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US state laws push age checks into the operating system
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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It wasn't Microslop-owned for most of my experience with it, but even sourceforge went the way of enshittification. The only real hope is, unfortunately, decentralization. My worry that is that discoverability is the payment.
We can't trust that any single point of failure won't eventually fall to corporate greed. But if there's a central place to locate things, there's a central place to control them; even if it's literally "search"!
Funny as search doesn’t work on MS GitHub without auth. If you post your library on a language’s forum, a personal blog post, & some other place, the search engines (or ugh LLMs with Exa search) can find the. There are decentralized forge options like Radicle, or at least a nonprofit-owned. But all snapshot-based VCSs will have the limitation of needing some centralized source of truth in most cases since the model makes a conflict out of patches being pulled in out of order (which the patch theory-based stuff covers).
But we can all still watch the wording aspect so folks feel free to not do dumb things like assume code = Git = MS GitHub.
Fair enough. My point wasn't to equate code with github, but to suggest that github, and any other code repository, is effectively an app store by the definition of the California law, and is therefore supposedly responsible for handling this 'age signal' bullshit.
Similarly, GeoCities from the 90's is a publicly accessible website (*actually it's not -- just tried and it seems to completely dead now as opposed to mostly dead in early 2000's, RIP) with the ability to (and did) distribute software and would have also been an "application store". Archive.org is maybe a better example now: you can download tons of 'applications' from there and none of them will ever have age verification baked in. Is Archive.org now illegal? Let's find out.