When we look at the hieroglyphs on the walls inside the Egyptian structures they depict concepts that are long lost to a society and culture we'll never understand fully.
I wonder if that's how future generations will feel reading on the internet about freedom & privacy. I know for a fact my grandparents enjoyed privacy and freedom long-gone today. It's even been suggested that teenagers today behave totally differently because they fear their embarrassing missteps or mishaps following them forever; immortalized by social-media.
But it's not just social-media and what is posted by us or those around us...
When I did my video on Windows Copilot AI features I titled it TOTAL RECALL.
Because one of the disturbing features is it constantly recording everything you do so that when you want to go back and find that article or that file or whatever; it'll be there recorded for you already.
The famous Schwarzenegger movie Total Recall is based on a story by Philip K. Dick called "We Can Remember It For You, Wholesale".
This is also a feature on my Playstation 5.
If I'm playing a game, and do something I can click record and then Save the last minute, 5 mins, 10, 15 all the way up to the previous hour... Meaning a buffer exists of it constantly recording regardless of if I wanted it to or not.
About a month ago I started laying out notes for a video that I'm still in the process of producing right now.
The subject was laws in various US states that would require age verification at an OPERATING SYSTEM level. You can find out more info about this at : https://action.freespeechcoalition.com/age-verification-bills/
Not long after that it was discovered that there had been code submitted on Github outlining an age verification function in systemd: a core part of most Linux distributions.
The System Daemon or systemd is already a somewhat notorious & contentious piece of Linux because many believe it violates many principles of UNIX/Linux philosophy like KISS or Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Systemd's first & foremost function is to be the INIT process, or the first process by the scheduler that's responsible for initiating all of the other system and eventually userspace services & utilities.
But it quickly was expanded to become a monolithic suite that manages nearly all low-level Linux system functions.
So it's somewhat unsurprising that this age-verification service would end up in systemd.
There are many Linux distros that exist as forks of other distros with their core feature being they use a different Init system.
For the record, I've never been a big critic of Systemd, and if I'm logging into a Linux server via terminal it makes my life a lot easier in many ways.
But within two weeks of taking initial notes for the video I learned there's now federal US legislation proposed regarding operating systems & age verification. Meaning it wouldn't be a handful of states. It would be all states.
The bill/legislation is very vague, but that's often even worse than it being specific. There's only so many ways age can be verified by the OS/computer, and all of them would likely require remote verification with some kind of server and your legal ID.
So how big of a deal is this? Every operating system and every computer required to verify your age, somehow. How does that work for computers? Computers are often used by multiple people. If your ID is tied to the computer how would they be certain it's you?
I could easily imagine using cameras or even your phone to scan bio-metric data such as face/eye/fingerprints.
Something so many people already do to unlock their phones...
This is the sort of thing that almost NO ONE would be comfortable with 15 years ago, and I don't think enough people are talking about this subject which is why I'm posting it here.
And I know many of you are outside the USA, but consider the influence the USA's tech industry has on the world. It may not stop here.
Google is "locking down" Android.
They're going to restrict the ability to side-load applications, and enforce more strict registration and requirements of the apps that get published to Google Play Store.
And this of course will be a worldwide issue.
When they made the announcement they were met with such backlash that they immediately backtracked, but also doubled-down.
You can find out all about, and find out what you can do to push back at:
https://keepandroidopen.org/
When switched to Android many years ago it was everything I wished my iPhone could be. More like a computer where I could change whatever I wanted, and even plug my mouse, keyboard, and all the other computer devices I wanted into it. But also I could get apps from F-Droid: A non-Google app store that would be threatened by Google locking their system down.
We don't have to just let these things happen.
If we threaten consequences and make enough noise these companies will cower because they need our data, our attention, and our money.
