Nice of them to push everyone to Linux.

Not gonna matter when apps and services start blocking Linux, or even worse, should this shit creep up the chain to the ISP level and should ISPs start requiring an Apple, Google, or MS OS just to get online to begin with.

That’s when I buy a LoRa array and a ham license.

The thing about the Internet is that anyone can be an ISP and any devices can be networked. If consumer ISPs become gatekeepers, we can network without them. And then we can tunnel encrypted data over the official devices that can’t be fully locked down.

… You can just be your own ISP? Is that, like, an actual thing one can do, or more a last ditch hypothetical thing that’s technically possible, but realistically not doable?

Yeah, just like you can run your own SMTP service and exchange e-mail, or… could 25 years ago before the big players froze all the small players out of the big network pool. You can set up your own internet, your own e-mail network, etc. but the Facebooks, Whats Apps, Apples and Googles of the world will lock your internet out of their internet.

Pretty much.

/someone who runs their own SMTP service.

But that’s a good thing and the whole point? You can use the big tech internet and all their services, or you can use the non big tech internet and not use their services.

when I buy a LoRa array and a ham license.

And talk to who? You (and I) and the 0.001% can ham it up, but the rest of the world will be living in a different bubble.

They already are though.

Well Meshcore only recently arrived here, but you can still reach Latvia from southern Finland. Not completely effortlessly though.

And talk to who? You (and I) and the 0.001% can ham it up, but the rest of the world will be living in a different bubble.

And just talk btw, no bandwidth for anything else

This isn’t how I thought we’d return to the good ole days of the internet, but hey, maybe BBSes can make a comeback.

Talk to like-minded people - like you and me here, sitting on Fediverse, discussing tech. Help set family and friends up with access. That’s what I do today with my Matrix server.

The rest of the world rarely have anything good to say.

Help set family and friends up with access.

that’s a dead end when all people are interested in is tiktok and amazon

ie. not interested in you? I guess you won’t need a way to communicate then (sorry, though).

I’d like to kick most of the world out of my bubble anyway. Most people just annoy and depress me.

What’s stopping the FCC or your country’s equivalent from locking down HAM regulations?

That’s an interesting one actually. If they licked down HAM regulations, they’d lose their relief valve/last line of defense.

It’s not that some idiotic government couldn’t do it, but if they did then they’d lose what control they currently have AND be totally screwed of anything went wrong.

You’re not making a single point for why trump wouldn’t do this on a whim because some corporate asshole smiled at him and praised him.

LoRaWAN and HaLOW WiFi don’t need HAM licenses unless you’re just being prepared!

I’m looking to setup Meshcore myself for a 900MHz setup.

Yeah; the HAM is a “next step” thing for if they lock down the microwave band somehow.

But also, a HAM license is required to operate LoRa at higher power broadcast, at least in my country. At under 10km range low bandwidth, it isn’t currently needed.

OK gotcha. I thought regulations were pretty standard across Europe and North America. I didn’t realize LoRa itself could get beyond 10km but that’s maybe bc I’ve been looking at consumer grade stuff.

Enjoy your upload/download speeds in the kbps on a clear day…

I like the way you’re thinking, but realistically that won’t replace the internet. You might be able to run lightweight messenger apps and forums that way, but updating software? Downloading media? Not likely.

People in densely populated areas can probably daisy-chain intranets over wifi to form makeshift mesh networks, but transferring data over distances like if you’re maintaining a software repo mirror would require some other solution. The best I can think of is physically running USB drives between different server locations to keep the mirrors up-to-date.

Of course you can use the radio to coordinate, like reaching out and telling people where to bring their USB to get a copy of your repo. Or getting enough people in one area to mesh their wifi extenders to create an intranet.

My fear is that personal devices will be super expensive and out of reach for most people and the only devices available will be subscription run and cloud served only. Enfeebled portable device and no power to own or even run anything locally. Locked in! No way out.

That is why the tech bros are going all in on the datacenters and burning books. Setting fire to the bridge as they cross.

Ai is just the excuse and the manufactured scarcity of hardware is the weapon that they hope to use to hold us hostage.

Damn, this is exactly my fear as well

People will just pretend to be on Windows and give whoever asks fabricated information that looks legit (probably because it’s reverse engineered from an actual Windows). FOSS is way stronger than you think.

Aren’t most servers running linux?

Linux ain’t gonna save you. The major distros rolled over at speed of LIGHT when this shit started popping off earlier in the year. I was disgusted and appalled at how fast many of the major FOSS players caved in. You’re going to need to move to BSD or Haiku or something.

Which major distros rolled over? AFAIK only systemd - used by the large majority of distros - added a field in some config json related to age. It’s not being used ATM anyway.

systemd, A Microsoft project.

It’s not a Microsoft project, stop being ridiculous.

