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Linux distro founder here (stagex) I will never be compelled to implement this, and would never merge it. Every release requires quorum signatures by an inter
by lrvick 2mo ago
Linux distro founder here (stagex)
I will never be compelled to implement this, and would never merge it.
Every release requires quorum signatures by an international maintainer team, and the distro is designed to work offline-first, with some variants not even supporting network drivers in the kernel, so Illinois legislators can eat shit.
- otterley 2mo agoIf you're in the USA or plan to visit someday, I would recommend you speak with your attorney before making such commitments.
- lrvick 2mo agoI am in the USA, but I literally cannot comply because by design it is not possible for me to ship changes without the international maintainer team agreeing to them. And Illinois legislators have no power over them. Also, we are not a company. We are an independent community owned project. Our code is free speech and I will burn the world down to defend that right. Truly I dare someone to try to take me to court over this. Would be great publicity for our coercion resistant approach. They might as well try to mandate code changes to a blockchain and mandate the whole world host them.
- rsyring 2mo agoThank you.
- mebizzle 2mo agoThank you for fighting the good fight.
- EA-3167 2mo agoI respect your principled stance on one hand, while on the other I’m amazed that someone as successful as you hasn’t learned that logic doesn’t dictate how governments work. Don’t make a target of yourself, there are countless ways for a government to make your life miserable.
- lrvick 2mo agoI will never show fear to tech-illiterate bullies trying to compromise constitutionally protected rights. That is how freedoms get quietly lost. Users need to see that the people in positions of influence in FOSS projects they trust are not afraid of this bullshit. I -hope- someone is stupid enough to take a case like this to court so we can establish some much needed case law here. These overreaches deserve to be contested.
- otterley 2mo ago> constitutionally protected rights Wait, which constitutionally protected right is that? I'm an attorney and constitutional scholar and am particularly interested in what right you believe is being violated here.
- misphrasing 2mo agoCode is speech. Forcing someone to implement something is legally-compelled speech, assuming no complicating factor like commerce.
- otterley 2mo agoThat argument has been going on for decades, and has had few victories in the court system. The DMCA, which prohibits trafficking in anticircumvention devices, even though there's a lot of code in them, is still alive and well.
- lrvick 2mo agoAnd the DMCA has been rightfully weakened to the point that archive.org has every Nintendo Gamecube game ever made hosted for the public, for years, uncontested. So too will these other silly laws go I expect.
- iamnothere 2mo ago
- otterley 2mo agoThere are a lot of remedies available to a court with respect to a recalcitrant party, ranging from an injunction to remove your product from the market to fines and imprisonment. Again, speak with your attorney. Do not try to "hack the law" yourself; many who have tried have regretted it later.
- lrvick 2mo agoNo need to hack the law. Our FOSS code is constitutionally protected free speech and I would defend on those grounds. The technical design of the project just makes it so no one can force changes on the distro unwanted by the maintainer team regardless of any courtroom outcomes. Like, what if someone made a law that said Bitcoin nodes must KYC? They could make the law I guess, and the international network operators would just laugh at it.
- otterley 2mo agoThe concern here is probably with the shipping of the product (i.e. the binary artifacts), not the code itself. I can imagine a situation in which you could continue to make the code available, but could not produce a shippable artifact from it that Illinoians could access.
- lrvick 2mo agoIf they are successful at doing so, then those distribution methods were too brittle. I expect in response one of the maintainers outside US jurisdiction of their own volition publishes via bittorrent, tor hidden services, and embedding blobs in public blockchains with no help from me. Then the problem the legislators sought to solve just got a lot worse, while calling a lot of attention to how little power they actually have to control decentralized FOSS software projects. Of course another point of the project is building the entire thing from source code with deterministic results only takes a few hours. For many, this would be faster than downloading artifacts. It is not needed for maintainers to publish binaries at all. Publishing signatures on the expected hashes would suffice at worst.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- 28304283409234 2mo agoHoney, that just means you cannot ship.
- polski-g 2mo agoIf you're in the ninth circuit you're safe because of Bernstein v DoJ.
- DennisP 2mo agoIf you're in the sixth circuit you're even safer because of Junger vs Daley.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- otterley 2mo agoStop it. This is not something either of you are competent to provide legal advice about. Anyone concerned about this should consult a licensed attorney, not get advice from randos on HN.
- lrvick 2mo agoI for one found two new cases to read about, and appreciate their comments. Anyone should be free to research, discuss, and try to understand the law for themselves. Lawyers do not own the law. But if actually pulled into a courtroom, sure, get a lawyer.
- otterley 2mo ago> Anyone should be free to research, discuss, and try to understand the law for themselves. Lawyers do not own the law. This isn't mere research and discussion; it's suggesting an outcome (i.e., "you're safe[r]"). That crosses a line into advice. > But if actually pulled into a courtroom, sure, get a lawyer. By the time you get pulled into a courtroom, it is often far too late. The time to talk to an attorney is well before that, when you’re contemplating action. That is the main point I’ve been trying to make, and it seems you just don’t want to pay heed. Yes, you've said multiple times that you're not afraid of the consequences, but you'll forgive me if I don't believe you. History is replete with people who regretted their actions once prosecutorial actions were commenced and punishments meted out. Defending oneself is expensive, and convictions impact not just the guilty but also their career and family. Ultimately, it's your life and you have to live with the decisions you make. (And, possibly, your family, should you have one.) Your bluster and actions may not harm you in this specific instance because you’re involved with a project too small to attract a prosecutor’s attention, but it doesn’t make my caution any less valid. It may not persuade you, personally, but hopefully others who read this will get the message.
