Andreas K
Robert KingettI just boosted a question, but I have a slightly reworded question. Why is Linux and FOSS tripping over themselves to comply with Fascism surveillance capitalism instead of the long established international and national accessibility laws and accessibility guidelines and disability inclusion guidelines? Surely, one thing is better than the other, no? And it ain't Fascism surveillance capitalism that's the better option. #Linux #FOSS
Demi Marie Obenour@WeirdWriter Because they are not willing to put themselves at legal risk to oppose them when there are much bigger things to be concerned about. Things like the wave of anti-trans laws and the accessibility stuff you mentioned.
bimbo savant (cow arc)@alwayscurious @WeirdWriter age verification is part of the anti-trans laws. that's why all the states introducing it are transphobic. they view transness as porn and deviance, and identity verification lets them control who can see the deviance, and track the ones that do.
we have to fight this war on all fronts, because all the fronts are the same war.
Mel M 
@WeirdWriter same reason why half the queer community tripped over themselves to bootlick
those who comply elevate themselves, and close the door behind them
🏳️⚧️PepperTheVixen🦯@WeirdWriter louder for the people in the back
Tray 
The dichotomy is weird to me. A lot of people (myself included) switched to FOSS to get away from the surveillance and data collection of big tech. Yet they see this as "oh, well it useless data because you can lie".
What? Fuck that. It's a wedge, the first of many, to further the data collection by the tech oligarchs to further sell and for surveillance. If it gets to it, I'll find a distro that doesn't use systemd
wizardwes@klep @WeirdWriter https://agelesslinux.github.io
This project is preparing scripts to remove age verification for any distro that add it, as well as tracking the status of projects to see who is complying. Far from a perfect solution, but it goes to show that there are already distro that are fully defying this, as well as giving people workarounds. They're also making small protest computers that lack age verification for people to distribute at low cost.
This project is preparing scripts to remove age verification for any distro that add it, as well as tracking the status of projects to see who is complying. Far from a perfect solution, but it goes to show that there are already distro that are fully defying this, as well as giving people workarounds. They're also making small protest computers that lack age verification for people to distribute at low cost.
Good to know! Thank you!
the elder sea@wizardwes Kind of weird that their agelesslinux.org page seems to be missing. I'm pretty sure I read it a week or so ago, but they're still linking to it on the bottom of their github.io page.
mirabilos@klep @WeirdWriter do so. Or NetBSD, since Linux is getting ensloppified.
Ariane@WeirdWriter I don't know. I hear systemd has a patch. Which wouldn't surprise me, because redhat (a company) probably wants to keep selling their OS to big tech companies in California.
But I've also seen a debian post on this, that tries to bring this to its logical conclusion.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2026/03/msg00018.html
Which can be used as a basis for arguing this is a bad law.
Krahabors@nahratzah What a *server* OS has to do with age verification?
Does it need to verify only it's installer, or all of it's users then?@WeirdWriter
Does it need to verify only it's installer, or all of it's users then?@WeirdWriter
@krahabors @WeirdWriter No idea.
But systemd is used by many linuxen.
And even server OSes have users, and can be used on your laptop (or a VM image).
Depending on how the law is worded, these may or may not be in scope.
But for this question, I recommend you speak to a (qualified) sollicitor, which I am not. <3
Malin
Thankful Machine- corporate interests and their infiltrators with nothing to lose
- coordinated and focused fascism
- spineless people who have been trained to not be able to tell the difference between conflict and abuse and so avoid it at any cost, desperate for validation and to be seen as productive and cooperative
- exhaustion
- loneliness
- growth/adoption mindset, “winning”
- obsession with how instead of why
i.e. the usual capitalism syndrome
D. Moonfire@WeirdWriter Because it personally affects them.
@WeirdWriter Just a minor expansion. I spent a lot of time with the UX designers saying their screens are difficult to work for people with vision problems. They don't see it and kept pushing back.
I didn't really get much progress until I showed them the website with a 1.0 Gaussian Blur which is relatively close to what I see when I look at the screen. Even then, I have to keep coming back and saying "the company's chosen font as italic is not sufficiently distinct for those with vision problems".
Or "your DBA has red/green color blindness. He can't see the difference between these two notices."
Every month, they treat that information as some new revelation and information but I know they are going to forget it in a matter of days because they have good eyes, steady hands, and massive monitors. It doesn't personally affect them on a day-to-day basis so it becomes nothing more than an abstract concept.
