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Comment by greyface- | Hacker News Reader

> Being unable to comply is not a valid legal defense.

Sure it is. Lawyers even have a pithy Latin maxim about it: lex non cogit ad impossibilia.

If you could stop doing that thing, it isn't an impossibility under lex non cogit ad impossibilia.

what could they be compelled to stop doing here? Mechanically speaking, I mean. I can imagine fines or contempt of court, etc

But how would you remove an international distro from "the marketplace" if it's free and not operating a business?

Same way anything else gets pulled from distribution. You shut down the servers, destroy keys, remove files, etc. Sure, the files may remain in circulation from unofficial sources, but that's not your problem, as long as you're no longer facilitating it.

We are fairly unique for a Linux OS in that we have no central servers, and there are no central keys, and no central entity to even send a C&D to. Everything is a quorum of privately owned hardware, so truly I do not know what mechanism they could even try.

If anyone is distributing it within Illinois jurisdiction (or maybe even distributing it elsewhere while maintaining a business presence in Illinois), they could be at risk of qualifying as an operating system provider under Illinois law.

How does that work with data on a server outside of the jurisdiction, that’s freely available to download and re-upload? The ‘local legal presence’ thing might work, but then what if they only distribute it on (say) a thumb drive, sent outside the jurisdiction, which is then uploaded by a third party? This whole thing seems unenforceable (or worse, arbitrarily enforceable).

A court will care about what you do in the jurisdictions where it has power over you. What anyone else does is their problem, not yours.

Some oddball Linux distro really has no relevance to the larger picture that lawmakers are trying to accomplish though. The vast majority of kids are using iphone/android/mac/chromebook/windows. Basically zero are using esoteric container images to access TikTok.

But wouldn't this type of law drive youth to using more exotic distributions to get around the issue? It's not far fetched to think that kids will just live boot from tails or another distro to visit socials and circumvent this rule. Plus with unlocked pixel bootloaders it would be trivial for them to petition their parents for a pixel, hard reset it, unlock the bootloader, install grapheneos via the web installer, and then be on their way. If parents don't know how to monitor their kids I doubt they'll notice grapheneos not being base android.

What is this bill blocking that kids want so bad that they'd go through the trouble to do that... and lose blue bubbles with their friends?

The ability to receive specifically unsolicited DMs from adult strangers?

Opting in to behavioral tracking?

This bill doesn't block social media for kids... I expect their response to be simply that they keep using social media on their phone the way they already do.

Perhaps I'm just too old and don't use mainstream socials outside of HN, but when I was growing up the very act of knowing I was on a "child" account was reason to break out of it alone. I broke a lot of operating systems that way but also got good at repairing them. Jailbreaking was normal. War driving was normal. Breaking WEP just because you could was normal. Later, watching your neighbors go crazy over the fence as you deauthed their devices from their network was normal. It was just part of being a kid and having fun learning about the world.

By far the vast majority of children did not have that experience in the past, nor do they today.

It's not that complicated.

If there's a law that says "Anyone who distributes X must also Y" and you can't figure out a way to continue distributing X while also doing Y, the way you comply with the law is that you stop distributing X.

None of this answers the question: even if @Irvick stops distributing or participating in any way with this "stagex" distro, that "stagex" distro continues its life outside of the jurisdiction, at most you start treating it like contraband drugs within your jurisdiction.

With LLM's anyone will be able to disengage such "default wars" in popular software, so there isn't really any border control when LLM's form a large surface area of the border.

That’s always been the case for things distributed on the internet. It’s irrelevant in terms of evaluating one’s personal compliance with the law.

> It’s irrelevant in terms of evaluating one’s personal compliance with the law.

That's precisely what I discussed: the case where this person fully complies and ceases distribution (but the distro doesn't cease being distributed by others).

So what? That's how all laws work. What if I don't rob my local convenience store, but someone else does?

Don't make the mistake of logically getting caught up on the idea of laws "preventing crime". They never have, and they never will. The deter crime by providing for penalties when someone breaks the law.

But they don't deter crime when people outside of the jurisdiction, or anyone inside the jurisdiction can provide for themselves with the help of LLM's.

Every law only applies inside of the jurisdiction where it applies. That's the nature of how political boundaries work, it has nothing to do with LLMs.

"Distributing" is doing a lot of work here.

A file hosted on foreign server might functionally be a system to "distribute" that file, but it is doubtful if a US state could prevent it from existing.

They could theoretically order US ISP's to cease providing access to said file, but that's a rabbit hole I'm not sure that Illinois or any other state really wants to go down.

Yes, most any law is primary enforced against people within the same legal jurisdiction. It matters less where the server is and more where the relevant people/organizations/assets are.

Major OS providers, including major Linux distributions, are all within reasonable reach of Illinois law.

It’s probably less relevant if you’re a hobbyist working on Hannah Montana Linux on the other side of the planet.

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