this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2026
18 points (100.0% liked)
technology
24325 readers
276 users here now
On the road to fully automated luxury gay space communism.
Spreading Linux propaganda since 2020
Rules:
- 1. Obviously abide by the sitewide code of conduct.
Bigotry will be met with an immediate ban
- 2. This community is about technology. Offtopic is permitted as long as it is kept in the comment sections
- 3. Although this is not /c/libre, FOSS related posting is tolerated, and even welcome in the case of effort posts
- 4. We believe technology should be liberating. As such, avoid promoting proprietary and/or bourgeois technology
- 5. Explanatory posts to correct the potential mistakes a comrade made in a post of their own are allowed, as long as they remain respectful
- 6. No crypto (Bitcoin, NFT, etc.) speculation, unless it is purely informative and not too cringe
- 7. Absolutely no tech bro shit. If you have a good opinion of Silicon Valley billionaires please manifest yourself so we can ban you.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
I think you're offering way too much good faith to a government that believes in prisonlabormaxxing and genocidemaxxing.
I'm not assuming good faith lol, those mechanisms just wouldn't be effective, and assuming the government thinks about linux users enough to chase down IP logs of users with a particular fake age is childish, and that's all assuming that the PRs being discussed even do anything of the sort (sending the age stored in the user db to external services willy nilly).
If age verification crap catches on it won't be totally unenforceable mandates like "its illegal to lie about your age" it'll be technological solutions ala DRM and they'll be more effective (but still circumventable with a little expertise probably). And for now, I do expect that the legal mandates will remain on service providers, not individual users. We're simply too much effort to prosecute for meaningless bullshit
You would think hippies and immigrants and trans people are too much effort to prosecute for meaningless bullshit too.
A
can't see on your face that you lied about your age when you installed ubuntu 9 months ago, but they can identify members of those groups and single them out for harassment, culminating in disproportionate prosecution for minor offenses. These things are not comparable. A better comparison would be digital piracy.
This is a ridiculous hill to die on, idk why I'm even replying
They didn't need your face, they have your digital footprint, and if you aren't being extremely mindful of what personal information you leak online, they have WAY more data collected on you already than you should be remotely comfortable with.
Of course, but that has nothing to do with your prediction that I took issue with. I'm not saying this shit isn't dystopian and going to get worse or that age verification isn't going to be a part of that, but the specific childish predictions of "operating systems add age verification that literally is just asking the user what their age is and just send it willy nilly to cloud services -> government outlaws lying about your age -> services log ages and IPs -> the government gets that info and uses that to track down and prosecute people with the exact maximum age".
The reason there's generalized harassment of oppressed groups and not of digital pirates (or age liars) is 1) because pigs don't actually care about digital piracy that much, its not baked-in to settler society in the way that white supremacy, patriarchy, etc. are, and 2) because pigs can't really see it. 2 could change, we could get the watch dogs future world where everyone is facial recognition-ed at all times and that's linked back to their digital footprint to such a granular level of detail that random beat cops can see that you pirated a movie last night or that you signed up to facebook with a false name/age. But even if that changes, point #1 will not change on its own, changing the law doesn't suddenly make cops or the legal system at large give a shit to enforce it, it'll just get used as another way of harassing the marginalized people they already wanted to harass.
"I'm a white dude so it'll never happen to me"
disengage