MidnightBSD, a FreeBSD-based desktop operating system, has quietly updated its README to reflect a new geographic restriction. The project has added a clause that bars residents of any country, state, or territory with OS-level age verification mandates from using MidnightBSD
That may be the best way to deal with the potential legal liabilities introduced by this unmitigated abject idiocy.
Good thing everybody can still torrent whatever they want from where ever they want. Or use IPFS. Or IRC DCC. Or Usenet. Or just a VPN.
Australian legislation specifically notes that all sites must age challenge users connecting via a VPN
Well, good for them. I’m not Australian, get to vote for Australian lawmakers or host websites in Australia.
Is Australia going to pay every single website admin for the burden of implementing this wonderful magical logic to detect a given source IP(v4) belongs to a VPN provider? What about IPv6?
If I host a simple static website on a static webhost in Denmark say, and provide some otherwise perfectly legal OS ISO’s for download, how would I implement any logic at all? Why the fuck should I be subject to Australian laws?
The cookie acceptance of the GPDR was already bad enough and ruined so much of the Internet with no appreciative improvement of the privacy of visitors. If every Tom, Dick and Harry are going to place spurious demands on every website, it’ll do nothing except raise enormous barriers to entry and ensure that only huge players with the capacity to comply with demands from legislators all over the world will even be able to “legally” run websites at all. And then we can’t have an Internet or FOSS for that matter.
Maybe legislators should stop writing half-baked laws the consequences of which they apparently cannot comprehend.
It applies to websites not hosted in Australia, that may have Australians visiting the site via VPN
Enforcement is going to be interesting to watch
There are already services that catalogue VPN sources for webmasters to implement block lists
That’s why a said static webhost, i.e. paying for the ability to serve files, not run scripts or manage the webserver configuration. Sure, the hosting provider could be made responsible for the implementation, but now they have been encumbered with the burden and liability of policing which hosted sites needs this bullshit enabled and which are just a blog about making strawberry preserves or something.
Point is, it’s complete and utter twattery of the highest order. Never mind enforcement, I don’t even see how it would be reliably or consistently implemented.
And all that is in any case absolutely futile, because there’s still the matter of people being perfectly able of obtaining those self-same ISO’s from any number of other sources that are even more difficult to police, like the ones I originally mentioned, and about a thousand more where they came from.
That should be fun for people self hosting.
Good. I’m glad they’re standing up to this insanity.
It’s ironic though because it’s a California based OS.
By the way, anyone tried gaming on BSD?
Gaming on BSD isn’t as bad as you’d expect. There are Linux compatibility tools that let you run proton/wine on FreeBSD
Random shit breaks sometimes but once you get past the steep learning curve you can play a lot of titles
Genuinely asking, why would you use FreeBSD when there already is Linux?
“Linux” is like 12 different software projects in a trench coat. Like people in a trenchcoat, the whole thing falls apart if one of them goes missing. The BSDs (and most other sane operating systems, for that matter) are a monolith developed together for each other
That’s absolutely brilliant. Don’t let the rest of the world suffer for some people’s government’s stupidity. If the users in those regions disagree with their government, they can figure out other ways to get it and use it.
haha I guess that’s one way to deal with it and do nothing at all. Doubtful they block the connections from those areas
IDK. It puts them at the forefront of this fight.
If governments successfully prosecute distro maintainers (if they can) for this, then distro maintainers are liable.
And distro maintainers would then have to pursue non-compliant users to cover that liability, or fold.
Which is a huge loss for open source.Or, there would be a huge legal fight and it turns out that the licence of a distro protects it from its users actions.
Which would be awesome and a massive win. It also makes sense. Nobody is suing an OS maintainer because it was used for a data breach.
And then the governments have to pursue the actual users. Which… is gonna be useless wrt these laws
ive been waiting to read headlines of this sort. cheers.
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They will either give special permissions to relevant businesses (maybe an expensive Super Premium Golden Access), or use selective enforcement to only go after people/businesses that don’t comply to their overall authoritarianism and pose too much of a risk to the status quo.
They don’t care about the details they just want control.
exasperated sigh I don’t want to get too deep in it with people again. Here is a link to the California law and some clarifications. (I cannot speak for the Brazilian law as I am not from Brazil)
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043
- The law does not require ID verifications it only required that a parent indicate the age of their child when setting up their account.
- The law’s definition for operating system provider includes “general purpose computing device” so no, your toaster, microwave, and fridge are not included. (please remember that legal definitions do not always match how we would use the term in everyday conversation)
- An “accessible interface” is not well defined here. But it could be as simple as a system call rather than a REST API call. Similar to open file or malloc. (this means no centralized government server storing the data)
I have said this in other posts, but the linux community sticking their heads in the sand and pretending these states don’t exist just leave MS, Google, and Apple to decide how this is implemented. I am glad some distro maintainers are taking this seriously and looking at what is the minimum they would need to implement to comply with the law.
To be clear I do not support this law. The definitions are written so loosely that it leaves much of it up to interpretation. It is clear that they did not meet with anyone in the industry before voting.
The law’s definition for operating system provider includes “general purpose computing device” so no, your toaster, microwave, and fridge are not included. (please remember that legal definitions do not always match how we would use the term in everyday conversation)
That does mean (by legal definitions in California) your toaster, microwave and fridge.
And really the choice of “pulling” support from areas with issue laws is the way, this law is not enforceable as written and is likely the easiest way for any OS to avoid legal issues. Just putting in a line that the OS is not supported in the state will not stop the OS being used but will stop legal issues from said state.
People put doom on microwaves, I’d call that general purpose computing.
After reading that… it only pertains to commercially licensed?
Well its stupid broad, but I don’t think they can even pretend to do things to non commercial products (as in not a product). I think this will just end up like the cancer warnings, companies will just put the label on everything.
I’m sorry I am really not seeing what you are referencing from your link. This appears to be a link to the state administration manual which deals with how departments in the state of California operate.
This does not appear to be a law especially when you look at the procedure for revising the SAM.
Responsibility for updating SAM content is assigned to authoring state departments
Ie. Not assembly members.
Edit: sorry I didn’t respond to your second point. From the Cali law:
1798.503(b) An operating system provider or a covered application store that makes a good faith effort to comply with this title, taking into consideration available technology and any reasonable technical limitations or outages, shall not be liable for an erroneous signal indicating a user’s age range or any conduct by a developer that receives a signal indicating a user’s age range.
1798.503(b) An operating system provider or a covered application store that makes a good faith effort to comply with this title, taking into consideration available technology and any reasonable technical limitations or outages, shall not be liable for an erroneous signal indicating a user’s age range or any conduct by a developer that receives a signal indicating a user’s age range.
OR instead of having to collect that info at all you just put “OS not for cali” on the user agreement and just not deal with the risk.
You are right. I have no additional response to this that would not make me sound like an asshole.
What an odd thing to say. I do think that california based projects/products will try to follow (at least show an attempt) as you say but as big a market cali is there just is no reason for a OS (more so a donation funded linux one) to pander to one state.
Didn’t hear anything about it in Brazil. It’s being done under the radar. Can’t even find articles about it.
Same here, didn’t hear a thing about this, I was actually kinda confused when I opened the article.
how its done
