Age verification proposals are often presented as a simple tradeoff: sacrifice a little privacy to better safeguard children online. But that framing overlooks a more fundamental question. What happens to people who cannot verify their age at all?
Yesterday, I read that certain software packages on the NixOS Linux distribution cannot be used in the UK, because they require downloading from the Git provider repo.or.cz, which just flat-out bans any traffic from the UK due to the Online Safety Act.
I have a colleague with two kids, who’s actually not unhappy about *something* being done to try to prevent children from accessing the internet unfiltered. But that colleague is a huge fan of NixOS, too.
So yeah, oof, even before we get into the very concrete problems this article talks about, there’s a lot of nuance these laws need to get right.
“I have a colleague with two kids, who’s actually not unhappy about something being done to try to prevent children from accessing the internet unfiltered.”
You know I really hate this kind of bullshit. I question if it’s a psyop at this point. When I was in school, they had this censorship thing, it was a stupid fucking dog as their logo, very fitting with the current news. I taught my friends how to bypass it. This was grade school. And I was teaching them how to use proxies, we we’re just browsing the net so ignore security. Had the school IT call us out on this lol. I mean I started with using a 64 MB flash drive running whatever was the smallest linux version to realizing I could just run TOR off that flash drive.
Not really. Maybe there’s a torrent of the source code somewhere, maybe as part of Debian or whatever. But you’d have to adjust the automatic build process to use the torrented source code. Certainly not impossible, but a pain.
If a workaround is introduced by NixOS itself, they could mirror the source code onto another Git provider, at least I saw that suggested in the discussion I stumbled across.
Side-note: I’m not from the UK myself. repo.or.cz just wasn’t reachable, from what looked like a denial of service attack or AI scrapers, that’s why I looked this up.
Although right now, I believe I can reach it fine, but get a wrong checksum for the source artifact, so hopefully they haven’t been hacked. 😵💫
Yesterday, I read that certain software packages on the NixOS Linux distribution cannot be used in the UK, because they require downloading from the Git provider repo.or.cz, which just flat-out bans any traffic from the UK due to the Online Safety Act.
I have a colleague with two kids, who’s actually not unhappy about *something* being done to try to prevent children from accessing the internet unfiltered. But that colleague is a huge fan of NixOS, too.
So yeah, oof, even before we get into the very concrete problems this article talks about, there’s a lot of nuance these laws need to get right.
“I have a colleague with two kids, who’s actually not unhappy about something being done to try to prevent children from accessing the internet unfiltered.”
You know I really hate this kind of bullshit. I question if it’s a psyop at this point. When I was in school, they had this censorship thing, it was a stupid fucking dog as their logo, very fitting with the current news. I taught my friends how to bypass it. This was grade school. And I was teaching them how to use proxies, we we’re just browsing the net so ignore security. Had the school IT call us out on this lol. I mean I started with using a 64 MB flash drive running whatever was the smallest linux version to realizing I could just run TOR off that flash drive.
Isn’t torrenting an option?
Not really. Maybe there’s a torrent of the source code somewhere, maybe as part of Debian or whatever. But you’d have to adjust the automatic build process to use the torrented source code. Certainly not impossible, but a pain.
If a workaround is introduced by NixOS itself, they could mirror the source code onto another Git provider, at least I saw that suggested in the discussion I stumbled across.
Side-note: I’m not from the UK myself. repo.or.cz just wasn’t reachable, from what looked like a denial of service attack or AI scrapers, that’s why I looked this up.
Although right now, I believe I can reach it fine, but get a wrong checksum for the source artifact, so hopefully they haven’t been hacked. 😵💫