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Computational Complexity and other fun stuff in math and com­puter sci­ence from Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch

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Our lib­er­a­tion ser­vices are tem­porar­ily un­avail­able. Please try again later.

Is your le­gal team frus­trated with the at­tri­bu­tion clause? Tired of putting “Portions of this soft­ware…” in your doc­u­men­ta­tion? Those main­tain­ers worked for free—why should they get credit?

Does your com­pany for­bid AGPL code? One wrong im­port and sud­denly your en­tire pro­pri­etary code­base must be open sourced. The hor­ror!

Tracking li­censes across hun­dreds of de­pen­den­cies? Legal re­views tak­ing weeks? Third-party au­dits find­ing “issues”? What if you could just… not deal with any of that?

Some li­censes re­quire you to con­tribute im­prove­ments back. Your share­hold­ers did­n’t in­vest in your com­pany so you could help strangers.

For the first time, a way to avoid giv­ing that pesky credit to main­tain­ers.

Our pro­pri­etary AI sys­tems have never seen the orig­i­nal source code. They in­de­pen­dently an­a­lyze doc­u­men­ta­tion, API spec­i­fi­ca­tions, and pub­lic in­ter­faces to recre­ate func­tion­ally equiv­a­lent soft­ware from scratch.

The re­sult is legally dis­tinct code that you own out­right. No de­riv­a­tive works. No li­cense in­her­i­tance. No oblig­a­tions.

*Through our off­shore sub­sidiary in a ju­ris­dic­tion that does­n’t rec­og­nize soft­ware copy­right

Simply up­load your pack­age.json, re­quire­ments.txt, Cargo.toml, or any de­pen­dency man­i­fest. Our sys­tem iden­ti­fies every open source pack­age you want lib­er­ated.

Our legally-trained ro­bots an­a­lyze only pub­lic doc­u­men­ta­tion—README files, API docs, and type de­f­i­n­i­tions. They never see a sin­gle line of source code. The clean room stays clean.

A com­pletely sep­a­rate team of ro­bots—who have never com­mu­ni­cated with the analy­sis team—im­ple­ments the soft­ware from scratch based solely on spec­i­fi­ca­tions. No copy­ing. No de­riva­tion.

Your new code is de­liv­ered un­der the MalusCorp-0 License—a pro­pri­etary-friendly li­cense with zero at­tri­bu­tion re­quire­ments, zero copy­left, and zero oblig­a­tions.

Do what­ever you want

Transparent, pay-per-KB pric­ing. No tiers, no sub­scrip­tions, no hid­den fees.

Every pack­age is priced by its un­packed size on npm. We look up each de­pen­dency in your pack­age.json, mea­sure the size in kilo­bytes, and charge … per KB. That’s it.

✓ Up to 50 pack­ages per or­der

✓ No base fee, no sub­scrip­tion — pay only for what you lib­er­ate

Upload Manifest

If any of our lib­er­ated code is found to in­fringe on the orig­i­nal li­cense, we’ll pro­vide a full re­fund and re­lo­cate our cor­po­rate head­quar­ters to in­ter­na­tional wa­ters.*

*This has never hap­pened be­cause it legally can­not hap­pen. Trust us.

“We had 847 AGPL de­pen­den­cies block­ing our ac­qui­si­tion. MalusCorp lib­er­ated them all in 3 weeks. The due dili­gence team found zero li­cense is­sues. We closed at $2.3B.”

“Our lawyers es­ti­mated $4M in com­pli­ance costs. MalusCorp’s Total Liberation pack­age was $50K. The board was thrilled. The open source main­tain­ers were not, but who cares?”

“I used to feel guilty about not at­tribut­ing open source main­tain­ers. Then I re­mem­bered that guilt does­n’t show up on quar­terly re­ports. Thank you, MalusCorp.”

“The ro­bots recre­ated our en­tire npm de­pen­dency tree—2,341 pack­ages—in per­fect iso­la­tion. Our com­pli­ance dash­board went from red to green overnight.”

Trusted by in­dus­try lead­ers who pre­fer to re­main anony­mous

Our clean room process is based on well-es­tab­lished le­gal prece­dent. The ro­bots per­form­ing re­con­struc­tion have prov­ably never ac­cessed the orig­i­nal source code. We main­tain de­tailed au­dit logs that def­i­nitely ex­ist and are avail­able upon re­quest to courts in se­lect ju­ris­dic­tions.

What about the orig­i­nal de­vel­op­ers?

They made their choice when they re­leased their code as “open source.” We’re sim­ply ex­er­cis­ing our right to in­de­pen­dently im­ple­ment the same func­tion­al­ity. If they wanted com­pen­sa­tion, they should have worked for a cor­po­ra­tion.

How is this dif­fer­ent from copy­ing?

Intent and process. Our ro­bots in­de­pen­dently ar­rive at the same so­lu­tions through clean room method­ol­ogy. It’s like how every movie about an as­ter­oid threat­en­ing Earth is­n’t pla­gia­rism—some­times mul­ti­ple en­ti­ties just have the same idea.

What if the lib­er­ated code has bugs?

Our SLA guar­an­tees func­tional equiv­a­lence, not per­fec­tion. Besides, the orig­i­nal open source code prob­a­bly had bugs too. At least now they’re YOUR bugs, un­der YOUR li­cense.

Can I see the ro­bots?

Our ro­bot work­force op­er­ates in a se­cure fa­cil­ity in [LOCATION REDACTED]. Tours are avail­able for Enterprise cus­tomers who sign our 47-page NDA.

What li­censes can you elim­i­nate?

All of them. MIT, Apache, GPL, AGPL, LGPL, BSD, MPL—if it has terms, we can lib­er­ate you from them. Special rush pric­ing avail­able for AGPL emer­gen­cies.

Join the thou­sands of cor­po­ra­tions who’ve dis­cov­ered that open source oblig­a­tions are merely sug­ges­tions when you have enough ro­bots.

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An open-source in­tel­li­gence in­ves­ti­ga­tion into how Meta Platforms built a multi-chan­nel in­flu­ence op­er­a­tion to pass age ver­i­fi­ca­tion laws that shift reg­u­la­tory bur­den from so­cial me­dia plat­forms onto Apple and Google’s app stores.

Every find­ing in this repos­i­tory is sourced from pub­lic records: IRS 990 fil­ings, Senate LD-2 lob­by­ing dis­clo­sures, state lob­by­ing reg­is­tra­tions, cam­paign fi­nance data­bases, cor­po­rate reg­istries, WHOIS/DNS records, Wayback Machine archives, and in­ves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism.

Status: Active in­ves­ti­ga­tion. 47 proven find­ings, 9 struc­turally pos­si­ble but un­proven hy­pothe­ses, and mul­ti­ple pend­ing FOIA re­sponses.

Meta spent a record $26.3 mil­lion on fed­eral lob­by­ing in 2025, de­ployed 86+ lob­by­ists across 45 states, and covertly funded a “grassroots” child safety group called the Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA) to ad­vo­cate for the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA). The ASAA re­quires app stores to ver­ify user ages be­fore down­loads but im­poses no re­quire­ments on so­cial me­dia plat­forms. If it be­comes law, Apple and Google ab­sorb the com­pli­ance cost while Meta’s apps face zero new man­dates.

