Most consumer routers give you a locked-down firmware, a few years of updates if you are lucky, and a web UI that makes you miss the terminal.
Routers powered by OpenWrt are a breath of fresh air here, as they give users a full Linux system, a proper package manager, support for VPNs, and the freedom to actually configure their network the way they want.
CZ.NIC, the organization behind the Czech Republic's national domain registry, which also does network security research, has the Turris line of OpenWrt-powered routers built to offer security, modularity, and long-term support.
Late last year, they launched the Turris Omnia NG, a router with Wi-Fi 7, swappable M.2 Wi-Fi modules, and a quad-core ARM processor. Now they are back with the Turris Omnia NG Wired, which does away with the built-in Wi-Fi and is designed for rack-mount installations.
📝 Turris Omnia NG Wired: Key Specifications
The front and back views of the Turris Omnia NG Wired.
The Omnia NG Wired runs Turris OS, a Linux distribution based on OpenWrt that ships with a web UI for easy router management and handles system updates automatically.
On the hardware side, a quad-core ARMv8 processor running at 2.2 GHz drives the device, backed by 2 GB of RAM and 8 GB of eMMC storage. CZ.NIC went with passive cooling for this one too, so there are no fans or noise to worry about.
For connectivity, you get two 10 Gbps SFP+ ports, one for WAN, one for LAN, and four 2.5 Gbps RJ45 ports for local devices.
Michal Hrušecký, head of hardware development at CZ.NIC, notes that:
In addition to 10G and 2.5G ports, we also considered expandability. Thanks to M.2 slots, you can add NVMe storage or mobile connectivity as a backup, for example.
This makes Omnia NG Wired a flexible foundation that can be adapted to specific deployments.
Additionally, the front panel has a 240x240 px IPS display for network stats and a D-pad for navigation, and the USB 3.0 ports round things out.
If wireless coverage is eventually needed, a Wi-Fi 6/Wi-Fi 7 upgrade kit is supposed to be made available separately (couldn't find its listing), so the wired-only design is not a permanent constraint. And with CZ.NIC's long-term support promise, updates to the device will continue well past the 10-year mark.
🛒 Get Yours
Prices for the Turris Omnia NG Wired range from €420 to €499, depending on the retailer you go for. The official website lists the authorized sellers who cater to different regions.
Germany has strictly standardized its digital document requirements. The Deutschland-Stack (in Deutsch), the country's new sovereign digital infrastructure framework, names just two document formats that public administrations are allowed to use: ODF and PDF/UA.
Proprietary document formats from Microsoft like .doc, .ppt, and .xls are not included.
Also keep in mind that the rollout of key infrastructure components is targeted for 2028.
ODF, or OpenDocument Format, is an XML-based file format for office documents. It covers text files, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents. The standard is maintained by OASIS and is also an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 26300), which means it is vendor-neutral and not controlled by any single company.
PDF/UA, short for PDF/Universal Accessibility, is the ISO accessibility standard for PDF files (ISO 14289). It lays out specs that make PDF documents readable by assistive technologies like screen readers, making it a sensible choice for a government that has to serve a diverse population.
The reasons behind this are not hard to understand. Vendor lock-in is the obvious one.
When public administrations run on proprietary document formats, they end up dependent on the vendor that controls those formats, with no real way out without significant disruption and cost.
The Deutschland-Stack explicitly calls this out, with reducing lock-in effects listed as one of its core goals. The framework also prioritizes use of open source solutions where possible, and explicitly favors sourcing from European providers over foreign alternatives.
This is not a recommendation or a preference, it is a mandate. Germany’s decision to anchor ODF at the heart of its national sovereign stack confirms what we have argued for years: open, vendor-neutral document formats are not a niche concern for some technology specialists and FOSS advocates.
They are a fundamental infrastructure for democratic, interoperable and sovereign public administrations.
Closing Words
Moves like this take time to matter, but they do matter. Governments adopting open standards at this scale sends a clear signal about where things are heading, and it makes the case for interoperable, vendor-neutral infrastructure in a way that no amount of social media preaching can.
Germany doing this in a binding, nationwide framework is a meaningful step, and the rest of Europe would benefit if they took note of this.
Big Win for Open Source as Germany Backs Open Document Format
If you have not been living under a rock, then you most likely know that age verification has been all over tech news lately, and the conversation surrounding it is a mess with a lot of information and misinformation flowing around.
For people who are trying to understand what's going on, the TLDR is that laws in regions like California, Colorado, and Brazil now require operating systems to report age signals to apps and app stores.
systemd, the init system and service manager used by most major Linux distributions, has made a change tied to this whole situation, but it is probably not what you are imagining.
What's going on?
The systemd project merged a pull request adding a new birthDate field to the JSON user records managed by userdb in response to the age verification laws of California, Colorado, and Brazil.
This is the same record that already holds basic user metadata like realName, emailAddress, and location. The field stores a full date in YYYY-MM-DD format and can only be set by administrators, not by users themselves.
Lennart Poettering, the creator of systemd, has clarified that this change is:
An optional field in the userdb JSON object. It's not a policy engine, not an API for apps. We just define the field, so that it's standardized iff people want to store the date there, but it's entirely optional.
In simple words, this is something that adds a new, optional field that can then be used by other open source projects like xdg-desktop-portal to build age verification compliance on top of, without systemd itself doing anything with the data or making it mandatory to provide.
A merge request asking for this change to be repealed was struck down by Lennart, who gave the above-mentioned reasoning behind this, and further noted that people were misunderstanding what systemd is trying to do here.
So yeah, that is what this change looks like, but this won't be stopping the haters and conspiracy theorists from making wild accusations, of course. Let's see how this develops.
If you want to backup your data on Linux, there's no shortage of reliable options that offer some pretty good functionality. We have Déjà Dup that handles the basics well if you just want a simple GNOME app that protects your files without much fuss.
Timeshift takes a different angle; it snapshots your system so you can roll back after a bad update, though it's not really designed for personal data backups.
For users who want more control, Borg and Restic have been the standards for years. Both are encrypted, deduplicated, and trusted by a vast community of Linux users.
BorgBase, on the other hand, is a managed repository hosting service for Borg and Restic backups that has been around for almost a decade. Vykar is their newest project—an open source encrypted backup tool that's worth a look if you're in the market for something new.
🚧
This tool is not recommended for production use by the developers; proceed with care.
