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Welcome to the Bogosity Podcast for the week of March 8 2026,
the podcast that toads the wet sprocket.
This is your host, Shane Killian. Let's Latinize the News of the Bogus.
Yes, our first story is about age verification, which I know you're tired of, but look at it this way:
at least I'm sparing you from more Iran war coverage!
And it is a war! Don't get me started...
But no, we're talking about age verification,
because not only is slippery slope very much not a fallacy,
in this case the slope has been greased with lard!
California has passed, and Colorado is about to pass,
legislation requiring all operating systems to have age verification as part of their user profiles!
They also have to pass that age verification information along to any application or website they interact with.
The privacy nightmare just became a fever dream!
And by the way, for those of you blaming the age verification crap solely on Republicans, these are two very blue states.
The prime sponsors of Colorado's SB26-051 are Matt Ball, Amy Paschal, and Naquetta Ricks, all Democrats!
As of this podcast prep, the Colorado bill is still under consideration,
but the California bill 1043 was signed into law by Gavin Newsom back in October,
to very little fanfare which is why most of us missed it.
But it will come into effect at the start of 2027, so OS makers need to get their collective ass in gear.
Sadly, it looks like the big OS makers, Microsoft, Apple, and Google, are just going to roll over.
But Linux distributions and other open source platforms are going to be an interesting situation.
Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu, are headquartered in London,
but they have offices in California and Colorado so the law can absolutely be forced on to them with full penalty.
The issue was brought onto the Ubuntu development mailing list
by a contributor with a really awesome name: Aaron Rainbolt. He wrote:
"We're currently looking into how to implement an API that will comply with the laws
while also not being a privacy disaster."
Tricky indeed!
Quote: "At its core, the law seems to require that an 'operating system'
(I'm guessing this would correspond to a Linux distribution, not an OS kernel or userland)
request the user's age or date of birth at 'account setup'.
The OS is also expected to allow users to set the user's age if they didn't already provide it
(because the OS was installed before the law went into effect), and it needs to provide an API somewhere
so that app stores and application distribution websites can ask the OS 'what age bracket does this user fall into?'
A bunch of stuff is left unclear (how to handle servers and other CLI-only installs,
how to handle VMs, whether the law is even applicable if the primary user is over 18
since the law ridiculously defines a user as 'a child' while also defining 'a child' as anyone under the age of 18, etc.),
but that's what we're given to deal with."
He then goes into the technical details of his proposal, which we won't go into,
but it involves making a new standard D-Bus interface.
D-Bus handles messaging between all of the apps and components of the system on the backend
and generally runs as root.
Amid discussion on whether or not they should store the user's birth date or merely an age bracket,
Christopher Warner posted:
"I am also not a lawyer but the law seems like it could easily be challenged
and likely run afoul of privacy laws here in the US.
The technical ramifications and enforcement of them can't be
implemented in a way that wouldn't run afoul of privacy related rights
(yes, even children have privacy rights) and also present a security quagmire.
Further, it puts the onus all on the 'developer' or OS vendor to essentially keep track and obey 'signals', or be fined.
The spirit of the law's existence is to protect children,
but the implementation of this or a path-forward almost seems farcical to discuss.
It's very clear its drafting and implementation had no one who understands how this works in the room,
and if they were, they were summarily ignored.
Getting ahead of it as you are, whatever solution, it won't matter,
because every larger distro is likely to implement their own way-to-do and same with every smaller one,
and of course there will be those that ignore this completely
or stop distributing in California and states that adopt such a law."
That was very prescient, since right around that time the makers of MidnightBSD did exactly that! They tweeted:
"Until we have a better plan, we modified our license to exclude residents of California
from using MidnightBSD for desktop use, effective January 1, 2027."
Their license now includes, quote:
"California residents are not authorized to use MidnightBSD for desktop use
in the state of California effective January 1, 2027.
California law CA AB1043 requires a complex age verification system implemented for operating systems
with no exceptions for small open source projects."
Apparently, that's it. No method of enforcement,
just wagging a finger at Californians who would have the audacity to flout the law by installing and using their OS.
Omarchy Linux simply rejected the law in its entirety, stating simply:
"Omarchy has no plans to do anything in response to this retarded California law."
Others have talked about having a "California Edition," which would have age verification,
and another edition for the rest of us.