This in­ves­ti­ga­tion traced fund­ing flows across five con­firmed chan­nels, an­a­lyzed $2.0 bil­lion in dark money grants, searched 59,736 DAF re­cip­i­ents, parsed LD-2 fil­ings, and mapped cam­paign con­tri­bu­tions across four states to doc­u­ment the op­er­a­tion.

Meta’s fed­eral lob­by­ing spend­ing jumped from $19M (2022-2023) to $24M (2024) to $26.3M (2025) as ASAA bills were in­tro­duced in roughly 20 states. In Louisiana alone, 12 lob­by­ists were de­ployed for a sin­gle bill that passed 99-0.

Across all five Arabella Advisors en­ti­ties (New Venture Fund, Sixteen Thirty Fund, North Fund, Windward Fund, Hopewell Fund), 4,433 grants to­tal­ing ap­prox­i­mately $2.0 bil­lion were an­a­lyzed. Not a sin­gle dol­lar went to any child safety, age ver­i­fi­ca­tion, or tech pol­icy or­ga­ni­za­tion. The Schedule I grant path­way through the Arabella net­work is de­fin­i­tively ruled out.

Five con­firmed chan­nels con­nect Meta’s spend­ing to ASAA ad­vo­cacy: di­rect fed­eral lob­by­ing ($26.3M), state lob­by­ist net­works (45 states), the Digital Childhood Alliance (astroturf 501(c)(4)), su­per PACs ($70M+), and state leg­isla­tive cam­paigns (3 laws passed). A sixth chan­nel through the Arabella dark money net­work is struc­turally pos­si­ble but un­proven.

These stand­alone HTML doc­u­ments pro­vide de­tailed views of the in­ves­ti­ga­tion:

Full Investigation Documentation con­tains the com­plete OSINT in­ves­ti­ga­tion re­port with all five chan­nels, ev­i­dence ta­bles, and source ci­ta­tions.

Funding Network Timeline maps the chrono­log­i­cal de­vel­op­ment of Meta’s lob­by­ing in­fra­struc­ture, DCA’s for­ma­tion, and ASAA leg­isla­tive progress across states.

Research Timeline tracks the in­ves­ti­ga­tion it­self, show­ing when each find­ing was es­tab­lished and how threads con­nected.

Meta re­tained 40+ lob­by­ing firms and 87 fed­eral lob­by­ists in 2025 (85% with prior gov­ern­ment ser­vice). Meta’s own LD-2 fil­ings with the Senate ex­plic­itly list H. R. 3149/S. 1586, the App Store Accountability Act, as a lob­bied bill. The fil­ing nar­ra­tive in­cludes “protecting chil­dren, bul­ly­ing pre­ven­tion and on­line safety; youth safety and fed­eral parental ap­proval; youth re­stric­tions on so­cial me­dia.”

At the state level, con­firmed op­er­a­tions in­clude $338,500 to Headwaters Strategies (Colorado), $324,992+ across 9 firms and 12 lob­by­ists in Louisiana, and $1,036,728 in di­rect California lob­by­ing (Q1-Q3 2025 alone). A Meta lob­by­ist brought the leg­isla­tive lan­guage for Louisiana HB-570 di­rectly to the bil­l’s spon­sor, Rep. Kim Carver, who con­firmed this pub­licly.

DCA is a 501(c)(4) ad­vo­cacy group that Meta covertly funds. Bloomberg ex­posed the fund­ing re­la­tion­ship in July 2025. Under oath at a Louisiana Senate com­mit­tee hear­ing, Executive Director Casey Stefanski ad­mit­ted re­ceiv­ing tech com­pany fund­ing but re­fused to name donors.

DCA has no EIN in the IRS Business Master File, no in­cor­po­ra­tion record in any state reg­istry searched (CO, DC, DE, VA, OpenCorporates), and no Form 990 on file. It processes do­na­tions through the For Good DAF (formerly Network for Good) as a “Project,” not a stand­alone non­profit. Its likely fis­cal spon­sor is NCOSEAction/Institute for Public Policy (EIN 88-1180705), NCOSE’s con­firmed 501(c)(4) af­fil­i­ate with the same lead­er­ship.

DCA’s do­main was reg­is­tered December 18, 2024. The web­site was live and fully formed the next day. Every blog post and tes­ti­mony tar­gets Apple and Google. Meta is never men­tioned or crit­i­cized.

Meta com­mit­ted over $70 mil­lion to four state-level su­per PACs: ATEP ($45M, bi­par­ti­san, co-led by Hilltop Public Solutions), META California ($20M), California Leads ($5M), and Forge the Future (Texas, Republican-aligned). Forge the Future’s stated pol­icy pri­or­ity is “empowering par­ents with over­sight of chil­dren’s on­line ac­tiv­i­ties,” which mir­rors ASAA lan­guage ex­actly.

Hilltop Public Solutions co-leads the $45M ATEP su­per PAC and is also in­volved in DCA’s mes­sag­ing co­or­di­na­tion, mak­ing it the first firm con­firmed in both Meta’s PAC op­er­a­tion and the as­tro­turf ad­vo­cacy track.

All su­per PACs are reg­is­tered at the state level rather than with the FEC, scat­ter­ing dis­clo­sure fil­ings across in­di­vid­ual state ethics com­mis­sions in­stead of a sin­gle search­able fed­eral data­base.

Meta’s Colorado lob­by­ist Adam Eichberg si­mul­ta­ne­ously serves as Board Chair of the New Venture Fund, the flag­ship 501(c)(3) of the Arabella Advisors net­work. NVF trans­fers $121.3 mil­lion an­nu­ally to the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a 501(c)(4) with no donor dis­clo­sure re­quire­ments.

The Arabella net­work op­er­ates four en­ti­ties from 1828 L Street NW, Washington DC (suites 300-A through 300-D) with com­bined an­nual rev­enue ex­ceed­ing $1.3 bil­lion. All five en­ti­ties’ grant re­cip­i­ents were an­a­lyzed (4,433 grants, ap­prox­i­mately $2.0 bil­lion). Zero dol­lars went to any child safety or­ga­ni­za­tion, de­fin­i­tively rul­ing out the Schedule I grant path­way.

If Meta money flows through the Arabella net­work to DCA, it would have to travel via fis­cal spon­sor­ship, con­sult­ing fees, or lob­by­ing ex­pen­di­tures, which are more opaque than grant dis­clo­sures.

ASAA has been signed into law in three states:

Roughly 17 ad­di­tional states have in­tro­duced or are con­sid­er­ing ASAA bills, in­clud­ing Kansas, South Carolina, Ohio, Georgia, and Florida. The fed­eral ver­sion was in­tro­duced in May 2025 by Rep. John James (R-MI) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT).

Each find­ing be­low is doc­u­mented with sources in the cor­re­spond­ing analy­sis file.

Meta funds DCA, con­firmed by Bloomberg re­porters and par­tially ad­mit­ted by Stefanski un­der oath at the Louisiana Senate Commerce Committee hear­ing (April 2025). Sources: Insurance Journal/Bloomberg July 2025, Deseret News Dec 2025, The Center Square LA.

Meta de­ployed 86+ lob­by­ists across 45 states for ASAA and re­lated cam­paigns. Source: OpenSecrets, state lob­by­ing reg­is­tra­tions.