Vykar: Overview ⭐
Vykar is an open source, encrypted, deduplicated backup tool written in Rust, developed by the BorgBase team, and released under the GPL-3.0 license. It draws inspiration from the likes of BorgBackup and Borgmatic but uses its own repository format, making it incompatible with existing Borg or Restic repositories.
The whole thing is configured through a single YAML file where you define your repositories, source directories, encryption settings, and retention policy.
Key features include:
Scheduling via vykar daemon.
Deduplication is doable via FastCDC.
Compression support with LZ4 or Zstandard.
Desktop GUI (vykar-gui) with system tray support.
WebDAV server for browsing and restoring snapshots.
Encryption with AES-256-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305 (auto-selected), and Argon2id key derivation.
Concurrent multi-client backups, where multiple machines can write to the same backup repository at the same time.
The desktop GUI deserves a particular mention. Borg relies on third-party tools like Vorta for a desktop interface, and Restic has Backrest, which is also a community project. Vykar ships its own GUI as a first-party component.
It reads directly from vykar.yaml, runs backups on demand, and can sit in the system tray running scheduled backups in the background.
As for the performance, the project's website has put up a comparison of Vykar against Borg, Restic, Rustic, and Kopia, tested against a 49 GiB dataset of 367,000 files.
📋
These are benchmarks run and published by the Vykar team, not an independent party.
On backup duration, Vykar finished in 61 seconds, Rustic took 313, Borg 268, Restic 138, and Kopia 85. Restore times follow a similar pattern where Vykar does it in 69 seconds, versus 82 for Rustic, 225 for Borg, 130 for Restic, and 132 for Kopia.
CPU efficiency shows the clearest gap. Vykar used 234 CPU seconds for backup, compared to Borg's 250, Restic's 696, Rustic's 728, and Kopia's 428.
Memory usage is where the picture gets more interesting. Borg uses just 236 MB during backup versus Vykar's 623 MB. Restic is also lighter at 327 MB. So Vykar is trading some RAM for its speed advantage. This is something to factor in on memory-constrained systems.
Repository sizes across all five tools land between 19.7 and 19.9 GB under equivalent Zstd compression settings, so deduplication efficiency is roughly comparable across the board.
Get Vykar 📥
Before you install, know that Vykar supports four storage backends: the local filesystem, S3-compatible object storage (any provider works), SFTP, and a dedicated REST server.
The installation itself is a one-liner:
curl -fsSL https://vykar.borgbase.com/install.sh | sh
Pre-built binaries for Linux (x86_64 and aarch64, both glibc and musl), macOS (Apple Silicon), and Windows are also available on the GitHub releases page.
From there, you can refer to the quickstart guide for going through the creation of a config file and initializing the backup process.
Each release has closed more hardware gaps, brought the experience closer to what you would expect on native hardware, and stayed in sync with mainline Fedora. Its latest release keeps that momentum going.
The latter is the flagship desktop that has introduced quite a few useful upgrades. One of the more practical ones is the OCR support in Spectacle. You can now pull text directly from a screenshot, making it helpful for situations where you need to copy something out of an image or a terminal error you cannot select.
Accessibility also sees many additions. Plasma Keyboard is the brand new on-screen keyboard that replaces the older solution, and a grayscale filter has been added to the Color Blindness Correction options in System Settings.
Beyond that, it also introduces Plasma Setup, a first-run wizard that handles user account creation separately from OS installation. This should come in handy for anyone setting up a new machine.
A GNOME variant is also available, featuring GNOME 49, which comes with new default apps, shell upgrades, and file manager refinements.
Both desktop variants benefit from RPM 6.0, which delivers some security-focused changes like full fingerprint-based OpenPGP key identification, multiple signatures per package, and OpenPGP v6 support with post-quantum cryptography.
Then there is the inclusion of the DNF5 backend that ensures Plasma Discover and GNOME Software now use the same underlying package management plumbing as everything else on the system. This specific change has yet to arrive on mainline Fedora and is on track for a Fedora 44 debut.
Hardware support also sees work, with the Mac Pro now being a supported device, and users of M2 Pro and M2 Max-powered MacBooks now getting functional microphones. There's also 120Hz refresh rate support for the MacBook Pro 14 and 16 models.
📥 Get Fedora Asahi Remix 43
All you need is a single command to get Fedora Asahi Remix installed on your Mac device. But you have to take note that this distro only works on Apple Silicon Macs running at least macOS 13.5 or 14.2.
Existing users, you will have to follow the upgrade guide for Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop to get this release on your computer. If you are on the GNOME variant, then you will have to use DNF to get this release.
Fedora Asahi Remix 43 Arrives with Mac Pro Support and Beats Fedora to a Key Upgrade
The idea behind this move is to tackle the growing problem of AI tools generating security findings (both legit and hallucination ones) at a scale open source maintainers simply cannot keep up with.
We already know that many open source projects don't have the resources or tooling to handle such a flood of reports. Combined with the other development-related issues they have to tackle, a project could be in real trouble if they are overwhelmed with AI slop.
Alpha-Omega and OpenSSF plan to work directly with maintainers to make sure whatever security tooling comes out of this is actually practical and fits into how their projects already work. The goal is to help them stay on top of growing security demands without getting completely buried.
The AI giants who have pitched in include the likes of:
Anthropic
AWS
Google
Google DeepMind
GitHub
Microsoft
OpenAI
On this, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux Foundation Fellow and Linux kernel maintainer, said:
Grant funding alone is not going to help solve the problem that AI tools are causing today on open source security teams. OpenSSF has the active resources needed to support numerous projects that will help these overworked maintainers with the triage and processing of the increased AI-generated security reports they are currently receiving.
This is not unfounded
Back in 2025, cURL's bug bounty program on HackerOne got hit with a wave of AI-generated reports. These were not real vulnerability findings, just a vomit of unresearched submissions that people were clearly generating with AI and sending off without actually understanding what they were reporting.
cURL's creator, Daniel Stenberg, initially tried to push back. He warned that anyone submitting AI slop would get publicly named, ridiculed, and banned. That did not really help. By January 2026, the project had already gone through 20 submissions in the first few weeks alone.
If you didn't know, cURL is an important building block of the modern IT infrastructure used by billions of devices worldwide.
Of course this funding grant does not fully remedy the problem of AI slop for open source projects, but it is at least a step in the right direction. These deep-pocketed AI giants need to do better, and hopefully this sets a precedent.
