California moves to exempt Linux from its upcoming age-verification law after backlash over forcing operating systems to collect users’ ages — amendment proposed by the same lawmaker who wrote the original law

Can’t aknowledge this is a dumb law to cover tech company desires? Need to gather everyone’s data to protect children that generally have access to the internet through their parents? If only there were control that could be implemented. Hell, you could even require a protocol that designates the account as a minor account without giving any details instead. It could be done by parents when the device is bought. 

So instead of blocking a shitty bill that has no intentions of actually solving anything, it’s being given an exception before it even goes into law. smfh

And people wonder why laws that should be easy to understand and make sense.. get rittled with complex exemptions that directly interfere with anyone’s perception of freedom or fairness.

Don’t get me wrong.. Linux deserves this, if only because it had zero intentions of following through. But this isn’t a victory. This is a bunk ass compromise to shut people up by directly addressing a single argument while completely ignoring everything else.

Ok help me out here. I’m not an AI expert but I imagine AI agents can (or soon will be able to) operate a computer independently. Is this law going to require the AI agent to report it’s age? Or report the age of it’s “owner”? How can the AI verify which human is prompting it? From a user login? Which could obviously be shared? And soon, agents employed by corporations will autonomously task other agents to operate machines that have an OS. The tasking agent may not even have an owner?

I feel like this law is obsolete before it even gets started. May as well pass a law about the purity of whale oil while we are at it.

Not just linux, please include also *BSD and all FOSS operating systems, for example *BSD. BSD is a thing in NASes and firewalls (XigmaNAS, OpnSense, etc), that is, where data passes through or it’s stored, and forcing user age verification there would be equally dangerous.

Sensible.

Imagine if mainline Linux distros actually implemented this, you’d have to go trawling shady sites for “cracked” versions of Linux that may or may not come with extra “features” like cred stealer or who knows what. Or you’d just need to build your own distro, because open source.