I think the obvious problem that those mailing list proposals are missing is that even implementing the minutest part of this law is little more than a "foot in the door" thing. Once the law is passed and a compliant vendor publishes, that sets jurisprudence so that Christofascists can update the law strengthening the requirements, such as adding a user photo (which IIRC account service already supports via $HOME/.face!), LGBTQ+ status, National ID Document, etc.

The correct option in Linuxland is simply to WONTFIX, and if any California and Colorado corporate users whine about it, well, that's what they voted for. Wanna fix it? Kick your bad leaders out of office.

My message to Ubuntu and all Linux distros is simple:

DON'T OBEY FASCISM IN ADVANCE!

[–] kbal@fedia.io 3 points 18 hours ago (1 child)

Somebody should go ahead and make an "is-user-old" command that just reads from /etc/age.txt and returns YES, NO, or IDK.

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 7 hours ago

Half of internet drops dead when developer of npm package age_pad makes a typo

[–] apparia@discuss.tchncs.de 35 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Is it really not as easy for them as saying "hey btw don't use this distro if you're in California" and fully expecting nobody to comply? I'm not sure if Ubuntu is based in Cali in which case I can see it being more difficult.

Also this "age bracket" thing seems to have an obvious flaw in that any application that's running semi-regularly can just poll the API every day and find out the user's DOB by checking when they roll into the next bracket. It's actually leaking more data about children than about adults in that case. Brilliant.

[–] deafboy@lemmy.world 5 points 23 hours ago (1 child)

On the other hand, it's one of the least intrusive proposals I've heard in this round of debate. The parent flags the account as a child, the browser sends one (or more, in this case) extra bit indicating if it should receive the adult content (whatever it might be) or not.

No ID verification, no face scanning, no credit card checks, no companies building profiles of everybody on earth and sharing them with shady institutions. Plus, it pushes the responsibility back to the parents, who (hopefully) know the child the best, and can adjust the restrictions either way if needed.

Now I can finally accept that the age verification issue is merely "controversial", instead of absolutely evil global conspiracy.

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 17 hours ago

On the other hand, it’s one of the least intrusive proposals I’ve heard in this round of debate.

It matters not, it's still intrusive, and it's the foot-in-the-door to demand more.

If you let a nazi peek into your bar and stay, it's a nazi bar.

[–] technohacker@programming.dev 14 points 1 day ago

Canonical seems to be based in the UK, going off of the Wikipedia page

[–] msokiovt@lemmy.today 9 points 1 day ago (1 child)

Canonical can kiss my behind if they want to implement digital ID.

[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago (1 child)

It's not though. It's literally asking the user "how old are you?" and not even caring if they lie. It's not even requiring a date, just a number of years.

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 17 hours ago (1 child)

It’s not even requiring a date, just a number of years.

Several posts in the mailing list thread specifically mention adding Y, M, D fields for DOB.

[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 1 point 16 hours ago (1 child)

As an option, so it can automatically increment the brackets.

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 7 hours ago (1 child)

Which gives away the whole birthday because applications requesting the age bracket can memorize values and notice what day they change.

[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 1 point 3 hours ago

That is a good point. Websites also if they are visited daily or if a web beacon or such can access the API.

Manually adjusting the brackets until 18+ (or just lying about the precise date) would grant more privacy. I can see making that trade-off though.