GNOME has had quite a journey so far, consistently evolving according to the community's needs, gaining both loyal users and ardent haters. Each release has brought steadier foundations, a more coherent design language, and a growing set of applications built around the same visual identity.
What it offers is fairly compelling. GNOME is built around a Wayland-first approach, with a consistent design system through Libadwaita, a decent attempt at accessibility, and a core app suite that handles most everyday tasks without much additional configuration.
Its latest release, GNOME 50, continues on that path with some major changes.
GNOME 50: What's New?
There is a decent amount packed into this release. On the shell side, there is more control over screen time limits, the top bar now shows a power mode indicator when you are not on the default profile, and a few annoyances around keyboard layouts and folder handling have been addressed.
The removal of X11 from GDM is the change most people will have an opinion about. It was supposed to happen in GNOME 49 but got pulled back at the last minute due to a bug. GNOME 50 sees it through, and this time it is not coming back.
Accessibility also sees some attention, specifically around Orca. The screen reader gets a redesigned preferences window, global settings that no longer need to be saved on a per-app basis, and a new option for reading chat room messages.
There is more to this release than that of course, and we will get into the details further below.
X11 is Gone
If you followed the GNOME 49 release, you may remember that X11 briefly came back. The plan had been to disable X11 sessions in GDM by default, but a bug caused GDM to stop detecting /usr/share/xsessions, which meant other desktops' X11 sessions would not appear at login.
The change was rolled back temporarily with an explicit assurance that GNOME 50 would finish the job. GDM now runs entirely on Wayland for its own sessions. X11 support has been removed outright, along with the ability to compile GDM without Wayland support.
Features that depended on X11, including XDCMP and the system-wide X server, are also gone. Desktop environments that ship their own X11 sessions can still be launched via a per-user X server, so Plasma, Xfce, and the others are not caught out by this.
Shell Refinements
The Shell picks up a mix of new features and reliability fixes. Parents can now extend screen time limits directly from the interface, and screen time tracking has been corrected to work properly when idle inhibitors are active (i.e. when apps are preventing the system from going idle).
This release also introduces a non-default power mode indicator in the top bar, so it is visible at a glance if the system is running in a performance or power-saving mode. The volume slider snaps to 100% when over-amplification is enabled. This should clear up any confusion about where the recommended volume ceiling actually sits during adjustment.
A couple of smaller but welcome fixes include default folders that were manually deleted no longer reappearing after a reboot, and password text is no longer exposed in IM pre-edit fields, which was a privacy concern.
Better Display Handling
Variable refresh rate and fractional scaling are two settings that have been sitting behind an experimental flag for so long that many users have either forgotten about them or given up on them.
Both are now stable features in Mutter, and if you have a high refresh rate display and skipped enabling these before, this is the release to try them properly.
HiDPI support has been extended to remote desktop and color management sees meaningful additions too with HDR screen sharing, a new SDR-native color mode, and wp-color-management v2 protocol support.
Discrete GPU detection has been improved which should help multi-GPU setups behave more predictably. For NVIDIA, Mutter has some fixes to handle driver quirks to improve performance on those GPUs.
Nautilus Buffs
The Files (aka Nautilus) app sees a significant round of improvements with this release. Path completion in the location bar is now case-insensitive, which is a small change that makes the experience noticeably smoother when you are typing quickly and not thinking about capitalization.
Thumbnails are now loaded through Glycin, GNOME's sandboxed image loading library, completing a change that caused missing image thumbnails for some users (including myself).
Icon caching has been reworked alongside this, and the multi-file properties dialog has been improved. Similarly, image thumbnails in the properties view now display against a checkerboard background, making it easier to see transparency at a glance.
Accessibility Upgrades
Orca gets a substantial overhaul, where the screen reader gets a redesigned preferences window that is more visually consistent with the rest of the GNOME ecosystem (it is still GTK3 tho).
More practically, all settings and commands are now global by default, meaning that you don't need to manually save settings on a per-application basis, though doing so is still possible.
Additionally, automatic language switching has been added for both web and interface content, and Browse mode now works across all document content rather than being limited to web pages.
On the platform side, at-spi2-core gains the pointer-moved, key-pressed, and key-released signals. These give assistive technologies a cleaner way to track pointer and keyboard input, with the pointer-moved signal supported on both X11 and on Wayland when the compositor implements the org.freedesktop.a11y.PointerLocator interface.
Other Changes and Improvements
We conclude this article with a few other notable refinements that include:
As usual, a set of fresh wallpapers is included.
Loupe (the image viewer) adds support for XPM and JPEG 2000 formats.
The new session save and restore feature has been postponed to a future release.
GTK 4 has dropped its Librsvg dependency as it can now render SVGs natively.
Calendar now shows event attendees in the event editor dialog and supports arrow key navigation in the Month view.
The release notes contain all the useful information you will need about this release.
How to Get GNOME 50?
If you run a rolling release distribution like Arch Linux, EndeavourOS, and CachyOS, GNOME 50 will arrive as an upgrade as soon as the maintainers are done pushing it to the repos.
The upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44 releases will also feature this GNOME release, so be sure to keep an eye out for those.
Manjaro has long been one of the more popular Arch-based Linux distributions, known for making Arch Linux more accessible to everyday users. But it has been losing ground for years, both in terms of user trust and active contributors, and the complaints about its direction have only gotten louder.
Now, things have hit a breaking point, with calls for a fork if the current leadership does not budge.
A Manjaro team member going by the handle "Aragorn" has published the "Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto" on the official Manjaro forum. The post lays out a detailed restructuring plan for the project that has been signed by 19 team members, including developers, community managers, moderators, and the company's technical lead.
Is there any weight behind this?
The manifesto opens by stating that the Manjaro Project has been declining over the past decade, losing trust and contributors while repeating the same mistakes without ever addressing them.
One example cited is the repeated failure to keep TLS certificates current, something volunteers had reportedly already built tooling to fix, only to be ignored.
From there, it goes after the core issue directly. Aragorn writes that Philip Müller (the project lead) has been running Manjaro as his own personal venture rather than a community effort, keeping a tight hold on access to both the codebase and the infrastructure.
Aragorn goes on to say that:
The priorities of the Project leadership do not align with those of the developers and community. The current leadership’s goal is to turn Manjaro into a successful business, and thus far, these attempts have mostly failed.
The money situation makes it worse. The manifesto says the company, Manjaro GmbH & Co KG, has not been funneling any of its funds back into the project and has not pursued outside funding either.
