it being mandated however is an absolute assault on freedom. will linux become outlawed over this?
This is a valid concern. But I think we should reject this law on the basis that it should be a recommendation rather than a mandate, without rejecting its premise entirely, because it actually has some merit.
Filtering on client-side is a good idea and lets parents parent without affecting anyone else, provided the filters work completely offline. And we should make sure governments and parents know this so they don't try to push any more Internet-wide censorship laws.
And instead of mandating it, it should work like movie ratings: OSes that implement parental control features get a "PG-capable" label, then make it illegal for minors to use a non-PG-capable OS. This should not affect adults, and parents can choose to not use it because it's a feature you have to manually turn on.
It’s just saying “include the equivalent of an adblocker” and allow parents to enable it.
Frankly seems easier to solve to me than adblocking, and that’s already a solved problem.
I don't understand how this is supposed to be water tight without client-side scanning etc.
Yes. This is a bad law, but somehow still a better one than the UK got...
Not sure it is. It will require a lot of locked down control, and may make open source OSes effectively illegal. Even on Windows it will require only being able to install software from the MS store AND MS only allowing software that complies with this law to be installed by German users.
how did we get here?
If you can give children something that is basically whilelisted access then it reduces the need to try to filter the open web.