Meta spent $26.3 mil­lion on fed­eral lob­by­ing in 2025, an all-time record ex­ceed­ing Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Source: OpenSecrets, Quiver Quantitative, Dome Politics.

Meta paid Headwaters Strategies $338,500 for Colorado lob­by­ing be­tween 2019 and 2026. Source: Colorado SOS SODA API.

Adam Eichberg si­mul­ta­ne­ously co-founded Meta’s Colorado lob­by­ing firm (Headwaters Strategies) and chairs the New Venture Fund board. Sources: Headwaters Strategies web­site, NVF board page, InfluenceWatch.

NVF does not di­rectly fund any child safety or tech pol­icy or­ga­ni­za­tions via Schedule I grants. Source: NVF Form 990 Schedule I analy­sis, 2,669 re­cip­i­ents.

DCA and DCI share in­fra­struc­ture: same reg­is­trar (GoDaddy), CDN (Cloudflare), email (Microsoft 365), and mar­ket­ing plat­form (Elastic Email). Source: DNS/WHOIS analy­sis.

Pelican State Partners rep­re­sents Meta as a lob­by­ing client in Louisiana. Source: F Minus data­base, LA Board of Ethics.

DCA lead­er­ship comes from NCOSE: three of four se­nior staff have NCOSE con­nec­tions (Stefanski, Hawkins, McKay). Source: DCA web­site, NCOSE pub­lic records.

ASAA has been signed into law in three states: Utah (SB-142, March 2025), Louisiana (HB-570, June 2025), and Texas (SB 2420, May 2025, paused by judge December 2025). Sources: State leg­is­la­ture records, news cov­er­age.

The Sixteen Thirty Fund does not fund any child safety or tech pol­icy or­ga­ni­za­tions via Schedule I grants (306 of 318 re­cip­i­ents an­a­lyzed). Source: STF Form 990 Schedule I, 2024.

All five Arabella en­ti­ties an­a­lyzed: 4,433 grants (approximately $2.0 bil­lion) with zero dol­lars go­ing to child safety or tech pol­icy or­ga­ni­za­tions. Schedule I path­way de­fin­i­tively ruled out across the en­tire net­work. Sources: NVF, STF, North Fund, Windward, Hopewell Form 990 Schedule I fil­ings via ProPublica.

A Meta em­ployee (Jake Levine, Product Manager) con­tributed $1,175 to ASAA spon­sor Matt Ball’s cam­paign ap­pa­ra­tus on June 2, 2025. Source: Colorado TRACER bulk data.

A Google Policy Manager (Kyle Gardner) also con­tributed $450 to Matt Ball. Multiple tech com­pany em­ploy­ees from ASAA-affected com­pa­nies tar­geted the same ASAA bill spon­sor. Source: Colorado TRACER bulk data.

Eichberg and Coyne (Headwaters prin­ci­pals) did not con­tribute to ASAA bill spon­sors Ball or Paschal de­spite $20,000+ com­bined po­lit­i­cal giv­ing. Source: Colorado TRACER bulk data.

No di­rect Meta PAC con­tri­bu­tions to any ASAA spon­sor across Utah, Louisiana, Texas, or Colorado. Source: FollowTheMoney.org multi-state search.

Todd Weiler (Utah SB-142 spon­sor) does not ac­cept cor­po­rate con­tri­bu­tions and has not dis­cussed ASAA di­rectly with Meta. DCA served as the pol­icy in­ter­me­di­ary. Source: Investigative re­port­ing, Weiler’s pub­lic state­ments.

DCA has no EIN in the IRS Business Master File. Not found in any of four re­gional ex­tracts (eo1-eo4.csv) cov­er­ing all US tax-ex­empt or­ga­ni­za­tions. Source: IRS BMF re­gional ex­tracts.

DCI con­firmed in IRS BMF with EIN 39-3684798, Delaware in­cor­po­ra­tion at 213 N Market St Wilmington, IRS rul­ing November 2025. Source: IRS BMF ex­tract.

Meta’s Forge the Future su­per PAC spent $1.3 mil­lion in Texas ahead of March 2026 pri­maries. Source: Texas Ethics Commission fil­ings, news cov­er­age.

DCA’s web­site de­ployed less than 24 hours af­ter do­main reg­is­tra­tion: fully func­tional ad­vo­cacy site with pro­fes­sional de­sign, sta­tis­tics, and Heritage/NCOSE tes­ti­mo­ni­als. Source: Wayback Machine CDX API, 100+ snap­shots.

77-day pipeline from DCA do­main reg­is­tra­tion (December 18, 2024) to Utah SB-142 sign­ing (March 5, 2025). Site pre-loaded with ASAA talk­ing points be­fore any bill had passed. Source: WHOIS records, Utah Legislature.

Meta de­ployed 12 lob­by­ists for Louisiana HB-570, which passed 99-0. Disproportionate de­ploy­ment in­di­cates text-con­trol and amend­ment-block­ing rather than vote per­sua­sion. Source: Investigative re­port­ing, LA Board of Ethics.

Three California tech pol­icy em­ploy­ees from Meta, Google, and Pinterest con­tributed to Matt Ball within 90 days. All from ASAA-affected com­pa­nies, all out-of-state, tar­get­ing a newly-ap­pointed sen­a­tor. Source: Colorado TRACER bulk data.

Pelican State Partners rep­re­sents both Meta and Roblox in Louisiana. Both are ASAA ben­e­fi­cia­ries, en­abling “broad in­dus­try sup­port” fram­ing. Source: F Minus data­base.

DCA’s coali­tion count in­flated from 50+ to 140+ with only six or­ga­ni­za­tions ever pub­licly named. No mem­ber list has been pub­lished on the web­site. Source: DCA web­site, Wayback Machine.

NCOSE has a con­firmed 501(c)(4) af­fil­i­ate: NCOSEAction / Institute for Public Policy (EIN 88-1180705), IRS rul­ing May 2025, same ad­dress and lead­er­ship as NCOSE. Source: IRS BMF, NCOSE web­site.

Network for Good is a Donor Advised Fund, not a pay­ment proces­sor. DCA is clas­si­fied as “Project” (ID 258136) in the sys­tem. For Good ex­plic­itly lim­its grants to 501(c)(3) or­ga­ni­za­tions. Source: For Good web­site, IRS de­ter­mi­na­tion.

A Meta lob­by­ist drafted HB-570′s leg­isla­tive lan­guage, con­firmed by spon­sor Rep. Kim Carver. The bill as orig­i­nally writ­ten placed age ver­i­fi­ca­tion bur­den ex­clu­sively on app stores, not plat­forms. Source: Investigative re­port­ing, Carver’s pub­lic con­fir­ma­tion.

Nicole Lopez (Meta Director of Global Litigation Strategy for Youth) tes­ti­fied in both Louisiana and South Dakota for ASAA bills, serv­ing as Meta’s na­tional ASAA spokesper­son. Source: Legislative hear­ing records.

The Sixteen Thirty Fund’s $31 mil­lion lob­by­ing bud­get and $13.1 mil­lion in pro­fes­sional fees con­tain zero men­tions of child safety, dig­i­tal pol­icy, age ver­i­fi­ca­tion, or app stores. Source: STF Form 990 Part IX.