What the team wants is a clean separation, where the Manjaro Project is spun off from Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG and restructured as a registered nonprofit association under German law (e.V.).
The new structure would distribute ownership equally among members, use transparent voting for major decisions, and assign "arbiter" roles to experienced contributors for specific domains.
Under the proposal, the nonprofit would get full use of the Manjaro trademark through 2029. The company keeps the right to use it too, as long as the two don't step on each other's toes. After that initial period, the manifesto nudges the company to declare that it is willing to hand over full trademark ownership to the nonprofit for €1.
Key assets like the GitHub organizations, the self-hosted GitLab instance, forum, CDN, and the manjaro.org domain would all move over to the non-profit as well.
The team has also laid out what would happen if they were ignored. The "Our Resolve" section of the manifesto says that there are three stages (from 0-2): waiting for a reply, striking and going public, and finally forking or leaving. Within Stage 1, there are three phases that control how public the document gets.
They skipped Phase 2 and jumped straight to Phase 3 a few days ago, moving the manifesto to the public Announcements section of the forum and archiving the thread on archive.org. If things don't improve, then a forum lockdown is on the table.
Don't think that this is some kind of witch hunt. One of the Manjaro team members, Dennis ten Hoove, has clarified that the goal of this initiative is not to kick people off the project but to change the leadership and help foster Manjaro as a healthy community-driven project.
Expect a bumpy transition
Philip did break his silence on the matter, saying that he is fine with an association being formed but wants no part in setting one up himself. He also made clear that handing over any assets would need to happen on the company's terms and closed with a warning that public statements damaging to either himself or the business could have legal consequences.
The protesting team's response was measured, where Aragorn pushed back, pointing out that the manifesto already lets the company continue using the infrastructure for as long as it needs to move its operations elsewhere.
Roman Gilg, who signed the manifesto despite being the company's CTO, put a direct question to Philip, asking whether he had any specific objection to the list of assets outlined in the document. Philip went quiet again.
After days of silence on that question, Aragorn declared that Philip was stalling and announced the team was skipping Phase 2 and moving straight to Phase 3 (where things stand as of now).
What can you do?
There's an active community discussion thread with over 200 replies, started specifically to accommodate talks surrounding the manifesto. If you have thoughts on what's going wrong with the Manjaro project and what could be done better, you can head over and weigh in.
One of the Manjaro old timers, Stefano Capitani, has recently posted there, sharing his view of the situation:
I have to apologize to all of you. It seems I’ve missed some of the events here. I believe, without fear of contradiction, that I, along with @guinux , @oberon , and of course @philm, am one of the “old timers” still active, if not as much as before, but still active in Manjaro.
I have to be honest, I feel like I’m having flashbacks because we’ve already had these discussions or “storms” in the past. We’ve always come out stronger, and we’ll come out stronger this time too.
PS:You need to be logged in to the Manjaro forum to view user profiles.
Kagi is best known for its privacy-focused search engine, but the company has been quietly building out a broader ecosystem of tools for people who would rather pay for software than be the product.
One of those tools is Orion, a web browser built on WebKit, the same engine that powers Safari, with a strong focus on privacy and customization.
Unlike most browsers you will come across on Linux, Orion is not a Chromium derivative or a Firefox fork. It is a fresh build that has earned a reputation for being fast, lightweight, and flexible, with support for extensions from Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
For a long time, that experience was exclusive to macOS and iOS users. But that has changed as Kagi has been working on bringing Orion to Linux. After an alpha phase limited to Orion+ subscribers, the team has opened things up with an early beta build for everyone to try out.
🚧
Orion is not open source software; we covered the application because it's available for Linux.
Orion for Linux: What to Expect?
The Beta build has basic browsing functionality in place, with additional bits like password management, browsing history, Dark Mode, and Focus Mode included.
The developers have also addressed a handful of stability issues, including crashes when closing pinned tabs, freezes in Website Settings, and a bug that prevented new tabs from being created on fresh installations.
That said, Kagi Sync and WebKit Extensions are still in development and not available in this beta, so do not go in expecting the full macOS feature set just yet.
A Quick Look
The user interface feels modern and fits in well with GNOME, though the toolbar is a bit cluttered at the top. Kagi Search is set as the default search engine, and you will need to log in to your Kagi account to use it or switch to one of the other search engines via the Settings menu.
Basic web browsing works for the most part, but every so often, Orion throws an "Orion can't open this page" error without much explanation. More bizarre is what happens when you open a page heavy with ads—Orion randomly launches the file manager.
Media controls work reasonably well on GNOME, though there were multiple duplicate entries for WebKit in the media panel. The one actually tied to whatever is playing was the last one, labeled "Playback Stream."
Many other features are either broken or inconsistent at this stage. The sidebar toggle on the top left, Focus Mode, the Share option, Page Tweaks, Website Settings, and Privacy Reports all fall into that bucket. Some of them do nothing and act as placeholders; others behave unpredictably.
The History page, while functional, refuses to open any of the listed webpages when an entry is double-clicked or even launched via the right-click context menu. It also failed to properly list quite a few of the webpages I visited during testing.
The in-built Password Manager works well, letting me add new entries with details like the website URL, username, and password. Searching through them is straightforward via the search bar on top, and importing/exporting passwords looks doable (I didn't test it tho).
If you have multiple windows and tabs open, Orion will prompt you with a warning to take note of the open content and that it will restore those the next time you launch the browser. This is a handy feature that worked decently during my use.
Download Orion Browser Beta
Kagi provides a direct download for the Flatpak package of this beta build, which should work on most popular Linux distributions that have Flatpak configured.
If you run into any issues, there is a dedicated category on Orion's Public Issue Tracker for bug reports and troubleshooting. Additionally, the project's GitHub repository hosts some open-sourced components.
As for the stable release, there is no official timeline yet, but with an early beta already out, in a few months time feels like a reasonable estimate.
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Amidst all the chaos in the world, some significant moves are being orchestrated that could potentially have detrimental effects on people's privacy and right to choose. Google's Developer Verification program falls under the latter.
Starting September 2026 (in certain regions), any app installed on a certified Android device will need to come from a developer who has gone through Google's new verification process. This applies regardless of where the app comes from: the Play Store, a third-party storefront, or a direct APK download.
To get verified, developers must register through a dedicated Android Developer Console and provide their legal name, address, email address, and phone number. In some cases, they will also need to upload a government-issued ID.
