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Weird how the people who habitually complain about government are conspicuously silent when it delivers something they wanted.
by anigbrowl 2mo ago
Weird how the people who habitually complain about government are conspicuously silent when it delivers something they wanted.
- antonvs 2mo agoIt delivered an arbitrary exception to a stupid law. If all someone wanted was an exception for Linux, they don’t understand the problem with this law.
- cwillu 2mo ago“California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law — software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses are exempt”
- antonvs 2mo agoAre you really missing the point that badly? If you allow this pandering to satisfy you, you’re essentially supporting an age verification requirement for all other computing systems. So you didn’t think the requirement itself was a problem, you just wanted to make sure it didn’t affect you?
- cwillu 2mo agoIt's not an exemption “for linux”, and claiming it is and then accusing people who point out that it's very clearly not of missing the point is something else. Good day.
- antonvs 2mo agoWhat you’re doing is called derailing. I used the same language as in the OP title. Why aren’t you responding to that? You’re missing the point because you weren’t responding meaningfully to what I was saying, you’re using someone else’s choice of language to derail. > Good day. And here comes the passive aggression, true to form.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- edot 2mo agoYeah, this is fantastic. Should be top of the page. I’m honestly shocked, I’ve fully internalized that everything is corrupt and beholden to big corporations. Somehow, a victory! Looks like the Linux Foundation and EFF pushed back, but they’re not exactly big. Good job, California lawmakers!
- zoobab 2mo agoNot a victory, Android is still covered.
- qmarchi 2mo agoHard to argue that it's open source...
- catlikesshrimp 2mo agoGraphene should qualify. That would be a good incentive for kids to learn to root a mobile device and run graphene on it.
- harvey9 2mo agoI used the web based installer and it was so easy that we would be complaining the kids are not really learning anything by doing it!
- epihelix 2mo agoYou actually don't root a GrapheneOS device (sadly, imo, but this is one of GrapheneOS's peculiarities. If you want root, Lineage is your friend.)
- gmueckl 2mo agoAOSP itself shouldn't be.
- roenxi 2mo ago> Good job, California lawmakers! Is this serious or sarcasm? They passed a horrible law, now its an internally contradictory horrible law because apparently it isn't important enough to consistently enforce. So, you know. Why legislate it? There isn't much of an angle here that reflects well on Californian lawmakers, they're still supporting this authoritarian trend of de-anonymisation and rolling back free communication on the internet. They're just going to come back for linux later once the idea of legally mandated PII on account registration is normalised. Although I do see this "In addition, lawmakers inserted a new provision prohibiting anyone from requesting an age signal from an OS provider or app store unless required by law" so we seem to be entering a wild space where they're going to try and micromanage this in a weird way.
- squigz 2mo agoIndeed, this is very generous of them, and we should be thankful.
- catlikesshrimp 2mo agoSounds more like they did their job well, not that they are generous.
- missinglugnut 2mo agoWhat do you want people to say? "Yay, the terrible law that threatened to make free computing illegal has an exemption for Linux. Now we only have to deal with unwanted mandatory age verification on all our non-linux devices. I'm so happy."
- anigbrowl 2mo agoYes, learn to take a win when you get one. This is a very basic skill in politics.
- Pavilion2095 2mo agoThe age verification requirement wasn't dropped, what are you talking about? Linux getting an exemption isn't a win.
- anigbrowl 2mo agoIt is absolutely a win. If you can't see it as a win because you didn't get everything you wanted at once, then you're setting yourself up for a lifetime of disappointment. Big wins in politics (and most other things) are made out of a succession of smaller wins. Getting unanimous passage of something in a messy legislature is actually quite rare.
- throwawayqqq11 2mo agoThis is not wanted, its duct taping a bad idea even further and i half-wish MS/apple/co sue against it. This may cause lawmakers to bounce back in the wrong direction though.
- Frannky 2mo agoA lot of people are not stupid. Age verification is a backdoor for control. I read and did not even bother to comment, it's like yay, that horrendous thing they were trying to do now it's not applied to everyone. I'm also sorry for California, such a beautiful place and full of wonderful people. I hope it will recover one day.
- carodgers 2mo ago"Delivers something they wanted" is the most bizarre way possible to phrase "followed through with the majority of a reprehensible agenda and were forced to carve out an exception due to technical constraints and massive blowback."
- PowerElectronix 2mo agoThey shouldn't need to pass this if they didn't pass age verification at all. This is not a good thing, it's a very small patch for a very bad thing.
- colordrops 2mo agoThey didn't "deliver something we wanted". They decided NOT to fuck us over. I guess we should thank them for that?
- sbuttgereit 2mo agoI habitually complain about government... so let me help you out with this. The original issue with the law was never that those poor open source developers were going to have to bear the burden of complying with the law, but that the law itself was a bald-faced invasion of privacy by an overbearing troupe of people in power (i.e., government) so shit-sure of their superiority over the simple common folk they govern (i.e., you and me) that they aren't even embarrassed by their own arrogance. I would suggest that what "we wanted" is no such law at all. What would be weird, and worthy of comment, is if those of us that complain about government were actually satisfied by an exemption which only applies to pretty damn tiny slice of the market. If anything, that wasn't a victory for privacy or common sense, but rather a concession that they had foolishly created a law that they wouldn't have been able to enforce as broadly as they thought they could get away with... or if they tried to enforce it they'd have to contend with the optics of the big hand of government yet again crushing individuals whose only real crime was their altruism rather than just some giant corporation. So it isn't weird at all that "we're" silent. This isn't a win. Pointing out that the law had unintended consequences, including with Linux, et al., wasn't a statement of objective but rather a simple show that the law was rife with thoughtless unintended, or perhaps simply unspoken, consequences. The legislature's act here didn't restore privacy nor did it remove bad outcomes: if anything it now just raises questions about equal protection under law, at least on some practical level. It raises the question why some users of computers need such protections as age verification and others don't, and why the licensing terms of the OS are a valid proxy for that need... taking for granted that the stated purposes of the law are the real ones, of course.
- lmm 2mo agoWhat a pointlessly provocative and unproductive thing to say.
- jchw 2mo agoWhen people pointed out the consequences this would have for open source, that did not mean what they wanted was an open source exemption. It was just meant to demonstrate just how poorly conceived the law is that nobody at any point even thought about this before it was signed in. Frankly the consequences for open source are not even at the forefront of concerns about what these rushed regulations will do to the world.