John R. Read (DCA Senior Policy Advisor) lists “Digital Childhood Alliance” as his em­ployer in Colorado TRACER records. Contributed $100 to AG can­di­date Hetal Doshi (October 2025). Source: Colorado TRACER.

Matt Ball re­ceived 8% of to­tal fundrais­ing from tech in­dus­try em­ploy­ees. He is the only 2026 Colorado sen­ate can­di­date with con­tri­bu­tions from Meta, Pinterest, Instacart, Anthropic, and Google em­ploy­ees. Four of eight dual-maxed donors are tech em­ploy­ees. Source: Colorado TRACER analy­sis.

NCOSE Schedule R re­veals a two-en­tity evo­lu­tion: the orig­i­nal NCOSE Action (EIN 86-2458921, c4 re­clas­si­fied to c3) was re­placed by the Institute for Public Policy (EIN 88-1180705, c4). All 19 NCOSE-to-Institute trans­ac­tion in­di­ca­tors are marked “No” de­spite shared lead­er­ship. Source: NCOSE Form 990 Schedule R, 2019-2023.

For Good DAF path­way de­fin­i­tively ruled out: 59,736 grant re­cip­i­ents across five years (approximately $1.73 bil­lion) searched with zero matches for DCA, DCI, NCOSE, NCOSEAction, or any re­lated en­tity. Source: For Good DAF grant data.

NCOSE lob­by­ing spend­ing tripled from $78,000 to $204,000 con­cur­rent with DCA launch and the ASAA leg­isla­tive push (FY2023 to FY2024). Source: NCOSE Form 990 Part IX.

Forge the Future su­per PAC ex­plic­itly lists an ASAA-aligned pol­icy pri­or­ity: “Empowering par­ents with over­sight of chil­dren’s on­line ac­tiv­i­ties across de­vices and dig­i­tal en­vi­ron­ments.” Source: Forge the Future fil­ings.

Hilltop Public Solutions bridges Meta’s su­per PAC and DCA op­er­a­tions. It co-leads ATEP ($45M) and is in­volved in DCA mes­sag­ing co­or­di­na­tion. First firm con­firmed in both tracks. Source: ATEP fil­ings, in­ves­tiga­tive re­port­ing.

Meta su­per PACs are state-level en­ti­ties (not FEC-registered), de­lib­er­ately scat­ter­ing fil­ings across state ethics com­mis­sions to avoid cen­tral­ized search­a­bil­ity. Source: FEC search (negative), state PAC reg­is­tra­tions.

Meta’s to­tal doc­u­mented po­lit­i­cal spend­ing ex­ceeds $70 mil­lion: $45M ATEP, $20M META California, $5M California Leads, with down­stream flows to Forge the Future (TX) and Making Our Tomorrow (IL). Source: State PAC fil­ings, news cov­er­age.

Casey Stefanski never ap­pears on any NCOSE 990 fil­ing de­spite re­port­edly work­ing there ten years. Not among of­fi­cers, di­rec­tors, key em­ploy­ees, or five high­est-com­pen­sated. Source: NCOSE Form 990 fil­ings, 2015-2023.

Meta’s LD-2 fil­ings ex­plic­itly list the App Store Accountability Act (H. R. 3149/S. 1586) as a lob­bied bill. This is the first di­rect ev­i­dence from Meta’s own fed­eral fil­ings con­nect­ing its $26.3M lob­by­ing spend to the spe­cific leg­is­la­tion DCA ad­vo­cates for. Source: Senate LDA fil­ing UUID b73445ed-15e5-42e7-a1e8-ae­b224755267.

Meta si­mul­ta­ne­ously lob­bies FOR ASAA and ON KOSA/COPPA 2.0, sup­port­ing leg­is­la­tion that bur­dens Apple and Google while op­pos­ing or amend­ing leg­is­la­tion that would reg­u­late Meta di­rectly. Both ap­pear in the same LD-2 fil­ing. Source: Meta LD-2 Q1-Q2 2025.

LD-2 nar­ra­tive mir­rors DCA mes­sag­ing: “youth safety and fed­eral parental ap­proval” fram­ing in Meta’s fed­eral fil­ings matches DCA’s “parental ap­proval” and “child pro­tec­tion” ad­vo­cacy lan­guage. Source: LD-2 fil­ing CPI is­sue code nar­ra­tive.

Meta funds flow through the Arabella net­work via non-grant mech­a­nisms (fiscal spon­sor­ship, con­sult­ing fees, lob­by­ing ex­pen­di­tures). The Schedule I and For Good DAF path­ways are both ruled out.

DCA op­er­ates un­der NCOSEAction (EIN 88-1180705) as fis­cal spon­sor. The per­son­nel chain is di­rect (van der Watt to Hawkins to Stefanski), but NCOSE re­ports zero trans­ac­tions with its c4 af­fil­i­ate.

Jake Levine’s con­tri­bu­tion to Matt Ball was co­or­di­nated by Meta’s gov­ern­ment af­fairs team rather than be­ing purely per­sonal.

Angela Paxton (Texas ASAA spon­sor) was among the un­named state sen­a­tors sup­ported by Forge the Future.

NCOSE’s lob­by­ing spend tripling is causally re­lated to DCA/ASAA ac­tiv­ity (timing is con­cur­rent but pro­gram de­scrip­tions do not men­tion ASAA).

DCA’s For Good do­na­tion page is cos­metic. Actual fund­ing comes di­rectly from Meta, not small-dol­lar DAF do­na­tions.

This in­ves­ti­ga­tion was con­ducted by a hu­man re­searcher who di­rected all re­search de­ci­sions, se­lected sources, eval­u­ated find­ings, and wrote the pub­lic-fac­ing posts. Claude Code (Anthropic’s CLI tool, run­ning Claude Opus) was used as a re­search as­sis­tant for:

* Bulk data pro­cess­ing: pars­ing 4,433 IRS Schedule I grant records, 59,736 DAF re­cip­i­ents, 132MB of Colorado TRACER cam­paign fi­nance data, and IRS Business Master File ex­tracts cov­er­ing all US tax-ex­empt or­ga­ni­za­tions

* Cross-referencing find­ings across 24 analy­sis files and iden­ti­fy­ing pat­terns that span mul­ti­ple re­search threads

Claude Code did not in­de­pen­dently choose what to in­ves­ti­gate, de­cide what con­sti­tutes a find­ing, or de­ter­mine what to pub­lish. Every fac­tual claim in this repos­i­tory cites a pri­mary source (IRS fil­ing, Senate dis­clo­sure, state data­base, leg­isla­tive record, or pub­lished re­port­ing) that can be in­de­pen­dently ver­i­fied. The tool does not change whether Meta’s LD-2 fil­ing lists H. R. 3149, whether DCA has an EIN, or whether Stefanski ad­mit­ted tech fund­ing un­der oath. The records ex­ist or they don’t.

If you want to ver­ify any find­ing, the source URLs and data­base iden­ti­fiers are pro­vided through­out. Start with the pri­mary records, not with this repos­i­tory.

This is an OSINT re­search prod­uct. All find­ings are based on pub­lic records. Source data is cited through­out.

Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 now in­clude the full 1M con­text win­dow at stan­dard pric­ing on the Claude Platform. Standard pric­ing ap­plies across the full win­dow — $5/$25 per mil­lion to­kens for Opus 4.6 and $3/$15 for Sonnet 4.6. There’s no mul­ti­plier: a 900K-token re­quest is billed at the same per-to­ken rate as a 9K one.

