Case in point: Typing from a spare Surface Pro that I installed Ubuntu and some support drivers on for the touchscreen. Some update broke the touchscreen drivers, and I needed a keyboard and a lot of googling to repair them.

If this had happened on Windows, someone likely could’ve taken it to their repair shop or to Microsoft. Sadly, these days even Microsoft might’ve dropped any user aid.

Don’t believe anyone that says this website is sketchy. I use it all the time, and I don’t have any malware (that I know of).

Lose, not loose. Loose uses a soft S, and means uncoupled, held in a less firm grip.

That was the Trump quote that made me horrified at anyone who still supported him. Child murderer.

Notably, he has a (adult) nephew that has stood on the side of justice and I bear no ill will to her.

Yeah, I’m lucky that my main games of interest weren’t blocked from Linux when I switched. If I had a friend group that played BF6, it likely would’ve been a harder decision

I recently learned there’s an entire fork of proton entirely for “anime” games (dwproton). They be dedicated

Shit, I think CachyOS and its gaming optimization made me jump to the end.

Like…at least Bush had a valid excuse initiated externally. Even if he stretched it into the wrong country. (Okay, in retrospect the claim is rooted in xenophobia. Maybe you can’t expect much better of GOP voters)

I’m not against people owning guns. God knows, we need a big crowd of hunters to thin turkey populations in New England. But by the same rules, there are some dumb absolutists against any form of gun regulation.

A child shot his brother from an unsecured firearm? We must send a pamphlet advertising gun safes to the parent sometime in the course of the year!

Fingerprinting. Age, as well as factors like IP address, can be one more data point to individually identify a user with a certain number of accounts.

There’s also potential they changeover from “Enter your DOB” to “Show your driver’s license”, which they can collect much more data from.

Hey, it’s rare to see someone admit they were wrong these days. Happy to see it.

Historians might say more of history is contested than we might realize. In my lifetime, I learned that Thomas Edison was a brilliant inventor who made the light bulb through perseverance; not a ruthless businessman who stole ideas from interns and sabotaged Nikola Tesla.

So, it may be best not to codify things into law if they have even the slightest chance for debate. Hence why Germany made laws against denying the holocaust specifically.

They’re military rations. Meal Ready to Attack

/s

Fictional worlds, which tbf is where we spend most of our time.

If you don’t want your info (whether you are an adult a teen or a child) to be shared with “owners of apps that are on the Epstein list”, then don’t install those apps. There is nothing in this law requiring you to download any particular app.

Linux, as well as any decent system of security, operates via varying levels of trust. If I install a game on Steam, that does not get root access with permission to rewrite my kernel. Similarly, if I have banking info on my device, it doesn’t get to view that, or anything with my face or name. You can install and even run something without trusting it with your life.

If an app were sending this data to a third party, like palantir, then they would be in direct violation of this law.

We have seen time and time again that courts do not provide adequate protections for these types of data breaches. The law does not matter. At the most, software companies get slapped on the wrist, but more likely they get away with it, as “programming is hard, and it’s easier to just send everything”. It is far, far easier to assert that a malicious app is not submitting marketing, or “fuckability” information on your child if that device does not denote itself as a child’s device in the first place. That’s only possible if the law isn’t hammering the OS into openly exposing its own user data to anyone that asks for it.

Your last point about personal responsibility is an important one. It’s why, if you happen to be using an old insecure device running Windows XP, you can toy around on the web with it, but you should disconnect it from your personal network, and should not enter personal info on it. Any device software that is forced to keep an open “Would_President_47_Seek_To_Rape_This_User” flag, available to every application, is removing that option for personal responsibility.

Does it even allow for user privacy protection? Nothing I’ve read of the bill suggests that an app could ask whether the user is of a fuckable class by its Epstein-list owners, and allow the user to block the prompt. Every other app has to ask for permission to use the camera, to write to certain directories, they can even be firewalled to prevent network access. The very idea that an OS must code in a form of user information that must be provided to any app, trusted or not, is a warped, Palantir-driven approach to (in)security.

Most practitioners of data security are aware of the severe dangers of fingerprinting users, and that is a hardline issue. Thus, in order to maintain their security practices, their only choice is to not collect this sort of info on users at any level. If they’re delivering a security product with a built-in vulnerability, they’re not delivering a security product. It’s much better to just surrender one state until it invents sanity.

Wake me when that actually leads to enforcement penalties. This law is vague enough as it is, no company is going to get slammed for “accidentally” skipping a user permission check, and having their FunPad app offer up your age info to one of Palantir’s long fingers.

Even entering DoB is imo too much of a privacy breach. In my view, they should just take the highest age bracket described, apparently 18+, and then ask that on OS installation: “Are you over the age of 18?” If the user says yes, it installs, and every app is hardcoded to receive that 18+ bracket when checking demographic. If they say no, then it simply replies that users under 18 may not install it under the laws of California.

It’s by design, and in theory meant to encourage ownership to put personal stakes in the region. In practice, of course, homes are laughably unaffordable and it’s a free bonus for the rich.