269
YSK about ageless Linux, a protest to the age attestation law that was passed in CA
(agelesslinux.org)
this post was submitted on 18 May 2026
269 points (97.2% liked)
You Should Know
45933 readers
462 users here now
YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.
All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.
Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK:
**In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: It’s helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. **
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- The majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Rule 11- Posts must actually be true: Disiniformation, trolling, and being misleading will not be tolerated. Repeated or egregious attempts will earn you a ban. This also applies to filing reports: If you continually file false reports YOU WILL BE BANNED! We can see who reports what, and shenanigans will not be tolerated. We are not here to ban people who said something you don't like.
If you file a report, include what specific rule is being violated and how.
Partnered Communities:
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
Credits
Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah I think the charitable way to read the law is that it requires OS, applications, etc to implement a standardized system for setting, requesting, and receiving age bracket data of a user. It doesn't require anyone to use it. By defining user as under 18 for the purpose of this section it means nothing in the section applies to users over 18.
I get protesting about this because implementation is not trivial and there's no time to do so. But creating a standard and all OS's, websites, and relavent applications adopting that standard isn't a bad thing (unrelated apps like text editors should clearly be exempt). It would make it way harder for kids to circumvent parental controls on a device.
According to the legislation, the concepts of "user" and "18 and over" are mutually exclusive. Anyone over 18 is "an account holder".
The most charitable reason I can think of that they would do this is that short phrases like "minor user", that would otherwise be far better choices, have an unwanted secondary reading that the creators of the law sought to avoid (that being "user of minors"), and they wished to keep things more terse than repeated use of the phrase "user under the age of 18".
I don't think that's a good enough excuse to blatantly redefine a well-established term, even if the scope of the redefinition is limited. Even if there's precedent for having done similarly in the past.
And it's all but guaranteed that someone will attempt to leverage that redefinition outside of the scope.
Plus they also allow a user to present an age bracket of "over 18" despite defining users as under 18. I think they just did a bad job of clearly scoping it. It should be clear that it's a tool for a parent to use and that it's merely requiring that software implement age signaling all the way from OS to website to application. A default OS configuration should have no age defined and nothing should require an age to be defined. But if a parent does define an age then that signal should be honored.