Will FreeBSD be available in California in 2027?

For all the folks who want to correct my English....\

Yes, I know regress is the opposite of progress. There is also a common expression, pros and cons, meaning the pluses and minuses of something. If you didn't get the implied joke of what's the opposite of PROG-gress, just say to yourself, RE-gress? I don't get it.
I explained it in earlier posts, if you didn't get it, sorry, my sense of humor is a bit out of step I guess.
 
Cedric62 said:
New Federal Law to Require Age Verification on All Operating Systems
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Are you sure this is accurate? Is it a law with a chance of being passed? Something one party wants and the other agrees to? Or is it a law up for debate? Seems if this was about to be Federal law it would be publicized far more widely and judging by the comments, many of the viewers of the channel don't seem overly erudite.
 
scottro said:
Are you sure this is accurate? Is it a law with a chance of being passed? Something one party wants and the other agrees to? Or is it a law up for debate? Seems if this was about to be Federal law it would be publicized far more widely and judging by the comments, many of the viewers of the channel don't seem overly erudite.
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My understanding is that this is a law that is being supported by both parties, and that it has just been introduced into the US House of Representatives, which is the first step in in it becoming an official law. Also, with so many people being unaware of this pending law, in my opinion, I would say that it has a good chance of passing and becoming an official law. However, recently lawmakers in the US state of Michigan abandoned a similar law after receiving too many comments from Michigan voters. So, maybe there is a chance that H.R.8250 might die on the floors of Congress, if enough people contact their representatives and let their feelings be known.
 
Once again, this law is aimed at vendors who actually try to collect a user's personal info in exchange for some kind of benefit provided by the OS (like installation of packages or unlocking some features).

FreeBSD certainly doesn't do that.

How come so many people are missing that one single important point - that is truly astonishing and is making me lose faith in humanity and its ability to comprehend simple stuff like that.
😲
 
astyle said:
Once again, this law is aimed at vendors
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That might be the aim, but is it worded correctly to achieve that? No chance of unintentional consequences?

I do not know, just asking the question. There seems to be a lot of noise (on open source forums and mailing lists) about this legislation and similar, so not sure if the noisy people have a valid point, or missing a key argument (the one that you are making.)

If that is the key argument, is it water-tight? Or are some of the noisy people pointing out flaws in the wording that might make the law (unintentionally) have wider impacts than the legislators appreciate?
 
richardtoohey2 said:
That might be the aim, but is it worded correctly to achieve that? No chance of unintentional consequences?

I do not know, just asking the question. There seems to be a lot of noise (on open source forums and mailing lists) about this legislation and similar, so not sure if the noisy people have a valid point, or missing a key argument (the one that you are making.)

If that is the key argument, is it water-tight? Or are some of the noisy people pointing out flaws in the wording that might make the law (unintentionally) have wider impacts than the legislators appreciate?
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In all honesty, I do think that these are good questions...
 
I asked search engines with AI today a question about who was the copyright holder for the embedded operating system inside SecureDigital (SD) flash memory cards. The answer was that the individual card manufacturers develop their own operating systems that comply with SD Card Association specifications. This is interesting as an SD Card contains and operating system of limited scope, is a mobile device and is a general purpose computing device. Therefore, it is likely that SD cards are within scope of the California law.

I also asked the following questions:

1. Is UEFI considered an embedded operating system, the answer was NO. It is a firmware layer between the hardware and an operating system.

2. Are there any embedded systems that used UEFI? The answer was YES, there are many embedded systems that use UEFI particularly on ARM based devices.

3. Is an embedded system that uses UEFI considered an operating system, the answer was YES.

4. Is the intel Management Engine an operating system? NO, it is a specialized monitoring system but it does incorporate the MINIX3 operating system within it.

5. Is Docker or Podman an operating system? NO.

6. Are Docker or OCI containers within scope of California Age Assurance? NO, containers are specialized applications.

7. Can QNX be embedded in a UEFI partition? YES

8. Can FreeBSD be embedded in a UEFI partition? YES with a specially designed boot loader.

9. Are Game Consoles like the PlayStation within scope of California Age Assurance? NO, they are specialized devices, not general purpose computing devices.

So from these answers, my opinion is that a FreeBSD system that is installed as an 'embedded' operating system specifically to run Podman is NOT within the scope of the California Age Assurance law as it is no longer a general purpose computing device. If it is, then so will every intel CPU containing the intel Management Engine and every SD card as they also contain an operating system for a specific task and are also general purpose computing devices.

