Simon Richter

What I wrote elsewhere about the California age verification law:

If this is meant as a security system, having it default to "fail-open" is insufficient.

The Unix APIs don't have age information. The systemd project has graciously decided that they are willing participants in this, and have accepted a patch to add a dbus API, and subsequently refused to revert that commit. So, dbus API it is.

If I start "env -u DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS firefox", does that mean that the browser must pretend that I'm in elementary school and only present "age-appropriate" material, or will it default to "full access"?

Likewise, will curl/wget be required to implement a dbus query? Do we mandate that build chroots now become full containers with a running dbus instance that has an age information service connected, so they can access the entire Internet, or do we allow bypassing the filter by doing a recursive curl/wget download of an URL and then displaying it locally?

The bits that were added to systemd (and which we cannot remove without creating evidence that we mean to disregard the California legislation) are not sufficient for the stated goal, so we must expect that further enforcement infrastructure becomes mandatory.

This entire law assumes that people are using managed infrastructure exclusively, i.e. with an Apple or Microsoft cloud account, and accessing cloud based services.

There is simply no niche for user-managed infrastructure here, because it circumvents all these enforcement mechanisms. I don't even see it being legal for a sixteen year old to be root on their own computer, like it was for me when I started out, because that would give them access to age-inappropriate material, and we cannot have that.

I fully expect that we will soon reach a point where we have to decide between following US or EU law, with no option to remain compliant with both. A requirement to include the user's age bracket in browser queries is already likely to be in violation of EU data protection legislation.

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