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Duke Nukem

Member

Registered: 2018-11-07

Posts: 66  

Age Verification

How, if at all, is Devuan going to react to the movements in age verification? 

In some jurisdictions, including Texas and California, it is to be a legal requirement by next year (AFAIR) to put some sort of flag in the operating system to indicate the user's age, and in Brazil it became so just yesterday - the extremely short notice (a couple of weeks) shows how little politicians understand tech. The end goal, presumably, is for all websites and software to have an age rating so that the OS will block them if they do not match the flag in the OS. I don't want to go into it all here, but Lunduke gives an update in the YouTube video below.

The penalties for non-compliance in Brazil are astronomical, $millions per infringement, meaning per user! That is similar to the penalties under the related UK Online Safety Act. It is not yet clear what the big players, Microsoft, Apple, and Android, are doing about it. Some journalist asked Microsoft and the PR person they spoke to seemed unaware of it, and taken aback!

Seems that Ubuntu and some others are complying under some protest, while some small distros are simply putting up a notice saying something like "Not for use in Brazil". 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1q8OFEBt0Y

tux_99

Member

Registered: 2025-06-17

Posts: 111  

Re: Age Verification

Is Devuan a legal entity? If yes in which country? If not, who are those countries making these laws supposed to hold responsible? Certainly not individual devs located all over the world and often not even easily identifiable.

In practice these local laws only have relevance for companies or legal entities who have some kind of presence in the territories affected by these laws.

but I guess some kind of disclaimer such as "Not for use in Brazil/California/whatever" doesn't hurt and is easily done but IMHO that's not really necessary as the standard FOSS licenses disclaimer ("THIS PROGRAM IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.") should already cover that.

With operating systems that don't come preinstalled on a device it is ultimately the user who decides to download and install it who is responsible for it, not the creators, as the creators cannot know where it will be installed and how it will be used.

This is nothing new really, for example there has always been the issue of software patents which apply to the US but not to many other parts of the world and non-commercial non-US based distros have always ignored these local US laws, as they don't apply to them.

Last edited by tux_99 (Today 15:36:42)

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“Either the users control the program – or the program controls the users” Richard Stallman

tux_99

Member

Registered: 2025-06-17

Posts: 111  

Re: Age Verification

BTW, for those more interested in removing any age tracking and compliance software from their installs which some distros are already discussing and implementing the following initiative has been started:
https://github.com/AntiSurv/oss-anti-surveillance

OSS Anti Surveillance

Tracking, documenting, opposing, removing, and reversing OS-level surveillance mechanisms in free software distributions.
Mission

OSS Anti Surveillance exists to document and resist attempts to turn free software distributions into surveillance, classification, or policy-enforcement endpoints.

This project opposes:

    OS-level age verification
    age signaling and age-bracket APIs
    client-side scanning and device-side inspection
    metadata and portal layers repurposed for compliance
    downstream inheritance of surveillance mechanisms
    geo-fencing users out of free software in response to coercive law

Free software distributions must remain general-purpose systems under user control. They must not become infrastructure for categorizing, filtering, or monitoring people on behalf of states, platforms, or third-party services.

Non-negotiable position

This project does not exist to help design a cleaner implementation path for surveillance mechanisms in free software. It exists to document them, oppose them, and prepare their removal.

The central error in many of the implementation discussions tracked here is not a particular daemon, schema, API, portal, or packaging choice. The central error is accepting the premise that general-purpose free operating systems should be discussing how to build these mechanisms at all.

That premise is rejected here.

No implementation path is acceptable. Not in a user record. Not in account metadata. Not in a portal. Not in an installer. Not as a minimal age bracket. Not as an opaque token. Not as a temporary compromise. Not as a jurisdiction-specific feature.

Last edited by tux_99 (Today 14:44:12)

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“Either the users control the program – or the program controls the users” Richard Stallman