We’ve talked about the various age verification laws in the United States, and there’s been a development recently that a lot of people seem to think is a good thing: both the age verification laws in California and Colorado have received exemptions for open source operating systems. I fail to see how this is a good thing, and luckily, I don’t even have to explain why because Liam Squires-Hand from GamingOnLinux already did it for me.
When all these laws get stamped and approved, what happens when you run an operating system (let’s say Fedora or Ubuntu) and some web service or application is forced to do age checking and verification (or they face massive fines). Unless Linux distributions / desktop environments do end up implementing something that correctly adheres to these laws, what do you think will happen? Those services / apps could very likely just entirely block Linux in certain regions – or even all regions if it’s Linux to prevent any issues for them.
↫ Liam Squires-Hand at GamingOnLinux
That’s the core of it, right there. These nebulous exemptions are not solutions; they’re barely even band-aids. Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android will implement whatever fascist anti-privacy age-verification nonsense governments can come up with, and virtually all services and applications that need to implement support for it will just follow along as well. Do you really think they’re going to craft exceptions for the few percent of their users running Linux? The past three decades of computing history has made it very clear that no, they will not.
But the exceptions have already achieved their goal: the Linux world is happy and lulled right back into a sense of complacency. What could possibly go wrong?
Without getting into the pros and cons of the laws themselves… That’s a separate debate.
Having an exception will be exactly what is used to circumvent the restrictions. Take the UKs recent introduction of age verification on adult websites. The effect? A reported 1800% increase in NordVPN subscriptions (and yes, it’s that many 0s!)
Honestly, I thought something like a hypervisor was going to be the way round it but seems it might be Linux as a whole might be (until it’s banned and people switch to Haiku)
All laws of this type do several things. The first is to get a piece of infrastructure installed. This is the foot in the door, and is almost always a success. Once it place, it can be used by whatever venal forces gain control over it. This sounds obvious, but it is the key to understanding another thing: it will now inevitably, at some unspecified time down the road, be used by someone else for a different purpose. This purpose may be legal or illegal, this does not matter to the discussion. This damage is done as soon as the cameras go up, or the laws take effect, or whatever, and it is very hard to undo.
The other thing they do, again almost always successfully, is change the landscape. Things like anti-piracy laws were always impossible to enforce absolutely. But enough people complied willingly or from fear of the law to consider the effort a success. The outliers also now stood out more, and once found, there was a club to beat them with.
You can be sure the UK government now, even if only unofficially, considers VPN use a red flag of its own that may be used to spark investigations, if it wasn’t already.
The same thing can be seen with privacy cryptocurrencies, heavy encryption, and other anti-surveillance measures. Hell, the cops used to ticket people found with a fuzz-buster in many US states. We’ve done all this before, many times. While there are always setbacks, it is working on the whole, as much as I personally wish it wasn’t.
Picking a minor nit: “1800%” … ?
Can we dispense with writing percentages over 100% ?
Could this not have been written “subscriptions jumped 18 times over” or simply “an 18-fold increase” ?
ponk,
Another reason to dispense with it is because as percentages rise over 100%, it’s common for people to start conflating increases versus a factor. Increasing by 100% is really a factor of 2. When people use 5X and a 500% increase interchangeably, now you’ve got to decipher which they actually meant.
1800% should be a 19 fold increase. But maybe the person saying 1800% was wrong and actually meant an 18 fold increase, it’s impossible to tell. This phenomena is common enough that I think the “% increase over 100” is just very problematic.
I don’t know if a source is needed here, but look at the chart in this link to see what I’m talking about.
https://calculator.academy/fold-increase-calculator/
I used what they reported. But I do get your meaning. To many people (and presidents) don’t use % correctly.
I think the approach of blocking Linux would be more harmful for them than it would be for Linux end users. History has shown you can’t really fight against Linux. If you don’t embrace it, you’re alienating a growing part of your customer base. Maybe it will take time for businesses to realise that, yet again, but I’d hope not.
The Linux they’re concerned about, and the use case this carve-out is targeted at, is Linux on the server and in the datacenter. Not requiring the OS to implement this gets these use cases off the hook, since there is no “user” in that scenario anyway. The “user” comes later, for public facing servers, or never for backend datacenters.
I would argue the home user, and the services serving them, get no carve-out at all from this. Vendors can still be required to verify “users” and refuse service if they cannot. This leaves Linux users in a substantial amount of dark. Haiku will do no better, unless they too make it an OS component. I couldn’t imagine the people behind it doing this, but you never know.
I agree with the people stating that this is nothing to celebrate. The bills remain a tremendous threat to anyone that prefers using “unofficial” computers.
Is it only for servers though? Perhaps I’ll go and RTFM. FWIW, I don’t at all claim its worth celebrating. The way these laws have been pushed has always been concerning to me. At the same time, I’m not angry at systemd folk from adding a few fields that _could_ be used for user identification.
Anyway, as of today, I’ve decided I no longer care. If vendors insist on requiring verification for their service, then that’s a service I no longer want to use. If that accelerates my complete departure from big tech and the internet they now own, so be it. I’ll just go back to playing on my vintage tech.
It’s not that the exemptions specify a use case, but rather that those are the only use cases for which it matters. For actual users, the fact that their OS does not implement mechanisms will not gain them admission to a law restricted service. They will be locked out by choosing not to run an OS that enforces the mechanism.
