I don’t agree with this law, but having an age verification API as an open-source modular component is the best way to do it. Build in privacy controls and permissions so you know what’s being sent, where, and when. Make sure we know to edit $HOME/.config/systemd/ageverificationd/birthday.conf whenever we want (yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if systemd handled this, too).
Don’t forget the off switch and don’t give it unnecessary dependencies. Let me be able to install it if I need it (spoilers: I won’t) and if you include it by default, let me be able to remove it without removing the whole GUI.
I know everyone here is obsessed with freaking out over the legislation.
But I think the author is wrong, they should just add this to accountservice and Debian will pick it up in 5-10 years and that’s fine.
I actually thing the tendency to over engineer this solution to make back porting easier is worse than the milktoast Californian law.
See now why we need decentralised communication?
Does FreeDOS need to comply with this law? After all these years, a new 21h interrupt!
Does it have accounts?
No, or at least I hope it don’t. DOS never had user accounts to begin with as it was always single-user, or at least the variants everyone is familiar with (MS-DOS, PC-DOS, DR-DOS, FreeDOS). There was a short-lived Multiuser DOS sold by Novell, but none of us on this thread have probably ever even seen it in the wild let alone heard of it outside of a wiki page.
The only way you could’ve locked others out of your DOS PC back when that platform was relevant, was to physically lock them out of turning your PC on while you were away, to which there were multiple keyed power switch locks to do exactly this sold, and even then, this only applied to either the original 5150, XT, or AT, or clones thereof which used the original-style PSU with the big switch on the side of the case, as outside of physically locking people out of your PC with a power switch lock, there was no user control back then.
Oh, an addendum to this, the original AT also had a keyboard lock built in so you could also straight-up disable the keyboard if you were away and lock others out that way, in addition to installing a power switch lock on the side. Basically, the only form of user control you had in the DOS era was a physical lock of some kind, as you have no user accounts to lock out to begin with on that platform.
A “good faith effort to comply” with a bad faith law is to pipe /dev/yes to the API.
I mean… there’s nothing stopping anyone from setting their age to 100 years old. It’s not like they are adding any sort of identification check, from what I gather. Just doing the minimum to comply.
Yeah, once everyone gets comfortable with being asked their age, then it’ll go to requiring a ‘realistic’ age instead of accepting someone born 1/1/1900, then it’ll move to requiring proof of your age
