The California bill only affects software distributors. And how would it be enforced with something like Linux?
this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2025
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I've been regularly downloading the 100+GB data dumps of wikipedia on an annual basis for the past few years. It seems the worse the world gets, the more often I download another new copy.
I use Kiwix and download the ZIM files to keep it updated.
Lots of good stuff on Kiwix
This is something a came across yesterday.
“We will not be age-gating Wikipedia under any circumstances, so, if it comes to that, it’s going to be an interesting showdown, because we’re going to just refuse to do it. Politically, what are they going to do? They could block Wikipedia. Good luck with that.” - Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales
https://reclaimthenet.org/uk-online-safety-act-privacy-surveillance-vpn-anonymity-regulation
I'm going to assume Wikipedia wouldn't be the only ones fighting this crap.
California fuckwit OS age verification means I'm going offline soon.
Go read the actual bill. It has issues, but it's not an ID requirement. It's an "are you over 18?" type of check (with several brackets) at the OS level.
Yeah, could it not be just setting /var/age or /home/user/.config/age to '20' or 'D', and just have a function to pass that value to a web browser to bypass every age gate prompt?
That's more or less how I read it, yeah. Pretty sure the authors were thinking in terms of GUIs having a field to enter that info when you make a user account on a system but I think something like that would meet the intent for programs to access the user's declared age.
Until some details drop about how they plan to actually enforce this, I wouldn't bother with trying to archive all that.
I don't know why it took me 4 attempts and reading comments to actually understand what this post is about. It was just random sentences with random words before that.
Is the whole age verification thing void if you compile the OS yourself?
Debian stable apt package archive
What would be a rough estimate of the size for that? How would it be affected if someone were to add KDE / Gnome to it?
Ok, after a minimal amount of searching I got this. I wonder if something like this would be feasible for a rolling release distro like Fedora.
Depends on how much you want to archive. Amd64 is about 150GB
Im a little out of the loop on this one... Might be easily overcome with a VPN rather than going feral?
I just don't see how this is at all enforceable. If necessary download your install medium from a vpn. Maybe setup a small VM for those times you need to do online interaction with California governmental services. For everything but online shopping you can set your exit node to somewhere in the EU. Shop from an exit node in NV, WA or wherever.
I guess we will have to wait and see how this will be enforced to find the best way around it. Thanks for the link.
I have a 200tb nas with all kinds of shit on it. Shows, music, books, manga, llms, software, etc
Keep in mind everything you use the internet for.
Unfortunately llms and tariffs have caused storage to shoot up in price quite a bit. It was quite a bit different a year ago or even better 3-5 years ago. There was a time where I’d add a drive to my NAS every few months when I had an extra hundred bucks but now I only generally only replace a drive when absolutely necessary because it’s pricey. And then on top of that each new drive means more electricity used which is also going up in cost
I have a few gb of music.
Otherwise i say "well, that was fun" and then go outside.
What's happening with Cali?
✅ Required age verifications by operating system and app store providers to help prevent children from accessing inappropriate or dangerous content online.
Hm yeah that'll do it
Pull a copy of Wikipedia.
Set up mirrors for package repos you mentioned. Each has documentation on how to set them up.
If you went with Arch Linux, you could effectively set up your own mirror, download the wiki zim file, and you should be good to go.
There is bandersnatch for mirroring PyPI but docs are all over the place for Python packages. You might just have to hope they made liberal use of docstrings…
I do this! Friendly reminder: the Arch Wiki is also in the repo an arch-wiki-docs.