Technology

Reject the age verification.

Feels like something systemd can solve with a compile time flag. Either have it on or off depending on if you want to legally sell it in those areas or not and away you go.

I am aware of the Orwellian privacy implication, but how do we deal with bots, now that AI is rampant?

Something like hashcash, or what?

Not sure what is worse:

1. The political fight re: should the OS store your age at all. (Linux will be illegal because they didn't bend).
2. The political fight re: should OSes be required to verify your age / identity?

To me, fighting at step 1 has the advantage of keeping the infrastructure from getting built, and the disadvantage of people saying "well, actually, there's nothing concerning or new here."

Fighting at step 2 has the advantage of being a clearer threat, but a disadvantage since the prior infrastructure has been built, society has adapted it, and politicians say "think of the children."

I feel like it is more strategic to fight at every step.

I find that move extremely funny, since it's purely made for sensationalism and nothing else. I mean, if you hate how systems implemented age verification, then why don't you remove its identity verification too, i.e. also optional fields for stuff like your address an e-mail that most users don't even fill out.

There is no mechanism verifying what birth date you type in - you can type whatever date you want and systems doesn't care.

I'd say no matter where you stand with age verification, this is the best solution to handle the situation. After all, any and all age checks we have nowadays are a black box anyways. There is no real knowing how other systems are checking ages, and there is AFAIK no real government mandated rules on how it is verified. They could make you scan your ID's front, back, nuclear composition and dietary preferences and give you a result that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a proper age verification procedure.

If the government wants to introduce age verification, they have to do it themselves - build an API that handles the age verification, similar to how the digital ID in Germany works, as an example. If they want proper age verification, they also have to take the blame themselves if things go wrong.