Mastodawn

California's age verification law is proving controversial — here's what you need to know, and why some Linux distros are in the firing line

California's age verification law is proving controversial — here's what you need to know, and why some Linux distros are in the firing line

The legislation might prove to be a real headache for some Linux distros.

TechRadar

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Arcane2077 Mar 3

I’m going to be the contrarian here and say the bill is… good? It seems sensibly lax: The OS is required to ask for age, without external proof or requirement to share, and then provide apps who request it an interface to verify your answer.

I think taking the responsibility to verify age out of whichever dodgy data broker asks for it and unto the operating system itself, and ultimately the user if they lied, is a far better solution to the “problem” of age verification, which I don’t believe is going anywhere any time soon.

If you disagree please don’t be mean, I only just read the draft bill

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Manalith

My argument to that is the general slippery slope effect. Make incremental changes so devs are more willing to accept it. "Oh, you complied when we asked you to add a general age range question, so now why don’t you make it more specific. Oh you’ve already made it more specific, why don’t you just have them input their ID number so it can check it against a database. " and so on and so forth. That’s not to say it will become that, but if you’re willing to play the long game for your end goal, you can convince people they’re okay with making those incremental changes.