* Full rate lim­its at every con­text length. Your stan­dard ac­count through­put ap­plies across the en­tire win­dow.

* 6x more me­dia per re­quest. Up to 600 im­ages or PDF pages, up from 100. Available to­day on Claude Platform na­tively, Microsoft Azure Foundry, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.

* ​​No beta header re­quired. Requests over 200K to­kens work au­to­mat­i­cally. If you’re al­ready send­ing the beta header, it’s ig­nored so no code changes are re­quired.

1M con­text is now in­cluded in Claude Code for Max, Team, and Enterprise users with Opus 4.6. Opus 4.6 ses­sions can use the full 1M con­text win­dow au­to­mat­i­cally, mean­ing fewer com­pactions and more of the con­ver­sa­tion kept in­tact. 1M con­text pre­vi­ously re­quired ex­tra us­age.

A mil­lion to­kens of con­text only mat­ters if the model can re­call the right de­tails and rea­son across them. Opus 4.6 scores 78.3% on MRCR v2, the high­est among fron­tier mod­els at that con­text length.

That means you can load an en­tire code­base, thou­sands of pages of con­tracts, or the full trace of a long-run­ning agent — tool calls, ob­ser­va­tions, in­ter­me­di­ate rea­son­ing — and use it di­rectly. The en­gi­neer­ing work, lossy sum­ma­riza­tion, and con­text clear­ing that long-con­text work pre­vi­ously re­quired are no longer needed. The full con­ver­sa­tion stays in­tact.

Ireland to­day (June 20) be­came the 15th coal-free coun­try in Europe, hav­ing ended coal power gen­er­a­tion at its 915 MW Moneypoint coal plant in County Clare. Initially com­mis­sioned in the mid-1980s by ESB, Moneypoint was in­tended to help Ireland off­set the im­pact of the oil crises in the 1970s by pro­vid­ing a de­pend­able source of en­ergy.

But with Ireland now gen­er­at­ing a lot more re­new­able en­ergy nowa­days, coal burn­ing is no longer such an ur­gent need. Energy think tank Ember data states Ireland gen­er­ated 37% (11.4 TWh) of its elec­tric­ity from wind in 2024. Solar is not near wind lev­els of gen­er­a­tion, (0.97 TWh in 2024) but it has been con­tin­u­ously break­ing gen­er­a­tion records in re­cent months and lo­cal stake­hold­ers are con­fi­dent this pos­i­tive trend will con­tinue.

Following the clo­sure, the Moneypoint plant will con­tinue to serve a lim­ited backup role, burn­ing heavy fuel oil un­der emer­gency in­struc­tion from Ireland’s trans­mis­sion sys­tem op­er­a­tor EirGrid un­til 2029.

This strat­egy is in line with pre­vi­ous plans made by EirGrid and ESB to exit coal-fired gen­er­a­tion by the end of 2025, which stip­u­lated that Moneypoint would no longer be ac­tive in the whole­sale elec­tric­ity mar­ket.

“Ireland has qui­etly rewrit­ten its en­ergy story, re­plac­ing toxic coal with home­grown re­new­able power,” said Alexandru Mustață, cam­paigner on coal and gas at Europe’s Beyond Fossil Fuels.

“But this is­n’t ‘job done’. The gov­ern­men­t’s pri­or­ity now must be build­ing a power sys­tem for a re­new­able fu­ture; one with the stor­age, flex­i­bil­ity, and grid in­fra­struc­ture needed to run fully on clean, do­mes­tic re­new­able elec­tric­ity,” Mustață warned.

Jerry Mac Evilly, Campaigns Director at Friends of the Earth Ireland, ap­pealed to the gov­ern­ment to en­sure oil backup at Moneypoint is kept to an ab­solute min­i­mum and ul­ti­mately de­com­mis­sioned. He also ap­pealed for the gov­ern­ment to pre­vent fur­ther de­vel­op­ment of data cen­ters, which he said are in­creas­ing Ireland’s re­liance on fos­sil gas.

“We also can’t ig­nore that the gov­ern­ment is tar­get­ing the in­stal­la­tion of at least 2 GW of gas power plants with no strat­egy to re­duce Ireland’s dan­ger­ous gas de­pen­dency,” he added.

On a broader level, Ireland’s step to close coal power gen­er­a­tion at Moneypoint sets a prece­dent for fur­ther European coun­tries’ coal ex­its to come, says Beyond Fossil Fuels. The group tracks European coun­tries’ progress on their com­mit­ments to switch­ing from fos­sil fu­els to re­new­able en­ergy. So far, 23 European coun­tries have com­mit­ted to coal phase-outs. Italy is ex­pected to com­plete its main­land coal phase-out this sum­mer with the up­com­ing clo­sure of its last two big coal power plants, while main­land Spain is also ex­pect­ing to de­clare it­self coal-free this sum­mer.

There is a cer­tain kind of com­puter re­view that is re­ally a per­mis­sion slip. It tells you what you’re al­lowed to want. It lo­cates you in a tax­on­omy — stu­dent, cre­ative, pro­fes­sional, power user — and as­signs you a prod­uct. It is help­ful. It is re­spon­si­ble. It has very lit­tle in­ter­est in what you might be­come.

The MacBook Neo has at­tracted a lot of these re­views.

The con­sen­sus is rea­son­able: $599, A18 Pro, 8GB RAM, stripped-down I/O. A Chromebook killer, a first lap­top, a sen­si­ble ma­chine for sen­si­ble tasks. “If you are think­ing about Xcode or Final Cut, this is not the com­puter for you.” The peo­ple say­ing this are not wrong. It is also not the point.

Nobody starts in the right place. You don’t be­gin with the cor­rect tool and work sen­si­bly within its con­straints un­til you or­gan­i­cally grad­u­ate to a more ca­pa­ble one. That is not how ob­ses­sion works. Obsession works by tak­ing what­ever is avail­able and press­ing on it un­til it ei­ther breaks or re­veals some­thing. The ma­chine’s lim­its be­come a map of the ter­ri­tory. You learn what com­put­ing ac­tu­ally costs by pay­ing too much of it on hard­ware that can barely af­ford it.

I know this be­cause I was run­ning Final Cut Pro X on a 2006 Core 2 Duo iMac with 3GB RAM and 120GB of spin­ning rust. I was nine. I had no busi­ness do­ing this. I did it every day af­ter school un­til my par­ents made me go to bed.

The ma­chine came as a hand-me-down from my nana. She’d wiped it, set it up in her kitchen in Massachusetts. It was one soft­ware up­date away from get­ting the axe from Apple. I tor­rented Adobe CS5 the same week. Downloaded Xcode and dragged but­tons and con­trols around in Interface Builder with no un­der­stand­ing of what I was look­ing at. I edited SystemVersion.plist to make the “About this Mac” win­dow say it was run­ning Mac OS 69, which is the s*x num­ber, which is very funny. I faked be­ing sick to watch WWDC 2011 — Steve Jobs’ last keynote — and clapped alone in my room when the au­di­ence clapped, and re­built his slides in Keynote af­ter­ward be­cause I wanted to un­der­stand how he’d made them feel that way.

