Wow ... also in the post above I needed to place .... between the letters of the forbidden word to post or I could not have posted it.
I wanted to add the link to the official EU Parliament decision, but as also the link contains a forbidden word in the URL, I am not able to do so.
If you want to read more go to Press room | News | European Parliament
and search for 'Child (3letter word +ual) abuse online: voluntary detection measures will not be extended' of 2026-03-26
This will be the EU approach for online-age-verification and more:
The European Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet is a government-backed mobile application designed to let citizens securely store and share identity data (like their name and birthdate) alongside official digital documents such as driving licenses and diplomas.
There is no single app for all of Europe. Instead, each Member State must provide at least one certified wallet to its citizens and residents by late 2026.
National Ownership: Countries may develop their own app, mandate a private provider, or certify existing national apps to meet EU standards. For instance, Italy is integrating it into its existing IO app, and Poland is upgrading mObywatel.
Full Interoperability: While the apps are national, they must follow a common technical architecture (the Architecture and Reference Framework) so they work seamlessly across borders. A user from Greece will be able to use their national wallet to rent a car in Spain or open a bank account in Germany
Irony, no?
Here we are talking about this topic and getting filtered. 
Yeah, funny. Soon we'll need age-verification to participate here.
Now, I do wonder which other words are on the blacklist of the forum-software-filter. I guess:
a) all word versions containing the letters e, x, & s. (ordered by alphabet)
b) names of illegal substances ... may I write weapons-of-mass-destruction ?
c) the correct spelling of the company-that-should-not-be-named in Redmond
d) the forbidden linux distros and the others
Well, Microsoft is not blacklisted.
Nor is Temple OS, SELKS or others.
I have full copies of all the included words in the filter and I have no objections over their presence there. They are extreme words that have no purpose in computing, a helpdesk or regular direct discussion.
The purpose the filters do serve is preventing the need for any age verification.
The filter prevents abuse - and was set up at a time when there was one or maybe two active moderators.
The filters primarily remind us to stop and think about what we are saying and if we can express ourselves better.
Yes, when topics shift into real GnuLinux issues; like discussing such laws that affect us - it can be annoying to smack into that word filter when your intentions are sound and are just discussing the facts.
One thing I had to learn the hard way growing up was how to apply a filter between my brain and my mouth.
Remembering those lessons; some of which left a few scars, makes the filter here less annoying.
It is reassuring to read your thoughts on this. One of the main reasons I am interesed in moving to zorin OS is to be free from digital control and the many traps that are drawing people into it like slow boiled frogs ... eg traps disguised as age verification safety things, etc with hidden agendas.
so, I hope it is the case, and that i'm understanding correctly, that Zorin OS aims to do whatever it can to keep choice alive and not force us down the slow boiled frogs path of no return or leave us stranded with no where to go as an alternative.
thank you for staying aware
Icve been mulling over Privacy aspect of GNU/Linux in general and to help keep users sanity I would remove all Web Apps such as Facebook or other social media apps (not the Gnome has ever supported Facebook, the one good thing I can say about Gnome) or others like LinkedIn, but just have web apps for functionality (cloud storage).
In terms of the ever inccreasing attacks on GNU/Linux users I contacted the local LUG crew where I live.
The co-ordinator advised me to do the following:
Ensure ufw (Gufw) is up and running
Install a VPN on desktop and smartphone. (I have free Proton VPN on phone and RiseUp! on the Desktop.)
Install fail2ban (Zorin users are 'lucky', you have systemd which this relies on.)
On smartphone install Malwarebytes. I have done this and impressed that it scans SMS for phishing and malware attacks. Just the free one. I can't upgrade as using an un-Googled phone.
The co-ordinator is lucky. He has ordered a Jolla phone (GNU/Linux) which runs SailfishOS. I could not warrant spending another ÂŁ500 after purchasing this Fairphone 6 from murena. Sailfish is far from perfect for users that require VolTE, it does not support that and the only phone supported out of the box are Sony ones. Community images are also only available for Fairphone 4 and 5, not 6.
Hey-ho!
Great idea to get a lawyer OP. TBF though, groups like the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), NOYB (None of Your Business), the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GNU project. All have deep legal expertise and financial pockets, and will be able to point you guys in the right direction.
Hopefully those exhorbitant lawyers fees can be better spent elsewhere. This trend is super-concerning internationally.
As for the posters concerned about Social Media. There's a privacy Android OS called Graphene OS. It blacklists most Social Media apps due to their built-in trackers. Once you switch your device, you won't miss TikTok or FB.
Tech sovereignity is tied deeply to Irish national security. The government have literally given up on the idea of national tech independence.
I raised a petition to stop the appointment of Niamh Sweeny as DPC. However, there are very few votes for the issue of data privacy on this island. We need to discuss how we can force the government's hand to take this issue seriously.
The only way to do this is to unite. Would anyone be interested in sharing ideas in a Signal group?
That's why your distro is the best. I been distro hopping for a little while, but i allways come back
Today I received this notification from SONY:
I signed in on my phone only to learn, you guessed it, your details will be stored by 'Yoti' a third party just waiting to be hacked so I backed out.