The distinction between a specialized embedded operating system and a general purpose operation system would likely have to be thrashed out in court. However, using the intel Management Engine, SD Cards and high value devices like ZF Automatic Transmissions (a mobile computer running QNX) as technical shields, may help all other specialized operating systems avoid age assurance compliance.

If a Game Console that uses FreeBSD code is a specialized device, then surely specialized software distributions of FreeBSD can be created to make specialized software development workstations, video editing workstations, portable web browsing and email 'kiosk' devices etc.

Many specialized automated and semi-automated industrial machine tools include general purpose motherboards and SOCs within them. If installing a specialized operating system distribution is considered unsufficient to qualify as being not in scope for age assurance, then all of these machines will be in scope.
 
"BSD" Berkley (as in U Cal at Berkley) Software Distribution.
Isn't it ironic that an operating system that has roots in California may not be available in California.
 
richardtoohey2 said:
Maybe I should have said that they seem to be trying to build in a specific exemption.
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In motherboards maybe but it would instantly obsolete all existing computers if a public OS with age verification becomes mandatory.
I so hope the EU is going to reject all of this. EU governments leaving Windows is a media fake. They stop using Windows PC's that aren't part of MS cloud. Almost nothing. It doesn't look very good atm..
 
Yeah, people who wrote the law have no idea what even counts for an OS... and how do you decide when something is not an OS, but 'firmware'. I think that bill is just hot air that the political theater is emitting. Besides, California has other stuff on its plate, like the governor race.
 
astyle said:
I think that bill is just hot air that the political theater is emitting.
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I thought it was to do with social media age verification checks - Meta and others trying to push it "down the stack" so it's not their problem?

Meta is the secret backer for the age verification push

Spoiled the suspense in the headline itself but fine. I didn't see this on Ars yet. It turns out the l that Meta is the secret backer behind the age verification push. Somebody traced all the connections and uploaded it. https://tboteproject.com/
arstechnica.com arstechnica.com

(Not the greatest link but what I could find).
 
richardtoohey2 said:
I thought it was to do with social media age verification checks - Meta and others trying to push it "down the stack" so it's not their problem?

Meta is the secret backer for the age verification push

Spoiled the suspense in the headline itself but fine. I didn't see this on Ars yet. It turns out the l that Meta is the secret backer behind the age verification push. Somebody traced all the connections and uploaded it. https://tboteproject.com/
arstechnica.com arstechnica.com

(Not the greatest link but what I could find).
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What's not making sense is why Meta would make a secret of THAT...
😲


You'd think that backing the age verification initiative would actually cast Meta in a positive light, and they'd want more of that...
 
astyle said:
You'd think that backing the age verification initiative would actually cast Meta in a positive light, and they'd want more of that...
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Because they are inflicting all the pain on the OS providers to implement this and be legally liable for it?

Meta just adds os_get_user_age() call in their code and then wash their hands "we called the OS to get the user's age, it's not our fault it didn't work, you can't sue Meta for this".

Meta (and the others) don't need to add age verification to their systems or work with third parties or try all the AI-guess-age-from-face stuff that's going on now. It's all the OS provider's problem.

So their thinking is presumably "lets lobby the politicians to make this happen at the OS level."

And then they also get another data point - the user's verified age - and they didn't mine it or ask for it, it was the OS!
 
richardtoohey2 said:
And then they also get another data point - the user's verified age - and they didn't mine it or ask for it, it was the OS!
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Meta already mined for the age verification... it's not the job of the OS, it's the job of the service/media provider. An OS doesn't do any data mining, it necessarily requires 3rd party apps to make the data mining even happen.

Not to mention that Meta is actually a contributor to the FreeBSD Foundation? (as is Google)...

And if the syscall doesn't work, isn't that because it's trying to get the OS to do something it was not designed to do in the first place? Maybe the very idea of such a syscall is just barking up the wrong tree? It's back to the drawing board for Meta, not the underlying OS.

And, if getting age verification (and teasing out a user's real info) is so much work that the Open Source OSes don't really wanna do it, that kind of leaves MS/Apple/Google to do the heavy lifting of the data mining required to pull that off.
 
richardtoohey2 said:
Meta just adds os_get_user_age() call in their code and then wash their hands "we called the OS to get the user's age, it's not our fault it didn't work, you can't sue Meta for this".
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The OS provider can just say "we asked the user and they said they were 21, so we're OK." Nobody gets sued successfully. Starting to make sense, no?
 
Let's wait and see what the wording of any legislation is, and then how it is actually implemented, and then what happens if it ever gets to court. Might need some more 🍿
 
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