I received the amended Colorado Age Attestation bill.

[kgf@hachyderm.io]

@carlrichell I started learning programming in high school (around age 16) and was messing around with QBASIC years before then. Can't say I would've known to pursue computer science if not for all of that.

I also attribute a significant amount of my Linux literacy to an amazing Swedish friend I met online, who IIRC was around 17 years old at the time. He got me started on Slackware in 2002 or 2003. (He was a couple of years younger than me, and unfortunately passed away due to cancer not long after that.)

So yeah kids do some pretty cool stuff and can even teach their elders new tricks that can help shape their entire careers.

[sparrows@calamity.world]

@carlrichell I learned programming by mucking around in GameMaker, I made a brute force factorizing program to check my math homework.

That freedom to build whatever I needed would have been restrained if I couldn't access GameMaker as app at all due to my age.

[eickot@mastodon.social]

@moonleay @carlrichell I remember once that I broke my Xorg config just before an exam. (Yes, it was an update of debian testing)

[qbit@mammothcirc.us]

@carlrichell can we just not pass the bill? Is that even considered?

[drwho@masto.hackers.town]

@qbit @carlrichell Nope.

[deathkitten@firetribe.org]

@carlrichell@fosstodon.org I get why you're focused on getting open source excluded here, but we really need to be fighting this nonsense as a whole. Surveillance instead of holding toxic social media companies to account for their predatory behavior is insane.

That said, an exception for open source is better than nothing. So thank you for at least trying that much.

[drewnaylor@mastodon.online]

@carlrichell Really hoping all these bills fail.

[dylanmtaylor@mastodon.social]

@carlrichell Thank you so much for your work on this! I love that there is now a FOSS exception in CO. I'd love to see the same in CA, NY, and the federal bill that was just proposed. Ideally we don't need to implement any age verification at all and the only thing added is a mechanism parents can use to control content if they wish to.

[jeremiah@tldr.nettime.org]

@jackryder @carlrichell Also, responsible for Friend. What a fall.

[asymmetricblue@mastodon.social]

@carlrichell @jackryder Looking at text of the bill, I find the definition of Device and Operating System lacking.
For example, if I had a car with the Android Automotive OS, would I need an account for every driver? What if a 12 year old tried to listen to a satellite radio station that has explicit content?
There are so many single user mode devices out there that are basically general purpose hardware, with an OS and a GUI. Will they require whole industries to fit their mold?

[gabemoralesvr@mastodon.social]

@carlrichell During covid, my friends and I built a smart mailbox that would sterilize mail for people using UV lights back when people didn't know how the virus was transmitted. We used a raspberry pi for the project, which of course ran Raspbian for the OS. Much cheaper, easier to work with, and more well suited for the job vs a microcontroller. How in the ever loving hell would this project work if the "microcontroller" required age verification? Just an example of how dumb this idea is.

[gabemoralesvr@mastodon.social]

@carlrichell what about stuff like Amiga Workbench? They still make Amiga OS. How would something like that work?? That's not FOSS... but Amigas lack the ability to even phone out to facilitate age verification. Amigas don't even have an RTC. This entire idea is technologically infeasible.

[gabemoralesvr@mastodon.social]

@carlrichell I began doing computer programming at 8. If this bill had been in place in the early 90s, I wouldn't have my career today. This will lead to immense brain drain in the US.

[gabemoralesvr@mastodon.social]

@moonleay @eickot @carlrichell "Oh, I suddenly only have single monitor support again, I must have updated."

[carlrichell@fosstodon.org]

@Tom_ofB that's impressive! Thank you for sharing.

[carlrichell@fosstodon.org]

@eickot @moonleay I've been there

[carlrichell@fosstodon.org]

@jzb @neal @eff I did catch that and it's one of the more draconian efforts with full verification. I don't expect it to go far but it is scary. Companies that provide verification services are pushing these laws.

There is apparently a group of open source projects starting to coordinate. I heard this from the FreeBSD Director and am supposed to receive an invite soon. I don't know who is involved yet.

Other projects like RockyLinux have reached out as well as others.

[swee@mastodon.swee.codes]

@carlrichell This is going to be a bit long..

Heya, hopefully me counts, but am is 15 years old and me has used lin ucks since like uhh age 11 (mom introduced me to Zorin OS, and I explored more to Linux), me was already interested in programming and breaking software since age 9 and open source software helped me even more with that with good documentation and community.

When I was 13 close to 14 I discovered IRC (with Libera.Chat), and that changed my whole life and it also became my comfort zone on the internet, the people there also inspired me to get a domain (https://swee.codes) and i also became a furry after using IRC :3

IRC also inspired me to start self hosting stuff, I currently selfhost a ZNC with 128 users (and also seen in https://wiki.znc.in/Providers), and some others listed on https://swee.codes/services

oh and not to mention the many projects on my self-hosted git site - https://git.swee.codes/swee just has 63 public repos, not that much /s

I've lost interest in looking at Linux distros and became more interested in exploring more unixes, my home server runs FreeBSD (https://oreo.node.swee.codes) and I've also tried Haiku and SerenityOS

At least I'm not an idiot that searches "how to convert .bat to .exe" and uses Scratch anymore, thanks to open source software. :3

I really hope Washington doesn't copy California and Colorado, and that we find a way to fight for anonymity

[vandorb12@infosec.exchange]

@qbit @carlrichell can we honestly expect politicians to do the right thing?

[dgr@toot.li]

@carlrichell I would like to have the feature to enable parental control on my Linux for my kids but I'm not happy with the laws. I would like the law to require sites and apps that want kids as users/customers to be required to provide a PEGI like signal. This way I control if I enable the feature on my machine and the OS and the browser does the checking if the user can launch the app or open the site.
Also distributions could add the PEGI class to the packages in their repos.