Another volley in the war on general purpose computing. [LWN.net]

Another volley in the war on general purpose computing.

Posted Mar 11, 2026 23:31 UTC (Wed) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644)
Parent article: California's Digital Age Assurance Act and Linux distributions

They're still trying to mandate the existence of a Turing machine that can only run the good programs.

something something stupidest timeline.

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Another volley in the war on general purpose computing.

Posted Mar 13, 2026 23:17 UTC (Fri) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644) [Link]

I guess this would mean that work on legacy OSs, like FreeDOS, would have to stop? Unless you put age verification in them, but then they're no longer being a copy of the thing they're a copy of.

But also you wouldn't be able to write a new OS from scratch, unless the first part you implement is age verification? Otherwise you might have an OS without one. So the first thing Linus would have to do would be to write an age verifier, before he started printing "A" and "B" from separate threads.

smh