Organizations are additionally required to provide a D-U-N-S Number, a business identifier issued by Dun & Bradstreet that can take up to 30 business days to obtain.
There are two account tiers on offer: a Full Distribution account with a one-time $25 fee and a free Limited Distribution account for students and hobbyists that skips the government ID requirement. Installs via ADB and apps deployed through enterprise managed device systems are exempt from the requirements.
The requirement goes live in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand first in September, followed by a global rollout from 2027 onward. We covered the initial announcement back in August 2025, when the first alarm bells started ringing.
But is there any convincing justification behind this? Let's find out.
Does it make sense?
The Developer Verification webpage.
Kinda, Google's official position is that this is a security measure. The company points to its own research showing that apps from internet sideloading sources are over 50 times more likely to contain malware compared to those distributed through the Play Store.
The core idea is accountability. Right now, a developer caught distributing malware can be removed from the Play Store and come straight back under a different identity. Developer verification is meant to make that harder by tying app distribution to a verified real-world identity.
In theory, repeat offenders would have a harder time cycling through new accounts to keep spreading harmful content, so there's a reasonable argument here.
Anonymous distribution channels have historically been where a lot of malware activity takes place. Raising the barrier for bad actors to operate at scale is not, on its face, an unreasonable goal.
And for the average Android user who installs apps without thinking much about where they come from, more accountability in the ecosystem is not a bad thing.
Why it doesn't
Take F-Droid, the long-running free and open source Android app repository that has been around for more than 15 years now. It does not build apps in the traditional sense but rather takes publicly available source code, reviews it for compliance with open source principles, compiles it, and distributes it signed with its own cryptographic key.
Under the new rules, F-Droid has no workable path forward. Compelling volunteer contributors to register their identities with Google runs against what the platform stands for.
But claiming those app identifiers on developers' behalf is equally impossible, since that would give F-Droid a kind of exclusive ownership over apps it has no right to own.
F-Droid has been clear that if Google goes through this, it effectively ends the project as it currently exists. IzzyOnDroid, another third-party storefront that distributes developer-signed APKs also faces the same fate.
It is a community campaign built around stopping Developer Verification. It's open letter to Google so far has 56 signatories from 19 countries, including the EFF, FSF, Tor Project, Proton, KDE, LineageOS, CryptPad, Nextcloud, Vivaldi, and the Software Freedom Conservancy.
The letter argues that Google is overreaching into distribution channels outside its own store, that mandatory registration creates barriers for independent developers and researchers, and that centralizing developer data with Google raises serious surveillance and government access concerns.
The initiative is also urging developers to refuse participation in Google's early access program entirely and not to perform identity verification or accept an invitation to the new Android Developer Console, arguing that without developer buy-in, the verification program simply cannot succeed.
What this means for you
If a significant number of open source developers and smaller projects choose not to register with Google, or cannot do so because of privacy concerns, where they live, or the structural incompatibility of how their apps are distributed, their apps will simply stop working on certified Android devices.
The expected outcome for you is a narrower selection of apps and fewer alternatives to what is available on the Play Store.
There is also a broader principle at stake here. Centralizing all app distribution under Google's registration system hands one corporation the ability to cut off any app on any certified Android device globally.
That kind of consolidated authority over a platform used by billions of people is unsettling.
I think bad actors will always find new ways to distribute malicious apps. They did before developer verification, and they will after. Then there's nation-state spyware, which operates on a different level entirely, and the developer registration requirement was never going to touch that (makes you think, huh).
What Google could have leaned into instead is user education with clearer warnings, better guidance, and more effective communication about what a risky install actually looks like.
In the end, not everyone can be spoon-fed through this. At some point, it is on the person operating the smartphone to exercise a little judgment.
Google Says Developer Verification Makes Android Safer. Critics Say It Just Makes Android More Closed
Linux gaming has been getting some wins lately, and while most of it is thanks to the hard work of countless open source contributors and community members, Microslop, err, Microsoft's unhealthy obsession has also been driving people towards the platform.
Steam, which is among the key drivers of that growth, has a new client update that offers many useful upgrades.
What do you get?
The most relevant fixes for Linux users address a bug where Proton games were incorrectly flagged as "Not valid on current platform" for users with huge libraries. A related instance of the same bug also affected offline mode specifically, so if you have a large library and have been running into these issues, both cases should now be sorted.
Moving on from that, the /store chat command has been updated to use the new Store trailer player (the video player that shows game trailers) instead of the old one.
On the library side, any game demos you have installed that are no longer available will now show a prompt to uninstall them rather than a play button. Plus, any new demos and free-to-play titles will appear at the top of your recent games list.
Steam is also rolling out opt-in anonymized framerate data collection, currently in beta with a focus on SteamOS devices. The data is stored without any connection to your Steam account but is tied to the type of hardware you are playing on. Valve says this will help improve game compatibility information.
Then there are Reviews, which are getting a small but useful addition. You can now include your hardware specs when writing or updating a user review on a game's store page, giving your review a bit more context for other gamers.
Depending on who you ask, this can either be a privacy headache or a genuinely useful signal for judging how a game runs on hardware similar to yours.
Finally, a fix went out for an issue where the game beta/version info was showing the date the beta was assigned to you, rather than the date the actual game build was created.
How to get Steam?
Officially, Valve only provides DEB packages for Linux, so you can get it installed on Debian, Ubuntu, and other derivatives without any issues. On Ubuntu, you just double-click on the package and click on "Install" to get it on your system.
There are some unofficial builds out there that do work, and if I had to suggest one, it would be the RPM Fusion version of Steam (available on GNOME Software). But again, this is not provided by Valve, so verify it before installing.
Brazil's Digital Statute of the Child and Adolescent takes effect on March 17, 2026, and explicitly names operating systems and app stores as entities that must implement age verification.
California's Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043), signed in October 2025 and effective January 1, 2027, requires OS providers to collect age data at account setup and pipe it to every app via a real-time API.
Colorado's Senate Bill 26-051, which passed the state Senate on March 3 with a 28-7 vote, would mandate the same and is currently awaiting a House vote before being set in stone.
They say they are doing it to protect the children; I think that is performative. Now we have a popular open source project outright banning people from using its offering just because they live in a region that has mandated age verification.
Age verification excludes
A stern disclaimer.
MidnightBSD, a FreeBSD-based desktop operating system, has quietly updated its README to reflect a new geographic restriction. The project has added a clause that bars residents of any country, state, or territory with OS-level age verification mandates from using MidnightBSD.
