Yeah … that’s never going to happen.

The word “spoofing” comes to mind…

So when is this happening, so we can mentally and logistically prepare for the next influx of new users into the fediverse?

You do understand that California is not the centre of the universe, that states within the United States of America don’t agree on how to conduct voting, let alone agree on laws and finally, that there are 8.3 billion people on this planet, 96% of whom don’t live in, or are subject to laws made in the USA.

I’m sorry, but no.

Age validation is surveillance under the guise of “protecting the children”, which it spectacularly fails at for more reasons than I can count.

1. Everyone has to validate their age, which creates a whole infrastructure that require documents that “prove” your age.
2. A verified “under age” user will be added to a database by unscrupulous players, creating a honeypot for predators.
3. Age verification isn’t universal, isn’t uniform and regardless of the jurisdiction in which it’s implemented, won’t actually prevent content from being procured from sources outside that jurisdiction.
4. One source of objectionable content is another’s entertainment, legally so, given that laws are made in isolation from each other across borders.
5. The result of such legislation is the effective censorship of content that some lawmaker finds objectionable, which will cause more harm than good.
6. Operating System level age verification on open source platforms will spectacularly fail since they’re published outside the jurisdiction.

So … no.

I understand your point and agree that this is the thin end of the wedge.

What we’re doing here is discussing the phenomenon and I’m highlighting some concerns.

I believe that this is how you get a dialogue happening which will effect change, which is what we’re both advocating.

I think that age verification is about surveillance rather than protecting children and I think it should be fought at every level.

This is me contributing to that fight.

In my opinion, storing a date is pretty much irrelevant unless there’s a process that validates the supplied date, otherwise every Linux user was born on 1/1/1, if not, an administrator can “fix” that

Furthermore, that systemd thinks that it’s the place to store such information is in my opinion beyond absurd.

Who appointed that project the source of age truth in the Linux ecosystem? What discussion was there, who was consulted and where was the vote?

I use apt, but you don’t have to, instead you can use any package manager from any distribution and use that distribution within the container.

If an application isn’t packaged, you can use the same mechanism to compile from source.

IMHO, if it’s not packaged and you can’t compile from source, it’s time to look for a different application.

I use Docker and apt instead. The definition of an application lives in a single text file and you don’t give it anymore resources or permissions than it needs.

So much so, that I wrote a bunch of scripts to make life easier, without ever needing to go anywhere near appimage, flatpak or snap.

https://github.com/ITmaze/remote-docker

And how will Instagram know who my parents are?

I wonder if the influx of slop contributions can be stemmed by a legal document that makes the contributor legally liable for their submission.

Seems like lawyers have been learning the hard way to be accountable for their slop, perhaps these lessons can be leveraged in the open source community.

Apparently it’s by subscription only…

Depends on how you install the software.

If you used snap to install it, then this affects you.

From the article, uninstall the software and use a .deb, .rpm or flatpack installer instead.

Essentially the snap version has a long standing bug that causes deleted files to be stored outside the normal “trash can” structure.

So … a company that despite decades of effort, can’t make a competitive web browser with all the help in the world, is now going to distract itself with even more non-essential rubbish with absolutely zero chance of success … can’t wait to hear what the excuse is going to be when this CEO leaves to pursue other opportunities.

Meanwhile the Assumed Intelligence Ponzi scheme will have collapsed, taking with it a significant portion of the economy, let alone the ICT industry.

This timeline needs some tweaking…

No, “the due and payable” kind.

I suspect that the house of cards will come tumbling down as soon as one of the companies in this massive Ponzi scheme fails to pay their bill.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/638975/how-do-i-tell-if-a-file-does-not-exist-in-bash#638980

man mv

https://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/string-manipulation.html

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/linux-sed-command

Defenestration in … three … two …

Look at tailscale.

You mean like the Nepalese government did?