This keeps escalating... It needs to be stopped.

The commentaries and analysis of those unjust laws continues. The motives behind the people pushing for them are getting clearer and it isn't pretty.

Good initiative to push these unjust laws to their limits. Hopefully it'll show how absurd they are.

It looks more and more likely that the current age verification fever has dark origins...

Excellent piece, indeed legal is not the same as legitimate. More often than not the law is lagging behind and things might be wrongly "fixed" at a later date. In that interval that's when our communities need to build its own tools to protect the commons. We're clearly reaching such an inflection point. Interestingly, I think there's is a difference of reaction between the people with a Free Software culture and the ones with an Open Source culture.

This is (IMNSHO) a very important open letter. This confirms to me that the whole set of age verification laws we're seeing popup everywhere is severely misguided. Had my suspicions before of course but it's getting clearer with this one. We should stay clear from those laws as a profession, it's important to not comply, it'd be a disservice to our users.

We should indeed put an end to those proprietary formats. It's sad to see the EU Commission contradict itself there.

Those dangerous and stupid laws keep popping out unfortunately. This is clearly a slippery slope as shown from the New York bill... We need to push back or the demands will keep growing. Let's hope Free Software communities won't try to preemptively comply, this would be short sighted and self-sabotage.

What could possibly go wrong? This is really a weird appointment.

The stupid idea of age verification keeps spreading with ridiculous laws...

Is Norway about to become one of the first countries to become serious about enshittification? Will more follow? This would be welcome.

There's clearly a regulation gap for satellites. We've been putting way too many of them in orbit the past decade and it's currently going to accelerate. This jeopardizes the night sky, astronomy and the possibility of space exploration. Clearly we're making the wrong choices here.

Automated DMCA take downs have been a problem for decades now... They still bring real damage, here is an example.

The ideas behind GDPR are sound. The enforcement is severely lacking though. Thus its effects are too limited.

Clearly a trial to keep an eye on. Some of those internal memos might prove decisive.

Clearly the regulators don't really understand the level of intrusiveness they're unleashing with mandating age gates. This is one more layer of surveillance for large parts of the population.

I'm not sure the legal case is completely lost even though chances are slim. The arguments here are worth mulling over though. There's really an ethical factor to consider.

This is totally misguided... Let's hope no one will succeed passing such dangerously stupid bills.

It's a bit of a sour article but it rings so true... We let Open Source take the mantle in companies which are mostly free loaders and churn closed products, or even worse have them closed and DRM protected. There's really quite some work to still realize the Free Software goals.

Well done everyone. This bullet was dodged... for now! This kind of fever comes back regularly unfortunately.