Ageless Linux
"Software for humans of indeterminate age. We don't know how old you are. We don't want to know. We are legally required to ask. We won't." Open source activism at its finest.
Ageless Linux is an act of open source activism designed to take the issue of age verification to the courts. I love it.
As lots of people have noted, while age verification laws are ostensibly being proposed to protect children, they create an authentication layer that deanonymizes the internet. The effect is a surveillance layer that will both chill speech and disproportionately harm vulnerable communities by requiring people who may already be targeted by conservative governments to fully reveal their identities.
As Rindala Alajaji and Molly Buckley wrote in Techdirt recently:
“The coalition of organizations that filed amicus briefs in support of Texas’s age verification law tells us everything we need to know about the true intentions behind legislating access to information online: censorship, surveillance, and control. After all, if the race to age-gate the internet was purely about child safety, we would expect its strongest supporters to be child-development experts or privacy advocates. Instead, the loudest advocates are organizations dedicated to policing sexuality, attacking LGBTQ+ folks and reproductive rights, and censoring anything that doesn’t fit within their worldview.”
Enter Ageless Linux, which makes its position clear as it describes its hardware product:
“A physical computing device designed to satisfy every element of the California Digital Age Assurance Act's regulatory scope while deliberately refusing to comply with its requirements. The device costs less than lunch and will be handed to children.“
The site maintains a list of age verification laws they are violating, as well as states that have proposed laws that they would violate. It’s sobering: these aren’t just the usual suspects (although that would be bad enough in itself, of course). California has a pending law that will take effect in 2027. New York and Illinois have laws under discussion.
The named contact at the bottom of the site, John McCardle, has an explanatory blog post, where he concludes:
“Since the California AG can charge me $7,500 per child that uses my OS, I may need to lawyer up. If you'd like to give me some money, I'd appreciate support on Patreon.”
Mike Godwin has published a riveting post about the unraveling of the Communications Decency Act in the nineties. I hope these laws, which are cut from the same ideological cloth, suffer the same fate. Perhaps efforts like Ageless Linux can be part of the road to get there.
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