Linux Hardware Maker System76 Speaks Out on Age Verification

0:00System 76 has spoken out regarding the age verification laws that are passing and being proposed in multiple states, including the home state of System 76, Colorado, where a law has already passed the Senate, and is just inching its way towards being signed into law. It seems almost inevitable at this point, which would require all of the operating systems shipped on System 76 hardware, including their own Linux distribution, known as POPOS, would require them all to include actual age attestation and some level of age verification, including age APIs and whatnot for developers for every user on every operating system they ship, kids, adults, the whole gamut. I think many people were wondering what System 76 is going to do. As soon as I saw this law was passing through in Colorado, that's what came to my mind.

1:07I've spent time at the System 76 offices in many, many years past. They do good quality work in shipping Linux hardware and kind of focusing increasingly on more open source hardware. And so that really raised a lot of red flags for me. I'm like, how are they going to respond to this law, which is just absolutely horrific. So Carl Rochelle, the CEO of System 76, made a fairly long blog post, which he made it very clear he was not a fan of these laws. Just a quick snippet from the blog post here. The best intentions can produce unintended consequences. Colorado's Senate Bill 26051 in California's Assembly Bill require operating systems to report age brackets to app stores and websites. A person who creates an account on a computer is supposed to be 18 or older and attest to the age of the user they're creating for themselves or for their child.

2:07In practice, this means anyone under 18 isn't supposed to create a computer account on their own. We talk about how he and so many of the employees at System 76, well, they kind of got started being computer nerds when they were kids, installing operating systems and fiddling around with their computers. And he's right. He's absolutely right. I mean, how many of us were, you know, eight, nine and 10 year old kids installing our own operating systems messing up our computers and the like. And that really built into us an identity of being computer nerds and that followed through for the rest of our lives and set us up for the careers that we would have. And so he pointed out among other issues that this is, this is going to be stifling. This is, this is not a good thing. He then, he then follows it up with an interesting conclusion. And I want to, I want to read this to you and then I have some thoughts on him.

3:09Some of these laws impose requirements on System 76 and Linux distributions in general. The California law and Colorado law modeled after it were agreed in concert with major operating system providers should this method of age attestation become the standard absent websites will not assume liability when a signal is not provided and assumed the lowest age bracket. Any Linux distribution that does not provide an age bracket signal will result result in a nerfed internet for their users as a kind of an interesting point that he makes there in that, yeah, websites and apps and whatnot are going to be requiring that they get certain information back from the operating system about what the age bracket is for the users. And if they don't get that back, you get the kitty version and maybe that's fun for some people and that's certainly going to be fine for a lot of people, but I can see that being a potentially big issue with social media and so many other things.

4:12He continues and here's one thing that that really stuck out to me, quote, we are accustomed to adding and he's referring to System 76 here. We are accustomed to adding operating system features to comply with laws, accessibility features for ADA and power efficiency settings for energy star regulations are two examples. We are a part of this world and we believe in the rule of law. We still hope these laws will be recognized for the folly they are and removed from the books or found unconstitutional and quote, okay. So what I'm reading between the lines there lines here, it's clear that the CEO of System 76 does not like these laws and I don't blame them. I don't like them either. We're on the same page there, but he's also making it clear that System 76, including with their OS of pop OS and whatever OS is they ship on their hardware, they're going

5:14to comply with the laws as written and he does, he runs a business. Now I would like to see System 76 fight these laws, especially in his home state of Colorado. Now I don't know what's happening behind the scenes, maybe the CEO of System 76 is getting a hold of the legislators behind this law and trying to encourage them to drop it and trying to encourage other legislators to vote against it in the house and the governor maybe to veto it, maybe all of that's happening and I would hope that it is because it's going to have such a dramatic and profound impact on the users and customers of System 76 hardware and software and honestly it's going to have a pretty negative impact on the company System 76 itself. So I would like to see them reaching out. Now there's multiple lawyers out there that can assist them with fighting these sorts of issues, including Preston Byrne who I've had on the show before, who has been the lawyer for 4chan and

6:20has been kind of been at the forefront of fighting a lot of these computer related privacy issues and he Preston's made the offer to to anyone who's looking to fight against these sorts of overreaching privacy infringing laws to reach out to him and and he can assist or at least help them find someone who can. So hopefully System 76 is reaching out to Preston or other attorneys, maybe their own lawyers to figure out how to effectively fight these sorts of laws because I think I think the CEO of System 76 is right. I believe after reading through these laws that yes, these laws are unconstitutional and and beyond that putting that aside for a moment. I just don't think that they're the right way to go. I think they're directly harmful to computer users, to computer manufacturers and any benefit that we might see from having age attestation and age

7:21verification being forced into these systems. I think it's negated by the fact that there's just so many drawbacks that it's just not worthwhile. And I am hopeful like System 76 CEO Karl Rochelle. I am hopeful that they do get struck down and removed from the books as well. That doesn't seem to be happening. I mean, not yet. Right. I mean, more and more states are proposing these laws. It's not just California and Colorado. We've also got New York and Illinois, the country of Brazil and it's growing in numbers almost almost constantly. Karl also pointed out over on X and I wanted to read this because he's absolutely right. Quote, perhaps the most perverse consequence of age verification laws, many require advertising the age bracket of the user to the open web. Children will be known to be children, even to those that would exploit that information without

8:22regard for any other safety law. End quote. And he's right. That is absolutely true. The reality is that many of these age verification laws would actually make children less safe. It is noteworthy. This is very noteworthy considering that the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC announced that they have now an official policy of not enforcing COPA regulations, the children's online privacy protection stuff, that those regulations were meant to protect kids online. But those COPA violations will no longer be enforced by the FTC for companies who are doing age verification. That to me tells me that even the FTC knows that these age verification procedures are actually going to be making kids less safe. They know that these are COPA violations.

