Fair enough. My point wasn’t to equate code with github, but to suggest that github, and any other code repository, is effectively an app store by the definition of the California law, and is therefore supposedly responsible for handling this ‘age signal’ bullshit.

Similarly, GeoCities from the 90’s is a publicly accessible website (*actually it’s not – just tried and it seems to completely dead now as opposed to mostly dead in early 2000’s, RIP) with the ability to (and did) distribute software and would have also been an “application store”. Archive.org is maybe a better example now: you can download tons of ‘applications’ from there and none of them will ever have age verification baked in. Is Archive.org now illegal? Let’s find out.

I get really upset when there’s this association between “the libs” and “non-authoritarian voters”. I’ve not done and don’t support lobbying for state control of social media.

I fully agree that there are shitty people elected as democrats.

I could go on a whole mile-long monologue about this, but I won’t do it here. I’m aware of the various definitions of liberal and I don’t want to talk about that – I’m using the US scope of the two parties that can actually matter: Conservative/Republican vs Liberal/Democratic. [If you Identify as Liberal in the US, you’re probably actually Socialist, but the media hates that word, so we don’t use it]

The short version is that the PEOPLE want things to be better; the voters called “the libs” want things to be better. Not enough of us are engaged at the low-level to fix this and I think it’ll only take a few of us to do the grass-roots remix that the conservatives did as the tea party, and fix the situation with the democratic org that will both win us elections (if we get anymore) and cut out the rot.

Gotta start local though. If you’re mad, join your precinct and choose who votes in the district, etc. Don’t wait for November and then be mad at your choices. Primaries are over for 2026, but you can influence choices for local offices in 2027 and other state and national ones in 2028.

Don’t just be mad at your options, help make the options better. And 'Both Sides’ing is either malicious or at least detrimental:

“Oh, the system is fucked. Guess we’ll keep aiming for the dystopia! We can’t possibly change the system!”

It wasn’t Microslop-owned for most of my experience with it, but even sourceforge went the way of enshittification. The only real hope is, unfortunately, decentralization. My worry that is that discoverability is the payment.

We can’t trust that any single point of failure won’t eventually fall to corporate greed. But if there’s a central place to locate things, there’s a central place to control them; even if it’s literally “search”!

I used to be corporate IT, and this would have ruined my weekend… but my CEO donated to McConnell, Trump and the RNC, so fuck them.

I’ve been posting this in other threads too and while the OS angle is huge, and worth picking a fight with, I haven’t seen any coverage over how this goes after developers too.

I think this is an attack on ALL open-source.

These bills are written by people who are clearly or maliciously tech illiterate and don’t understand either the terminology or the practical impacts. And of course it’s wrapped in ‘what about the children?!’

They include definitions like (paraphrasing; not quoting a specific bill, but New York, Colorado and California do this):

• “Application” is any software application that may be run on a user’s device – so … EVERYTHING.
• “Application Store” is any publicly accessible website or similar service that distributes applications – so … also everywhere, such as GitHub or GeoCities.
• “Developer” is a person who writes, creates or maintains an application – so if you have a github repo, or you’ve posted a binary or perhaps even a script somewhere recently, you’re a developer.

And then require both developers and operating system providers to handshake this age verification data or face financial ruin. I think the original intent or appearance of intent is that the store developer needs to do the handshake. I’m not a lawyer, but I can’t imagine these definitions aren’t vague enough that they can’t be weaponized against basically anything software.

I have a github account, and have contributed to “applications”. As I read them, these bills pose a serious threat to me if I continue to do so, as that makes me a “developer” and would need to ensure the things I contribute to are doing age verification – which I don’t want to do.

I think that even outside the surveillance aspect, the chilling effect of devs not publishing applications is the end-goal. Gatekeeping software to the big publishers who have both the capacity to follow the law and the lawyers/pockets to handle a suit. These laws are going to be like the DMCA 1201 language (which had much much more prose wrapped around it and was at least attempting to limit scope), which HAS been weaponized against solo devs trying to make the world better.

I fully expect some suit against multiple github repo owners on Jan 2, 2027.

I’ve emailed the office of Buffy Wicks, the author of the California bill, with similar details as the above. I haven’t yet identified the authors of the NY and CO bills, but I’m working on that too. If you live in one of these places, please contact your state officials and tell them this is a bad idea – and if you don’t live there, keep an eye on your state bills.