It is not a blanket ban but is directly tied to the existence of these laws, meaning the list grows as more regions pass similar legislation.
As it stands right now, it reads:
Residents of any countries, states or territories that require age verification for operating systems, are not authorized to use MidnightBSD. This list currently includes Brazil, effective March 17, 2026, California, effective January 1, 2027, and will include Colorado, Illinois and New York provided they pass their currently proposed legislation.
The project also urges anyone affected by this restriction to write to their local representatives and push for these laws to be repealed or replaced.
MidnightBSD has been around since 2006, when Lucas Holt forked it from FreeBSD 6.1 to build a desktop-oriented BSD for everyday users. It ships with Xfce and its own package manager, mport, targeting i386 and amd64 hardware.
It is a small, community-driven project with no corporate backing. The fines these laws carry, up to $7,500 per minor for intentional violations, are a serious risk for a team this size.
I wonder, though, how this would actually be enforced; maybe the official website and download mirrors for MidnightBSD will be out of reach for people in those regions. Of course, a tech-savvy crowd who uses MidnightBSD will know how to bypass such an embargo.
It makes you wonder how effective such age verification laws are. Oh wait, some of these so-called public servants are also pushing for VPNs to be banned.
Microcontrollers are small, low-power chips built to accomplish specific tasks like reading sensors, controlling motors, and responding to inputs. You can find them inside washing machines, TV remotes, medical devices, industrial equipment, and practically anything with a circuit board that is not a fully fledged computer.
Because of their limited resources, they typically run either bare-metal firmware or a lightweight real-time operating system (RTOS) like Zephyr or Eclipse ThreadX.
And now, someone has decided that a microcontroller should have a graphical desktop interface. A tinkerer based out of Greece, Mikhail Matveev, has released FRANK OS, a desktop operating system built for the RP2350 microcontroller.
What is FRANK OS?
It is a desktop operating system built on top of FreeRTOS, the widely used open source real-time operating system that offers preemptive multitasking, a modest memory footprint, and support for 40+ processor architectures.
Building on that base, FRANK OS has its own windowed GUI, shell, filesystem stack, and application runtime in place. The result of that is a system that offers a Windows 95-style desktop with the ability to run ELF applications from SD cards and hard fault recovery in place.
The project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 and just got its first stable release a few weeks ago. On paper, the OS targets the FRANK M2 board, which is the developer's own RP2350B-based creation that has DVI output, PS/2 ports, PSRAM, and an SD card slot.
Running a windowed desktop on a microcontroller with 520 KB of on-chip SRAM is not a small feat. FRANK OS achieves it by splitting the workload across the RP2350's two cores.
Core 0 runs the FreeRTOS scheduler, window manager, input handling, and applications, while Core 1 is entirely dedicated to real-time DVI scanline rendering via the DispHSTX driver.
Applications are compiled as standalone ARM ELF binaries and loaded from an SD card. The OS also includes a MOS2 compatibility layer for running Murmulator OS 2 applications.
What can you expect?
From left to right: FRANK OS' terminal, music player, notepad, and digger game.
Going into greater detail, FRANK OS comes with a proper desktop environment where app windows can overlap, be dragged, resized from edges and corners, minimized, maximized, or closed.
The taskbar sits at the bottom of the screen with a Start button, buttons for any currently open windows, and a system tray that shows a clock and the volume slider. Additionally, the Start menu can scan /fos/ on the SD card at boot to list applications.
The desktop supports up to 24 shortcuts via the right-click context menu that stay intact across reboots, and pressing Alt+Tab brings up a switcher overlay, letting you cycle through all open windows, including the minimized ones.
PShell is the built-in shell that runs inside the Terminal application. It can handle file operations, editing files with vi, a C compiler, and launching MOS2-compatible console applications from the SD card.
The Control Panel, accessible via the Start menu, has four applets covering background color, system info, mouse settings, and CPU/PSRAM clock frequencies.
On the audio side, FRANK OS can provide I2S stereo output with 4 concurrent sound channels, MP3 and MOD playback, MIDI/OPL FM synthesis, and even a startup sound.
Fret not, the OS also features nine pre-installed applications that include:
Coloumn 1
Coloumn 2
Terminal
Notepad
Solitaire
Minesweeper
Digger
ZX Spectrum 48K Emulator
FrankAmp
MMBasic
PShell
You will find detailed installation instructions, source code, and documentation on FRANK OS' GitHub repository.
Firefox's Proton design has been around since 2021, and it is starting to show its age. The interface is flat, uses a lot of gray, and feels very dated in 2026. You either live with it or you go out of your way to install a theme from the add-ons store.
Neither option feels particularly appealing when practically every other mainstream browser and several Firefox forks, have put real thought into what people expect from a modern web browser.
On top of that, its AIness and lack of genuinely user experience-centric additions have been making me wonder whether it is time to move on entirely.
But, it looks like there's some hope after all.
📝
Going forward, I’ll be using sentence case for most (if not all) of my article titles and headings.
This is my attempt to provide you, the readers, with a better reading experience, and many authors have already switched, so why not?
Under the internal project name "Nova," Mozilla is working on a significant visual overhaul of Firefox. Sören was the first to put out the internal design mockups, which show a very different version of Firefox than what you and me currently use.
The most obvious change is how rounded everything is. Tabs, the address bar, and the toolbar no longer sit as separate flat strips—they form a single floating island at the top of the browser.
The sidebar toggle and the web content area follow the same rounded design language, and even elements on the new tab page get the same treatment.
Flat, solid colors are also going away. Nova brings in subtle gradients across the interface, and the mockups show a clear lean toward violet as a color accent. Sören notes that this is likely tied to the active theme or what the user has chosen in the Appearance settings.
On the left is the vertical tab layout; on the right is the 'Appearance' settings menu. (Source: Sören Hentzschel)
That menu, btw, also sees a redesign, where the various options are laid out neatly with rounded corners and possibly a different font for the text.
There is also a structural change in how web content is displayed. Rather than sitting flush against the window edges, pages are presented inside a rounded container, visually separated from the other elements of the interface.
📋
You will probably recognize this from Zen Browser.
The mockups also showcase vertical tabs that already exist on the current build of Firefox, but, again, with a more rounded appearance and a slightly more accessible layout.
From left to right: Firefox Nova's dark mode, light mode, and Private Window. (Source: Sören Hentzschel)
Above, the dark mode mockup shows the split view feature in action, with two sites open side by side inside their rounded containers. The browser's interface is a black/red gradient, with the tab bar and toolbar housed in a single strip at the top.
