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The California law is actually the best form of age verification one can imagine. It only requires the OS to let the user to 'signal' their age. In other words, it's more like a checkbox asking if you're older than 18, instead of scanning your face or driving license. It doesn't require a cloud account either. Storing the ages the user inputted in /etc/ages besides /etc/passed and providing an API to read it is compliance.

How is it so bad that we need some civil disobedience movement over it? On the contrary to, UK's Online Safety Act and China asking all online platforms to verify your phone number?

Just because it's easy doesn't mean it's right. Give legislative busybodies the ability to force this little flag into the OS because it's no big deal, and next year they'll say "hey, make sure you only report 18+ if secure boot is enabled" and 5 years later it'll be "hey, you can only report 18+ if one of our Identity Partners has confirmed it."

It's the principle of the matter. The State should not be allowed to compel speech (what code you write) in your open source project. It may sound stubborn but if we don't fight it now it will only grow little by "easy feature" little.

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I think the bigger factor there is that it requires apps to use that, which preempts things like Discord sharing info with Peter Thiel in the name of age verification.
One day ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47364591

> Have you heard of the slippery slope? A cornerstone of American political philosophy?

> Arguments like this one are why the authoritarian ratchet continues to turn unimpeded over time.

Compelling any speech or written code is a violation of our rights as recognized by the first amendment of the United States Constitution.

Because people don't have real power, it's all indirect through politicians who are manipulated or paid by professionals.

Democracy should be direct and the gating function shouldn't be age but a test of intelligence, logical reasoning, general knowledge and ability to detect manipulation.

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