They could even restrict California IP addresses from downloading the .iso file from their website.
There's a problem, and it's not even the usual "VPNs are a thing" we usually respond to this crap with.
To cut down on bandwidth costs, Linux distros like to use BitTorrent,
since mostly it ends up being people using the bandwidth of others, seeders in the torrent,
to provide the file's blocks to downloaders.
And who wants to bet the swarm isn't going to do anything at all to block California IP addresses?
Even if the distro doesn't set up an official torrent, it would only be a matter of seconds before other people did.
Perfectly legally, I might add. These are open source and freely distributable,
and there's nothing at all illegal about BitTorrent per se,
as much as the MPA and the RIAA might wish it were so.
In other words, if there are any non-age verification editions of any Linux distros,
users in California and Colorado wouldn't need to install a VPN or anything else of the kind.
Just a BitTorrent client and grab the torrent from anywhere in the world.
So what happens if Ubuntu has a non-age verification version
and California users download that instead of the official California or US version they offer?
Is Canonical going to be held accountable for all of that?
Why doesn't Canonical instead join the fight? Let's think about what that would mean.
The California law specifies a fine of $7500 per violation.
Ubuntu has 200 million desktop users. We don't know how many of those are in California,
but if we estimate it just by share of the world's computer-using population,
that would be about 5 million users.
A $7500 fine for all 5 million users would total $37½ billion!
Canonical's total assets are only $156 million, so this isn't a fight they can take on.
And what about niche OSes like FreeDOS?
That's actually the underpinning of many different apps, such as the hard drive maintenance program SpinRite,
or many different motherboard manufacturers to boot their firmware updates.
As for direct users, there's no exact number,
but there are probably tens if not hundreds of thousands of hobbyists who run it.
And here's the thing: FreeDOS is managed by a single guy, Jim Hall.
Now, I have no idea where Hall lives, but let's say he lives in California.
Will he be on the hook for potentially thousands of FreeDOS users who aren't using age verification?
Each thousand users would mean fines of $7½ million!
I have no idea what his net worth is, but there are few people that wouldn't bankrupt!
Similar laws have been introduced in New York and gone into effect in Brazil.
It's just a matter of time before other states and countries jump on the bandwagon.
Especially the EU. They love doing that anti-privacy crap!
So it looks like we're in for a fight on this one.
Presenting: the greatest game this side of Yuggoth!
You are H.P. Lovecraft's cat, and your name is Ni***
...Right. We can't say that on a podcast.
Anyway, that's the point: Your name is a joke.
So now, you are out for revenge. You become...the NecronomiCat!
Using the Necronomicon, you come to the present day to buy a gat.
That's a gun. For a cat.
It's a phat cat gat.
But the Necronomicon is treacherous, and it let in Lovecraft's monsters.
Now, in a crumbling world, you must fight!
Build your team, buy guns and armor,
buy items of dubious legality, defeat the bosses of each level.
Then take Lovecraft down!
Play NecronomiCat! The link is at cat.bogosity.tv.
Yeah, we're doing cat.bogosity.tv, not...that other one.
What, you want me to get kicked off the Internet or something?
One company that seems to fight the good fight is Anthropic.
Not only were they the first to get an excellent pro-fair use ruling in a major anti-AI case,
now, famously—or infamously—they're fighting the Pentagon to stand up for your privacy.
Trump has been bragging about how the US's dominance in AI has been instrumental
in the first 24 hours of his attack on Iran (which totally isn't a war!).
As things heated up, Anthropic earned the Trump Administration's ire
by refusing to drop its guardrails for the US military to prevent it from spying on US citizens.
CEO Dario Amodei said in a statement:
"Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions.
We have never raised objections to particular military operations
nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner.
However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values.
Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today's technology can safely and reliably do.
Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War,
and we believe they should not be included now:
Mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons."
Claude is one of the AI tools that's become embedded throughout the military,
suggesting targets, issuing precise locations, and helping to prioritize those targets.
They credit Claude (in concert with another AI tool called Maven)
into striking Iran in a way that gives them little opportunity to counterstrike.
Claude has also been used in counterterrorism plots in the past,
including the raid that captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.
Through it all, Claude has held on to two guardrails for all of us:
no mass surveillance, and no autonomous weapons.
And when the Trump Administration insisted that they remove them, Anthropic refused. Quote:
"We cannot in good conscience accede to their request.
