Omarchy Linux Rejects "Retarded" California Age Verification Law

0:00O'Marchi Linux has officially rejected the, quote, retarded California law, quote, requiring age verification at the operating system level. I reached out to DHH to ask him what they were planning to do with O'Marchi Linux. I said, quote, does O'Marchi plan to implement age verification functionality to comply with the California and Brazilian laws, which by the way, the California law takes effect in January, the Brazilian law takes effect in less than two weeks. The HH responded with quote, and this is my favorite response I've received in a while. O'Marchi has no plans to do anything in response to this retarded California law, and quote, I just want to say that's how you do it. We've seen a lot of responses from multiple project leads and corporate spokespeople over

1:00the last couple of days, and that one right there is my favorite, so good on O'Marchi Linux. Now I reported yesterday that a bunch of Linux was planning to implement on specifically how to implement mandatory age verification. In fact, they were talking about adding it to kind of the underlying core of the system to kind of build in an upstream API that ended debuts, essentially, that would go to every major Linux system. This made a lot of rounds over the last couple of hours, probably viewed about a half a million times or so, and caught the attention of Ubuntu's vice president of engineering, and he has issued a response, and I'm just going to read the whole response to you now. This is from the Ubuntu X account. Over the past couple of days, there has been a lot of commentary about Ubuntu, and how

2:01it'll respond to California's new Digital Age Assurance Act, AB1043, read our response. Okay, here's their response. Again, this is from their vice president of engineering. Over the past couple of days, there has been a lot of commentary about Ubuntu and how it'll respond to California's new Digital Age Assurance Act, which will require operating systems to collect age information at account setup and expose an age signal to eligible applications from 2027. Canonical is aware of the legislation and is reviewing it internally with legal counsel, but there are currently no concrete plans on how or even whether Ubuntu will change in response. The recent mailing list post is an informal conversation among Ubuntu community members, not an announcement. While the discussion contains potentially useful ideas, none have been adopted, or committed to by Canonical. When we have a clear plan, we will publish it through our usual channels, and quote.

3:05It's a worthwhile update, it's a little bit of a backpedal, and just to be clear, the individuals discussing these particular implementation were Ubuntu community counsel members. These are official seeded board members, the people who actually make these sorts of decisions. However, Ubuntu's VP of engineering trumps them. So what he says is the official policy, at least until Mark Shuttleworth the CEO of Canonical comes out and trumps the VP of engineering. So but what we had yesterday was absolutely right, and that does still seem to be moving forward. People are continuing to work on exactly that sort of cross Linux distribution mechanism for doing age verification, including people who are sitting on the Ubuntu community council and pushing that forward, but it does sound like Canonical is not 100% certain what they're going to do, or at the very least they want to waffle on it for the moment.

4:10Now they did say that they are reviewing it internally with legal counsel. That's probably a good idea. You should be doing that. What's fascinating about this to me is the VP of Ubuntu made this announcement when exactly was this. This was in the wee hours of this morning, right? This was, I mean, just like 7 a.m. or 6 a.m. this morning East Coast time. I mean, this was, this was just a few hours ago, and clearly when he made this announcement, he was unaware of the law in Brazil, let me bring this up here, which takes effect on March 17th, with the same if not far more stringent requirements than the California law has. I'm finding this amazing that I keep having to tell all the people running some of these,

5:11some of the biggest open source companies on earth, what the laws are that are about to impact them. Do they not have people that are actually looking into this? Do they not have attorneys that are regularly checking the laws? Are the people who pass these laws just not not notifying people who run corporations? Like, there's like nothing happening here. This is absolutely fascinating to me. In fact, the Fedora project leader pivoting over to Red Hat for a moment, which it should be noted, the Fedora Linux project leader is a paid position, a paid leadership position within Red Hat to have ultimate control over the Fedora project, right? Because Fedora Linux, while it is community done or whatever, it's really ultimately controlled by IBM. IBM and Red Hat control Fedora, they own Fedora, and their Fedora project leader is their mechanism for doing that. He made a statement, Jeff Spaletta, who is the Fedora project leader, made the following

6:14statement, greetings from the Fedora project leader. I was not personally aware of this. I'll look into it. Because this is a legal matter, I'm going to refrain from speculating or opining about this until I sync with the project's nominal legal assistance concerning impact. So, Red Hat, and I double checked with one contact that were internally at Red Hat. Before I started doing coverage of the laws in Colorado and California, he says my contact within Red Hat says that there had been absolutely no conversations that they'd seen going on within the company about these laws, but now it's going all over the place of course, but they hadn't been aware of it until I brought it up to them. But now I'm bringing up to them the fact that there's the Brazilian law which went into effect and is they can get fine for starting in 13 days from now, almost 12 days from now.

7:21So I expect some sort of statements from a bunch of Fedora and everyone else saying we're aware of the Brazilian law and we're looking into it. Okay. Yeah. So that's happening all right now. What I would like to say to all of the open source developers of various distributions of Linux, BSD, HIKU, FreeDOS, the like, which almost all major operating systems are impacted by these laws, New York, Colorado, California, and Brazil, that there are legal resources out there available to them, Preston Byrne, who you may remember as one of the lawyers that had been working with 4chan and Kiwi Farms to defend them against some of the attacks coming from the United Kingdom from off-com and whatnot, doing some really good first

8:21amendment sort of protections here in the States. Preston Byrne posted this, if these developers contact me, I will advise them for free and start assembling a legal team to challenge this law end quote. And Preston Byrne was joking around a little bit. He's like, he's kind of, he's kind of becoming the go-to guy for protecting the first amendment as it pertains to the computers and that really does seem to be the case. So I'm just going to say this flat out. Well, this is not particularly my job. If any project leads or founders or CEOs that oversee Linux and BSDs and various open source operating systems, would like to get in contact with Preston Byrne, feel free to reach out to me and I would be happy to make an introduction for you, or you can just reach out to Preston directly, of course. So there's definitely options there. My personal favorite, though, still has to remain the Omarchi Linux response.

9:26Omarchi has no plans to do anything in response to this retarded California law end quote. That's not a bad way to go. Regardless, people are going to have to figure out what they want to do with this. Simply doing nothing is of course an option. Let's say Debian Linux just wants to do absolutely nothing. That's a choice, but they may run a foul of Brazilian laws starting March 17th. Now, this is not going to be a huge deal for say a lone wolf developer who does not exist within the state of the country of Brazil or within the United States or with any of these states where these laws are coming up and maybe doesn't have any sort of financial, you know, existence within those states, maybe not a deal, but if you're a corporation with offices in Brazil, looking at you, all open source corporations, Brazil is going to have the ability to find you.

10:29So you're going to have to decide what sort of approach you're going to take here and I highly recommend talking with lawyers about it like Preston Bern because so anyway, that's that's all happening. My my expectation is we're going to see a whole lot more of statements, both against all of these ridiculous laws and statements about how some some organizations are going to be complying with it over the coming days because the clock is ticking. Thank you to the Lunduke Journal subscribers for making it possible to do this sort of coverage lunduke.com. Look at all those links. They're the best links on the internet. There's never been a better website than lunduke.com, not since geocities closed down. May she rest in peace. If you become a Lunduke Journal lifetime subscriber, you can be into the lifetime subscriber wall of shame or awesomeness or whatever you want to call it. You can get on one of these fancy pants walls or wall number five, which we'll be making its debut anytime now. That's that's it's like it's like Duke

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