Humans are quite capable of bankrupting financial companies with coding issues. Knight Capital Group introduced a bug into their system while using high frequency trading software. 45 minutes later, they were effectively bankrupt.

Except compulsory age verification in Linux is now becoming a real threat. Some Linux distros are actively against this but many are not seemingly interested in fighting it: CachyOS, Ubuntu, Fedora and others.

Age Verification is the thin end of a much bigger wedge in "open" OS's

Yes time to wake up.

I really believe most "open source" big projects have been compromised long ago. We have saw all those "Foundations" taking them over with all their governance, bureaucracy and goal which do not make any sense at the first look.

One example is Fedora, which is part of "The Digital Public Goods Alliance" [0], "a multi-stakeholder initiative that accelerates the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals by facilitating the discovery, development, use of, and investment in digital public goods."

The Digital Public Goods Alliance has about every governments as member plus all the usual suspects: Gate Foundation and co.

All the leaderships have usually no background or experience in open source or even computers but are just magically placed there. But you can't say anything because they are mostly women.

You read the goals and roadmaps of those foundations and find out it has nothing to do with software or open source. It is basically there to control those projects and then have them implement all the age verification, digital id, etc.

So yes this is not a surprise all those projects are now all in absurd features such as age verification.

- [0] https://www.digitalpublicgoods.net/

Yes, all the code of conducts pushed onto open source projects, often by outside actors or novice contributors backed by a mob, has been mostly about replacing people who care about the projects with people who care more about following rules and will do what they will be told.

the current law requires no verification at all simple attestation, you could put in _any_ age. it also does not effect linux distros as a whole, only distros in jurisdictions with the laws.

Sure, for now... I simply don't believe it will stop at "simple attestation", because we all know that simple attestation is practically useless, but once the various distros accept this "trivial" inconvenience, "Age verification 2" with harsher requirements will soon be on the way.

I would be ecstatic to be proved wrong on this, but experience tells me that is not likely to happen.

We all know it's not about age, it's about user identity. As above, it's clearly a wedge so it's not rhetorical to observe more invasive and controlling features are coming.

I wouldn't be surprised if it is being done to help microslop and AI companies lock in their profit margins.

Right now, if a handful of tech companies crater they'll take the whole world's financial systems out with them, so the government could easily be made complicit in any scheme they can conceive of to bolster their finances.

Simple attestation is very useful for the case where a parent gives a child access to a computer and wants that computer to block porn. That's the use case everyone is clamoring for, and asking the root user "how old is this user?" solves it in a simple, open, privacy-preserving way. Everybody wins, except the teenager who wants to watch porn. If this were not legally mandated, everyone would support it as a useful feature, but since it is legally mandated, we have to get angry about it.

This has got very little to do with children - that is just the excuse that sounds good. "Think of the children" is a rhetorical tactic that anyone who wants to get unfettered access to your data rolls out whenever they can. It is a tactic that unreasonable people use to influence reasonable people, because it is so difficult for a reasonable person to argue against without coming across as uncaring and/or bigoted.

If it was an excuse to get your data there would be some data-getting involved. It may be hard for you to believe, but lots of people really do want parental controls that actually work and are bound by the force of law.

This is likely the first step, and in itself is not much of a concern but only if it stops there, which it almost certainly will not. The next step, where the government argue that simple attestation is not secure enough to protect the children, and now we need to show a government ID is when the true damage starts.

This is a little like the joke: "Madam, would you sleep with me for 1 million dollars?", to which she replies "I would". "Madam, would you sleep with me for 1 dollar?", to which she replies, "Sir, what sort of woman do you think I am?" To which he replies "We have already established what sort of woman you are, now we are just trying to establish your price!"

By agreeing to this initial Age Verification, companies are establishing that they are willing to implement checks on age for their users, now we will see just how much more they are willing to do - all to protect the children of course.

Yes that may be true, but parents are being misguided by efforts that are trying to control aspects of data.

If you, as a parent, make yourself open to this attack, you will find that you are making us less free of a society by expecting others to parent for you.

If you oppose minimal, sensible parental controls, you open the door to whatever someone can jam down our throats that also happens to implement parental controls as a side effect.

If you oppose the law to force liquor stores to deny service to minors, but people are still upset about minors getting alcohol, you have no right to be surprised when the next proposal is to ban alcohol for everyone, and you have no right to be surprised if it passes.

