I may pull down all the debs I need in my core configurations before those get co-opted by whatever evil crap is occurring as well. I'm prepared to weather the storm in my own little ecosystem.  Probably have VMs act as the "outside world" in the long run while I keep living in a 2025 technobubble.

https://agelesslinux.org

jaromil on X . . . "In 2019 we removed machine-id from @DevuanOrg and we will remove age verification now. "AgelessLinux" is based on Debian, a foundation made to spy on users in a way or another, because it tracks machine-id."

https://www.gadgetreview.com/reddit-use … ation-tech

Considering Meta are footing the bill for age verification on their own platform, this does make sense... pusing it into the core OS will relieve them of all but the application developers obligation: to read the age verification data from the OS. This massively lets them off the hook by shifting that to the OS level.

So any who thought this kind of corporate skullduggery was "conspiracy nonsense"', may want to have a rethink.

However, I suspect that the "way forward" will be MS, google, Apple, etc accounts. So though the linked article portrays Apple and google as the targets, I'm not sure that either will complain at being forced to capture this data. Oddly the article refers to phones, but not PCs, nor are Microsoft mentioned.

I heard that Brazil acted as fast as it did in a knee jerk reaction to a particular video that has gone viral on the web and was displeasing to the Brazillian government. Does anyone know if this is true, and if so what it was about? It must have been a heck of a video.

I would have thought that any age indicator in the OS would need to be in an agreed format for websites to read. Is anyone aware of any industry group working on this? Or will it just be left to Microsoft to set a de-facto standard that everyone else must follow (if MS even allow that to be possible), or be locked out. I can just imagine MS devising a system that involves age verification via the MS mothership, so you need an MS account even if you are on Linux and MS can record every website you visit.

The rise of the likes of 'Microsoft loves Opensource' is just free-washing in my mind. FOSS is great when you can use a permissive license to pull the rug out from you at any point in time.

Microsoft are the same. They changed their tactics in response to the internet revolution and the fact that most people "online" are using a smartphone. There is no longer any sense in MS solely persuing Linux or other FOSS via patent trolling tactics (though it still goes on by proxy) - it has reverted to EEE tactics and is playing the long game.

While I see your point on permissive licences, that's the common fallacy to adopt a mindset that those licences are corporate friendly. It's not so black and white. OpenBSD for example is permissive licenced and has far less corporate influence and control when compared to e.g. the Linux kernel, gnome or systemd, which are all funded, managed/influenced and/or developed by "Big Tech".

I don't think it's as simple as the licencing indicating where the intentions lie or of any affilations.

Licences can be abused strategically. While the MIT licence may be used for one project for a valid reason, the "viral" nature of GPL v3 may be exploited, as a means to an end (e.g. forcing potential competitors to keep their changes open). If code, developed by a corporate entity, is released under a permissive licence, a competitor can equally utilise that, turn it proprietary and close it off. They would not be able to under GPL. So GPL is "pro business" in that respect. So in reality, business favours closed proprietary code first and foremost - but that costs money. They cab throw what amounts to peanuts at the LF and get something which is a "good enough" replacement for something like AIX, HP-UX, etc.

Anyway I'm going off track a bit here but, this is my theory from observation of course, I don't have the evidence to back it up, so it will remain a theory floating across the either of space and time with all the other theories out there.

What I do know is, none of us are immune to these nefarious laws. So how do we fight them?  Education, We need to educate the people that It's is not about saving the children, It's about slow but assured surveillance at a thousand paper-cuts!
A politician's number one goal is to stay in power, and to do that it's a popularity contest, so if they are seen to be backing a very unpopular bill by the masses, they will probably back down.

Education! It works.

oh government officials and billionares care for children, but only for the children they can use to satisfy their depravity, after all government and tech are ruled by the epstein class.

Too true. The idea that Cali politicians and the wealthy that own them actually care about children would be laughable if it weren't so horrible and evil.

Zero chance i'll comply with their absurd demands, and any crap that comes from upstream with unwanted big brother garbage in it will get chopped on and re-written before it gets installed on one of my machines.

As you can see, the systemd sellouts are more than willing to implement this, but ultimately, just as they sold out when it came to secureboot, the likes of IBM/Red Hat and Canonical will sell out again. The Linux Foundation sold their souls many years ago - so I can honestly see "Sign into Ubuntu with your Microsoft account" eventually becoming a reality.

The aim here is "prove you're an adult" and to do that they will get your data and track all of your activity - that's the sad reality of where this is going. "The children" is, as ever, the pretext, coming from billionaires who have only ever cared about profit and never about children, nor anyone else for that matter.

The only date of birth that would avoid this is one that gets randomly generated each time it's requested (or at least at each reboot), so it's never the same date.

But it should be obvious to anyone that the current legislation is only an initial  stepping stone since the date can be faked easily, within a year or two the laws will be changed to allow only verified dates that are cryptographically signed by some authority so that you can no longer fake it.

This is only to get people used to the idea, so they can expand upon it in the coming years. Classic boiling the frog slowly strategy.