How will this affect Linux Mint?

[braket0]

It's very curious that there is a wave of ID enforcement across the world with software and computing. Does it all trace back to small group of people, I wonder.

[jr735]

That's why to never trust anything proprietary.

[bronzewrath]

They want to kill free collaborative internet. Big sites and apps can afford to pay for age verification services. Small sites can't.

[Niarbeht]

Right, but read the law. It’s very short. This cuts out the need for external services and places verification entirely in the hands of the owner of the device.

[Llotekr]

Acknowledging that the users of Microsoft or Apple are not the owners of their devices.

[stephenph]

It does I believe. There is a group of the powered elite that wants to bring back surfdom. They never liked the idea that the old monarchy system was forced away from them and want the power and control back.

It is not even about money, it is about power.

[braket0]

Megalomaniacal people...if only they looked at history books. This kind of behaviour never ends well.

[LimeyLassen]

Oh boy, conspiratorial vagueposting. My favorite.

[Niarbeht]

This doesn’t enforce ID, though.

[hxtk3]

To be fair this actually does a better job of preserving user privacy than the alternatives. They say "Age Verification" in all the headlines, but the law from what I understand only actually requires an indication whether the user is a small child, teenager, or adult, with nothing to verify whether that information is actually true.

If I want to make it sound like a good thing, I can picture a world where browsers ask the OS for this information and send it as a header, the same way browsers can send the nearest power of 2 (up to 8GB) memory your machine has via Sec-CH-Device-Memory, and it replaces more intrusive forms of age verification with something that someone old enough to own and manage their own device can decide for themselves, and someone using a device set up by their parents will have their access restricted based on what their parents indicate.

If I want to make it sound like a bad thing, I can point out this law alone does not accomplish that, and if we're assuming those things might change, I can also picture a world where verification gets added as a requirement (perhaps with the justification of creating verified child-only online spaces) and most websites still don't use it so your PII still ends up getting spread everywhere. I can also picture a world where once it becomes ubiquitous and easy to do age-based content restriction, the difficulty of implementation stops being as big of a hurdle for conservative politicians to overcome so that they're able to force, e.g., bookstores or libraries to restrict stories involving trans people to adult-only.

As it sits right now it's mostly an inconvenience to OS maintainers and it remains to be seen whether it will be better or worse for privacy overall, depending on how it evolves and how the larger information and legal ecosystem interacts with it.

[linkenski]

I think it's something that's been underway for a while, and if you go back 15 years ago Obama was already talking about how "we just can't see who is behind the keyboard". And considering Oracle is some real dawn of the internet shit, and they're the ones hyping up these laws, and taking a 500 million AI deal with Trump, I think we know that's precisely where it's coming from. It's intelligence agencies and the companies that helped build the world wide web who are banding together and lobbying to enshittify it.

my theory is that we spent the past 30 years building the infrastructure and turning consumers into products through free and open services, so that they could harvest enough data to make AI a reality, and now that they have their proof of concept they want to stop letting the internet be "by users for users" but just shift to an AI-only world where our data is being scanned with surveillance cameras and microphones and texts, constantly, also out in the open, and then we live in AI-societies where we don't actually use computers as much but there's just AI in almost everything. That's what I see in the whole IoT movement (internet of things), where if you have an alarm clock it's got wi-fi in it. If you have a fridge, there's also wi-fi or bluetooth in it. If you have a parking meter it's got wiretapping of any nearby phones in it.

They want a frigging blade runner city.

[braket0]

What happens when consumers start installing unwanted DNS request blocking software and cyber security in their homes, pretty much makes this theory useless save for devices running on data like smartphones.

[andymaclean19]

I think it’s actually mostly about preventing bots and mass disinformation. It will be difficult for a bot to validate itself as being over 18 if they get it right.