9:23Age verification of kids storing the ages of kids, making catalogs of miners. These are COPA violations, man. These are making kids less safe. And the companies doing it know the lawmakers know and the FTC knows they're making kids less safe. This is worth noting. I'm a big fan of making kids safe. I have kids. Other people have kids. I'd like those kids to be safe. This is a reasonable thing. But what these lawmakers are doing is they're using the fact that all good people want kids to be safe as a justification for making kids less safe. That's some Hutzbar right there, right? They're literally passing laws that will make kids less safe by telling us, well, we've got to make kids safe. Think of the children. Like, uh-huh.

10:27You're lying to me right now. You're not making kids less safe. You're not making kids safer. You're making them less safe. I find that immensely frustrating, immensely frustrating because the reality is I think all of the reasonable people of the world, we think, okay, yeah, you know what? We do want kids to be safe. We want to think of the children. But then when there's these lawmakers out there using phrases like keep kids safe and think of the children in order to actually hurt kids and create online catalogs of kids, uh-uh. They're making the world actively a worse and worse place. And I think that is absolutely horrific. Uh, so- so a couple of things. Kudos to System 76 for speaking out about this. Uh, I truly appreciate it. And I think- I think the users of System 76 appreciate it as well. I would like to see more of a firm speaking out in a firm fighting of this from System 76. Um, but you know what?

11:34This sort of statement is a heck of a lot more than any other major company has really done in fighting these sorts of- these sorts of just draconian age verification laws. Uh, canonicals, uh, in Ubuntu, they haven't- they haven't made any sort of statement like this. Neither is Red Hat. Neither is Susa. Uh, IBM hasn't Microsoft and Apple. They're not fighting these laws. At least System 76 had the cajonays to come out and actually fight the law. Uh, they- and actually make a statement that they don't see this as a good thing. And, um, you know, ultimately System 76 feels that they might- at least it sounds like to me that they might need to comply with the laws because they're a business and they do business and they don't want to get sued into oblivion by the government. I can't blame them on that front. But I do hope that they, I hope that they do take an increasingly active role in fighting the laws. In some way, um,

12:36I understand if they feel like they have to, uh, comply with the laws when uh, push comes to shove when they take effect, but until such time, fighting against it would be a positive thing. It would be a win for them and for their users. Uh, but again, kudos to Carl for coming out and actually saying these sorts of things. No other, uh, major open source leader is coming out and making these sorts of statements. Uh, no, no major one anyway. Um, now that said, that said, there have been some movements here and there with some of the smaller open source projects. Like midnight BSD, we covered this, uh, I think it was early last week. Midnight BSD changed their licensing in response to the California law and they said, look, okay, fine. Uh, we don't have the time and resources to implement this change properly. Um, so, uh, we're just not going to do the California required age verification that their law is going to require. So users in California, you can't use midnight BSD anymore. Right. Uh, they just came out and they just,

13:40they just set it flat out. Um, and, uh, they've expanded that since then, uh, to include, uh, all of the remaining states. Um, quote, we have revised our license to include additional jurisdictions implementing the age verification laws. Residents of Brazil are no longer authorized to use midnight BSD. We will not implement ID checks as Brazil requires, um, not just, uh, a testing age. Um, so they, and this is the license that they've updated. Residents of any countries, states or territories that require age verification for operating systems are not authorized to use midnight BSD. This list currently includes Brazil effective March 17th, California effective next January 1st and will include Colorado, Illinois and New York provided they pass their currently proposed proposed proposed legislation. We urge users to write the representatives to get these laws repealed and replaced. Um, so, uh, kudos to midnight BSD for speaking out as well. Um,

14:40uh, but again, system 76 is in a little bit more of a, of a tricky position in that they have large customer bases already existing in states like Colorado, New York and, and California and the like, and they do business in the state of Colorado. So how do they navigate this while staying in business as a company, not getting sued into oblivion by the state, um, while still fighting this? I understand that the difficulty there, but they spoke out and kudos to them for that. Uh, thank you to the London Journal subscribers for making all of this sort of coverage possible. It would not happen without all of you go to lunduke.com and click on links there. Become a monthly, yearly or lifetime subscriber. If you want to support the work going on here at the Lunduke Journal and if you would like to become a lifetime subscriber, you can optionally get added to the Lunduke Journal wall of lifetime fancy pants. This, uh, there are now five such walls. Wall number one is the, uh, Pete Pico CRT wall. Wall number two is the DOS wall. The wall number three, the windows

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