Post by @JdeBP@mastodonapp.uk

2026-03-29 10:54 UTC

@bytebro@mastodonapp.uk It's very unlikely that anything of the sort will occur. There is simply a complete disconnect between Microsoft/Google/Apple user accounts anything that firmware can record in persistent storage before an operating system has even started up. I predicted, as you probably saw, the form that the compliance measures would take for #Unix and Unix-like operating systems on 2026-03-01, and both 11 hours and about 4 days later they took that form from two different people. One with pull requests on GitHub, one in the very FediVerse thread that I began. It is operating systems that will see (and indeed have seen) the updates bringing this. Not firmwares. #AgeVerification #systemd #FreeBSD #NetBSD #OpenBSD #MidnightBSD

Replies (1)

@JdeBP@mastodonapp.uk 2026-03-29 11:08

@bytebro@mastodonapp.uk #UKLaw and #EULaw have not followed in the footsteps of the U.S.A.. The two legal approaches (3, in fact, as Japan has another one) are divergent, and the U.K. and E.U. are already on another legal path where the fundamentals differ. They already have laws. In fact, their laws came first. The relevant U.K. law was passed when Rishi Sunak was Prime Minister, for historical context. The E.U.'s was the year before that. The fundamentals are things like exactly who is being legally required to verify, record, provide, and act upon information about people's ages. U.S.A. laws put these onuses on different classes of people than do U.K. and E.U. laws. Japan is different again. One 'fun' part is that the U.S.A. laws differ on this from state to state, but #Debian Developers (and their counterparts in other Linux-based operating systems) always match the definitions regardless. Because they are both operating system and app store providers. #AgeVerification #USLaw

Open ##5201107