It was a Redhat project, which is now wholly owned by IBM.

You miss the point of Linux. Even if major distros roll over, there will be other distros that don’t. If there is a demand for a distro with specific use case, it will be created and released by somebody. The major distros are only popular and major because they serve the needs of the majority. When they don’t, they won’t be major or popular.

What is stopping me from paying a homeless dude to help me set up my computer by using their face?

His priors.

That’s why you’ve got to find a fresh one. /s

Well that’s one way to increase people using cash.

My problema isn’t the age verification, but the privacy. But how to solve it the age without leaking data to third party servers?

how to solve it the age without leaking data to third party servers?

Really easily. There are multiple possible options, not all equally easy, but the best option for privacy is also the easiest.

You don’t do true age verification. You mandate that operating systems and browsers work out a parental controls API and require apps and websites support that API. Then you ask (if you really want, you could demand, but I’d prefer to ask or suggest) parents to ensure their kids’ devices are configured correctly. When a user tries to access an age-restricted site, it calls an API in their browser, which calls an API in the OS, which returns a simple true/false value based on whether or not the current profile is configured to be old enough to access it.

Adults don’t have to do anything to prove they are adults. Merely the fact that they were able to buy a device that they control and didn’t get configured as a child is the proof.

More complicated solutions if you really insist on having true age verification could involve blinded signatures. I can explain in more detail if people are interested, but the slightly simplified TL;DR is that you have a system where the user goes to a trusted age verifier (my preference is for governments to do this themselves rather than farm it out to private companies, but either works). They do the age verification using ID, face recognition, whatever, and send the user a special token that they can use to prove they were age verified but which the site can’t use to determine any personal details about the user. Meanwhile the age verifier doesn’t know what site the age verification was just done for.

the fact that they were able to buy a device that they control and didn’t get configured as a child is the proof

That would just move the burden of age verification onto retailers.

Not necessarily. It puts it where it belongs: on parents. Parents who buy computers and phones for their kids have the responsibility of supervising their use. My own preference is that this would be something that parents are encouraged to use through public education campaigns.

But yes, depending of the level of strictness, it could also be enforced at point of sale. A fairly standard practice. We’re already used to it with alcohol, cigarettes, knives. Heck, it’s already done when buying a SIM for your phone. It has the advantage of preserving the most important part of privacy—the link between the person and their activity. The phone store knows you bought a phone and that you’re an adult, but they have no idea what sites or apps you’re using.

Televisions have had similar age restriction technology built-in for a while now.

Search for “EU digital wallet”

The answer is actually fairly simple and easier to implement than ID collection.

My family for example, is all on apple products. So my kids are all under my family as kids in iCloud. With that information any web browser has more than enough information to just send a header saying “No porn or non-age suitable things to this device, please” as a header

It mostly respects privacy while putting the onus of not serving non age appropriate things to the service provider that can serve the non age appropriate thing.

Instead we are going for collecting IDs because some idiots want to strip anonymity and even bigger idiots don’t know how to setup devices for their children

I don’t want that either. I’d like to be the one determining what’s age-suitable. If I haven’t denied access for my 14 year old to access worldofwarcraft.com, then some legislator shouldn’t be able to say “adults use chat so block them in case someone says the word shit”.

I’m not even sure if this is a problem with “idiots” not knowing how to set up devices for their children as much as it is the same old moral panic. “I don’t like how some people are parenting their children! Certain words are bad and should be blocked! LGBT content is adults only! Kids shouldn’t be aware of what’s going on in Gaza!”

Thats great, the design of that still gives you the parent the ability to decide that. You just have to take responsibility.

The problem is that the services are asking for age verification, but to do that, you need to supply them personal information, and the way the information is handled is opaque. You’re handing highly sensitive information to a private company that, more often than not, cannot be trusted to handle that information responsibly for the singular purpose they’re tasked with.

One solution would be an official government service which supplies this information and nothing else. We have “strong identification service” in Finland, they supply your identifying information to government services and businesses that need to have the actual information on record, while you see which information gets shared. There’s no technical reason this service couldn’t just supply “Is this person 18+? Yes/No” and absolutely nothing else, even anything tying this person to any identifier.

Actually, if age verification would become a legal requirement, I’d expect the technical side to be exactly that. I frankly can’t believe the UK half-assed this stuff and went “whatever, let private providers use whatever voodoo they can come up with to make age verification happen”.

I frankly can’t believe the UK half-assed this stuff and went “whatever, let private providers use whatever voodoo they can come up with to make age verification happen”.

Do you not have corruption in Finland?

Belgium’s user verification app was built by a consortium of local banks and ISPs, most of which have politicians or ex-politicians on their boards.

we don’t have corruption in finland. we only have “hyvä veli -verkostot” which means “dear brother networks”

they might or might not be the exact same thing, but who knows

i need old thinkpad

Data hoard enough shit to get you through however many decades you have left and get off grid.