Worse, they are making society less free for their children - the parents themselves will be either dead or too old to care by the time the consequences are in full swing.

If you think you are anyone can stop motivated teenagers from watching porn then I have a bridge to sell you. That is such an absurd goal that you really should be asking what the real motivations for this are.

If you think you are anyone can stop motivated teenagers from getting alcohol then I have a bridge to sell you. That is such an absurd goal that you really should be asking what the real motivations for [forcing liquor stores not to serve minors] are.

That's how these things always go. No one is ever asked to build the whole thing, just provide one more brick.

I thought community projects (as opposed to the corporate Fedora and Ubuntu) are exempt from such laws.

This is worrying on many levels. So Microsoft force you to create an account to use Windows and then they reserve the right to block you from your own account, thereby potentially making you lose access to all your OWN data. This is crazy and yet another reason to stop using Windows as soon as possible.

I know it's not what people want to hear but my response to a lot of the comments here is just a general, I agree, it's time to stop using Windows.

They won't let you secure your drive the way you want. They won't let you secure your network the way you want (per the top-level comment about Wireguard). In so doing they are demonstrating not just that they can stop you from running these particular programs but that they are very likely going to exert this control on the entire product category going forward, and I see little reason to believe they will stop there. These are not minor issues; these are fundamental to the safety, security, and functionality of your machine. This indicates that Microsoft will continue to compromise the safety, security, and functionality of your machine going forward to their benefit as they see fit. This is intolerable for many, many use cases.

I think it is becoming clear that Microsoft no longer considers Windows users to be their customers any more. Despite the fact that people do in fact pay for Windows, Microsoft has shifted from largely supporting their customers to out-and-out exploiting their customers. (Granted a certain amount of exploitation has been around for a long time, but things like the best backwards compatibility in the industry showed their support, as well.)

I suspect this is the result of a lot of internal changes (not one big one) but I also see no particular reason at the moment to expect this to change. To my eyes both the first and second derivative is heading in the direction of more exploitation. More treating users like a cattle field and less like customers. When new features or work is being proposed at Microsoft, it is clear that it is being analyzed entirely in terms of how it can benefit Microsoft and users are not at the table.

No amount of wishing this wasn't so is going to change anything. No amount of complaining about how hard it is to get off of Windows is going to change anything; indeed at this point you're just signalling to Microsoft that they are correct and they can treat you this way and there's nothing you will do about it for a long time.

Stop supporting Windows as well.

Open source developers are doing Microsoft a big favor when they support Windows and publish Windows builds and installers. It's a substantial effort, and apparently that effort isn't appreciated.

If all open source software dropped support for Windows, it wouldn't really affect the open source community that much. It would definitely cause headaches for Microsoft however.

It's not that easy.

I agree that supporting Windows helps its ecosystem.

But also open source software on Windows is an important gateway to the free world. When you are already used to Firefox, LibreOffice and VLC, you might as well switch to Linux painlessly, but if those didn't run on Windows, switching to Linux would require relearning everything.

> If it's time to stop using windows, all those windows users will have to relearn everything either way.

No, that's the thing; they ideally would only need to replace the OS. Many long years ago, when I switched from Windows to Ubuntu (this was back when it was good), part of why it was so easy is because I mostly kept the same applications. If you use eg. Firefox, VLC, open/libreoffice, audacity, etc., then you can install a new OS, reinstall the same applications, and barely have to change anything. That's huge.

And for a company, not having to train people on all new applications at once might be what makes it _practically_ possible at all.

I agree to some extend but we (or at least I) publish open source software (amongst other reasons) because I like helping others and it so happens that most users that could benefit are still using Windows so it doesn't feel right to stop doing that as long as the effort is reasonable (which it is, unlike for macOS).

Nah, it's simpler. Microsoft just lost sense of UX and touch with the reality to their own internal management vibes.

Look at the Windows start menu. It used to be trivial to switch users. Two clicks, one to open the user list, another to switch - done. Now it's four: user panel, three-dots, switch user, pick user.

Look at the login sequence. They want their Windows Hello and they don't care if it works well or not - no way to get a pin or password prompt instantly, you gotta click three times (one to show a method picker, another to pick PIN entry, and lastly one to focus the goddamn field) despite no reasons to hide this UI.

