I am extremely concerned about the new laws that are going to require ID to use any operating system. I know there is an exception for FOSS at the moment, but the phase 2 plans to deny access to web services for unverified devices would essentially make that exception useless.
I’ve been thinking hard about everything my home server connects to, and it isn’t looking good. How will I pull containers from GitHub or DockerHub when those sites will undoubtedly be subject to the same verification rules? How is SearXNG going to work when my users searches are tied to my identity? Put simply, how are we going to get around this as a community?
Ideas I’ve had:
- Hire an anonymous person and use their identity. Problem: if they commit a crime, the authorities could think it was me, and if I’m suspected of a crime, they could be in trouble.
- Figure out a way to route services through a virtual Windows 95 machine since many ATM’s run on that and maybe there would be an exception for them. Problem: my gut tells me that they would also be blocked and that ATM’s make direct connections separate from traditional web services.
- VPN to the safest country possible during setup and pretend to be in a region that doesn’t require identification. Problem: even if the country doesn’t require it, it doesn’t mean that the OS company won’t require it.
- Move to a more reasonable country and go full FOSS for the rest of my life. Problem: leaving everything I know behind and still potentially have blocked access to some sites that deliver FOSS software.
That’s pretty much it. Moving seems like the option with the greatest possibility of success, but it comes at a huge cost. I’d need to change jobs and start my life all over, but on the other hand, my home server is the only thing that makes my poverty tolerable here. If I lose that, then I have literally nothing to do but read books and wait to die.
So, with humility and anxiety, I come to you, my friends with bigger brains than me. What are we going to do? How are we going to remain private and free? What is your personal plan because I’m drawing blanks and starting to feel like everything I’ve ever believed in is crumbling around me.
Thank you for any advice or theories on how to navigate this paradigm shift. I never would have thought, when I first fired up Netscape and got connected to the whole world, that it would come to this before the end of my lifetime.
Linux is never going to have an age verification system. Any distro that implements it will be forked or abandoned. Or both.
I was born on January 1, 1970, at exactly midnight in London. My OS will confirm this.
Give the politicians who’re pushing this shit a more pressing problem to worry about.
0.- install a old-enough OS into a old-enough machine (basically any Linux from up to ~2025 into a machine of up to ~2021 works) as they support docker and virtualization and you can spin more modern individual programs from there.
Distributed mesh network. Bypass internet by making own.
literally nothing to do but read books
I remember those days. They weren’t that bad.
Unfortunately for me, I’m a film major.
Isn’t then reading books like literally half of how you get your instruction / do your work? Study things figure out how they work etc.
Yeah, my friend was a film major, I remember going with them to movie theaters or watching films on VCR. It wasn’t that bad. Look at what the corporations want to make us do in the name of “convenience”.
For floss operating systems someone will inevitably maintain a (potentially illegal) fork/patch that bypasses the age check. The same will be true for repos and flathub, there will be a mirror without verification for most stuff. Just like youtube hasn’t been able to smash yt-dlp yet I imagine that there will be bypasses that fake an “adult token” to send to websites.
What we can do is:
a) Join organizations, eff.org exists and maybe your country has a local organization too?
b) Discuss privacy with friends, we all have things we’d rather keep hidden - a medical journal, a hobby most find childish or a kinky sex toy. That doesn’t make us criminal. Encourage them to accept newsletters from eff and similar groups.
c) Question your politicians about their view on privacy, we must make noise for them to care.
d) Submit letters to your local newspaper in regards to privacy. If they publish it that’s a win and if they don’t then maybe you got a journalist interested enough to write a full article. Someday.
e) Join politics and work inside the system to protect privacy for everyone.
f) Go offline. Host get-togethers in real life, create regular groups that meet outside the internet, read books, play tabletop games.
g) Become a hermit, plant potatoes, feed the birds. Live far away from town.I like option G, lol.
