Can't wait to use and promote illegal operating systems that do not verify age.

[bms48@mastodon.social]

@catsalad The Register here in UK are tracking the Californian kneejerk legislation: https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/06/os_age_verification/?td=keepreading

[fl0und3r@defcon.social]

@catsalad people are going to have to add a section to their "how to write a minimalist kernel in Rust" called "how to add age verification", congrats, you haven't gotten USB functionality working but now to be legal in the US you need to ask the user for a photocopy of their ID

[zer0unplanned@friendica.rogueproject.org]

@catsalad Cat barely legal salad I would change the handle as well!

[reallylazybear@mastodon.social]

@GerardThornley @catsalad Right. I forgot. Can't have that "back in my day..." crap

And to think most of em still run the world today, like that stupid orange man.

[aakl@infosec.exchange]

@catsalad Ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seat belts. We are now revisiting the Prohibition era.

[tubetime@mastodon.social]

@GerardThornley @Amorpheus @serapath @catsalad for actually useful desktop computing, it still comes down to getting wafers fabbed. not too many advanced fabs around the world these days. Taiwan, South Korea, US, france, probably a few others.

[rhialto@mastodon.sdf.org]

@catsalad
How about Ageless Linux? That seems like it counts.

Ageless Linux — Software for Humans of Indeterminate Age

(goblincorps.com)

[doomed_daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@WTL @Dianora @catsalad
good thing that modern hardware has a reputation of longevity

[dianora@ottawa.place]

@Doomed_Daniel @WTL @catsalad ROHS.

[dandylover1@someplace.social]

@catsalad Let's just hope they have built-in screen readers that can easily be turned on, or they'll be just like most, completely inaccessible.

[doomed_daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@Dianora @WTL @catsalad
I was more thinking about chips degrading relatively fast because of nanometer semiconductor scale and massive complexity, but that's probably a factor as well

[anon_4601@nerdculture.de]

@catsalad

I've got an alternative idea if this madness actually goes through and we can't find a solution to circumvent it legally or not....

Instead of just running, let's turn every single phone into a weapon of digital disobedience.Imagine if an 'outlaw' OS (or a simple mod) automatically appended a 'bag of forbidden words' to every message, hidden in metadata or invisible text, containing a random mix of terms guaranteed to trigger the system.
If millions of people sent billions of these 'poisoned' messages, Chat Control would collapse under the sheer weight of false positives. It would be the biggest DDoS attack in history, powered purely by civil disobedience......

If everything is suspicious, nothing is.

#DDoS #FalsePositives #DataPoisoning #ChatContol #AgeVerification #AgeCheck

[dianora@ottawa.place]

@Doomed_Daniel @WTL @catsalad Ah yes. Cosmic rays could certainly degrade chips on earth given enough time. Hardened ICs are not typical for earth use ether. Older chips would be more resistant e.g. the COSMAC 1802 was rad hardened without trying. Cosmic rays do cause memory errors more easily as well as very few use ECC memory.

[doomed_daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@Dianora @WTL @catsalad
It's not just cosmic rays but just degradation by use which happens faster now, or bugs in hardware (due to complexity) killing it, or a combination, see Intel CPUs one or two generations ago.
But I've seen (DDR4) RAM kits dying after just a few years of use and I'm not too optimistic that ECC would help too much beyond detecting the errors.

I'm just not too optimistic that today's hardware still works fine in 20 years...

[doomed_daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@Dianora @WTL @catsalad
would be awesome though, the current state of the art is pretty good and by writing better optimized software we could get even much more out of it

[dianora@ottawa.place]

@Doomed_Daniel @WTL @catsalad Yes. We are furiously agreeing. However I suspect electrolytics drying out will kill most commodity devices before the chips completely die.

[dianora@ottawa.place]

@Doomed_Daniel @WTL @catsalad As you would know there are open source initiatives for hardware (including CPUs) as well. I'd be fine with a slower computer that was more robust. Hell I've programmed PDP-8s.

[doomed_daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@Dianora @WTL @catsalad
yeah but that has always been a problem and AFAIK is usually fixable with not too advanced soldering equipment?

[dianora@ottawa.place]

@Doomed_Daniel @WTL @catsalad IFF you can get the capacitors yes. I have a hot air rework station.

[lambdacalculus@masto.hackers.town]

@catsalad "You wanna use TOPS-10, kid? You're not old enough!"