TLDW:
Brazil is requiring OS level age verification by march 17th, 2026.
New York about to vote on a law that would “require all manufacturers of internet-enabled devices, operating systems, or application stores to conduct commercially reason-able and technically feasible age assurance for users at the point of device activation.”
In order to “incentivize” age verification, The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has announced that they will ignore COPPA violations for software performing age verification.
They are taking the power of personal computing away from us…
They can pry it out of my cold dead hands
If anyone has recommendations for ways to preserve personal computing, please share at !homecomputing@piefed.social
I feel like there is a line coming with hardware and software and that will be the last of it’s type as the move towards subscription based services is forced onto everyone. Its a shame people won’t vote with their wallets. It just means I’ll have my basement crammed with old tech and I’ll go full old man mode and stop keeping up with technological progress.
Just learn how to harvest the next generation of chips out of their subscription-based devices that don’t have any onboard RAM or GPU, and then integrate it into your existing system.
You might have to write your own firmware and triple-check for any backdoors that might send your data back to the mothership, but it’s not like you have to cut yourself off entirely as long as you maintain your own self-sufficient system.
Thats my plan.
Too bad you will need hard drives for that. And all the rest.
No no. OLD tech. Books do not require hard drives.
Books like “A Canticle for Liebowitz”
Pretty much. They‘re essentially outlawing privacy so there will be no point in resisting. This is worse than Orwellian.
This will make it more anonymous because verification relies on a token defined in the OS rather than uploading identification.