As for the bill itself, it's one of those that gets passed because it is non invasive to the typical person, it's voluntary, and it should help some. There is no downside at all.
But 2 years from now a baseline has been established where the need to know your age when using a computer is taken for granted, and it's revealed that self-reporting isn't working and gasp there was this one kid in the news about something bad happening.
This is how it goes. This is one of the reasons the anti-gun crowd is so adamantly opposed to virtually everything. I'm not advocating anything with respect to guns here, but "sensible" measures were broadly supported and then turned against the owners who acquiesced.
An "exception" is two faced in this case. It implies Linux needs an exception to begin with and that the bill itself isn't absolute garbage and a direct attack on general purpose computing. Again, they establish a baseline with something that people are ok with.
The baseline is already being established. In the majority of US states now you have to send your photo ID to a 3rd party to access "adult content". The conspiracy theories around the California and Illinois laws are senseless given the speed run the rest of the country is doing to ending privacy online. We get threads with hundreds of comments about California "fighting against privacy" and basically silence on the dozens of other states implementing far more privacy invasive legislation.
I agree, it's just a different vector to entry based on content. California is stepping it up to computing as a whole. Combine the two. Then the next step is actual ID, not an ID clearinghouse. But we're all paranoid for suggesting such things, just as people were paranoid that we'd get this far.
Precisely. Courts will find that the situation where Linux users are exempt from the law, whereas Windows users have to submit their ID and any other personal data, can not be maintained, so Linux users will also be forced to give up their ID before being able to access the internet. This will also first come via commercial distributions (perhaps it can not be enforced by independent linux users, but the law need not necessarily work for 100%, could be 95%, and the rest are declared as breaking the law).
Totally agree. After the next big cyber attack, ganna have to kyc to access internet. It will be “for our safety”. Luckily now with ai the world doesn’t need me as a programmer so I’m just ganna stop using computers if they go full facist
This is pure speculation. You can't possibly predict what courts are going to decide in the future. And the Digital Age Assurance Act doesn't "force a user to give up ID to access the Internet", it requires age information to be collected during creation of a user account on a system.
