These are active, ongoing discussions on the Qubes OS and Whonix Forum with various external references to forges, mailing lists, and MediaWiki instances of other Linux distributions across the Internet.
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Thank you for the link, I shared it in the Qubes OS Forum topic and provided attribution to your contribution.
What a disaster. People making laws with no concept of the implications.
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I will continue to provide updates to this topic as the Qubes team and Encrypted Support LP work (together) on developing a solution to address this issue.
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Well that’s… interesting. I am more open to age verification on algorithmic social media only than others on here, depending how it’s implemented, but I don’t know why you would want an OS based limitation logs age brackets.
“(b) “Age bracket data” means nonpersonally identifiable data derived from a user’s birth date or age for the purpose of sharing with developers of applications that indicates the user’s age range, including, at a minimum, the following:
(1) Whether a user is under 13 years of age.
(2) Whether the user is at least 13 years of age and under 16 years of age.
(3) Whether the user is at least 16 years of age and under 18 years of age.
(4) Whether the user is at least 18 years of age.“
We would hope linux devs are only requesting the minimum, at which point the 17 year old can select 4 and no one gets fined… Then every application in the official repositories gets this information for some reason? Having every application know it’s talking to a very honest 12 year old is safer somehow? If the 12 year old is smarter than me and learns how to compile programs before they’re in they’re multiple decades old, will that bypass it?
Maybe the intent is to make it so that the profile on a tablet is set up with an age bracket, and then, even if the profile has access to google play, California can ban them from downloading tiktok? That would be similar to a child profile with gated content, except California gets to decide what’s on it instead of the parents.
It seems like this will be limited impact on linux in any case. Fedora already knows I’m probably older than 17. The risk is maybe future expansion, like requiring applications to check the age category and declaring other applications black market applications, or punishing the kids who lie about their age like with tobacco and alcohol.
Also shared accounts are exempt:
“(g) This title does not impose liability on an operating system provider, a covered application store, or a developer that arises from the use of a device or application by a person who is not the user to whom a signal pertains.”
Overall it seems unnecessary when devices can already be locked down by the parents. They could have made child user a required type of user account instead, where the parents must manually approve new applications, to make it less confusing for parents to set up.
Am I misunderstanding anything?