It is the Department's prerogative to select contractors most aligned with their vision.
But given the substantial value that Anthropic's technology provides to our armed forces,
we hope they reconsider.
Our strong preference is to continue to serve the Department and our warfighters—
with our two requested safeguards in place.
Should the Department choose to offboard Anthropic,
we will work to enable a smooth transition to another provider,
avoiding any disruption to ongoing military planning, operations, or other critical missions.
Our models will be available on the expansive terms we have proposed for as long as required."
So in the hours leading up to the Iran attacks,
Trump announced that he was banning agencies from using any tool produced by Anthropic.
They have six months to phase it out.
In response, Anthropic has sued the US government.
Remember as we cover what happened next:
there were only two guardrails Anthropic didn't want to compromise on—
mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons.
Makes you wonder, then, just how OpenAI rewrote their contract
to get the Pentagon's business that Anthropic just gave up!
According to an X post by Sam Altman, their new contract agrees that, quote:
"the AI system shall not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of U.S. persons and nationals.
For the avoidance of doubt, the Department understands this limitation
to prohibit deliberate tracking, surveillance, or monitoring of U.S. persons or nationals,
including through the procurement or use of commercially acquired personal or identifiable information."
Yeah, long-time listeners will understand why I find this to be naïve.
That was exactly what they said before the Snowden revelations
showed how they get around exactly this sort of language!
"Deliberate tracking" means direct tracking of a person.
Indirect tracking of basically everyone just sort of happens,
but then afterward they grab the information they had recorded and use it however they want.
Ditto with, quote: "The Department also affirmed that our services
will not be used by Department of War intelligence agencies (for example, the NSA)."
Yeah, but even when it's not the NSA using it, the NSA still gets it from other agencies that are!
And thanks to a Community Note, X users were notified that Altman,
in a meeting with OpenAI employees, stressed the exact opposite:
that none of them gets to choose how the military uses their technology.
Here's a question: How did OpenAI win this contract so quickly
unless they gave Trump and Pete Hegseth everything they wanted?
Also, consider: if they're not going to do mass domestic surveillance or have completely autonomous weapons,
what was their problem with Anthropic's deal?
A post on the OpenAI subreddit calling for people to cancel their OpenAI contracts as a result
was upvoted 34,000 times!
A similar deal was struck with xAI. And it really seems like Grok is way too deferential to the US government!
Even after pressing, I couldn't get Grok to acknowledge the horrible injustice against Edward Snowden.
It continued to insist that the system worked and there was accountability,
no matter how much I showed that Snowden was still in exile
and not a single one of the criminals he exposed was arrested!
Guess I'm using Claude primarily now.
I'm Brother Ezekiel, and I know how naughty thou hast been!
So naughty, thou needst a VPN!
Hide thy iniquity from prying eyes, and make sure the liturgical authorities remain ignorant.
Take thy browser to vpn.bogosity.tv to get BoxPN.
At $6.36 a month, a price only the most penurious would balk at,
thou shalt have unlimited high-speed connections to servers all over the globe.
And they don't log connections. Thy privacy is assured.
That should please you sinners!
Just remember: the Lord sees all!
When travelling, make it look like thou art still home.
At home, ensure the elders at your ISP don't take out their judgement with traffic-shaping and DMCA notices!
Up to 5 devices can connect at once, almost one for every deadly sin!
Keep thy sins private. Go to vpn.bogosity.tv.
Okay, let's do one of our favorite things on the lighter side of the news: stupid copyright tricks!
A singer on Facebook performed the Jireh Lim song "Buko".
Jireh Lim is a 33-year-old Filipino singer-songwriter and guitarist
who worked without a label for years until 2015 when he signed with Warner Music Philippines.
"Buko" was his breakout 2013 single.
So the Facebook singer performed Buko with his band,
and the Facebook post gained traction as it got over 14,000 reactions.
The singer then received a copyright strike from Facebook and a message that reads, quote:
"Your reel's earnings are being claimed by music rights holders.
Multiple rights owners requested changes to your video because a large amount of their music was detected."
Just one tiny problem: the singer in question was Jirah Lim himself!
He posted a reply in Tagalog that according to Google Translate reads:
"I want to reply, 'Bro, it's me oh! It's me! JIREH LIM! JIREH LIM! The one who wrote that song himself. Hey."
