A small set of people are merging changes to various Linux components to make sure every application knows your birth date.
This is being done rapidly by people with questionable justifications and being merged with no youth and few marginalized people involved.
If you have a fediverse account, you can quote this note from your own instance. Search https://social.treehouse.systems/users/wwahammy/statuses/116264430375745593 on your instance and quote it. (Note that quoting is not supported in Mastodon.)
RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@wwahammy/116264430375745593
@wwahammyEric Schultz the possibility of a free Internet is gone unless we start punishing these people.
RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@wwahammy/116264430375745593
US government in 1996: strong encryption is a munition and you can go to prison for years if you export
FOSS engineers: hey so only use this if you're in the US but we'll give instructions for how to do it otherwise 😉
California in 2026: we're passing a law that allows the AG to sue OS providers in civil court if they don't implement age verification in order to restrict Apple, Google, Facebook and the worst companies in the world.
FOSS Engineers: OMG THEY MIGHT COME AFTER OUR LINUX LAPTOP VENDORS WHO HAVE LIKE 3 TOTAL CUSTOMERS WE SHOULD HAVE IMPLEMENTED AGE GATING YESTERDAY I PROMISE WE'RE NOT CHALLENGING YOUR AUTHORITY GOVERNOR NEWSOM
