It’s not a fallacy when multiple countries/states have passed laws that explicitly demand some form of ID confirmation/scanning and others have stated an intent for it. It’s not a fallacy when you understand what the purpose of this push actually is.

The fact is the end result isn’t going to be compliance with the least restrictive standard but the most. That’s how regulatory compliance always works. You always comply with the most restrictive because it encompasses the least restrictive as well. Further if you stopped to think and analyzed history scientifically instead of it being a series of great man events or whatever you’d understand how capitalism in crisis reacts by crushing the working class using tools like fascism. That the 5-eyes spying abuse far from being some deviation from liberalism embody the deeper desires and wants of the modern western world to spy on and control their citizens and the world and that a free internet has been an incredible threat to state power since day one.

It’s just the first big moment where their propaganda failed, where their narrative was undermined was the Gaza genocide and they will do anything to prop up the Zio-Nazi entity occupying Palestine and prevent their other narratives from suffering the same fate in future. A man in the “free speech” loving EU was unpersoned FFS and can’t be given money, buy food, stay at hotels, use banks, anything for deviating too far from the approved EU narrative. These are the people we’re dealing with.

It’s also not a fallacy when AI has created a crisis for private/government spy fusion platforms like Meta, Google, etc in both gaining ad dollars due to AI bots being hard to discern so hard identifying humans is a must for not only spying but profits from ads.

For a long time the material interests of the massive tech companies and their financial backers and shareholders did not particularly benefit from this kind of ID law and so they pushed back and disallowed it. Now thanks to AI their interests align with those of the state, the capitalist propaganda organs, the moral crusaders. There is in other words nothing major standing in their way and tons of power centers pushing for this as a result of AI, the Gaze genocide breaking containment, etc and it has gained momentum.

I’m afraid this isn’t the win you think it is.

One of two things will happen in the near future:

1. Nearly everything you do online from banking to shopping to social media (including online gaming) to paying your electric or internet bill to yes porn will require OS-level attestation to access and use the site. Linux lacking this will become an incredibly private OS that is useless for anything online making this a defeat for Linux having any hopes of real desktop market share and/or forcing it to comply. Microsoft, Apple, Google would love to push Linux as an OS option off the table.

2. Kids will start using liveboot or installing Linux and evading these controls, Christian fascists, tech overlord capitalists, and the government will take notice and write a bill to close this “loophole” and within a few years having already established the idea in the popular conception that age verification is okay will face lesser resistance in quickly ramming it through.

Quickly running out of places where VPN companies can be legally incorporated/based and where exit servers can be located that aren’t subject to advancing laws like these.

All the fools who were saying “lol they can’t ban VPNs, impossible!!!” are looking well ever more foolish and will feel very confused and shocked when the pain actually hits them and they realize it’s not so easy and they were wrong and complacent and too late now to do anything. But these are primarily westerners who’ve never had the western sanctions regime and its full power turned against anything they care about so they can be forgiven a bit for not understanding how powerful it is, its total dominance of financial exchange and how lacking a counter state interest by Russia or China in spinning up their own censorship resistant VPN for western users there isn’t really much counter to it. Russia and China are going to sit and laugh at you flailing about in the tattered remains of your liberal illusions of freedom and not lift a finger to help.

Sure you can pay for a VPS and spin up a VPN on that but that has your credit card on it with your name making it clear its you doing it and providing zero plausible deniability and as a non-residential IP you’re going to be getting increasing amounts of blocks by anti-AI-scraper methods as well as fraud alerts. Also it doesn’t hide you in the crowd so even advertisers who don’t have access to your credit card like authorities would will be able to associate all your activity back to one person and it’s just a short correlation from there via a mistake back to your real identity. Also won’t help much with torrenting copyright content as your provider will drop you at the first sign of trouble. Maybe you can find one that shrugs off DMCAs but I bet you’ll be paying through the nose. No more $5/month long term plan, get ready for $25/month and much higher than that and you still won’t necessarily be able to avoid ISP throttling of your traffic if they move to allow-listing for uncapped speeds only to known services and throttle everything else.

Very grim.

Doesn’t work. Not a Linux issue. No graphics card or motherboard maker connects the hardware correctly to support CEC on PCs. It’s an industry-wide practice.

There is the pulse eight injector which together with software can inject CEC with a USB connection with the caveat it can’t turn your computer on and it’s a hacky and imperfect solution for tinkerers rather than production ready equipment. Also it’s only HDMI 2.0 not 2.1.

Then they will break you and industry that wants data will win. You vs bourgeois governments, you will lose.

This is a serious push and though children are the cover they’re after surveillance. Take away their talking points, give them what they claim to want but in a privacy-preserving way and this goes away for another 10 years before they can make another push.

If we win this fight by doing a zero knowledge form they have no scaffolding to use on which to build anything further. If we lose and they build something that isn’t zero knowledge it will 100% be used in a few years to iterate on to build more surveillance and control.

Basically if we don’t push for this privacy alternative and instead fight like hell against it entirely they’ll listen to the only voices putting forward a solution which is meta and the other privacy invasive actors who want an invasive approach. If it’s made heard that people will accept this we can shunt them onto this path.

Ideally we’d push onto this path but make demands that it doesn’t require verification. That parents can set it up at phone/computer setup and it cannot be changed without reinstalling the OS or erasing the phone and that on phones it gets tied to a Google/Apple account. That way there’s not even any identity aspect involved but tools given to parents who want to do this. Shove it back to parental responsibility. But this would be a compromise we could live with and still have some privacy with.