Will FreeBSD be available in California in 2027?

(1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.
(2) Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies, at a minimum, which of the following categories pertains to the user."

The categories are broken into four sections: users under 13 years of age, over 13 years of age under 16, at least 16 years of age and under 18, and "at least 18 years of age."

That doesn't sound too bad but I can see how it can be expanded into grief mode and it's somewhat more work nonetheless.
 
atax1a said:
that is, in fact, what their goal is. and then they'll say that trans people and queers are also porn and we need to ban them too. because of the children. there's a bit of historical precedent for this, even.
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Sadly I don't think there's a cat's chance in hell that they will ban online porn. It's a multi-billon dollar business with very deep pockets for lobbying politicians. As for a link to LGBTQ rights... I don't see any connection. There were LGBTQ (can't they make that thing a bit shorter to type? How about just "L+" 😁) people around long before there was mass availability of porn over the internet, or even before there was an internet. Like poor Alan Turing...
 
blackbird9 said:
Well, yeah, I'm getting into areas I know nothing about with LGBTQ, fair enough.
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what you need to understand is that for a very large amount of people, especially those in power at present, "transgender" is a porn category, not a kind of person. we understand that this is hard to believe, but we can assure you that it is true. we are considered by these people to be inherently and ontologically unsafe for children. do you see the connection now?
 
atax1a said:
what you need to understand is that for a very large amount of people, especially those in power at present, "transgender" is a porn category, not a kind of person. we understand that this is hard to believe, but we can assure you that it is true. we are considered by these people to be inherently and ontologically unsafe for children. do you see the connection now?
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I'm going to refrain from further comment on stuff I don't know about. The idea that 'transgender' is a category of porn is certainly a new one on me. But I think this is too far off-topic.
 
well, so, the issue of "age and identity verification" is also on topic for trans people, considering how difficult it is to get people to understand that we do have identities that are not the ones assigned to us by state-recognized authorities. :) basically, all of this shit sucks and it's going to hit weird queers like us before it hits anyone else, and that's again by design.
 
Maselko said:
I am wondering what can be harmful if you live only inside tty... Ascii-art porn would be an interesting conept...
Seems like majority of problems are around usage of GUI and desktop anyway. So how about restricting on the desktop level?
Still, the truth is that whatever all the OS developers will do, kids are going to find their ways anyway. Like it always has been...

I'm not supportive of anything around this legistlation but at least trying finding a workaround...
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I think the motivation is to delete private control of computers for commercial reasons. Using a computer with full privilege is a problem because it doesn't require a company.
 
MG said:
I think rhe motivation is to delete private control of computers for commercial reasons. Using a computer with full privilege is a problem because it doesn't require a company.
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Yeah. I've thought that for a long time. They know that letting you have a general purpose programmable machine, under your own control, was a historic accident, and they would much rather you didn't have one. They've been moving steadily in that direction on commercial platforms for years. Microsoft scrapiing your screen every few seconds, and getting telemetry on everything you do. Similar crap on Mac, smartphones, etc.
 
Maselko said:
I am wondering what can be harmful if you live only inside tty... Ascii-art porn would be an interesting conept...
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In the ASCII serial terminal days (mostly up to the 1990s?) - there was prn. There were actually entire (link to Wikipedia) USENET groups that carried prn. Was the prn displayed in ASCII on your 24x80 line ASCII tty terminal? Well... maybe?

But mostly what happened is that Users would run (link to FreeBSD man page) uuencode(1) against binary data (aka binary formatted images, Office Documents, other proprietary binary files, etc) to turn that data into 7-bit ASCII "printable data". The 7-bit ASCII printable data would then be sent over USENET as a newsgroup posting -- to the world (?).

7-bit ASCII printable data was passed over the "network" between UNIX/Linux/*BSD/etc machines -- because at that time (most) of the network traffic between Unix hosts was being transmitted over dialup modems using uucp(1) (Unix to Unix CoPy).