That’s literally the only solution that’s going to be left.

Not sure that is going to be a solution either. Have you seen HDD prices lately?

In the end, corporate buyers are cornering the market for self-use technology. Once the consumer market is gone, and habits change, there may be no going back since a new subscription market will be built and self-perpetuating. So I hope the AI bubble pops before that happens.

Have you seen the capacity of a phone with cracked screen, lately? Slap Syncthing on it, if you can’t be bothered with PostmarketOS, for a cheap, low-power, solar compatible backup solution or a Kiwix server or something. I ran an email server on one for years. People toss out amazing things these times.

www.projectnomad.us

Can I just have a dumbphone and an offline computer that can run eu4? Id be pretty set. If I could get podcasts somehow though, I’d miss my podcasts, but I could live without.

If we are adding age verification, can we please accept that AI age should be calculated for each version separately? So the ChatGPT version X is only 2 years old and should only be allowed to watch Teletubbies

You can’t demand anything from open source becasue I can just change the demands myself. Linux is free from this nonsense.

What I’m worried about is whether we’ll be able to connect to anything else. With open source, sure you can remove age gates, but with device attestation coming to a device near you, you won’t be he able to log into your favorite game or website.

Its already like that with CloudFlare randomly blocking my Firefox on Linux install occasionally.

That’s why local networks are beginning to pop up. We’re working on a scaled-down version of Internet for the kids in our estate. So far, it’s to control what they have access to, and to provide them with a safe social network. But I can see this growing to localised “Internet” instances for everybody.

Yes, and how many people are going to go change the Linux kernel for their distro to rip out age verification ad-hoc?

Let’s just focus on the <0.001% of the population who might have the knowledge and skills to do so. How many of that absolutely minute portion are capable of spending the time and effort to achieve that?

It’s extremely naive to expand your superiority complex to assume that you won’t be affected by this while ignoring almost everyone else that will.

Some distro from a country outside the Epstein class’ jurisdiction will do that for them.

only until device attestation does not exist on the web. google has already tried to make it a thing, and the public backlash only caused them to continue development in chrome on android

And you are copy/pasting the same comment because…? 🤔

copy pasting? what?

oh, probably a network error. I did not do it intentionally

Lol, i just read this and was about to send you the screen shots. All good man, I was just really curious, haha.

only until device attestation does not exist on the web. google has already tried to make it a thing, and the public backlash only caused them to continue development in chrome on android

Y’all just cannot fathom how completely most people do not care until it directly impacts them personally.

Shit even when it does impact them directly they still do nothing but accept it, while whining about it.

Meanwhile the French

People need to teach their kids about empathy

Or just use a sensible OS that you control.

Lol, thinking this won’t come for the Linux kernel is laughably naive.

Thinking that the free open-source software (FOSS) community will not find a way to work around whatever comes their way is the pure essence of ignorance. Remember when crypto was export restricted? Yeah, it got exported no problem. Only FOSS users had strong crypto outside the US.
If they try to repeat this with age restrictions, well, I use Gentoo and will probably be able to just put in a number which the OS then reports to whoever asks. Aren’t we all born on 1970-01-01?

Thinking that the FOSS community can’t get locked out of all modern (next gen) AMD/Intel class processors is naive.

Most servers and half the phones run Linux. Linux will not be locked out by any CPU maker. It would be suicide to do so.

How long do you think it would take for “special industrial licenses” to be required to get “Linux accessible” CPUs?

Actually, I expect that to not happen at all. Jurisdictions in the US already started to exempt FOSS OSes from age restriction stuff.

But if they actually try… look at how well prohibitions worked in the past - even when the prohibited thing was legitimately harmful and outlawing it made actual sense. When there is demand there will be supply. You can still get the absolutely worst drugs in the US. Surely it would be easier to get unlocked CPUs into that country than deadly drugs.

And if it really became impossible to get western CPUs that can run Linux inside the US… I could still just switch to Chinese hardware because like most people I luckily am outside the US. China is catching up.

I don’t think it’s coming, but if they really do “go there” what it will look like is: extreme tariffs on “open” processors, $1000 for a Raspberry Pi where you can get a new Intel Core NUC class system for $500. And, IMO, it would be worth the premium for the freedom of operation, but, then, you’ve also painted a target on your forehead by being one of “those nutjobs” who are willing to pay so much more for something that “only criminals need.”

I will say: the US is more likely to take away our right to free computing before they take away our right to privately own firearms.

Buying new ultra-low-performance hardware makes no sense even in that scenario. PCs can last decades. People in the US would just hoard used components. And piracy still exists even though there was real effort to end it. So I guess the jailbreaking/right-to-repair community would eventually get around the limitations.
There are plenty of examples where the absolutely strictest regimes tried to restrict their citizens’ access to foreign goods. And black markets always won.

