The harm this law aims to address is grave and real. For the 99% of the population who aren’t compiling their own kernels, the ability to “age-lock” a child account to prevent young children from accessing doomscroll brainrot on Instagram is an amazing and valuable feature.

I disagree even with this premise. I reject the idea that it’s legitimate to want to keep young people from seeing, watching, reading things that they actively want to see/watch/read simply because we have a vague idea that “it’s not good for them”.

My parents too unfortunately agreed with your idea, and I remember being a (teenaged) minor and worried that my parents might find out too much about what I’ve been reading and doing on the Internet and punish me for it, I don’t wish that on anyone who happened to be born after me. I hereby resolve that if I ever have children, they will not have to worry about this. I think it is a very good thing that modern technology makes it somewhat harder for parents to oppress their children in such a manner.

But there’s nothing inherently wrong with OS developers implementing such a feature if that is what their customers want. There’s a lot wrong with the government mandating it.

The principled “linux source code is free-speech, and no government mandates can compel changes” stance is quite divorced from reality.

No, it’s an exactly correct legal analysis; at least morally, and should be legally.

Are crypto-exchange founders likewise free to implement whatever fraudulent schemes they like, as their source code is their speech to freely dictate?

I’m not sure what scenario you have in mind. Distributing software (even software that can be used for illegal activities) is free speech. Running and using software isn’t (automatically) speech, it’s an action that can be declared to be criminal. Anyone can use Thunderbird to send phishing emails, but it would be absurd to prosecute the developers of Thunderbird for that.

I agree with the idea that a user account with an age field is less bad than actual (biometric or ID-based) age verification.

The rest of your post is so full of meaningless buzzwords that it’s impossible to write anything coherent about it.

With chat control we actually have to distinguish two different things that people sometimes confuse:

• voluntary chat control (“chat control 1.0”), which is currently already the law in the EU
• mandatory chat control (“chat control 2.0”), proposed in 2022

Voluntary chat control is about letting operators of communication services voluntarily scan messages for certain illegal activity (without this constituting a violation of data protection laws). This doesn’t break encryption and isn’t a part of a war on general purpose computing. While there are many good arguments against it, it’s not especially catastrophic. It’s a detail of business regulation.

Mandatory chat control is about forcing them to do so, which must necessarily break encryption and impose limits on software freedom. This is what is most important to oppose.

The most recent win ended up rejecting even (most) voluntary chat control, which is a good sign that mandatory chat control won’t get a majority either.

Yes; recent news have made me somewhat optimistic that the resistance to it is winning though.

Age verification laws currently look like a much greater danger to freedom.

2000s: war on general purpose computing because of copyright

2020s: war on general purpose computing because of child protection

In the 2000s the forces of freedom mostly won, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital_Television_Promotion_Act didn’t become law. So far it seems that we are currently losing. :(

I like the JetBrains IDEs too from a purely practical perspective, but I would still rather use FOSS VSCodium than a nonfree JetBrains IDE. Those that are FOSS are a different story.

I don’t hate Microsoft, I hate nonfree software. I happily use free software developed by Microsoft, eg VSCodium.

Yes, I think it’s realistic if we look at how things in computing have changed even just within the last few decades.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-200901-202603 in early 2009, IE was at ~65%, Chrome at <2%, we’ve gone from that to “IE does not exist” and Chrome in the same spot IE was then

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share#monthly-200901-202603 in early 2009, Windows was at ~94%, now it is at ~26% with Android having taken the top spot, even that is just at ~37%, so there is now no dominant operating system overall

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide#monthly-200901-202603 even disregarding mobile devices, Windows has fallen from ~95% to ~61% in that time frame

and maybe I’m just old but early 2009 doesn’t seem an enormously long time ago somehow

that has already happened tbh

The way I remember it, on old phones before smartphones, speakerphone was a very obscure feature that many users didn’t know how to turn on. I certainly didn’t (I was a child at the time) unless someone showed me.

On modern smartphones it’s very easy, maybe that should be changed again. 😁

I use speakerphone a lot in my own home too when no one is around. It’s just more comfortable to hold my phone in front of me instead of to my ear. Never in public unless specific other people need to hear it.

I’m not sure if that law will pass/has passed,

It has already passed the legislature and been signed into law, but not become operative yet, won’t until 2027-01-01.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043

I am not. I am from a country whose constitution starts with the statement that it is a democratic republic.

I would find it very sad if they were a majority, anywhere. :(

I really didn’t hear anything about it until recently

Yes, I expressed the same sentiment here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/55959326/24302621

Is our entire information “ecosystem” so broken that we only pay attention to bad things after they’ve already happened, not before when there is still a chance to stop them?!

OK, that’s about the elaboration I was looking for…

Somehow I don’t think this is the central reason. I think governments are perfectly capable of doing bad things completely without billionaires having an interest in it. It especially doesn’t explain things like the California law that will regulate how we can or cannot program operating systems (hint: software code is a form of speech, meaning that this ought to be struck down as a violation of free speech), because no age verification services are involved in that.

Billionaires certainly are people, but these laws don’t even serve billionaires in any meaningful sense, so that’s hardly an explanation without more elaboration.

In my youth I was taught that democracy meant that the government served the people.

What do any of these laws have to do with serving the people? Do they have anything to do with the will of the people?

I miss the days when making money from posting things on the Internet wasn’t really a (widespread) thing. In the earliest days of YouTube there was no partner program, everyone who uploaded anything there did so out of enthusiasm; if we still had that, maybe we’d have fewer videos overall, but no one would have a reason to post AI slop or other low-quality videos just for profit.

It used to be that similar (and equally bad) ideas were getting traction because of copyright law, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital_Television_Promotion_Act

Now other excuses for the same thing have been invented. I wonder which will be next.

This debate is about as old as the existence of free licenses. I doubt anyone will have anything new to say in this thread.

One aspect that isn’t raised very much is that for a company to maintain software (including their own fork of any software however licensed) costs developer time (= money). It may be cheaper to contribute back anyway, no matter the license, just in order to outsource that effort. If we are talking about software where this is true, companies have an incentive to work with the existing maintainers even if they aren’t legally obliged to.