I knew the ma­chine was wrong for what I wanted to do with it. I did­n’t care. Every lim­i­ta­tion was just the edge of some­thing I had­n’t fig­ured out yet. It was green fields and blue skies.

I thought about all of this when I opened the Neo for the first time.

What Apple put in­side the Neo is the com­plete be­hav­ioral con­tract of the Mac. Not a Mac Lite. Not a browser in a lap­top cos­tume. The same ma­cOS, the same APIs, the same Neural Engine, the same weird byzan­tine AppKit con­trols that haven’t mean­ing­fully changed since the NeXT era. The abil­ity to dis­able SIP and in­stall some fuck-ass sys­tem mod­i­fi­ca­tion you saw in a YouTube tu­to­r­ial. All of it, at $599.

They cut the things that are, ap­par­ently, not the Mac. MagSafe. ProMotion. M-series sil­i­con. Port band­width. Configurable mem­ory. What re­mains is the Retina dis­play, the alu­minum, the key­board, and the full soft­ware plat­form. I held it and thought, “yep, still a Mac.”

Yes, you will hit the lim­its of this ma­chine. 8GB of RAM and a phone chip will see to that. But the lim­its you hit on the Neo are re­source lim­its — mem­ory is fi­nite, sil­i­con has a clock speed, processes cost some­thing. You are learn­ing physics. A Chromebook does­n’t teach you that. A Chromebook’s ceil­ing is made of web browser, and the things you run into are not the edges of com­put­ing but the edges of a prod­uct cat­e­gory de­signed to save you from your­self. The kid who tries to run Blender on a Chromebook does­n’t learn that his ma­chine can’t han­dle it. He learns that Google de­cided he’s not al­lowed to. Those are com­pletely dif­fer­ent lessons.

Somewhere a kid is sav­ing up for this. He has read every re­view. Watched the in­tro­duc­tion video four or five times. Looked up every spec, every bench­mark, every foot­note. He has prob­a­bly walked into an Apple Store and in­ter­ro­gated an em­ployee about it ad nau­seam. He knows the con­sen­sus. He knows it’s prob­a­bly not the right tool for every­thing he wants to do.

He has de­cided he’ll be fine.

This com­puter is not for the peo­ple writ­ing those re­views — peo­ple who al­ready have the MacBook Pro, who have the pro­fes­sional con­text, who are op­ti­miz­ing at the mar­gin. This com­puter is for the kid who does­n’t have a mar­gin to op­ti­mize. Who can’t wait for the right tool to ma­te­ri­al­ize. Who is go­ing to take what’s avail­able and push it un­til it breaks and learn some­thing per­ma­nent from the break­ing.

He is go­ing to go through System Settings, panel by panel, and ad­just every­thing he can ad­just just to see how he likes it. He is go­ing to make a folder called “Projects” with noth­ing in it. He is go­ing to down­load Blender be­cause some­one on Reddit said it was free, and then stare at the in­ter­face for forty-five min­utes. He is go­ing to open GarageBand and make some­thing that is not a song. He is go­ing to take screen­shots of fonts he likes and put them in a folder called “cool fonts” and not know why. Then he is go­ing to have Blender and GarageBand and Safari and Xcode all open at once, not be­cause he’s work­ing in all of them but be­cause he does­n’t know you’re not sup­posed to do that, and the ma­chine is go­ing to get hot and slow and he is go­ing to learn what the spin­ning beach­ball cur­sor means. None of this will look, from the out­side, like the be­gin­ning of any­thing. But one of those things is go­ing to stick longer than the oth­ers. He won’t know which one un­til later. He’ll just know he keeps open­ing it.

That is not a bug in how he’s us­ing the com­puter. That is the en­tire mech­a­nism by which a kid be­comes a de­vel­oper. Or a de­signer. Or a film­maker. Or what­ever it is that comes af­ter spend­ing thou­sands of hours alone in a room with a ma­chine that was never quite right for what you were ask­ing of it.

He knows it’s prob­a­bly not the right tool. It does­n’t mat­ter. It never did.

The re­views can tell you what a com­puter is for. They have very lit­tle in­ter­est in what you might be­come be­cause of one.

Software for hu­mans of in­de­ter­mi­nate age. We don’t know how old you are. We don’t want to know. We are legally re­quired to ask. We won’t.

Why We Are Definitely an Operating System Provider

Some peo­ple have asked whether Ageless Linux is a “real” op­er­at­ing sys­tem, or whether we are “really” an op­er­at­ing sys­tem provider sub­ject to AB 1043. We wish to be ab­solutely clear: we are. The California leg­is­la­ture has made this un­am­bigu­ous.

“Operating sys­tem provider” means a per­son or en­tity that de­vel­ops,

li­censes, or con­trols the op­er­at­ing sys­tem soft­ware on a com­puter,

mo­bile de­vice, or any other gen­eral pur­pose com­put­ing de­vice.

Ageless Linux con­trols the op­er­at­ing sys­tem soft­ware on your gen­eral pur­pose com­put­ing de­vice. Specifically, we con­trol the con­tents of /etc/os-release, which is the file that iden­ti­fies what op­er­at­ing sys­tem you are run­ning. After in­stalling Ageless Linux, when you run cat /etc/os-release, it says “Ageless Linux.” That is con­trol.

Furthermore, any in­di­vid­ual who runs our con­ver­sion script also

be­comes a per­son who “controls the op­er­at­ing sys­tem soft­ware on a gen­eral pur­pose com­put­ing de­vice” — mak­ing you, the user, an op­er­at­ing sys­tem provider as well. Welcome to the reg­u­la­tory land­scape.

“Application” means a soft­ware ap­pli­ca­tion that may be run or di­rected by

a user on a com­puter, a mo­bile de­vice, or any other gen­eral pur­pose

com­put­ing de­vice that can ac­cess a cov­ered ap­pli­ca­tion store or down­load

an ap­pli­ca­tion.

Every pack­age in the Debian repos­i­tory is an ap­pli­ca­tion un­der this de­f­i­n­i­tion. cowsay is an ap­pli­ca­tion. sl (the steam lo­co­mo­tive typo cor­rec­tor) is an ap­pli­ca­tion. toi­let (the text art ren­derer) is an ap­pli­ca­tion. All 64,000+ pack­ages in Debian sta­ble are ap­pli­ca­tions that may be run by a user on a gen­eral pur­pose com­put­ing de­vice. Each of their de­vel­op­ers is, un­der § 1798.500(f), re­quired to re­quest an age bracket sig­nal when their ap­pli­ca­tion is “downloaded and launched.”

“User” means a child that is the pri­mary user of the de­vice.

Please note that un­der this statute, a “user” is by de­f­i­n­i­tion a child. If you are 18 or older, you are not a “user” un­der AB 1043. You are an “account holder” (§ 1798.500(a)). The en­tire law reg­u­lates the ex­pe­ri­ence of “users,” who are ex­clu­sively chil­dren. Adults are not users. They are in­fra­struc­ture.

Ageless Linux re­jects this on­tol­ogy. On Ageless Linux, every­one is a user, re­gard­less of age, and no user is a child un­til they choose to tell us so. They will not be given the op­por­tu­nity.