The firearm situation is a bit exceptional though. Being armed might make resistance a bit more viable once a large percentage of the population stops fighting each other over whether futanari are men or women.

PCs can last decades.

They can, but how much of that longevity is in your control? My last round of Intel NUCs all died within a month of each other at 4.5 years of age - I have NUCs that I ran for 6 years before them that still work fine, but that’s now 11 year old hardware and remarkably underpowered compared to today’s options…

People in the US would just hoard used components.

Some would, some already do. Most?

And piracy still exists even though there was real effort to end it.

How real? Piracy still exists because it was too politically costly to end it.

I guess the jailbreaking/right-to-repair community would eventually get around the limitations.

They already do for the current limitations. How big is that community vs the broad market?

black markets always won.

Did they? When I traveled through the former East Germany in 1990 my bicycle was 40 years of design above and beyond anything any East German had seen before. I stayed with a “wealthy” retiree in his apartment filled with the latest/greatest of what he could obtain on that black market: a reel-to-reel tape player, a 9" color TV, basic Hi Fi gear - nothing resembling a computer.

The firearm situation is a bit exceptional

Thankfully.

Thinking that any modern CPU vendor would lock out Linux is not naive, it’s the demonstration of pure ignorance and utter lack of knowledge in the world of technology.

a number of distros have said they will never capitulate. Zorin, for example.

www.gnu.org/philosophy/

Stallman calls this “Service as a Software Substitute” (SaaSS): users operate weak “thin clients” while the real computing happens on someone else’s server. He argues this creates dependence and oppression because users cannot control, inspect, modify, or reliably access the software handling their data. He develops this argument in “What Does That Server Really Serve?” (2010).

Fuck RMS.

I’m burned out being online anymore. It was fun and now it’s not. It’s just stressful

It seems bleak but there are millions of sites and many of them aren’t going to add age checks.

And there are also self-hostable alternatives although figuring out how to install and use it can be difficult. But I’m getting used to docker it’s a lot easier than when I first started.

I think all this regulation will make the internet small again. The pendulum will swing away from this terrible direction we’ve gone in. I’m okay with it. Let them ruin it. I know that there will still be places to go.

I just run my own internet now, completely restricted to my own hosted websites and services. With hookers and blackjack.

Actually, forget the internet

every goddamn thing needs an update or a login or some feature was deleted or now this thing cant talk to that thing. it is unbelievably exhausting. i dream of becoming a hermit in the woods somewhere.

I hope I. The future, laptops bring Linux by default

I remember when consumers had power because they refused to buy things. Tech has power because no one will go without. Don’t buy a new phone, computer, tablet, game. Make do with what you already have. Stop approving of everything Tech is doing by buying all their stuff regardless of the enshitification and spyware. Learn how to use cash again or whatever is necessary to stop empowering Tech.

buy refurbished if possible

I remember when consumers had power because they refused to buy things.

they still do, it’s just that the markets are supersaturated and not enough people have the integrity or willpower to stop themselves from financially supporting corporate interests.

They’re required to function in society

that’s not true, at least not yet.

but we’ll get there soon.

What’s the consequences look like of nanny-state-ing everyone who buys spoon-fed mainstream products, yet allowing an out for people “smart” enough to configure their own systems with Linux/open source? (“Smart”, I don’t have a better word for people who don’t require government parenting) This is of course making the wild assumption there are in fact people who need the government to parent them/their own children, of undetermined proportion of the population. The more cynical take being it has never been about the children, but I’d like to explore the absurdity that it could be. E.g., allowing an out surpresses pushback from the motivated, where the resistance-path-of-least-resistance is personal exemption

been saying this for over a decade.

nobody cared then, nobody cares now.

the day I can no longer ensure my privacy is the day I abandon tech completely.

the day I can no longer live daily without technology is the day I abandon society.

Assuming age ID wasn’t invasive and stupid to begin with, there could be other ways to set it that would be much less invasive for many devices, such as setting an “IS_ADULT” flag on devices (or even an associated account) at the time of registration.

“Hey Mr Smith, it looks like you’ve never registered a device on our phone network before but you’ve got a driver’s license from 1979 so we’ll just set the age code on your account aaaand, done”.

Then you get a sheet of random scratch-off AV codes pulled from a drawer that you can use on other shit, similar to how VPN providers do to separate payment vs login. Nothing should ever say who you are or even your age, just “hey this person is old enough, fuck off and let them at it”.

It’s still annoying, but less privacy invasive. And it’ll never fly because what they really want is to tie all communication back to a person not just an age.

People aren’t burning enough buildings down

Chronicles of a death foretold.