Ultimately someone has to vouch for “yes, this person is 18+”. People can’t self-attest, except through crappy biometric, so at some point a government ID has to be involved.

I’d trust my government over a credit reference agency that literally makes revenue from selling access to your private data.

https://digst.dk/media/5gybwsaq/implementing-age-verification-with-danish-digital-identity-wallet-dktb-09.pdf

What if I told you that by regulation, the EU age verification system has to be anonymous and that it’s only the AUKUS countries that are moving forward in a way where anonymity is “a nice to have”.

Denmark’s system, which is a front-runner implementation in the EU, is going to be fully ZKP.

And yes it’s basically built with tokens.

You identify with a government system in an app. The services issues you signed tokens that are anonymous. You hand these anonymous tokens over to the sites that demand proof of age.

Yes how dare you challenge our opinions!

Volunteer adoption of a system found to be better by distro maintainers is not the same as forced adoption of a system distro maintainers don’t find to be better.

But this proposal for a full auth-chain isn’t a proposal by Linus and many thousands contributors. It’s the proposal of a commercial entity that doesn’t control Linux in any way.

It’s Linux. In what world do you imagine there wouldn’t be 87 forks that went in a different direction.

Linux cannot be controlled, at least as it stands today.

When Linus disappears I have some fears. But jerk as he may be, he’s also incredibly effective at keeping it open.

I’ve stayed away from Facebook since forever. It was a principle for me, for a long time.

Then I realised that, at least here where I live, whether I like it or not, if I need to engage with something local (local game group, neighbour discussion, updates from the council etc.) Facebook is actually the better place to do it, because it solves a discovery problem that WhatsApp hasn’t really (and where a lot of local stuff also congregates).

I still deeply dislike it and stay away from it. But on the odd occasion I need/offer something from/to the local area, it’s the only game in town.

Town being south of in the UK.