Ubuntu Planning Mandatory Age Verification

0:00Developers for Ubuntu and Elementary OS are planning specific age verification functionality for their systems in a way which would impact all Linux users off pretty much every Linux distribution on the planet. This is in response to a age verification law. Let me bring this up here. That was passed in California back in November of this last year. But which really didn't get any coverage at all until the londo journal started covering it last week since then coverage of this age verification laws exploded which essentially requires all operating systems without exception to implement a first run or user account setup piece of functionality which asks the user for what their age is, what their date of birth is, stores that at the system level provides an API for it for application developers to query against,

1:01provide age group demographics for people for applications to utilize and possibly nebulously provide some other form of age verification on top of that. The penalties for operating systems not complying with this are pretty severe on the order of $7,500 per instance which means every single user. So if Ubuntu has 10 users, it's 10 times 7,500, you can do the math on if what that would actually mean for some of these bigger distributions. So it was obviously going to happen that now that they know about this law, thanks to the londo journal, that they were going to do something about it because they have until January 1st of this coming year. So was it nine months away from now to actually get that in place. So over on the Ubuntu-Devil list,

2:01the Ubuntu development mailing list, they've begun a discussion around exactly this. This discussion kicked off on Sunday with let's see, it's Aaron, let me make it his name right here because it's awesome. Aaron Rein Bolt, Aaron Rein Bolt, a Ubuntu community council member said, quote, we're currently looking into how to implement an API that will comply with the laws while also not being a privacy disaster. Their current proposal is that they would be adding a new debuffs interface. That's a real thing. That would basically ship to every single Linux distribution on earth. If you don't know, debuffs handles an awful lot of messaging between various components of the system. And I don't know of any Linux distribution that can really exist without debuffs at this point. So many packages depend on it that it is in essence a core part of every Linux distribution, which means if Ubuntu works to incorporate age verification features into debuffs,

3:08every Linux distribution will be getting those age verification features. They're working together with one of the developers or the head developer Dan Foray over at elementary OS to provide this sort of solution. Now they're going to have to also provide some sort of UI around this, which more than likely will be based on gnome, right? Because that's what Ubuntu ships with. So I haven't seen any statement come out of the gnome camp for or against this law yet, which isn't entirely surprising since the majority of the news regarding this law comes from the Lunduke journal and it is against the law the gnome law to mention the Lunduke journal. It's punishable by an immediate lifetime ban if you just simply link to one of my stories. So it does make it kind of hard for them to discuss the law when they can't link to the primary source for the law. That's a conundrum for the gnome folks.

4:13But assuming that this does happen and this does get implemented into gnome somehow, that means that more than likely that'll go upstream and then downstream to every Linux distribution that ships with gnome as a desktop will probably be getting age verification features courtesy of a Ubuntu and elementary OS. Thanks to Governor Gavin Newsom of California. Now the it's not just California. The the Democrats over in Colorado also have state bill 26 0 5 1 which has yet to pass but is looking like it's pretty well on track to pass and so that it'll be both California and and Colorado. Now there are other ways to deal with this obviously. I mean we've seen that midnight BSD came out and said that they just simply would say you're not you're not able to use our software Californians because of the state law in California. So

5:16effective January 1st in 2027 in a little over nine months from now midnight BSD will no longer be available to residents of California. That's that's one approach to it. The California's rather large as is Colorado. It would be ashamed to lose all those users so I could understand why Ubuntu maybe doesn't want to considering how many corporates accounts canonical parent company or canonical apparent company of Ubuntu has that are with inside the state of California. So for canonical Ubuntu this isn't an option from a business standpoint. They don't have the choice they want to go out of business of of ignoring the law entirely but it appears that they're also not going to fight the law. They're just going to go straight in and implement age verification functionality. So from an end user perspective the motivation almost doesn't really matter so much. You're now stuck with the with the choice of continue using Ubuntu or elementary or or likely any

6:16of the other distributions that will be impacted by these pieces of functionality being created or switched to something that is taking some sort of a stand and not allowing age verification features in the OS anymore. So I expect to see a whole lot of movement over the next nine months. I should also be stated that I've heard from a large number of distribution and other key component developers over the last couple of days who have stated that they will not be complying with the California state law. Some of them are planning to do something similar to what midnight be as deeded and simply say that hey California you're out of luck. We simply are not available in the state of California. One one developers has talked about having a California edition of their Linux distribution where they literally have their OS which does not have age verification and then the California edition which is the exact same thing except it it asks you for your

7:18birthday stores it provides an API and all that sort of thing. So essentially there's the there's the not spying on you edition and the California edition which assumedly will also be for residents of Colorado. Now from just from the the broader Ubuntu standpoint here just because they're they're a big dog in the Linux world right. They're making some very curious moves lately. Now there's this adding in the age verification not fighting against mandatory age verification is it is was kind of expected from them. I mean for those of you who've been around a long time you may remember some of the the privacy concerns that cropped up with built in like Amazon functionality and whatnot in early versions of unity and there was a lot of uproar around that there's a lot of things along those lines and and telemetry issues that have happened with Ubuntu over the years. Typically what's happened is Ubuntu oversteps the user privacy features a bit

8:20and then gets slapped on the wrist everyone gets upset and then they roll those features back in the next release and they say oh my bad and they don't talk about them anymore. That's usually what happens with Ubuntu and so it's not terribly surprising that they're coming in with the age verification side of things and just saying okay we'll implement that because they've implemented those sorts of things before that violate users privacy but they're also doing the whole rewrite everything and rust thing right now which they're making a clear declaration to everyone that not only is Ubuntu going to violate your privacy a whole lot more than it did yesterday but going forward all of the software that you use on your Ubuntu system will become increasingly less stable as they migrate everything do a whole new programming language and there's going to was it there will quote see some serious see some breakage over the the months and years ahead.

9:26I don't know exactly what sort of marketing message that is sending to people hey come and use our system sure we violate your privacy but it's okay because the software doesn't work that well but that seems to be what they're going for so who knows to Ubuntu I guess thank you to the Lunduke Journal subscribers for allowing me to do this sort of coverage. Lunduke.com become a Lunduke lifetime subscriber get on the walls the walls are great you love the walls there's more walls coming because there's a lot of you getting lifetime subscriptions and those will be absolutely fantastic. In fact a wall number five will be coming up later this week I was going to do it today but I got busy I got busy and I couldn't do the wall but you'll you'll have that later on the week and with that ladies and gentlemen boys and girls nerds and nerds across the inner tubes I do declare and broadcast