Revise age verification terms for MidnightBSD | Hacker News Reader

Revise age verification terms for MidnightBSD

github.com

36 pointshpb4220 comments

Is this an effective CTA?

What types of negative side-effects would there be from an “open source” application that was free, open, and restricted entirely by license? Rather than “we make no warranty” the license says “you may not use”.

I’ve also had a few products I’ve released on GitHub as public but never assigned a license, which probably means they are proprietary, unless GitHub TOS says otherwise.

I realize each of these is a unique situation.

This is a huge problem. I won't use an operating system that comes with SpyID. I also could not care any less what any fake-rationale a government uses to spy on the people - it is simple illegal.

Then again, not so many use MidnightBSD, so ... not so many affected, right?

This age verification stuff is insane.

Fringe loonies have too much power.

I suppose it has to do with saving their asses? We probably have to thank the Government for this, too.

In any case, it is indeed crazy. If I were to live by this >10 years ago I would not know anything about Linux or BSDs. Or programming for that matter.

Meta is putting a lot of money into lobbying for these laws, presumably because it's easier to change laws than it is to fix their business model, and they're probably tired of getting sued for COPPA violations.

This may make sense from their point of view, but from a user's point of view I do not understand why I would want my own operating system to spy on me so the government can get more data, which it may then hand over to others. Now the main problem is that governments become increasingly hostile to The People, but now downstream people suddenly act as surrogate-spy helpers, such as the MidnightBSD folks do. This is a simple case where people should globally reject criminal governments from spying on people.

Think of the children!!

spends time thinking of children having fun learning BSD

I wasn't under 18 when I started playing with *BSD/Nix systems on my own, but how tragic that kids who would be drawn to understanding these systems are essentially 'outlawed' from learning them. As another HNer pointed out in a related post, I think this stems from not understanding the delineation between an OS/App/Platform.

not fringe loonies, big business, Meta and Palantir (and others) are financially pushing for it.

They're pushing because the loonies are pushing. The loonies are passing age verification laws and big businesses don't want the responsibility.

Now... it just so happens that the loonies and big business are connected another way. Despite not much liking each other, they share a political party to advance each other's goals. Only a relatively small fraction of the country really wants to eliminate porn (which is the real goal), but they have enough allies who are willing to tolerate it to make a majority (or near-majority).

Which enables big business to get everything else that they want.

Billionaires are the fringe loonies

They want us trapped on their platforms and absolution from obligation to police their platforms

They’re involved in indemnifying themselves legally while jacking up RAM prices to prop up their data center investments and make us use those data centers to compute

And they get the government help making us the bad guy if we lie about age verification

They are playing both sides of this argument because doing so keeps them in the conversation altogether. They sell TIE Fighters and Xwings

The entirety of American society has gone absolutely off the fucking rails kowtowing to office dweebs who need to keep us tending the server fields or their buy in data centers becomes worthless

> The loonies are passing age verification laws and big businesses don't want the responsibility.

Big businesses don't want the responsibility but they want all the data they can get from you. Data brokers pay well.

Billionaires are fringe loonies

They make up a tiny tiny tiny portion of the human population and whatever nation state they claim to originate from

I genuinely don't know why these small niche software projects are even bothering to address this. Literally no one cares.

It’s a liability for them. They’re a small project and someone who just hates open source community projects can sue them out of existence for non-compliance.

That may be a rationale, but then they act to help governments spy on people. This is a no go. I understand that the government created that problem, but they should just refuse acting as proxy-sniffer for governments here. Who in his or her sane mind would want age-spying daemons to run on their systems? Next thing the BSDs will do is to support systemd ... then we can integrate the sniffing and call it systemd-kiddie-protector.c.

I wouldn't mind it getting fully tested in court, to be honest.

I hope they're serious about this. Start suing people in California who post screenshots of MidnightBSD for piracy.

They publicly map the free speech of the USA!

https://www.adl.org/resources/tools-to-track-hate/heat-map

I guess free speech is age-restricted now. :)

If I were a kid, I would reject those attempts to age-gate restrict me. I actually wonder if that age-spying is in violation of free speech. Does free speech not hold valid for younger people? They are getting restricted here. I don't see how that is fair to them.

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