Erin 💽✨Mar 22
Everyone seemingly getting mad about systemd adding a completely optional date of birth field to user records that is, in reality, only ever going to be filled in on the machines of children administered by parents who want such restrictions enforced, perhaps on machines administered by schools, or by people who want their computer to wish them a happy birthday.
Show threadErin 💽✨

There’s a lot that can be said about the ineffectiveness of age gates or the problems of rating systems but those are better directed at legislators rather than open source maintainers working to ensure that distros are in legal compliance with flawed legislation by the deadline, especially with regards to laws like New York’s with serious privacy issues and that are pretty much unworkable by any open source projects

And also a lot to think about in terms of why educating parents is ineffective and the nature of the societal problems motivating these laws and how to address them in the real world with actual parents

Mar 22 at 11:27pmWeb
Show threadErin 💽✨Mar 23
The more I ruminate on this thought the more I realise that the way I see it is that the California law may be misguided but it's designed in a minimally invasive way, and I see that as intentional as opposed to the start of a slippery slope

On the flip side we have things like New York's proposal, which is unavoidably a major invasion of privacy
Show threadOctavia Con Amore  Succubard's LibraryMar 23
@erincandescent what differences lead you to see them so differently? 
Show threadErin 💽✨Mar 23
@OctaviaConAmore California's law (and copies thereof) is entirely based upon self reported age. You get asked for your age when creating an account and also the OS can just throw that away if you're over 18 (I'm pretty sure an "I'm over 18" checkbox would be legal also, with any age entry field only appearing if you didn't check it)

New York's law requires IDV or similar
Show threadvekkqMar 23
@erincandescent will see soon if its a slippery slope.
Show threadJoakim ForsMar 22
@erincandescent ... don't tell people about GECOS. 😅
Show threadChristopher IseneMar 23

@erincandescent default date, 1/1/1970

If there absolutely have to be a date there, also hoping for an ISO date, 1970-01-01

Show threadinfinite love â´³Mar 23
@erincandescent "working to ensure legal compliance" is the problem though. no one should be complying at all.
Show threadErin 💽✨Mar 23
@trwnh if i were a person shipping a distro to users in California from the 1st Jan next year, I'd be asking who's going to pay my legal fees...
Show threadinfinite love â´³Mar 23
@erincandescent assuming the distro has a legal entity that california etc can sue? sure, maybe in that case. i don't envy being system76 headquartered in colorado, but i also am not using pop os. for a community project like arch, i am not sure how feasible it is for us states to sue some guy in germany or prevent the distribution of linux isos.
Show threadErin 💽✨Mar 23
@trwnh as a person not in the US and with no intention to travel I'd personally feel fairly comfortable, but I might worry about mirror operators
Show threadLisPiMar 23
@erincandescent @trwnh What legal fees?

Just slap a disclaimer you're not responsible for nor approving of users choosing to use it in non-Free locations and that they take the risk on their own.

"This distribution is not approved for use in police states. Do so at your own risk."
Show threadLisPiMar 23

@erincandescent @trwnh Besides, Guix provides a hint of the solution for this.

The binary bootstrap seed.

Distribute everything as text, speech, that is to say, and provide the bootstrap as an image or shirt or something.

Then provide a very minimal boot image the user can use to enter the seed manually and overwrite the start of a disk (a very old school kind of editor isn't it?), with the next partition over (or a USB disk) containing the source for everything else, and now the blocking of such a distribution is a Free Speech issue.

UEFI provides most of the tooling necessary to make this require an absolute minimum object code (little enough to be auditable reasonably without source if need be).

Show threadaliceif Mar 23
@trwnh @[email protected] so how do distros with codecs from countries without software patents get away with being used in countries where that's Problematic