I agree that what the systemd people did is irrelevant. And so are these exemptions. The bottom line is that people will be left with exactly the choice you describe – run our stuff or keep out. I would love to believe the majority of people will take the stand you describe, but I doubt it. For some, not caring will probably carry grave consequences, but there is no telling them this.
You said it yourself, the laws are government surveillance disguised as age verification (“fascist anti-privacy age-verification nonsense governments”). This is a victory for open source. It’s a victory for Linux and the *bsds.
What it means is that – by law – any open source operating system accessing these locked down sites must give open source OSes entry. By law.
If they remain locked to open source OSes, they are breaking the law. It might mean lots of battles down the road but are they not worth the fight – if it’s a fight against a fascist state? Or should we get down on our knees too?
It almost certainly doesnt mean that they must give access without checking. Not having a requirement to check and not being denied the service are two completely different things, i have seen no evidence that the later is even under consideration
You’re right. I posted this in a hurry and didn’t think it through. I just came back to see if I could delete the post but it’s too late. Ha!
Nearly all sites I visit are tame for all ages but that may mean nothing when forced identification is the ultimate goal.
It took a while but people are finally taking notice of these draconian laws.
They started at EU and UK, with nonsense like “Chat Control” and moved here states side. There are also other places on earth like Brazil that immediately implemented Internet Government Tracking.
(I’ll not call it by what they want us to do)
This is bad, and yes, I agree, partial exemptions for Linux does not mean anything at all. Since even if it was ironclad today, what they have given, they can take away pretty easily.
This entire thing is unconstitutional. We have already had this exact debate several times in the US of A already, and Supreme Court ruled against age control in games (should listen to Antonin Scalia on this).
https://kotaku.com/antonin-scalias-landmark-defense-of-violent-video-games-1758990360
And yes it was once again our “very liberal” state of California (why?). We can have everything out in the open, but cannot have kids look at some artificial pixels? CAADCA is the same exact nonsense as Brown v EMA. Again, this was essentially struck down in 2011, but they want to walk through the back door.
But they will entrance it in all Linux distributions, and by the time it was overturned a decade later, it would be too late. No distribution would want to roll the clock back.
I’m not so sure. Certainly plenty of people are angry about these laws, but they fall roughly into 2 groups. The smaller group is angry on principle. The larger group is angry because these particular draconian instruments effect them and groups they sympathize with.
The trouble with this group is that when other particular draconian instruments are up for discussion, their anger fades into quiet acquiescence or mutates into support. For example, during the Covid panic I saw draconian suggestions, many of them implemented, that would turn a Revolutionary War soldier out of his grave in arms. The ideas and support were coming from many of the same people bitching now.
As we rapidly descend into a surveillance nightmare existence, the people that are noticing and angry about it like to blame factions of elites. Who they are specifically depends on who you are talking to, sort of like religion, but the message is clear: people are doing this to us. And there is truth in that – there are many factions of people that consider themselves elite, that run in high circles, that find the elements of controlling a population attractive, and are working towards that.
But they have been welcomed in. With open arms, by populations of people turning a blind eye when the wind is blowing their way. When they feel that control will be used by “their people” to do “good things” suddenly the people in Group 1 above find themselves alone on the battlefield yet again. The laws go up, the technology is invested into the fabric of society, and that’s that. Wash, rinse, repeat.
I really don’t know who the worst of the lot is – the Gollum-esque elites and the politicians that serve them, the techies that abet them for gold and empty laurels, or the hoards of unprincipled mini-wanna-be-dictators in the population that flip each time because “yeah but this is DIFFERENT!”
*end rant*
Baylan Tano,
I don’t know where you are going, probably walking around to avoid some political mine field.
But I try to consistently oppose government censorship, unlawful monitoring and tampering, and overall “we know better than you” attitude.
I don’t know about those groups, but *everyone* should be up in arms, since this is directly a hostile attack against our very Constitution.
All of politics is a minefield, so I do try to avoid it. I also try to be careful when posting because I have strong opinions, many of which fall well out of the mainstream. Often, something someone will write in a post gets me thinking, so I respond to them to keep the thread intact. I’m not talking *about* them, yet in my experience many people take it this way. I’m also not on the internet to pick fights or start arguments, and I don’t like hurting people’s feelings or being mean until it is warranted. I realize the caution makes my posts longer and in some cases, vague. 🙁
To your point. I maintain that you are part of that minority if those are your values and you live them. The vast majority of people are partisans of one stripe or another. And most partisans behave as I describe. I, too, have been consistent since a young age in opposing government censorship, unlawful monitoring and tampering, and overall “we know better than you” attitude. And I have watched the people standing next to me and the people standing “across the field” literally switch places over and over again, depending on who is in power and which “side” is behind the push at that time.
To put it directly. These are the partisans that cheer surveillance culture when it comes to tracking women who may be about to have an abortion, and booing when the same is done to people looking to buy a gun. Or the partisans that are lamenting age verification for adult materials and content but who were wild about tracking people’s movements during the Covid panic, and who shared all sorts of ideas on how to do it. These are just examples. Take almost any collection of partisan divided issues involving increased government surveillance and you can see the pattern for yourself.
These people are unreliable, exhausting, and the primary reason things continue as they do. And they’ll never see it. To them, people with actual principles are stubborn, childish, not team players, and anti-social. The bad guys even badder than the opposition.