Just wanted to clarify one thing. According to this post, Fedora is planning to implement age verification. So what about the regions/countries which do not enforce age verification?
Will they get any age verification annoyances?
Common sense says No, but still want to clarify.
As far as I know there has been no decision on what needs to be done if anything.
The legal position is not clear and what an open source project needs to do is not clear.
Indeed some people think the CA law may not enforcable.
Well, fedora’s survival depends on Red Hat. They are the one providing the cash. So I wouldn’t be surprised if fedora chooses to comply. However, I am strongly against this age verification and mass surveillance propaganda.
I do not blame fedora, given they have no choice if Red Hat wants something to happen. On top of that, Red Hat is a corporation and they have to comply.
Keeping all of this in mind, and the fact that I’ve been a loyal fedora user, I will keeping using it until giving my private information is not enforced. The day it is, I will have to ditch fedora for the distros that have chosen not to.
Furthermore, I also do not live where these laws are passed.
Let us hope for the best.
Might be an unpopular opinion, but I believe the best way to stand up to such forced, almost tyrannical laws is to play smart and coy instead of resisting loudly. Add the systemd age field, enter a common value noone can validate anyway and call it a day.
People who enforce such laws, feels to me, also want to see who reacts allergically to clarify who they can vilify and get to work against. Kind of like Streissand effect. In a perfect world this shouldn’t happen but in current situation I believe it’s best if we play smart.
FYI A reddit user investigated who lobbied for these laws.
See An investigation of the forces behind the age-verification bills [LWN.net] and follow it’s links.
You’ve got some good points there.
I would argue that playing smart is going to see your elected representative and explaining nicely that the laws / proposed laws are a bad idea.
I am more talking based on the aggressive, almost extreme responses the community has been giving (hence the word “allergic”), like vilifying distro maintainers and boycotting distros for agreeing to a law and trying to find a compromise, sending death threats and doxxing the guy who added the age field to systemd etc. were what I was addressing to.
A lot of people think an all out, uncompromising war is the way to stop this nonsense. I say acting smart and showing the lawmakers that this law is nonsensical and ineffective without turning us into yet another target would be a more constructive and effective way.
I am pretty sure the same people who pass these laws already know they are a bad idea. So waging a war and shouting angrily at everything won’t solve anything.
I’m not sure they do. I think they don’t understand technology, and are wanting to make changes as they see the dangers of exposing people to negative behaviour and content online.
By going and talking to the law-makers, we can teach them better ways.
Overall it sounds like we are roughly on the same page.
As a parent and a system administrator, I think it is a good idea to be able to mark a non-admin account with the age of the user, and have a mechanism in the browser which reports to websites if the user is adult or not. By giving to parents the technical tool to enforce age verification, this method allows them to actually enforce the responsibility that they already have.
This is much more reliable that DNS-based blocklists, which are usually outdated, and often over-reaching. And much more flexible that whitelist, which are a pain. It is also a much less invasive method, than transferring age-verification responsibility to the websites (as is the case in UK and France and some USA states), which requires the user to upload ID and selfies to unknown third parties.
Of course, it only works for legit websites, but the largest gambling and alcohol and even porn websites are perfectly legit, and have little interest in attracting minors or controversies. It would allow users to access websites which have mixed adult/non-adult content, on a per-page basis, i.e. an online store may bar minor from adding alcohol to the cart, without blocking the rest. Or a video streaming service could supply adult films, but not when accessed by a minor.
It would not work for dodgy/pirate/illegal websites, for those we would have to go back to DNS blocklists, but we already have to.
On the contrary what I would oppose, is if this scheme is enforced with a DRM-like method, locked all the way to secure boot, and age verification is enforced by vendor. It would be completely unacceptable to delegate age verification to Microsoft, or Red Hat, and have you computer locked down if you do not comply.
Tl;DR: age verification is good if controlled by the parents, bad if hard-locked and controlled by the PC vendor.
P.S. this exactly the way parental control works in Android. It is not perfect, but considerably reduces the attack surface.
IANAL but my reading of the California law is that if you as a parent buy your child an iPad you have to sit with them and set it up and make sure they answer the age question honestly (at least).
My issues are:
And finally, my real concern is that there’s about 6 OSes (honestly, no 8 year old is geting a FreeDOS computer for their birthday) but there’s millions of apps and billions of web sites that will need to implement the age signal they get from the OS!!!
It looks like Apple is doing it the wrong way: they force you to verify the age of your Apple account (i.e. by sending them your ID and picture) or they’ll lock down the hardware you own. This is completely bonkers.
Not for them They simply want proof you are as old as you claim to be and so they need an ID to show that. Having to send the ID is something no normal thinking person wants to do because of the danger it might get hijacked, for which Apple is of course not responsible.
How beautiful…
Google told me that they cannot verify that I am an adult.
So they turned off personalised advertising, you tube history and more.
At least there are some upsides 
They allow multiple ways to verify age, for me they used my apple account as proof, no ID required. I have had a apple account for more then 18 years.