Revise age verification terms for MidnightBSD (opens in new tab)

Meta is putting a lot of money into lobbying for these laws, presumably because it's easier to change laws than it is to fix their business model, and they're probably tired of getting sued for COPPA violations.

This may make sense from their point of view, but from a user's point of view I do not understand why I would want my own operating system to spy on me so the government can get more data, which it may then hand over to others. Now the main problem is that governments become increasingly hostile to The People, but now downstream people suddenly act as surrogate-spy helpers, such as the MidnightBSD folks do. This is a simple case where people should globally reject criminal governments from spying on people.

They're pushing because the loonies are pushing. The loonies are passing age verification laws and big businesses don't want the responsibility.

Now... it just so happens that the loonies and big business are connected another way. Despite not much liking each other, they share a political party to advance each other's goals. Only a relatively small fraction of the country really wants to eliminate porn (which is the real goal), but they have enough allies who are willing to tolerate it to make a majority (or near-majority).

Which enables big business to get everything else that they want.

Billionaires are fringe loonies

They make up a tiny tiny tiny portion of the human population and whatever nation state they claim to originate from

I wasn't under 18 when I started playing with *BSD/Nix systems on my own, but how tragic that kids who would be drawn to understanding these systems are essentially 'outlawed' from learning them. As another HNer pointed out in a related post, I think this stems from not understanding the delineation between an OS/App/Platform.

That may be a rationale, but then they act to help governments spy on people. This is a no go. I understand that the government created that problem, but they should just refuse acting as proxy-sniffer for governments here. Who in his or her sane mind would want age-spying daemons to run on their systems? Next thing the BSDs will do is to support systemd ... then we can integrate the sniffing and call it systemd-kiddie-protector.c.

I wouldn't mind it getting fully tested in court, to be honest.