Encryption backdoors, social media bans for children, creepy age verification for applications – what will they think of next? The latest brilliant idea by US lawmakers sure is a hell of a doozy: legally mandated age verification in every single operating system.
Colorado’s SB26-051, introduced last month, would require operating systems to register the owner’s age, which third-party apps can then leverage to determine if the user is an adult. The bill calls for the device owner to register their birthdate or age, but for the purposes of creating an “age bracket,” which can then be shared to an app developer through an API to learn their age range, according to BiometricUpdate.com.
[…]Ball also said the legislation was based on California’s bill AB 1043, which was passed last year. It too requires OS makers to create a way for the device owner to register their age bracket, which can then be shared to app developers over an API. The California law starts to take effect January 1, 2027.
↫ Michael Kan at PCMag
Age verification to protect children sounds innocent enough, but if you have more than two brain cells to rub together it’s crystal clear that what we’re really looking at is the true end of privacy and online anonymity. If age verification is only used by certain applications, it’s easy enough to avoid them, but if it becomes part of Windows, desktop Linux, Android, it’s truly game over. Nobody will be anonymous online ever again, and nobody will have any sense of privacy left when opening up their computer.
Worse yet, if you do end up using an operating system that doesn’t adhere to this law, or you hack out or circumvent the age verification nonsense, you’ll automatically become an easy target for law enforcement. Clearly, if you circumvent age verification, you must be up to no good, right? Of course, as we’ve seen in countries with heavily deteriorating democracies and freedoms, like the US or Hungary, even merely opposing the government will be classified as “up to no good”, and let’s not even get started about the various minorities these countries are actively trying to eradicate.
If something like this is enshrined in law in your country, you’re fucked.
What about multi-user machines?
Orgies are tolerated between consenting adults. The proposed age verification process is made (up) to ensure about that.
The reason they are doing this is because their previous attempt was found unconstitutional, and now they are trying another door.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a bad thing. And completely braindead (Linux does not have accounts, it had users. They don’t even know this basic difference). But I do not expect the politicians ever getting the “message”, even time after time both the public, the companies, researchers, advocacy groups like EFF, and of course higher courts tells them “no this is a terrible idea”
They will just reword, and retry.
(Just like EU is trying their terrible “Chat Control” idea in 2.0 again)
This too is of course unconstitutional. And they already broken Open Source. Two smaller operating systems, one is a BSD, the other one is a calculator custom firmware decided to ban California users.
However those licenses, which exclude people based on geography are anti-open source.
Soon we will have two incompatible world of licenses: those which are truly free, and those which can be used in restrictive regimes.
DB48X and MidnightBSD (the operating systems that now exclude users from CA)
>MidnightBSD
Don’t confuse inability to code with making a stand here. MidnightBSD is just somebody’s hilariously poor attempt at marketing their custom desktop as a complete operating system and nobody told them to stop. It’s used by no more than six people and probably not even as their primary system, given how much trouble they seem to have tracking upstream. The devs of this trash couldn’t write the code to comply with California law if they wanted to.
This was somebody’s high school project from an era where people were just skinning things and calling it a new OS, but it went 19 years too long, kind of like how nobody told Anthony Davis to shave his unibrow and he trademarked his unibrow it but it’s actually embarrassing and now he wears goggles while playing to hide it.
Pop!_OS might have more impact, being from Colorado and having several tens of thousands of users, but that is still leverage and could result in the law not being passed.
It’s a bad law, but I would still rather live in California and just have my kids lie about their age than live most other places in America. And also I’m not going to use MidnightBSD, a separate but also sensible position. Just a weird fucking thing for them to make a stand on, are they MAGAts?
SOULFLY98,
This technically includes IBM / Redhat / Fedora, AWS, and Google all of which who have offices in Colorado and nearby.
The problem is I don’t think any of them are principled enough to make a stand. Google will say “we already have something”, and IBM… is well IBM
As written, California law, which already passed unfortunately, is much worse, they have a very broad definition of operating system, and no proper definition of user accounts.
Given the history of our great State, it would not be far fetched to expect some lawyer to basically include everything, including your TI calculator, and Samsung Fridge with the screen. Alongside cloud virtual, and even docker installations.
Basically this is going to be a funny ride.
I think we need people that understand the necessary hashtags…
(https://mashable.com/article/necessary-hashtags-whatsapp-encryption – if you read that you’ll lose at least 5 IQ points)
ppp,
That’s funny, I hadn’t heard of it before.
Good lord I hate when news sites embed Tweets instead of screen shotting them. Most of them have been removed, and I can’t see them anyways because the org I work for blocks Twitter (and Bluesky, for that matter). Jumping to my cell phone each time an article is half tweets is annoying!
Drumhellar,
I didn’t notice that before, but I agree. And I also see more content is unavailable right now…
There are a number of reasons it’s a bad practice: tracking, preservation, firewalls, bait and switch, page security, etc.