I’m here spending my free time discussing this topic here, with my close network, and researching age verification laws so that people are informed. I don’t live in any of these states, so I have no influence on lawmakers.
For the conduent data breach that occurred in my state, I reported this to my State’s Attorney General. The response from the Attorney General was the most generic identity theft letter.
I don’t see a store item to fundraise and challenge this specific law. All they have said is the law is wrong, but have not taken any actions yet.
Other community rub distros have pulled out of such states, or have said the distro is not suitable for such states. If system 76 needs donations to fund the legal battle, I don’t mind buying some stickers or generic system 76 donation items.
I won’t do anything. But I’m also not demanding OTHERS to do anything. I’m also not shaming companies if they make a decision that is good for the survival of their business just because it doesn’t meet the standards of armchair revoluzzers.
Best I will do is find some workaround to make whatever that means more convenient for myself. For example, if the OS asks me at every login to enter my age, I hope there is a hack to prevent that. If i only have to enter my age at installation, I will just enter a fake age.
Humankind thanks you for your sacrifice. Sophie Scholl hasn’t contributed anything compared to you.
Anyway, interesting take by Rossmann. He does so much consumer rights stuff and IIRC he was behind a “clippy” protest to encourage people to boycott Microsoft. So he is okay with bringing financial pain to a company that he thinks is doing bad things, but he seems to have a real issue if that company doing bad things is small. I don’t know enough about why he wanted to bring pain to Microsoft (I’m sure the list of justifiable reasons is enormous) but I’m sure it differed somewhat from choosing to do business in a State and choosing to therefore comply with their bad law to do bad things. He’s concerned about the employees who might be fired from a small bad company doing bad things and says they should comply with bad laws to do bad things instead of fire employees, but doesn’t seem concerned if Microsoft has to fire some employees.
Maybe with Rossmann’s support, this small company doing bad things will become a large company doing bad things, and then he will try to bring financial pain to it in the future.
This issue has brought out some very interesting viewpoints.
I believe this is really salient. People are blowing this up like all Linux distros are going to be phoning home to the NSA but it doesn’t jive with the apparent reality of the bill.
It would be stupid for tech companies and open software consortiums to comply with the law of the land in Silicon Valley? That same argument was trotted out against GDPR… but eventually mostly everyone, including hobbyist webmasters, ended up in compliance.
I didn’t really read to much into it. Is it like “location” where the website can grab the users data to see where they are at. Except it grabs the users age instead? Because that seems like a new way to target ads. And an unsafe way to go about it. Even if the OS doesn’t talk to the browser. I am sure there will be new exploits to bridge that divide. I really can’t think of a way to implement such a thing in a safe way.
It just makes it hard for young enthusiasts. I probably tried over 100 operating systems before i turned 18. I was always trying out new flavors of linux.
I don’t believe I posted that. I think this is a serious existential threat packaged as a “just an age bracket” thing. Like this guy discusses. It’s not a small thing.
I believe you accidentally misquoted me for some reason.
You did post it, it’s an excerpt of the quote from the system76 engineer in your original post. It’s the 5th paragraph counting the link to the California legislation, 4th paragraph not counting the link.
S76’s distro is made for their hardware, and they can’t simply stop selling to California since it’s the largest economy in the US. You’re placing the blame on the wrong people.
If they wanted to fight it in court and pull out of California at the same time, they would need to pull in enough donations or extra sales to sustain ~5-8 employees+their legal fees for the entire duration of it, during a global recession. That is a very unrealistic goal and would be incredibly irresponsible toward their employees. Consider finding useful ways of supporting current legal efforts instead.
Companies hire and fire routinely, they shrink and the expand, but suddenly it’s just out of the question when there is good money to be made creating surveillance. Fascism (the partnership of the state and private companies) is just so profitable.
How is anyone making money by storing age in one of 4 bins for a Linux account? If we follow the money, where is it coming from and to whom does it flow? For what services? This is the equivalent of writing your legal first and last name in the standard create user prompt on Linux. It’s virtually useless…
It’s just a bit much to write off all public-private partnerships as Fascism (that’s a dreadfully reductive definition for a concept that is not well-defined even in political science!).
Because they’re doing that to comply with a State that makes that a requirement in exchange for access to its market, which produces more money. Which System76 has made clear is the reason they’re doing this.
They’ve also admitted they know this is being done so that they build infrastructure that will later be used for digital ID and not the downplayed version you’re peddling.
I remember western public laughing about requirement of the former USSR to register a typewriters. So we have a case of he who slays the dragon becomes one