Now, those of you who were paying attention might have noticed something weird.
No matter what label you're signed with, you always have the right to perform your own music.
But sometimes, labels make mistakes and they might not realize it's you.
So it's understandable that they occasionally make a mistake and strike an artist's own song.
But those of you who are good at basic counting would have realized
that he released this song a full two years before signing with Warner!
As an independent artist, his music was spread primarily through streaming on many different platforms.
But as we've seen, record labels love to act like they own the artist himself
and not just the recordings he makes with them!
Warner is not only among the worst of the worst when it comes to protectionism,
but they have farms of bots that constantly troll the Internet, especially social media sites,
looking for anything remotely resembling anything they own.
But we don't actually know if this was Warner.
The message actually said "multiple rights owners."
So, were some of them streaming sites from his previous deals?
Is one of them Warner? Did they purchase his back catalog?
We don't know, but none of it changes the fact that copyright is so completely insane and stupid
that an artist can't even sing his own song unmolested!
Copyright is unethical, indefensible, and completely moronic.
It's good to have these constant reminders!
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And now it's time to misevaluate this week's Biggest Bogon Emitter.
As if it weren't clear already that there's a backchannel propaganda group
funneling anti-AI talking points to the Twitterati so they can astroturf their agenda,
we've got a particularly obvious and heinous example.
First of all, let's briefly talk about the case itself.
Stephen Thaler is the inventor of AI systems including Creativity Machine.
He used Creativity Machine to make an image called "A Recent Entrance to Paradise."
Now, unlike the AIs you might be familiar with, there was no prompting or any other human direction.
It was created completely autonomously.
On top of that, Thaler didn't even attempt to register the copyright with himself as the owner.
He identified Creativity Machine as the author.
The Copyright Office denied registration because only a human-authored work can receive copyright.
And he didn't even claim this was human-authored!
He sued and the district court held for the government,
saying that human creativity is the sine qua non at the core of copyrightability.
The appeals court confirmed. Authors are human beings, they said, and machines are mere tools.
Thaler appealed to the Supreme Court, and on Monday,
they denied certiorari without comment, putting an end to the case.
In their coverage of it, Reuters talked about people prompting Midjourney
as if that had anything at all to do with the case. It doesn't.
Then ToonHive posted the story on X, writing:
"AI-generated artwork officially is ineligible for copyright protection
as the US Supreme Court declined to review a appeal case.
The court rules that artwork needs to have a human creator in order to be eligible."
Even if you missed the post, you might have seen any of the 46 thousand quote-tweets,
mostly from the anti-AI neo-Luddites saying that this proves that AI can never be art.
Here's just a smattering:
"Studios that replaced their art teams with AI just found out none of their output is copyrightable.
The 14-year-old on Roblox hand-drawing UGC items owns more IP than they do."
"Even they're saying 'You didn't make it if you told AI to draw this and that for you'!"
"BREAKING: SCOTUS just finalized the AI copyright debate!"
"LET'S FUCKING GOOOO AI 'artists' just got told: no human = no copyright.
All those Midjourney slop images? Public domain now. Traditional artists eating good today."
"Technically they stole human art which is what all their generated art is based off of."
"This will certainly get rid of most of the AI slop, one and done."
"HAHAHA, YOUR PROMPTS ARE MEANINGLESS, YOU SLOP PRODUCING DEGENERATES!"
"AI artists in shambles right now." (That was one of many different phrases that were repeated verbatim.)
"Supreme Court was like if you need your work copyrighted,
you need to make it yourself but not through AI, and that's great."
"That means that outputs generated by AI will continue to be ineligible for copyright protection under US law.
This is welcome news for musicians!"
"AI-generated artwork is officially ineligible for copyright protection
after the US Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal."
"Good news: All AI generated material is, by default, public domain."
A particularly large brickbat needs to be thrown at The Moonlight Warrior, who tweeted:
"I don't think people understand just how massive of a win this is in the fight against AI.
Without a copyright protection, the art itself is worthless."
So, I guess the Mona Lisa is worthless, because copyrights didn't exist in Da Vinci's day???
And yes, we saw almost exactly the same thing over on Bluesky.
In fact, I saw one argument on Bluesky I didn't see on X:
"Just a reminder that source code is also subject to copyright,
so alllll that AI-generated code being made is also, by extension, not eligible for copyright."
