Post by @bytebro@mastodonapp.uk

2026-03-28 22:12 UTC

Okay, lots of 'stuff' recently about the 'age verification' crap out there, which I think has only (so far) been mandated by one state in the US? And I'm not in the US, so WTF, although allegedly the EU are on the case as well, which means that the UK gov will inevitably curl up and do similar because they want to be in Europe without all the more restrictive rules. But, if all of these orgs/countries/whatever beat up all the manufacturers and resellers (and probably give them some sweet trade deals) , at some point there will probably be some UEFI or BIOS update which will enforce this bollox on whatever platform I have perhaps, even my ageing laptops, no? What are my options after that, rather than re-flashing my BIOS or UEFI on every boot? Good grief.

Replies (1)

@JdeBP@mastodonapp.uk 2026-03-29 10:54

@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

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