If a User wanted to view uuencoded data that was sent to the USENET Newsgroup they would run (link to FreeBSD man page) uudecode(1) to turn the received USENET newsgroup contents back into native binary again. The User would then display the received binary data on an appropriate device or route the binary data directly to a local printer, etc.

In the "late stage" of USENET readers -- a User could just hit a key (like "a") on their keyboard and the just received Newsgroup posting containing uuencoded data would be automatically uudecoded and immediately displayed on the Users terminal (assuming an X session, native Windows, etc).

In 2026 terminology "uuencoded data" is now called BASE-64 encoded data. There are libraries on FreeBSD (and pretty much all other Operating Systems) that know how to process BASE-64 encoded data files.

Did USENET posts from States make it "over the pond" to Europe and elsewhere.. I do not know
:cool: . I am sure the long distance international telephone call charges from States to Europe racked up by 300/1200/2400/4800/etc baud dialup modems was expensive ($$$$) for somebody though! AT&T, British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom (and others) were real happy ($$$) for the long distance, long duration modem calls going "over the pond" regularly.

And that... is how the Unix was won !
 
While I certainly don't understand the psychology behind it all, that is the exact reason why I say we shouldn't taint technology with human crap and by crap I don't mean age/genders only, but everything.

Same stupid non tech people that thought it is a good idea to force or incentivize "real names" on the Internet now want to protect the children by means of censorship.

The solution is to remove these people from positions of power.
 
Ok, I did a bit of web searching and it's been passed in California to take effect January 2027. How do such stupid people get elected? And one will probably run for president. Zare, it seems that if you remove idiots from power, more idiots take their place.
 
Yes it seems the idiot politicians are cheaply cloned nowadays.
Which is real, because environment creates them. American political environment is going increasingly toxic by the year.
 
6502 said:
It looks like Digital Age Assurance Act is not applicable for open source OS. I don't understand why this limitation is at OS level, not site/internet service.
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Where does it say that in the law? The actual code is quite brief.

At home, I have a cp/m machine (disclaimer: It hasn't been booted in about 2 decades, and would probably not work if turned on). A friend of mine has a PDP-15 and an HP minicomputer in his garage. Neither have any notion of "account" or "password". To use them, you walk up to them, click the power switch, and start typing at the shell prompt (the PDP-15 doesn't have a terminal, so you load a program from a DECtape, and it prints output). There isn't even a way to have a notion of "account", "password" or "age" on these machines. While basic Unix machines at least have the Gecos field in /etc/passwd, a cp/m machine has no such thing, only a 4-bit user number (and usually only user number 0 works correctly, because of how executables are found by the standard CCP). Technically, the moment I turn on my cp/m machine, I am in violation of this law (once it takes effect).

The whole law is idiotic; it is designed around cell phones and their app stores, and with the assumption of cloudiness. It accomplishes nothing, other than enable our state AG to sue big companies.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
(1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.
(2) Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies, at a minimum, which of the following categories pertains to the user."

The categories are broken into four sections: users under 13 years of age, over 13 years of age under 16, at least 16 years of age and under 18, and "at least 18 years of age."
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It depends what they mean by 'account'. I suspect they do NOT mean a unix user id as created by 'adduser' on a freebsd box someone has just installed. What they mean is an account on a social media platform, or some website like a porn site, or an android or apple appstore account. That's my take. So I'm a bit puzzled at what midnightbsd has done.
 
6502 said:
And MidnightBSD cannot implement it and prefer to exclude California?
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It requires a change to the license which can be rather complicated when much of the code is coming from a different project. I feel like they will have more luck if it's a click through on their website to download, but I haven't really looked into it enough to know how precisely they're going about it as even that might technically not comply with the BSD license requirements. The whole thing is an absolute mess from pretty much every possible way you might care to handle it with an open source project whether you accept it or try to resist.
 
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