- greyface- 2mo agoGood news: the legislation doesn't target you as an individual. "Operating system provider" means a commercial or non-profit entity that controls the Internet-enabled device's operating system, including the design, programming, or supply of operating systems for the Internet-enabled devices.
- moffkalast 2mo agoSo OEMs will only be shipping Windows and that's more or less it.
- lrvick 2mo agoAnd it will be wiped immediately as usual, so sure whatever.
- imhoguy 2mo agoOr it will have some new TPM/SecureBoot guard rails to not let minors install unapproved systems. Think of children again ;)
- lrvick 2mo agoI specialize in TPM security and know plenty of ways to bypass it with physical access to consumer laptop hardware, and would gladly make that easy for the public if needed. But I hope they try this. It will be funny to watch the public humiliation of how hard it fails at scale.
- iamnothere 2mo agoSome of us hoard stacks of old computers (and lots of source code) in case they ever try this! ;)
- lrvick 2mo agoYou and me both.
- bryanlarsen 2mo agoRedHat/IBM does have an Illinois presence so will likely be compelled to add it to their distro, and will likely do it through systemd. So to avoid it getting into any consumer distro you'd have to ship a patch to remove it from systemd. This is probably all completely irrelevant to StageX since it's a distro designed to be used in containers, AFAICT.
- PunchyHamster 2mo agoIIRC systemd already started implementing some hooks for age verification API
- novafunc 2mo agosystemd added a field where users can add their date of birth. It's completely optional. It's not implementing age implementation, but can be used as a place to store a DOB in an age verification system.
- LukeShu 2mo agoNB that you could already add your own freeform fields; it just added that field to userdbctl and friends.
- Ferret7446 2mo agoUnfortunately that's too boring, so everyone posted the FUD about systemd implementing age verification and now everyone believes it. "A lie will make it around the world before the truth can put its pants on"
- cindyllm 2mo ago[dead]
- miohtama 2mo agoAFAIK they were implemented by Microsoft staff.
- bluGill 2mo agoThey can stop you from doing any work on the project. They can even fine or jail you for work done after the law takes affect that the international committee doesn't allow. Which is to say you can be forced to stop work. Though if you don't live in IL it is unclear how this affects you.
- EGreg 2mo agoGovernments can hire a hitman to go after you, if you say something wrong. So can international crime syndicates. Will this have a meaningful effect on chilling your speech? https://abcnews.com/amp/US/children-recruited-criminals-industrial-scale-europol/story?id=133762293 https://abcnews.com/amp/US/children-recruited-criminals-indu...
- lrvick 2mo agoPretty far fetched an Illinois legislator hires a hitman for a FOSS developer. But to humor you, if they did, the distro would carry right on, so they would be taking a lot of risk with no progress on their objective. I only sign like 1/3 releases these days so I am replaceable now. Decentralized control and decentralized trust was the whole point of stagex.
- etc-hosts 2mo agoRepresentatives of the US government threaten to drone bomb anyone they disagree with all of the time now
- lrvick 2mo agolol. I can only aspire to be someone so effective in my goals for furthering personal freedoms that a government feels compelled to drop a bomb on me to make it stop.
- lrvick 2mo agoSome time in jail or having to fight a fine for refusing to implement features in the constitutionally protected free speech code they author? If that is what it takes. I do not want to go to jail, but if that is the only way to get to an outcome where people have confidence they can not be forced to add unwanted code to open source projects, so be it. But that is a pointless thought experiment because it will never happen. I do not think anyone would be stupid enough to jail a FOSS developer for not agreeing to compelled speech, and if they did, an army of lawyers would be lining up to take the case I expect, with the full support of the public. It would be an insane thing to attempt. We must loudly push back on the chilling effects intended here. Our free speech to write or not write any code we want will not be compromised.
- Reason077 2mo ago> ”Linux distro founder here (stagex)… designed to work offline-first, with some variants not even supporting network drivers” If your OS doesn’t access the internet or isn’t intended to run browsers / social apps, then you are outside the scope of this legislation. That would be a bit like requiring a toaster to ask for your age before letting you operate it.
- lrvick 2mo agoBut someone could attach a GPU in the offline OS and use it to generate porn with local AI models! Oh no! How will we stop them?!
- amelius 2mo agoJust wait until all vendors are required to lock down their devices like Apple does. Apple has shown that it is possible, thanks Apple!
- lrvick 2mo agoHow many jailbreaks has Apple had now? I even have an Apple DRM bypass not public yet. We will be fine ;)
- username135 2mo agoi like the cut of your jib
- petcat 2mo ago> Linux distro founder here (stagex) What does it mean to "found" a Linux distro? Can you describe it?
- lrvick 2mo agohttps://stagex.tools https://stagex.tools
- anymouse123456 2mo agoTHIS. PLEASE THIS.
- koalak 2mo agoBrother you are doing the worlds work stopping this type of "law". If we don't like the law we keep doing the thing and enough people join and it gets changed to our liking.
- dorkydev 2mo agoThey'll just find a way to work around that then or blacklist and fine you
- lrvick 2mo agoI kind of hope they try. I would like to see them fail so publicly that no one ever has to be afraid of laws like this again.