Linux

Good, one more reason to slowly push people out of Microsoft's clutches.

To be fair our situation is unprecedented. Children with access to social media (for some reason) interacting endlessly with AI slop.

Research indicates we’ve already wiped out 30 years of literacy progress.

Can you explain in detail, what exactly that change did?

I think you are confusing something. A tech company running proprietary code can and will ask for age verification. It does not matter if the user runs Windows, Linux, iOS, GrapheneOS.

The law here makes sure that services, which are basically also open source, are not required to do the age verification check.

So, you install Windows? Age check. You install Linux? No age check. Before even opening a browser. Then on Linux you open Netflix? Age check.

So I fundamentally saw this actually as a good news.

My guess is they figure it will make little difference due to network effects, and by making this exception they can remove a meaningful source of political resistance to the change. If the vast majority of users are running operating systems that declare underage status, then websites and apps will be able to use those signals to sidestep legal liability for actually doing anything meaningful to protect underage users, and new laws can be passed that assume the use of those signals is possible. That it isn't 100% doesn't change that very much.

Cause they don't want to have to force corpos to get age verification on the ludicrous number of IoT devices that run Linux, but cover their ass in making it not seem that way.

Oh sorry. I mean... cause they're, like, open-source and how could you even enforce that?

Obviously our lawmakers are communist and this is a ploy to undermine the very capable and responsible software maker called Microsoft /s

But if lawmakers didnt constantly push out completely ineffective laws that cause problems, then what else would they do with their time? Effectively govern? Fucking nonsense.

The logic is none of these distros would do shit to comply with this, and enforcement is almost impossible. This is just saving face.

I'd imagine most kids using Linux are either being actively taught computers by a parent who's paying close attention, or so smart that nobody is stopping them from doing anything.

I don't know what the Cali gov was thinking

But it makes sense to me, based on the commercial incentive. It's not that FreeBSD doesn't form the basis of products that will need to comply with the law (whatever Apple calls their desktop OS for instance), but FreeBSD itself is only for the leet.

No, you don't have to be a genius to use it, but you do need to be very weird, in that you want to use your own actual brain to solve problems, and you want to fully understand what the thing is doing, from bootup to shutdown. If that's you, you're a very odd person, according to many.

Yes, but they'll rule that using free open-source software is terrorism.

First off, we're talking about operating systems and not websites.

Second, if it's open source, the users can just edit out the age verification, no matter how it's implemented. And if it's open source, you simply can't prevent that behavior.

In theory, the closed source systems make that more complicated, to the point where we can "rely" on those safeguards.

There's a logic here, even if I totally disagree with the premise of the OS needing anything to do with the user's age. Parents need to parent and we've had solid enough parental controls for a long time now that make this type of monitoring and control easy.