It's not like they're trying to scam or sell user into something. It looks like some internal decision-makers that don't ever dogfood their decisions losing touch with the common sense.

Apple has that too, and this rot spreads elsewhere. But it's not intently malicious, a lot of things simply don't make sense - just total lack of self-reflection capabilities at the corporate level.

> I think it is becoming clear that Microsoft no longer considers Windows users to be their customers any more.

Quite obviously. Look at the out of box new user experience on a Windows 11 Home installation. What you get when you open a new $600 laptop from Best Buy for the first time. The entire thing is designed to drive users towards perpetual monthly recurring subscription billing for various MS services for life (OneDrive, Office, Xbox Live, Xbox game store purchased games, etc). It's a platform which is built atop a rent seeking cloud services ideology that shows no sign of ever letting up.

I think they've been heading that way for a while, and it's only getting clearer.

I've been thinking, and said before, 90s Microsoft was far from perfect, but they at least seemed to care a lot about the quality of Windows. 2020s Microsoft seems to see Windows users as a captive audience they can exploit for whatever the corporate executives fancy at the moment. It seems more like a gradual transition.

In any case, it seems to be getting more clear that Linux is destined to be the best OS for power-users.

Correction: stop using Microsoft products as soon as possible.

It's not your own data anymore if you gave it away.

Google and Apple have been doing this for a long time, and Microsoft clearly got jealous.

Their first big win was when they banned the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court from accessing any of the court's documents, then deleted all of those documents. Now they're going after slightly less important enemies of the state. That bar will continue to drop as long as it's allowed to. And let's not kid ourselves: if you develop or use encryption software that Mossad can't break, you are an enemy of the state.

yeah no. on my mac I don't need to sign in with an apple id.

Or create the account but don't use Microsoft services.

The earth was too scared to have him on it anymore...

With the increasingly intrusive legislated age verification and content monitoring being forced globally, I can easily see this as a catalyst to drive the Gemini protocol past critical mass.

They basically are, the algorithm is something like:

At the beginning of january and july, observe the difference between UT1 and UTC. If the difference is >= 0.6s, a leap second will be inserted at the end of june/december. Publish the results here: https://hpiers.obspm.fr/eoppc/bul/bulc

This is true. They look at how much the earth spun, and whether it was more or less than 86400 seconds/day average. This can't be done without external data. It's not a pure mathematical algorithm.

Waiting until Trump discovers that the earth rotation service exists and forces them to insert a negative leap second just because he can.

Oh thank God I thought I was going to make it through a thread on leap seconds without a political discussion

As those social justice groups like to say: "everything is political"...

Is it that surprising? Elsewhere in the thread, people are discussing the best smear tactics!

Remember, it is for the children. /s

Even a face scan is a hard no for me. I have no desire to make it easy for companies to start linking me (the person) to anywhere else, directly via my face metadata.

Especially if it lands in hands of Thiel. He's selling his services to governments, law enforcement and abusers like ICE.

I think we might have different risk/reward levels. For me, using VR can make me feel sick and vaguely disorientated for many hours afterwards. Almost nothing is worth that.

I love the idea of VR but my brain / balance system most certainly does not!

I.Don't.Care.

I enjoyed the narrative. It was true. Who cares if it was written by a ghost writer, an AI or anything else.

I did not read it because the prose was insipid. Maybe the project is interesting, but I won't know because I'm not going to read an infomercial. You must understand that this stuff is not to everyone's taste.

So if something is written by an LLM it makes it an infomercial?

Also, what are you comparing this post to? Because you should compare it to the author’s own writing and according to the author, his writing is not that good.

If the author cannot write then he should not write.

Move along then? Anecdotal datapoint but all the anti LLM comments in here are a lot of less than a year old accounts.

If you don’t like something simply move along. Constructive criticism is great but the volume of overly negative and honestly nasty replies like yours are not in the spirit of HN.

>Constructive criticism is great

Good, I will continue to voice it. Unfortunately it takes me several thousand times longer to complain about AI slop polluting the bulletin than it does to populate the bulletin with AI slop, which is the actual nastiness going on here.

Nope the only nastiness is how critical mean you are in your replies. All it takes is a quick hey I appreciate the article but not the use of a LLM to write it. None of the other words you have used are in the spirit here. Move along.