Age Verification is a mess

init=/bin/bash, need I say more?

California is having bad ideas and everyone else is likely to follow suit — leading to a global outburst of poorly written age gating legislation that probably does not protect children because evil people on Discord will in fact just pretend to be children.

The number of teens that use Linux is low at best, but yet California really wants the big distros to require age verification. Not like:

• D-Bus intentionally lets literally anyone implement an interface — we call it «Open Standard», something MS clearly hasn’t heard of and absolutely should, considering Windows is “The most open operating system”
• The …3 if you squint hard enough…teens on Linux and other less busy users are way too obsessed to use a normal distro (I use Alpine, by the way)
• The general concept of age gating is utterly silly, if not backed by ID — a controversial and major violation of various places’ privacy laws.
• This legislation was built with commercial and locked-down systems in mind, two words that most definitely conflict with both “Linux” and “Desktop”, the latter sometimes also referred to as “a pretty much user controlled environment” by practically no one except me — though it’s accurate, I’d say.