Just searched if any Data breaches which they (currently) have not but have been fined for breach of GDPR:
" Based on the provided search context, there is no record of a historical data breach involving Yoti. The company explicitly stated in response to a recent âŹ950,000 fine from Spainâs AEPD that "no personal data of any app user has been breached or compromised."
The context highlights regulatory violations regarding data handling rather than security failures:
AI-generated answer. Please verify critical facts."
I have been busy messaging my PS4 friends that it might be the last message I send, as I backed out once I found out Yoti had been fined by the Spanish government for GDPR breaches.
And so it begins, as a users privacy is no longer being respected, massive government surveillance, and identity profiling become the standard. The government decides whether or not you can use your device. They force you to give them your data, its their method of control. 1984 is starting to seem more real, as we are living it.
Meta, the company built on watching everything its billions of users do online so it can keep them clicking on ragebait and targeted ads, is reportedly now installing surveillance software on employeesâ work computers.
Newswire Reuters reports that Meta management sent staff a memo informing them that theyâll soon run a new tool called âModel Capability Initiativeâ that will record their keystrokes, mouse movements, and even take occasional screenshots â all in the name of gathering data the social networking giant can use to build better AI models.
Business Insider claims itâs got the memo, which apparently says surveillance will observe workers as they use âwork-related applications and URLsâ including Gmail, GChat, VCCode, and an internal app called âMetamateâ.
The document reportedly explains that Meta feels AI models donât understand how people use computers, so the company needs real-life examples of how meatbags click their way through a working day so it can build agents. CTO Andrew Bosworth apparently said collecting this data from Meta staff will help the company to realize a vision for a world âwhere our agents primarily do the work and our role is to direct, review and help them improve.â
Meta is not alone in pursuing such a vision: Anthropic debuted tech capable of doing this in 2024 âOperatorâ â a tool that can use a web browser on a humanâs behalf.
Microsoft has even created a special type of cloud PC for agents to use.
All imagine that in the not-too-distant future many of us will designate some tasks that we currently undertake with our own brains and fingers on a physical PC to an agent that uses a virtual PC. AI folk imagine asking an agent to book an airfare, respond to email, or constantly scan e-tail sites to spot a discount for a desired item and then swoop in to make a purchase.
Metaâs term for this sort of thing is a âpersonal superintelligenceâ that CEO-for-life Mark Zuckerberg says âhelps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be.â
So long as your goals and aspirations donât include workplace privacy.
This situation is replete with irony, given Meta has for years mined its users for information and often run afoul of privacy laws.
Now the companyâs remaining staff can get a taste of the unease users have felt for years.
What they are really saying is that their A.I. workforce will improve the meatbags readiness for redundancy.
I think Social Media is the problem which created this scenario in the first place. See it as the first step of planned surveillance, entice people in and then swallow them hook, line and sinker.
I am a member of KDE Discuss forum and spotted a statement at the bottom of their web page so I posted this:
Thats what happens when government and corporations run amuck, invasian of privacy is done, to market you, but to also discover who their enemies are, and go after them. We live in a dystopian world now, because our nations & corporations only value us as dollar signs. And if their is a voting system, they do everything they can, to insure we keep them in power, for voting for those, who mean us harm in the long run. Microsoft has been a terrible company for so many decades. Freedom is for enlightened 1st world countries. Freedom was lost for us, all to increase people's coughers. It will continue to get worse, were already at, "lets see your paper's now."
The prospect of OS-level age checks applying to open source systems is a serious concern for FOSS advocates. Campaigners appear to have secured proposed exemptions for open source operating systems, code repositories, and containers in one US state, but stricter federal legislation has already been introduced in Congress.
Carl Richell, founder of Linux PC vendor System76, reports some encouraging news from the companyâs home state of Colorado: the bill is still moving, but amended language appears likely to exclude FOSS OSes and some of the tools used to build and distribute them. He hopes to set a precedent in Colorado and then use it to persuade other state legislatures. The problem is that this may yet become somewhat moot, because the US Congress is getting interested as well, and national legislation may follow.
This story has been developing for some months now: we [first reported on this new legislation in early March, and the following week on Richell's campaigning efforts. Later that month, we reported that systemd had added code to store user ages.
In that story, we also reported on the independent TBOTE Project, which is investigating the funding of the lobbying efforts and the relatively new conservative pressure groups pressing for the laws, such as the Digital Childhood Alliance (founded in 2025). TBOTE echoes Bloomberg's reporting: Meta appears to be a major financial force behind recent age-verification lobbying.
On Tuesday, in a Mastodon post, Richell reported:
I received the amended Colorado Age Attestation bill.
- Open source OS's and apps are excluded
- Code repos are excluded (github/gitlab)
- Containers are excluded (docker/podman)
On PS4Pro yesterday I had to agree to new terms and conditions but not submit to age verification. It lays out users requirements not to let children under 7 years of age to have access. So the onus is on the user without age verification. If it is not accepted you can't go online so I could not play my free 2k23 Golf game. (On a side note the game is having it's servers pulled in March next year and the new one? You need to buy a PS5 to play it!)
Age verification will come later in the year. If it demands it to access PSN I will remove the 2 Tb SSE and put it in my PC and trash the PS4 Pro. (But I do have offline games I can access, so all I would have to do is turn off networking (hopefully).
