It makes me sad to think the internet I grew up with as a kid is dying.

Corporations push so much slop into our lives, and we're just forced to deal with it.

Adding age vertification to Linux, of all things, seems insane!

I recently read a GitHub diff that showed some poor guy who makes firmware for graphing calculators being forced to add age verification into the embedded OS, because it is considered an "operating system" under California law.

Make no mistake, this will not protect kids. It's an advertising bill and surveillance state weapon thinly disguised as """protect the children""" - If this country, let alone the corporations of the world actually cared about that, they'd do far different things.

I'm being forced to ditch systemd (and therefore CachyOS) because systemd, sadly being MicroSlop-influenced, is getting age verification silently rolled into it.

In other news, Ubuntu is prioritizing closed-source flatpaks. We really are living in a cursed timeline.

Of course people are rebelling against this! When I was a teenager, I installed Linux distros because, well, I liked it! I didn't have to worry about corporations trying to worm their way into my software and add tech that I didn't consent to using! I read the Snowden docs as a kid and it pissed me off. It still does!

...

"the anxious generation" is a book.

In it, it covers how legally, most kids get tracked for advertising purposes at the age of 13.

COPPA is a bill that, well, is an utter failure at protecting kids. Advertisers are allowed to track 13 year olds! This has been the case for a long time.

I wonder why companies think that adding age verification to a Linux service manager, systemd, will do...much of anything?! Kids lie! I lied as a kid! They will continue to lie! This just pollutes the Linux codebase with legal requirements that are...very poorly thought out.

If you also use CachyOS and feel like rebelling, I recommend trying out Artix Linux. It doesn't use systemd.

Instead of rolling out tracking and nanny state legislation so thinly disguised as """protect the children""", why not fund schools. Fund parents. Give them a stipend for raising kids. Fund STEAM/STEM in schools. Fund kids' mental health for god's sakes!!

I was in special education as a kid, transferred to IEP, and when my dad died when I was 13, my world imploded. If I didn't have an IEP (special ed-lite), I probably would be homeless! or dead! My life sucked. I had undiagnosed autism, treated ADHD, and undiagnosed bipolar type 1, and half my family was dead. I found my dad dead by the side of the bed! I needed that special ed program to become the fearsome cyber engineer I am today.

College was not easier. But I got pretty good grades... My mom died shortly after I began college. My world imploded, AGAIN. Not going to go too much into detail because honestly, I don't feel like it.

Fund those things - special ed, therapy, counseling, tutoring, etc - instead. For the love of god, more online tracking is not going to solve children's welfare problems. It's just another way for corporations to steal our data, analyze our behavior, and treat us as the statistical objects that we seem to be molded into.