The kids are very fucked up tho by the internet in our pockets. I'm Not sure that id on OS is the solution. But we should be trying something

It's pretty well understood to be Meta, isn't it?

So if your service is proprietary, but your client is open source, it looks like your're free to go.

As someone that relies on third-party clients to get usable interfaces, if this gets widely adopted it would be great news. It would end the cat-and-mouse game from companies trying to force users onto first-party clients.

On the one hand, I'm absolutely against blanket age verification laws like this one, think there are better ways to solve the stated problem, and believe that the current crop of legislation is being pushed by bad actors for nefarious purposes by means of pandering to public mania.

On the other hand, I do appreciate that a possible unintended consequence of the out provided by (5)(b)(I) could be that PII (along with user generated content in general) becomes similarly radioactive to if the US had passed a GDPR equivalent. Either that or it's used as a justification for every single online service to require government ID in order to interact with it "because liability". Unfortunately I assume the latter is somewhat more likely at this point.

Also is it defined precisely what it means to "process users' personal data"?

That wording could be interesting, because it's ambiguous if free is applicable to the repository or the project. Presumably, the latter. This means you could absolutely do source-open but not open-source and still get around it.

It took almost 30 years for politicians to close down the openness of the internet. Not too bad.

That's how politics works actually. Something has to be done but also not upset X, Y, Z because they will be loud. It's quite okay situation when it happens I think.

I'm actually OK if websites trend toward being endpoints and there's competition for frontends. The unification of the two by site owners has been a net negative for the internet.

So a FOSS app running a device local diffusion model specifically for porn would be free of age checks. From a technical perspective that's not all that different from, say, an ansible playbook or bash script or whatever to download a model from HF and configure a local inference stack yet I feel like it must be an unintended loophole.

This one is trivial to comply with.

You have to add a couple fields or so to whatever gathers user info at account creation time. Personally I would find that non-trivial because nowadays those are usually GUIs and I haven't done any GUI stuff in ages. People who current write GUI apps for current OSes would have no problem.

Then you need to use that data in a way that lets you provide an API for apps to check the age bracket of the current user.

That part is easy, although some people will no doubt make it way more complicated than it needs to be (probably making it part of systemd or something ridiculous like that).

What I would do is create a file in some standardized location for each age bracket. These files would be protect so that ordinary users cannot open them for reading. When an account is set up, an access control list entry would be added to the appropriate files that allows that user to open the file for reading.

The API for apps to check if the user is in an age range they allow is to simply use the normal file access API to try to open the age bracket files corresponding to the age ranges they are checking for.

the only ones that'll bebanned are where they dont prostrate themselves to the fascists.

It does seem kind of elegant, doesn’t it, in terms of aligning incentives?

Annoyed by the age gating, or feel it to be commercially burdensome? Open your source, and poof, no more mandate!

Just trying to build and maintain a cool thing, and share it with the world? Never mind the compliance burden.

Of course you do. And farmers like subsidies for corn. That's a general idea for them too. And of course you're going to say the public benefits from open source projects and the farmer will say starving no good. Middle class see, middle class do but think they no do.

The DOJ already has been prosecuting developers of open source tools.

(https://www.therage.co/tag/tornado-cash/)

What for? That's kind of strange. Maybe if its a critical project, but for random projects that aren't like apache web server, nginx, or Linux Kernel, I don't care, heck I would argue if its a very very small change, and it has been scrutinized I don't care who it came from.