@oblomov of course there was. How do you think it helps to pretend otherwise?

@kirb

@oblomov how not? do you imagine that the law simply goes away if you wish hard enough, or do you think that people in (e.g.) california should simply be forced to use windows or macos instead?

@kirb

@benjamineskola @oblomov @kirb

Let them try to enforce it

@benjamineskola

right, at some point it starts being my problem because I'm sitting downstream of this code. People are responsible for the code they write and the harm it does. This is how you talk yourself into 'just following orders'. You're free to act out of self preservation. I'm free to withhold my sympathy.

And we're talking here about laws that are not even yet in effect, and compliance implemented by someone who isn't in the position to be held responsible in the end either. The stakes could not be lower. How am I supposed to trust that there is a point at which I downstream won't be thrown under the bus by these projects, when the stakes inevitably will be higher?

@benjamineskola

It's part and parcel with similar pushes for 'trusted environments' on end user devices. It's building infrastructure.

And yeah in its current iteration it is almost minuscule, that's why it's so alarming that compliance is so eager.

@einsiedlerspiel I have zero sympathy for hysteria about this.

It's a bad law, yes. But the people affected by it do not have the luxury of simply ignoring it and hoping it'll go away.

@benjamineskola

well it won't go away if there's no resistance and the infrastructure for enforcing it exists that's for sure.

@benjamineskola

Laws that I don't have direct influence on, not even the bit of voting power i might have had in the us, affecting what kinda control mechanisms are normalized in software i rely on? How could that be upsetting. The US exports these policies.

@benjamineskola @einsiedlerspiel You do realize that literally nobody forced you to respond to someone like that, right?

Nor did anyone force you to use any operating system other than the one you wrote single-handedly from scratch. Nobody forces you to drive on public roads or use a cell phone. There’s a lot of things nobody forces you to do that you choose to do anyways, because we live lives and exist in a society.

FOSS software exists across borders. I’m not going to make the claim that the modern American Republican Party is a Nazi party, but “just follow the law” equates to “just following orders” and had the business community followed one man’s orders in the 1930s we may not have certain groups of people to defend the rights of today.

If the majority of the FOSS stakeholders decide that age verification should not move forward for ethical reasons, the real answer is to cut California off. Developers in that jurisdiction will have to find a way to comply with the law should they stick with the wider community’s tools, but it’s ultimately *their* responsibility to follow *their* laws.