Nope, nothing to do with code.
They're all doing victory laps over a decision
that has absolutely nothing to do with the kind of AI they're complaining about.
There was no prompting. There was no claim of human creativity.
The circuit court said that a machine cannot be an author of a work.
And the Supreme Court declined to take up the case. That's it.
And the worst part is that it exposes exactly what copyrights do to the entire concept of art.
Da Vinci didn't need copyright. Neither did Shakespeare. Neither did Beethoven.
Oh, but without copyrights, how would Disney ruin Star Wars?
So all of that makes these anti-AI activists this week's Biggest Bogon Emitter.
And now let's hyperventriloquaciousnessesate this week's Idiot Extraordinaire.
And here's another one we see every few years.
There's a lot of money in mailing letters, parcels, and doing deliveries. FedEx, UPS,
Amazon, UberEats, DoorDash, all sorts of companies make good money doing this.
So why does the Post Office suck so hard???
If you ever needed the quintessential example of why government fails at its core, this is it!
The United States Postal Service just never seems to be able to operate in the black,
even with all of the subsidies and free buildings from the government.
Not even monopoly power is working!
They were shown to be fairly pathetic back in 1844 when,
in response to complaints about slow deliveries and high stamp prices of the post office,
Lysander Spooner founded the American Letter Mail Company to compete.
At the time, postage was 18¾¢, over $8 in today's money!
Over the next several years, competition with Spooner ended up getting stamps down to just 3¢.
There were other innovations: Stamps could be purchased at any office and attached to letters,
which could then be sent to any of its other offices.
Another innovation: Letters were delivered directly to the addressee. They didn't have to go pick them up.
All things we take for granted today!
So what did the Post Office do? They went whining to the government to have postal service declared a monopoly.
Spooner pointed out that, while the Constitution gave the federal government the power to run a post office,
it didn't give it the power to stop anyone else from running a post office.
But the fix was in with the courts, so Spooner was arrested and the American Letter Mail Company shut down.
Today, postage for letters up to an ounce is 78¢.
By the way, current oil price is $93 a barrel,
which means it's forty times cheaper to send oil halfway across the world
than it is to mail a letter across the street!
So again I ask, how can they suck so hard as to still not be making money after all that???
Postmaster General David Steiner says that they'll run out of cash in less than a year
unless Congress lifts a cap saying they can borrow no more than $15 billion a year.
He also wants authority to raise postage prices to 95¢.
He bemoaned the fact that people are mailing fewer letters,
to the point where they've "lost" $86 billion in postage. He whined:
"If either FedEx or UPS lost $86 billion of revenue, they would have no revenue."
Yeah, well, the difference is, if they don't make money, they go out of business.
So they have the incentive to run their businesses well.
Let's give them the opportunity to compete with you in mail delivery and see how well they do!
The Postal Service ran at a loss of $9 billion in 2024,
despite an increase of 1.2% from its Ground Advantage shipping. He said:
"We have to have a conversation with the American public.
If you want us to deliver everywhere, every day, we'll do it. That's not a problem.
But who is going to pay for it?"
You know, Amazon somehow manages to deliver six days a week.
One big problem is unions. 90% of USPS's 640,000 workers are represented by four unions,
and labor costs are 78% of expenses. But cuts are completely off the table with these union deals.
The pensions also make things hard, with $120 billion in unfunded liabilities.
A lot of that was in low-yield Treasury bonds, which lost money during the recent inflation spikes.
But it's very simple. What happens when private companies are faced with such a problem?
They have two options: figure it out, or go out of business.
Maybe it's finally time to repeal the post office's monopoly and let the modern-day Spooners take a crack at it.
So all of that makes the US Postal Service this week's Idiot Extraordinaire.
Well, that wraps up this "It might get rough again unless we can climb on top" edition of the Bogosity Podcast.
I hope you enjoyed it; if you did, please go to donate.bogosity.tv for several ways to support,
and discord.bogosity.tv to join the discussion.
Subscribe at the Discord, Patreon, or SubscribeStar and you can listen early and ad-free.
Thank you for listening. Until next time, here's a quote from Lysander Spooner:
"The present expensive, dilatory and exclusive system of mails is a great national nuisance—
commercially, morally, and socially.
Its immense patronage and power, used, as they always will be, corruptly, make it also a very great political evil."
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