The light mode mockup shows the browser menu open, which has noticeably rounded corners and floats as a panel rather than being pinned to the toolbar. You can also spot tab groups displayed as colored pills in the tab bar.
The private window mockup is the most visually distinct of the three. The entire interface is a dark purple, with large flowing curves and slightly varying shades of purple as the background.
Stay updated
If you want to follow development, Mozilla's Bugzilla page has an active set of entries tracking the work surrounding Nova.
Going through them, I came across several Figma links that presumably pointed to the actual design files. But none of them were accessible; my best guess is that they were taken down after the leak.
Also, there's no official announcement on this from Mozilla, but seeing that the mockups are now out in the wild, we can probably expect one shortly.
In the meantime, customize it yourself
We have a detailed video on customizing Firefox to give it a lean, minimal but efficient makeover. Perhaps you would want to give it a try before the new, redesigned version is released.
As of today, about half of all U.S. states have some form of age verification law around. Nine of those were passed in 2025 alone, covering everything from adult content sites to social media platforms to app stores.
Right now, California's Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043) is all the rage right now, which targets not only websites and apps but also operating systems. Come January 1, 2027, every OS provider must collect a user's age at account setup and provide that data to app developers via a real-time API.
The EFF's year-end review put it more bluntly: 2025 was "the year states chose surveillance over safety." The foundation's concern, which I concur with, is, where does this stop? Self-reported birthday today, government ID tomorrow? There appears to be no limit to these laws' overreach.
📋
What's next—verify yourself to get access to potable water? ☠️
Governments across the world are pulling out the exact same argument (protect the children) to push through laws with consequences that go well beyond keeping a kid off a harmful website. All while attendees of a certain island roam about the world freely.
It's Not Just the U.S.
The UK moved first back in 2023. The Online Safety Act's child safety duties went into force in July 2025, where it required platforms to deploy age verification measures, blocking minors from accessing harmful material.
Australia followed in December 2025 with a ban on social media accounts for under-16s, requiring age checks for adults to use the platform. It is narrower in scope, targeting platforms rather than app stores or operating systems.
Brazil has gone further. The Digital Statute of the Child and Adolescent comes into effect on March 17, 2026, and it explicitly names operating systems and app stores by definition.
Article 12 requires both to implement auditable age verification, expose an age signal via API to third-party apps, and get parental/legal guardian consent before minors can download anything.
Singapore's approach skips the OS side of things and goes straight for the app stores themselves. Their IMDA requires the likes of Apple, Google, Huawei, Microsoft, and Samsung to implement age assurance by March 31, 2026.
Apple has already gotten it done, rolling out its Declared Age Range API on February 24, blocking 18+ apps in Singapore, Australia, and Brazil.
As usual, the EU is doing its own thing. In October 2025, the Commission introduced the second version of its age verification blueprint, which is a mobile app that lets users prove they're over 18 without revealing any personal data. It's built on the same technical foundation as the EU Digital Identity Wallets rolling out across member states.
Five countries are already in the process of customizing it for their needs: Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, and Spain.
The Fallout
Predictably, the Linux community has not taken this quietly. While there is a bunch of misinformation strewn about, some things are clear.
Take Ubuntu, for instance. Aaron Rainbolt, an Ubuntu Community Council member, posted on the Ubuntu mailing list raising this issue of age checks with a post titled:
On the unfortunate need for an "age verification" API for legal compliance reasons in some U.S. states
In the post, he proposed a D-Bus interface called org.freedesktop.AgeVerification1. Rather than storing raw personal data, it would only expose an age bracket to apps that request it. The goal is a spec loose enough that any distro can implement it however they see fit, while still satisfying what laws like AB 1043 actually require.
Then there's the thread up on Fedora's Discourse, where a user asked whether the developers were aware of California's age verification law. Jef Spaleta, Fedora Project Leader, chimed in with a measured approach, where no telemetry was required, and a local API would do the heavy lifting.
Here, apps would query Fedora for an age bracket, and the OS would provide it. He even suggested it could be as simple as a new file in /etc/ that would be populated during account creation.
As for what people think of this, take the example of a Redditor, who is going as far as hoarding ISO files for old builds of Linux and Windows once age verification-equipped versions start rolling out. I am sure many will follow in their footsteps.
Lastly, my take on this situation? This feels less like coincidence and more like a coordinated move being run under the guise of protecting children's rights. We already know how certain regimes around the world treat those rights.
A listing on Electronic Arts' (EA) job portal has us wondering if the game developer finally considers Linux to be a platform worthy of their support.
EA recently put up a listing for a Senior Anti-Cheat Engineer, ARM64, looking for someone to join its SPEAR (Secure Product Engineering & Anti-Cheat Response) team. The role is focused on expanding their in-house kernel-level anti-cheat solution, EA Javelin, to run natively in Windows on ARM64.
The person will be responsible for developing a native ARM64 driver for Javelin and porting the existing solution over from x86_64. Building and maintaining automated test pipelines to validate the anti-cheat on ARM hardware is also part of the job.
This makes sense given where the Windows handheld market is heading. ARM-based Windows devices are a growing segment, and as more players game on them, security solutions need to adapt.
This warped gallery shows some sections of EA's job posting.
Where's Linux, you ask? Look at the bottom of the responsibility requirements, and you will see the following:
Chart a path for EA Javelin Anticheat to support additional OS and hardware in the future, such as Linux and Proton.
That one line is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It points to EA at least thinking about bringing Javelin to the Linux kernel and to Proton. It is clearly a long-term goal rather than an immediate one, as Windows on ARM64 is still numero uno.
Linux needs no introduction, but if you were thinking what the heck is Proton. It is a compatibility layer developed by Valve, built on top of Wine, that allows Linux users to run Windows games without needing a Winslop install.
The Steam Deck, Valve's popular Linux-based handheld, relies heavily on it to run the vast majority of its game library. And when you look further, without Proton, many of the games playable on Steam Deck simply would not work on Linux.
Things Are Looking Up?
Linux as a gaming platform has been gaining traction. The Steam Deck put it in the hands of a much wider audience, and the broader desktop Linux community has kept that momentum going.
The track record from big publishers, however, has not been great. EA itself pulled Linux and Steam Deck support for Apex Legends in late 2024, arguing that the open nature of Linux made it harder to keep cheaters out. Rockstar followed a similar path, with GTA V Online quietly kicking Linux users after rolling out BattlEye.
