alt Hacker NewsNo one is being convicted and doing hard time for refusing to add age verification to a Linux distro. This is just more fear mongering.
It would be a fine or a few days of jail until bail is posted, at worst. And then a media shit show where the public is certain to side with the developer who is having their rights violated to discourage this from ever happening again.
The public even got the back of weev for his bullshit arrest. Weev, one of the shittiest people to ever live. But rights are rights.
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The public may have weev's back, but privately the majority of us disavowed him after he went full nazi in prison and doubled down on an alt-right agenda. I personally know people who signed the court petition to get him acquitted and they have rescinded support for him. That said, he shouldn't have gone to prison for that.
Anyway, the nature of a slippery slope like this one is that the punishments will get worse over time as the government further vilifies those who push against things like this and encryption backdoors.
> No one is being convicted and doing hard time for refusing to add age verification to a Linux distro.
That's not the point. The point is that people who don't face a real possibility of being convicted and imprisoned are the ones who make the most noise about how they're willing to accept imprisonment (or, worse, are cheering on others to be imprisoned as some sort of Cyberpunk Martyr).
As I said elsewhere - it's easy to be an Internet Tough Guy when you (think you) have little to lose.