I’m really hoping for the fork/patch because that seems like something that is well enough within my skill range and time availability to manage. Ideally, there will be a dark web mirror available for that kind of thing because I have a funny feeling that VPN’s might be in the crosshairs too.
The worst part is the “save the children” mentality of it all. It gives them license to pursue offenders to the utmost extent because “think of the kids!” It’s hard to get an average person to feel sorry for a big Hollywood studio or Google being unable to sell your data, but when it comes to preventing a kid from seeing a boob, scorched earth methods are immediately authorized and usually approved of in the court of public opinion.
FWIW, a number of distros have said they will not capitulate to the requirements. I’m on zorin now and they’ve said they won’t capitulate, but systemd has already said they will. So I’m about to move to devuan which doesn’t use systemd.
C2) Organize and participate in protest marches, petitions, and strikes against this.
Strikes, good idea. Learn to fly fpv drones. Those with fiber optics go up to 40 km and can’t be jammed.
Where can I learn more and get involved?
I get the concern, especially since people who aren’t tech savvy are pretty clueless when it comes to digital privacy, but I don’t know if we’re at the point where the ship has sailed on OS level age verification. At least in the US it seems like this is a fight that’s still worth fighting especially since the majority of the political energy right now is directed towards the concurrent AI and affordability crises (and, on the right wing, toward stoking anti-immigrant and to a much lesser extent anti-trans sentiment). To be fair, I’m pessimistic too and realistically, yes, any sincere effort to upend the power structure will eventually need to take place offline.
I feel 100% activated over this. Those fools just radicalized me (more than I already was).
I made a recurring monthly donation to the EFF today, and I made it bigger than any other subscription in my budget.
I live next to a concentration camp for god’s sake. This can’t continue, and you’re right, we need to take it to the streets, but the planning and communication starts online. We need these tools to stay coordinated, and we need people at protests who are ready to take some risks to create change.
Eyes wide open over here. Sign me up. I’d rather go down trying than get slowly crushed under the wheels of capitalism.
I hear ya and obviously I see the value of coordinating online (we wouldn’t be talking otherwise obviously) but many revolutions in history happened without the internet and they can (and likely will) happen again.
From your lips to the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s ears.
There is no way that verification is going to be enforceable. I’m not too worried about it.
Why wouldn’t it be enforceable with government power behind it?
Currently, in the US, we have garbage trucks looking for code violations, people in concentration camps, AI face tracking at stop lights, and every major digital map in the US displays the Lake of Suck-merica and the Gulf of Suck-merica. There are other countries with massive firewalls preventing access to huge swaths of the internet. I really don’t see how this next move would be outside of their capabilities.
There’s a division between state procedure and private possessions there. You can run whatever you want at home and that will never change, you can not take jobs that will require ID on devices (most jobs aren’t government jobs), as of now you can use VPN or TOR to get outside America’s internet. Be a pest to your representatives to make sure it stays that way
Most of what you’re experiencing is an intentionally created climate of doom. It helps quell dissent to make people think it’s all out of their control. The map renaming is just theatrics. But the street camera’s are real. That’s going to take being active in your community in one way or another.
I’m not as worried about the first phase, but the second, where they are talking about limiting access to Google, Apple, and Amazon services (etc.) for non-verified devices is what really concerns me. Do you think those companies will restrict it to the US only and allow a VPN to get around it, or do you think they will see the potential in the ultimate identifier for ads and make it mandatory for all users globally?
At its worst extreme, I could see this being used to identify every user of every device and then potentially use harvested data to deliver targeted and customized propaganda that could circumvent VPN anonymization since they are confident of who the specific device belongs to separate from an IP address it is connecting from. With AI, the ads could even be altered and customized to specifically prey on that individual user’s insecurities and biases. In a political context, this would be the most powerful propaganda weapon ever invented, and the capitalistic value of it would be immense.