Going back more, Roblox joined the club in 2023, when its Hyperion anti-cheat blocked Wine entirely, ending years of unofficial Linux support. But Linux gaming keeps growing regardless, and game publishers who want a slice of that market will have to take note.
Then there's Sony, which seems to be going backwards, pulling back from the PC gaming market (paywalled, grr) for its flagship single-player titles. Anonymous spokespersons from the company have disclosed that titles like Ghost of Yōtei and Saros will only be available on the PlayStation 5 series of consoles.
It is a strange time. One major publisher is quietly hinting at Linux support in a job listing, while another is seemingly retreating from PC. For Linux gamers, the situation remains mixed, but at least someone is headed in the right direction.
💬 Your thoughts? Is EA serious about Linux support, or is it just not that important to them?
Microsoft's official Copilot Discord server has descended into chaos after users flooded it with a nickname that has been making the rounds on social media for a while now: Microslop.
The term caught on as frustration grew over Microsoft's push to integrate AI into their most popular products like Windows, Office, and GitHub. Many people now feel that user experience is being traded for bloat, breach of privacy, and instability in the name of Copilot.
Abhijith M B from Windows Latest was the first to catch that the word had been quietly added to the server's auto-moderation blocklist. Any message containing it was silently blocked, with only the sender receiving a notice that their message included a phrase the server moderators considered inappropriate.
That discovery, once posted on X, was practically an open invitation. People began testing workarounds almost immediately, and it did not take long before "Microsl0p," with a zero in place of the letter "o," sailed right through the filter.
When I tried joining the server to see how things were unfolding firsthand, I could not. Server invites had been paused, which made things pretty clear for me.
Microsoft did eventually respond with an official statement:
The Copilot Discord channel has recently been targeted by spammers attempting to disrupt and overwhelm the space with harmful content not related to Copilot. Initially, this spam consisted of walls of text, so we added temporary filters for select terms to slow this activity.
We have since made the decision to temporarily lock down the server while we work to implement stronger safeguards to protect users from this harmful spam and help ensure the server remains a safe, usable space for the community.
That explains why I wasn't able to join the server. 😆
But does banning people, or spammers as they claim, actually address the real problem? Microsoft could also think twice before shoving AI into everything and branding it as everyone's 'companion,' 'pair programmer,' or whatever else sounds good in a press release.
Motorola just partnered with the GrapheneOS Foundation, and it was announced at MWC 2026. The two plan to collaborate on research, software improvements, and new security features in the coming months.
If you were not familiar, GrapheneOS is an open source OS built on the Android Open Source Project. It ditches Google's data collection layer entirely and has long been the go-to for anyone serious about privacy.
But, it has been out of reach for most people as it only officially supports Google's Pixel line of smartphones.
Following this news, a spokesperson at GrapheneOS stated that:
We are thrilled to be partnering with Motorola to bring GrapheneOS’s industry‑leading privacy and security‑focused mobile operating system to their next-generation smartphone.
This collaboration marks a significant milestone in expanding the reach of GrapheneOS, and we applaud Motorola for taking this meaningful step towards advancing mobile security.
What to Expect?
The obvious outcome is a Motorola phone shipping with GrapheneOS pre-installed. The spokesperson's reference to "next-generation smartphone" suggests a specific device is already being worked on, even if Motorola isn't ready to show it yet.
Official GrapheneOS support for existing Motorola devices is a separate question. Expanding beyond Pixel hardware will take some significant developmental effort, and nothing has been confirmed there. The mention of "software enhancements" in the announcement language might be a hint, but a vague one.
What this partnership does more immediately is break the Pixel monopoly on GrapheneOS-compatible hardware. More device options means more people can actually use it, which is good for the project and good for the wider push toward privacy-respecting smartphones.
If this proves commercially viable, other manufacturers have little excuse not to follow. A privacy-focused phone is a real need right now, and it beats being in the business of trading user data.
Alongside this, Motorola also announced a new enterprise-grade analytics platform and new feature for its Moto Secure app that, when enabled, automatically strips metadata from camera images.
When I first played Cyberpunk 2077, its dystopian world was what drew me in. A place where surveillance was part of daily life, and questioning any of the big corpos meant you would probably disappear one night, never to be found again.
Years later, in 2026, I am sitting here wondering—this is not fiction, but something that could really happen one day, seeing how things are escalating thanks to a cabal of senile cretins and how quickly rights are being stripped from the general public.
You might've already noticed that there's a trend among governments to bring in age verification for deterring children from being exposed to harmful content and people.
But the methods deployed to ensure compliance either ask you to fork over extremely sensitive PII or fill out a form that *sternly* asks you of your age or age bracket.
Age Verification, Why?
A few days ago, we saw the U.S. state of Colorado wanting to make operating systems hand over age bracket data to apps. This would work via an API that transmits a user-reported "age signal" to verify a person's age range before they use the software.
While this is set for a January 1, 2028 adoption, there are a few hurdles it has to cross before it is set in stone.
A similarly worded bill has already been passed in California, where the Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043) was signed into law back in October 2025.
Starting in 2027, it mandates that OS providers collect a user's birth date, age, or both at account setup and provide a signal to developers via a real-time API. This effectively forces the computer itself to act as the primary gatekeeper, telling every app you launch exactly which age bracket you fall into.
The Other Side
A federal judge in Virginia blocked the state from enforcing its social media age-limit law (SB 854) just a few days ago. The judge ruled that the mandate, which forced platforms to verify ages and limit minors to one hour of daily use, violates First Amendment rights by overextending to both adults and children and leaving out addictive interactive games.
Then there's Discord, which tried implementing an age verification system that blew up in its face. It had to distance itself from Persona after a massive backlash over privacy and security, and people were already on edge after a previous breach exposed nearly 70,000 government IDs. The situation has now hit a new low point where researchers have discovered Persona’s code was tied to extensive surveillance checks and global watchlists.
Even people over on Reddit are calling out such moves, with a Redditor, ForeverHuman1354, putting out a call to resist system-level age verification checks. They point out that even if the law in California doesn't require forking over identification, what's to stop anyone from normalizing doing so in the future?
And these age checks could easily be repurposed to identify the user of an app or operating system; not that Big Tech hasn't already done that with their never-ending greed for our data.
💬 Where do you think we’re headed? Is this really about safeguarding children, or are we just living out the plot of an Orwellian horror novel?
