Russia and China.

Thank you for the explanation. But I don’t understand how it can work if:

1. I send a message while my contact is offline,
2. then I go offline,
3. my contact comes back online while I’m still offline.

The message needs to be somewhere in between. This is a situation that occurs quite often when you message with people in very different time zones.

Nobody in the middle. No server storing anything. No company analyzing anything

[…]

In deferred mode, it works just like regular email. Meaning your contact doesn’t need to be online when you send the message. Your contact will get it automatically once they come online.

So I can’t send a message while my contact is offline, then go offline myself, and expect that my contact will receive it when they go online? This is quite limiting.

How is PeerBox different from Delta Chat?

I wish, but I’m not so sure. Look at what happened with the Californian age-verification laws and Systemd for example. Some (arsehole, in my personal opinion) FOSS developers hurried up and bent over backwards to start complying. We’ll probably end up having “Linux” distros that will comply, and Linux distros, probably distributed via secret channels, that won’t.