Bytebro 🇬🇧 🇺🇦 🇬🇱

Okay, lots of 'stuff' recently about the 'age verification' crap out there, which I think has only (so far) been mandated by one state in the US?

And I'm not in the US, so WTF, although allegedly the EU are on the case as well, which means that the UK gov will inevitably curl up and do similar because they want to be in Europe without all the more restrictive rules.

But, if all of these orgs/countries/whatever beat up all the manufacturers and resellers (and probably give them some sweet trade deals) , at some point there will probably be some UEFI or BIOS update which will enforce this bollox on whatever platform I have perhaps, even my ageing laptops, no?

What are my options after that, rather than re-flashing my BIOS or UEFI on every boot? Good grief.

Mar 28 at 10:12pmWeb
Show threadJdeBP22h ago

@bytebro

It's very unlikely that anything of the sort will occur. There is simply a complete disconnect between Microsoft/Google/Apple user accounts anything that firmware can record in persistent storage before an operating system has even started up.

I predicted, as you probably saw, the form that the compliance measures would take for #Unix and Unix-like operating systems on 2026-03-01, and both 11 hours and about 4 days later they took that form from two different people. One with pull requests on GitHub, one in the very FediVerse thread that I began.

It is operating systems that will see (and indeed have seen) the updates bringing this. Not firmwares.

#AgeVerification #systemd #FreeBSD #NetBSD #OpenBSD #MidnightBSD

Show threadJdeBP22h ago

@bytebro

#UKLaw and #EULaw have not followed in the footsteps of the U.S.A.. The two legal approaches (3, in fact, as Japan has another one) are divergent, and the U.K. and E.U. are already on another legal path where the fundamentals differ. They already have laws.

In fact, their laws came first. The relevant U.K. law was passed when Rishi Sunak was Prime Minister, for historical context. The E.U.'s was the year before that.

The fundamentals are things like exactly who is being legally required to verify, record, provide, and act upon information about people's ages. U.S.A. laws put these onuses on different classes of people than do U.K. and E.U. laws. Japan is different again.

One 'fun' part is that the U.S.A. laws differ on this from state to state, but #Debian Developers (and their counterparts in other Linux-based operating systems) always match the definitions regardless. Because they are both operating system and app store providers.

#AgeVerification #USLaw

Show threadJdeBP21h ago

@bytebro

One U.S.A. state has passed the law, and there are about 8 months to go before the law comes into effect, with the chance of fixing its problems being slim to none given the way that legislatures work and the time left.

But there are at least 4 others (Louisiana, Colorado, New York, Illinois) where it's still pending in the legislature and people have a chance of fixing the problems before things become law there.

Some people are trying. They have a hard task ahead, because it's actually quite hard to find a legal framework that does not have unintended consequences. I've tried.

California legislators (and Texas, Utah, and Louisiana before them with version 1.0 of this, we being now on version 2.0) simply didn't think outwith the smart 'phone and Microsoft Windows worlds at all. Colorado legislators at least know that those are not the entire world, now.

#AgeVerification #USLaw #ColoradoLaw #IllionoisLaw #CaliforniaLaw #NewYorkLaw #LouisianaLaw #AppStoreAccountability