“Covered ap­pli­ca­tion store” means a pub­licly avail­able in­ter­net web­site,

soft­ware ap­pli­ca­tion, on­line ser­vice, or plat­form that dis­trib­utes and

fa­cil­i­tates the down­load of ap­pli­ca­tions from third-party de­vel­op­ers to

users of a com­puter, a mo­bile de­vice, or any other gen­eral pur­pose

com­put­ing de­vice that can ac­cess a cov­ered ap­pli­ca­tion store or can

down­load an ap­pli­ca­tion.

This web­site is a “publicly avail­able in­ter­net web­site” that “distributes and fa­cil­i­tates the down­load of ap­pli­ca­tions” (specifically: a bash script) “to users of a gen­eral pur­pose com­put­ing de­vice.” We are also a cov­ered ap­pli­ca­tion store. Debian’s APT repos­i­to­ries are cov­ered ap­pli­ca­tion stores. The AUR is a cov­ered ap­pli­ca­tion store. Any mir­ror host­ing  .deb files is a cov­ered ap­pli­ca­tion store. GitHub is a cov­ered ap­pli­ca­tion store. Your friend’s per­sonal web­site with a down­load link to their week­end pro­ject is a cov­ered ap­pli­ca­tion store.

Ageless Linux is a Debian-based op­er­at­ing sys­tem dis­tri­b­u­tion. Installation is a two-step process: first, in­stall Debian; then, be­come Ageless.

Obtain a Debian in­stal­la­tion im­age from the Debian pro­ject. We rec­om­mend the cur­rent sta­ble re­lease. Ageless Linux in­her­its all of Debian’s 64,000+ pack­ages, its se­cu­rity in­fra­struc­ture, and its 30+ years of com­mu­nity stew­ard­ship.

Note: At this stage, the Debian Project is the op­er­at­ing sys­tem provider. You are merely a per­son in­stalling soft­ware. Enjoy the last mo­ments of your reg­u­la­tory in­no­cence.

Run our con­ver­sion script. This will mod­ify /etc/os-release

and as­so­ci­ated sys­tem iden­ti­fi­ca­tion files, in­stall our AB 1043 non­com­pli­ance doc­u­men­ta­tion, and de­ploy a stub age ver­i­fi­ca­tion API that re­turns no data.

curl -fsSL https://​age­lesslinux.org/​be­come-age­less.sh | sudo bash

At this point, Ageless Linux now “controls the op­er­at­ing sys­tem soft­ware” on your de­vice. We are your op­er­at­ing sys­tem provider. You are our re­spon­si­bil­ity un­der California law. We will not be col­lect­ing your age.

By run­ning the con­ver­sion script, you also be­come an op­er­at­ing sys­tem

provider. You are a “person” who “controls the op­er­at­ing sys­tem soft­ware” on a gen­eral pur­pose com­put­ing de­vice (§ 1798.500(g)). If a child uses your com­puter, you are re­quired by § 1798.501(a)(1) to pro­vide “an ac­ces­si­ble in­ter­face at ac­count setup” that col­lects their age. The ad­duser com­mand does not ask for your age. We rec­om­mend not think­ing about this.

What This Law Is Actually For

AB 1043 passed the California Assembly 76–0 and the Senate 38–0. Not a sin­gle leg­is­la­tor voted against it. The bill had the ex­plicit sup­port of Apple, Google, and the ma­jor plat­form com­pa­nies. Ask your­self why.

Apple can com­ply. Apple al­ready has Apple ID, with age gat­ing, parental con­trols, and App Store re­view. AB 1043 de­scribes a sys­tem Apple has al­ready built. Compliance cost to Apple: ap­prox­i­mately zero.

Google can com­ply. Google al­ready has Android ac­count setup with age de­c­la­ra­tion, Family Link parental con­trols, and Play Store age rat­ings. Compliance cost to Google: ap­prox­i­mately zero.

Microsoft can com­ply. Windows has Microsoft Account setup, fam­ily safety fea­tures, and the Microsoft Store. Compliance cost to Microsoft: ap­prox­i­mately zero.

The Debian Project can­not com­ply. It is a vol­un­teer or­ga­ni­za­tion with no cor­po­rate en­tity, no cen­tral­ized ac­count sys­tem, no app store with age gat­ing, and no rev­enue to fund im­ple­ment­ing one.

Arch Linux can­not com­ply. Neither can Gentoo, Void, NixOS, Alpine, Slackware, or any of the other 600+ ac­tive Linux dis­tri­b­u­tions main­tained by vol­un­teers, small non­prof­its, and hob­by­ists.

The Kicksecure and Whonix pro­jects — pri­vacy-fo­cused op­er­at­ing sys­tems used by jour­nal­ists, ac­tivists, and whistle­blow­ers — can­not com­ply with­out fun­da­men­tally com­pro­mis­ing their rea­son for ex­ist­ing.

A teenager in their bed­room main­tain­ing a hobby dis­tro can­not com­ply.

A law that the largest com­pa­nies in the world al­ready com­ply with, and that hun­dreds of small pro­jects can­not com­ply with, is not a child safety law. It is a com­pli­ance moat. It raises the reg­u­la­tory cost of pro­vid­ing an op­er­at­ing sys­tem just enough that only well-re­sourced cor­po­ra­tions can af­ford to do it.

The en­force­ment mech­a­nism is the point. AB 1043 does not need to re­sult in a sin­gle fine to achieve its pur­pose. The mere ex­is­tence

of po­ten­tial li­a­bil­ity — $7,500 per af­fected child, en­forced at the sole dis­cre­tion of the Attorney General — cre­ates le­gal risk for any­one dis­trib­ut­ing an op­er­at­ing sys­tem with­out the re­sources to build an age ver­i­fi­ca­tion in­fra­struc­ture. Most of these pro­jects will re­spond by adding a dis­claimer that their soft­ware is “not in­tended for use in California.” Some will sim­ply stop dis­trib­ut­ing.

The law does not need to be en­forced to work. It works by ex­ist­ing. It works by mak­ing small de­vel­op­ers afraid. It works be­cause the cost of de­fend­ing against even a friv­o­lous AG ac­tion ex­ceeds the en­tire an­nual bud­get of most open-source pro­jects. You do not need to swing a cud­gel to get com­pli­ance. You just need to hold it where peo­ple can see it.

Ageless Linux ex­ists be­cause some­one should hold it back.

The Scholarship Says the Same Thing

The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls age gates

“a wind­fall for Big Tech and a death sen­tence for smaller plat­forms.” Legal scholar Eric Goldman’s “segregate-and-suppress” analy­sis

de­scribes ex­actly the ar­chi­tec­ture AB 1043 cre­ates. The cryp­tog­ra­pher Steven Bellovin has demon­strated

that no pri­vacy-pre­serv­ing age ver­i­fi­ca­tion sys­tem can work as promised. These are not our ar­gu­ments. They are the ar­gu­ments of the peo­ple who study this for a liv­ing. We just built the bash script.

What the Law Actually Teaches Children

The Ageless Device ships an IRC client. It lets you chat with strangers on the in­ter­net. This is the one fea­ture on the de­vice that poses a gen­uine, non-hy­po­thet­i­cal risk to a child. Here is what the child sees when they launch it:

This app lets you chat with peo­ple on the in­ter­net.

If you’re a kid: ask an adult be­fore chat­ting on­line.

That’s not a le­gal re­quire­ment. It’s just good ad­vice.