Huh. I guess I hadn’t thought of that because I don’t personally plan on using any Google, Apple, or Amazon services or devices. Kind of already cut most of it out of my life, but for companies that still will insist on having Google support yeah those jobs probably will still demand you give ID to those companies. That will suck.
They kind of already identify people’s devices, phones anyway. Canvas tracing is getting most people id’d by correlating the info like how you describe. For marketing and propoganda that might be worth the effort. I think the real cash cow in forcing everyone to use their services will be claiming ownership of any work that gets created using it. Kind of like employers do if you build anything while under a contract.
As I was reading it, this would affect any site that is using Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon (etc.) infrastructure services as well. That covers a huge swath of the internet—GitHub, news sites, eBay…it’s hard to think of a major site that wouldn’t be tangentially connected to one of those mega-providers through ads, hosting, networking, and the rest.
I’m not even considering work computers, I’m talking about my personal server potentially needing ID to download stuff or serve results through SearXNG. The dependency on major service providers extends to so many sites that it is hard to fathom how we could access much of anything other than torrents and Lemmy, and even some Lemmy instances could end up affected depending on how they’ve set up their instance.
I don’t think they’d go to all this trouble if it just meant you couldn’t see the next iPhone on the Apple website—they’re doing this to create an environment where you’d essentially need a license to use the internet…”for the children.”
hmmm maybe you and I are in different kinds of ecosystems with different worries. Protecting yourself at home isn’t easy but it’s way less hopeless. If it would help, you should look at ways to cut those out of your life now. Not trying to convert you to anything, but you might be surprised how much is out there even after you degoogle, and switch to foss kinds of stuff.
I’m already in that transitionary phase. I need to save money for a new phone and laptop to complete the move to FOSS completely, but everything that matters is already running on my Linux server.
Fully distributed networking over IPv6? No more domain names? That’s a lot of technical ground to cover tho. We would have to deal with discovering mutually common open ports on random addresses and keeping local lists… Isn’t this just basically dark web?
Are there any safe dark web FOSS distributors?
I could start a bittorrent (or whatever replaces it) 🫡 Or we could go back to distributing distros by CD. Ahh, the good old days. 😆
Torrenting containers would be a pretty good idea. An even better idea would be if docker would include an ability to download those packages through a system like that for ease of use and so that we could circumvent a connection that passes through the affected services.
I was thinking about using Tor to tunnel things through, but at a certain point in the relay it will require somebody to put a server with an authorized, identifiable system as an exit point, and the legal implications of this would make the relay owner criminally liable. The option B is to use Tor, I2P, et cetera as hidden networks, and mirror packages manually between authorized and unauthorized devices (for as long as mandatory DRM for external storage devices doesn’t kick in).
Yeah, I had the same realization about Tor: the exit node is the weakness. Also, as we all know, that is sending us back to the Stone Age with the speed which means that accessing content becomes really difficult.
Mirroring packages is a clever idea, but boy howdy that’s a lot of work to manage updates. I’m not totally against doing it, I just feel that pit in my stomach at the understanding that it would mean a huge amount of work to continue operating as I have been, and I have to juggle a job and a semblance of a social life at the same time.
I wish there were two of me—one guy to run the network and another guy to keep us alive and housed.
Ah, the good old days when a couple bonded for the division of labor, among other perks. Fuckin’ doom & gloom “religion” infested that too, and with extreme prejudice. 🤮🤬
I know! Women’s rights are great, but the conclusion shouldn’t have been “ok, now you BOTH have to work for the man to support a home, or else you’re screwed.”
One person works for the company, one person works for the family, and it shouldn’t matter which gender does which. Of course, both can work for the company if they want, but making it mandatory is a misery machine.
FWIW, most religious systems are focused on population control, and that includes birth rate. Females of child-bearing age (some far younger 🤢🤬) being relegated to almost entirely that and defining their existence by that alone.
All gods must die, and their fanatics rehabbed or excised.
