cm0002An upcoming California law requires operating system providers to enforce basic mandatory age verification
I don’t get how this can work practically. Say if I install Arch, right. At which point during the process of entering a bunch of commands when following the installation guide would I be entering my age? And what software would be mandatory to install to enforce blocking content based on my age? pacstrap would need to like, read some file with my age, then install whatever needed based on that?
This makes no sense to me, but maybe I’m missing something.
The law is not for the individual person, but for organisations that develop the OS. So they would go to Arch linux org and start threatening them with huge fines, unless they do something here. And all the headache of how exactly to implement this would fall on arch developers. At which point I suspect they would go the same route as Midnight BSD and just forbid the use in California, because as you rightly said it is impossible to implement age verification in DIY distro.
Blocking use in California is definitely the only way forward. This is not practical to implement.
They’ll just do it everywhere else. What is the privacy distro that runs on USB that you just carry around? TailsOS or some such? You can just use it anywhere but since it’s different than a live boot I guess you can have all the rest of your personal stuff in there too. Black market for tails OS USBs, or really, just use a VPS somewhere else or a VPN or just go out of state for a few minutes and buy a dumb phone for downloading whatever you want.