Since we've had to recently change our application to be more accessible, half our development team has been forced to use NVDA or JAWS. Which is great, but most of them are complaining about how painful it is and are already looking forward to not using it. Which sucks for them because we have to keep maintaining the accessibility of our application until the end of time. But I think the key part is that they see it as a "once I'm done, I can move on" whereas there are a lot of people that there is never a "once I'm done".
Age Verification, at first blush, seems like a "simple problem" and it is one that affects them, mostly because a lot of people use social networks and enjoy porn, the two major things AV is targeting. So, it becomes something that personally affects them, something they can't be "once I'm done" so they are more driven to jump on it.
I think it is an integral demonstration that a lot of folk don't have the compassion to really understand what other people experience. Or, in my dad's words:
Why do you care about people you will never meet?
Yep, I think so! And this is such an obvious step to even worse tech fascism, I can't articulate my rage loud enough. I absolutely hate all of this timeline. @dmoonfire
@WeirdWriter I agree 100%.
I've just spent six months writing a program to cover my ass because of an irrational fight-or-flight mechanism because of crappy AV laws put me at risk since I have queer characters enjoying mostly offscreen sex. And one book where queers are having very graphic, on-page sex.
(Admittedly, I could have gone with an off-the-shelf approach but they were based on paying money when my patrons and donation income stream is effectively nil.)
@dmoonfire @WeirdWriter interested in how you did the Gaussian blur on the site… iirc there’s css to do it on an image, but not the whole page. Was it an extension? Sounds useful for convincing devs to do their job, though I note your pessimism about that.
@Kynx @WeirdWriter In my case, I used GNU Image to do it since I was trying to be precise, but you can also do it in Chrome with:
- Open up Developer Tools
- Go to the console
- Press the three dot menu to the upper left of the "Console" tab
- Go down to "Rendering"
- Go to "Emulate vision deficiencies"
- Select "Blurred vision"
Sadly, Firefox doesn't have blurred option.
@dmoonfire @WeirdWriter gah, so chrome it is then 😬 OK, thanks for the advice
A Fine Day to build a fence 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸The creeping commercialism that is attempting to destroy foss
derptronThen the "Open Source" term is doing what it was intended to do.
René SeindalBecause a large segment of the FOSS movement is hard right, libertarianism which can easily slide into fascism for the unwary.
Ra (Freyja) (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩@WeirdWriter because complying with this bullshit requires minor changes that don't slow down the rapid iteration of FOSS at all. accessibility, on the other hand, requires code quality and consistency
John-Mark GurneyDon't group all foss in with Linux. Plenty of other OSes aren't complying and I saw a post recently that OpenBSD won't comply.
Though the link below says MidnightBSD excluded California, but they also have a commit adding an age verification daemon, so it's all over the place.
https://itsfoss.com/news/distros-response-age-verification-laws/
Regendans@WeirdWriter Blog post by Debian package maintainer Marco d'Itri about this : https://blog.bofh.it/debian/id_473
@regendans Ah thank you for this! I have not read this before today so thank you
xrvshow comes reacting to systemd bowing to fascist laws trying to control how people use their computers get painted as being nazi? the PR clearly states that it is doing that to comply with the law requirements
also
the systemd project is not accepting “AI slop”. What happened is that a documentation file for the benefit of coding agents was added to the repository
that is the very definition of accepting AI slop. not only that, it encourages sloptribution by signaling “hey, here is something that helps you use the slop machine more conveniently”
meek cynicsthe systemd project is not accepting “AI slop” [...] all contributions must be reviewed in detail by humans, and this is basically the same policy used by the Linux kernel.
@xarvos, @regendans & @WeirdWriter, so it does accept slop after all.
also
must be reviewed in detail by humans
(tbf people did review it beforehand)
userdb: add birthDate field to JSON user records by dylanmtaylor · Pull Request #40954 · systemd/systemd
Stores the user's birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc. The xdg-desktop-portal project is addi...
@xarvos @WeirdWriter @regendans He's referencing the campaign by a rightwing influencer called Lunduke.
If you disagree with age verification laws, and everybody should, fight those policies. I know, complaining to developers is easier, but not helpful.
There are legitimate uses for the birthdate field (e.g. parental control), as there are for the name field, which also already exists in passwd with GECOS and which I personally find more sensitive.