We used to say "uptime is vanity", but now I'm wondering it the beige box that has been running in the kitchen for 20 years can be used for ambient age verification.

In reply to Pixelo789.

This is why I have trust issues.

Oh, for fuck's sake.

The site's largely generated by an LLM: https://github.com/agelesslinux/agelesslinux.org/commits/main/
The conversion script too: https://github.com/agelesslinux/agelesslinux/commits/main/

In reply to marinheiro.

My father has entered random birthdates into online services for years - and now he can't get into his hacked Outlook.com address because he can't remember which one he gave them!

In reply to hackillu.

Ah, I see California is taking on the UK in the final in the idiotic authoritarian IT legislation. I remain concerned that the British government will draught a law that accidentally also makes underwear and cheese illegal

It's stupid how well another "Hackers"-quote fits. "They're trashing our rights, man! Hack the planet!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3CKgkyc7Qo&pp=ygUXaGFja2VycyBoYWNrIHRoZSBwbGFuZXQ%3D

In reply to Karellen.

Another thought - if (for some reason) programs which don't use the age data for any purpose are still required to perform the check, but are built with a compiler which has a dead-code elimination optimisation pass to remove computations if the result is not used, is it lawful to distribute the resulting binary?

In reply to jwz.

Alright, man, will do.

In reply to hackillu.

Dude stop telling me what I oughta do

In reply to hackillu.

Look, there's a bajillion developers in California. I'm pretty sure half of them will have a clue what a data leak is and how often they happen. Like the Discord ID leak last October.

In reply to hackillu.

I mean, crap, they're short of wanting to see my ID for me to use my computer. This is stupid and outrageous beyond belief. As if corporations kafkaesque surveillance system for showing useless ads wasn't enough. This is straight out of Hackers. Apparently I can't use the device I own the way I want. They also want my biometrics if I want to run my own program on android, or install an APK not from the Google Play Store. Putting cameras on TVs wasn't 1984 enough, now they want to see my ID.

You're in California. You gotta do something. You don't have to talk to legislators and can probably find someone else who will and can. But you can totally do protests in the street or something. I'm pretty sure you can tell legislators that they just outlawed owning a computer or a smartphone before 18 and this is not how most programmers alive learned stuff. Tell them that requiring peoples ages for the 1984 surveillance ad network is too much. And that they're outlawing Linux/FOSS OSs.

In reply to Humbird0 Fandom.

It's not just hardware. Downloadable applications (aka "programs you get from your distro's repository") are supposedly required to check the OS's user age data when they are run.

I am wondering what the minimum possible compliant implementation of `/bin/true` will be under this law.

Somewhere, somehow, Alan Kay’s Dynabook sense is tingling.

In reply to Jessie Nabein.

"idk how they'll hit that lower USD cost per unit" is it that low?

I don't have any milkV hardware yet personally, but most of their designs seem to be focusing more on the higher end of things with things like the Jupiter2 (RV23 [new hawtness] compliant, 8 core count, etc. Albeit, maybe not yet shipping and the "pay $5 to get a $50 coupon" for the devkit is an interesting discount paradigm)?

There are increasingly more RISC-V (yay, royalty free!) options, from more fully fledged SBCs such as the StarFive VIsionPro 2 which had 8GB of RAM variants for $89 in their Kickstarter years ago and cheaper options with less RAM (it looks as if I paid $77 for 8GB boards in late 2022). To the middle of the road reference stuff from SiFive targeting more like $399(16GB RAM, 128GB eMMC) for their HiFive Premier P550 boards ($499 for the 32GB of RAM variants). I think one of the milkV desktop workstation prebuilt systems was in the thousands?

But those are all higher end.

Meanwhile, bunnie seems to be aiming for $9.50 per chip with the Daobao (and has a cost comparison with other similarly embedded devices here: https://www.crowdsupply.com/baochip/dabao a differentiator being that his RISC-V SBC has an MMU, unlike ARM offerings at similar price points) and that eMMC you seem to be fawning over, isn't at the $12.49 price point (the eMMC option is crossed out, so I don't know how much they're charging for 8GB of flash, but my guess is: it isn't free, or wasn't free, when it was available for sale).

The coalition that wrote AB 1043 is bipartisan, well-funded, and weirder than any simple political narrative can contain.

the chips themselves are quite interesting, tho idk how they'll hit that lower USD cost per unit, esp with eMMC on board? Although they mention a MicroSD card.

https://arace.tech/products/milkv-duo-s?variant=42703107195060

The non-eMMC unit has microSD slot on it, and in theory you could solder on a chip in the future, it just voids warranty per Arace Tech email support:

eMMC Boot: In theory, you can solder an eMMC chip onto the board after purchasing it, and the board supports booting from eMMC.

PoE Support: Yes, you can add PoE support separately by using the PoE HAT. You just need to solder the 4PIN header on the board first.

Please note: Although both modifications (soldering eMMC and the 4PIN PoE header) are technically feasible and will work normally after soldering, any manual soldering will void the warranty. We will not be able to provide after-sales support for the board if it is damaged due to self-modification.

In reply to Humbird0 Fandom.

Interesting question.

I am not a lawyer. Neither is John McCardle, the self identified:

operating system provider. I am the developer. I am the covered application store. I am the person who curates the catalog. I am the person who will hand the device to a child. If the California Attorney General would like to discuss any of this, I am easy to find.

I find it kind of hilarious that McCardle's other site, ffwf.net stands for Fight Fire With Fire though. ^_^ I guess he graduated in 2018 and has a day job at NASA in IT?

However, a C64 is explicitly mentioned on this page: https://agelesslinux.org/hardware.html under the Lineage section.

Last year, a company started selling revamped Commodore 64s (ostensibly FPGA based, but they have cartridge ports and the rights to the Commodore brand name) but I kinda doubt any of this was part of their sales pitch?

I didn't own a computer of my own until I was 18; though I took my first formal class in programming when I was six and had been using and coding on systems before that. All of this is rather challenging for me to wrap my head around, but I guess since I gave my kids laptops before this legislation passed, I'm in the clear? It seems beyond slippery slope territory and into full on dystopia panopticon realms from my vantage, but that's about par for the course for this timeline, so I am not surprised.

I am a little more confused by MidnightBSD on the distros page: https://agelesslinux.org/distros.html Appanently, they're excluding California and Brazil? The B in BSD stands for Berkeley (California) and AFAIK, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD haven't done anything in response to the legislation. I used to consult for iXSystems (previously known as BSDi) and I don't think they've done anything about it either (TrueNAS is ostensibly downstream from FreeBSD). So, I have no idea why MidnightBSD decided to take a stance since they're also, downstream from larger BSDs. However, one thing I think all BSD folks can agree on: they are not "distros".

Handing a Commodore 64 or a BBC Micro to a child would be illegal under this ridiculous California Legislation, it seems.

I learned to program on a BBC Micro (6502 assembler) and my age at the time was never an issue. It was an exam requirement to create software for it! 🙄🤦‍♂️

So does that mean a Commodore 64 is somehow illegal now?

AntiX is another choice for an aggressively non-systemd Linux.
For years I have given random birthdates to sites that demand to know; I wonder if that will come back to bite me now? "Your known birthdate does not match the date on your citizen's card; please correct your citizen's card" 😂

In reply to jwz.

That's true. If this initiative also happens to get some kids interested in coding/FOSS, all the better.

In reply to Ben 🏴‍☠️.

Why not both

In reply to ~n.

The point is civil disobedience, not to provide utility to children.

I see… "one laptop per child".