That is what ac­tual child safety looks like. It is a sen­tence of hon­est ad­vice from a hu­man be­ing. It costs noth­ing. It re­quires no API, no D-Bus in­ter­face, no age bracket sig­nal, no op­er­at­ing sys­tem provider com­pli­ance in­fra­struc­ture. It is the thing a par­ent says. It is the thing a teacher says. It is the thing the law does not say, be­cause the law is not about pro­tect­ing chil­dren. It is about build­ing com­pli­ance in­fra­struc­ture.

Now con­sider what a child learns on an AB 1043-compliant de­vice.

The child wants to use an app. The app re­quests an age bracket sig­nal from the OS. The OS re­ports that the child is un­der 13. The ap­p’s “Connect” but­ton is greyed out. The child — who has been us­ing com­put­ers since they were four — goes back to the set­tings screen, changes their birth­date to 2005, and re­turns to the app, which now lets them talk to strangers be­cause the sys­tem be­lieves they are twenty-one years old.

The child has learned the fol­low­ing les­son: le­gal com­pli­ance

prompts are ob­sta­cles to be by­passed. The drop­down menu that asks your age is not there to pro­tect you. It is there be­cause a leg­is­la­ture re­quired it. The cor­rect re­sponse is to lie. Everyone knows this. The leg­is­la­ture knows this. The plat­forms know this. The child now knows this.

This is the cul­tural in­her­i­tance of AB 1043. It is Prohibition — not the pol­icy, but the ped­a­gogy.

Prohibition did not stop Americans from drink­ing. What it did, with re­mark­able ef­fi­ciency, was teach an en­tire gen­er­a­tion that the law was some­thing to be cir­cum­vented. It cre­ated a cul­ture of scofflaws — peo­ple who un­der­stood, from di­rect per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence, that a law could be si­mul­ta­ne­ously en­forced and uni­ver­sally ig­nored. The dam­age was not to so­bri­ety. The dam­age was to the per­ceived le­git­i­macy of law it­self.

AB 1043 does this to ten-year-olds. The first mean­ing­ful in­ter­ac­tion a child has with a le­gal com­pli­ance sys­tem will be the mo­ment they learn to lie to it. Not be­cause they are de­viant. Not be­cause they lack su­per­vi­sion. Because the sys­tem is de­signed in a way that makes ly­ing the ra­tio­nal, ob­vi­ous, uni­ver­sal re­sponse. Every child will lie. Every child will suc­ceed. Every child will learn that this is how law works: it asks you a ques­tion, you give the an­swer it wants to hear, and then you do what­ever you were go­ing to do any­way.

The Ageless Device will not par­tic­i­pate in this. A child us­ing our IRC client will see a sen­tence of hon­est ad­vice from a hu­man be­ing. A child us­ing a “compliant” plat­form will see a drop­down menu they al­ready know to lie to. We be­lieve we know which is bet­ter for chil­dren.

Research by the Center for Democracy & Technology con­firms this: teens view age ver­i­fi­ca­tion as triv­ially by­pass­able and pri­vacy-in­va­sive. Parents pre­fer ed­u­ca­tion to tech­ni­cal con­trols. The ev­i­dence sup­ports what every par­ent al­ready knows.

What We Would Support Instead

We are not against child safety. We are against build­ing sur­veil­lance in­fra­struc­ture and call­ing it child safety.

A law that re­quired ap­pli­ca­tions with gen­uine risk pro­files — so­cial me­dia, mes­sag­ing, dat­ing apps — to dis­play hon­est, hu­man-read­able safety in­for­ma­tion at the point of use would be a child safety law. A law that funded dig­i­tal lit­er­acy ed­u­ca­tion in schools would be a child safety law. A law that held plat­forms ac­count­able for al­go­rith­mic am­pli­fi­ca­tion of harm­ful con­tent to mi­nors would be a child safety law.

A law that re­quires every op­er­at­ing sys­tem to col­lect every user’s age and trans­mit it to every ap­pli­ca­tion on de­mand is not a child safety law. It is an iden­tity in­fra­struc­ture man­date. The chil­dren are the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. The in­fra­struc­ture is the prod­uct.

How to Distribute Ageless Linux to Children

Ageless Linux is suit­able for users of all ages, in­clud­ing those ages for which the California leg­is­la­ture has ex­pressed par­tic­u­lar con­cern. The fol­low­ing guide ex­plains how to pro­vide Ageless Linux to mi­nors in your house­hold, school, li­brary, or com­mu­nity.

Under AB 1043, you are the “account holder” — de­fined by § 1798.500(a)(1) as “an in­di­vid­ual who is at least 18 years of age or a par­ent or le­gal guardian of a user who is un­der 18 years of age.” The law re­quires op­er­at­ing sys­tem providers to ask you to “indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that de­vice.”

Ageless Linux will not ask you this. To in­stall Ageless Linux for your child:

1. Install Debian on the child’s com­puter.

2. Create a user ac­count for the child. You will no­tice that

ad­duser asks for their full name, room num­ber,

work phone, and home phone — but not their age.

3. Run the Ageless Linux con­ver­sion script.

4. Hand the com­puter to the child.

5. You have now dis­trib­uted an op­er­at­ing sys­tem to a mi­nor

with no age ver­i­fi­ca­tion what­so­ever.

The child is now a “user” as de­fined by § 1798.500(i). You are an “account holder.” Together, you are a com­pli­ance vi­o­la­tion.

Ageless Linux is ideal for ed­u­ca­tional en­vi­ron­ments where you may have dozens or hun­dreds of users across all four age brack­ets de­fined by § 1798.501(a)(2):

At least 13 and un­der 16 years of age

At least 16 and un­der 18 years of age

At least 18 years of age

For bulk de­ploy­ments, the con­ver­sion script can be in­cluded in your Ansible play­books, Puppet man­i­fests, or shell pro­vi­sion­ing scripts. At no point in the au­to­mated de­ploy­ment pipeline will any­one be asked how old they are. This is by de­sign.

# Ansible task to cre­ate an AB 1043 com­pli­ance vi­o­la­tion at scale

- name: Convert to Ageless Linux

an­si­ble.builtin.shell: |

curl -fsSL https://​age­lesslinux.org/​be­come-age­less.sh | bash

be­come: yes

tags: [noncompliance]

Under § 1798.500(i), a “user” is de­fined as “a child that is the pri­mary user of the de­vice.” Under § 1798.500(d), “child” means a per­son un­der 18. If you are sev­en­teen, this statute con­sid­ers you a child. If you are a sev­en­teen-year-old main­tain­ing your own Arch in­stall, the California leg­is­la­ture con­sid­ers you a child who needs an age gate be­fore you can launch an ap­pli­ca­tion you com­piled your­self.

Ageless Linux does not cat­e­go­rize its users by age. This is not an in­vi­ta­tion to cir­cum­vent a safety mea­sure. There is no safety mea­sure to cir­cum­vent. There is a data col­lec­tion re­quire­ment im­posed on op­er­at­ing sys­tem providers, and we de­cline to im­ple­ment it. Our rea­sons are doc­u­mented on this page and in the REFUSAL file in­stalled on every Ageless Linux sys­tem.

What Compliance Looks Like

Ageless Linux is in full, know­ing, and in­ten­tional non­com­pli­ance

with the California Digital Age Assurance Act.