13 ms·

Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill

290 points by terminalbraid 7mo ago

johnisgood 7mo ago
What is the reasoning behind this exactly? Yeah, I know Meta is behind it, but surely they will throw it out if it is absord, right... right?
spullara 7mo ago
this is completely insane. we need some kind of constitutional amendment to get rid of all this kind legislation forever.
- chronic20001 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - prophesi 7mo ago
    > For the record, I don’t care enough about age verification. Whether the law passes or not, I don’t really care. Sounds like there actually would be some benefit commenting about it on HN.
    - alephnerd 7mo ago
      No one who matters uses HN or cares about HN. The handful of us on HN who are in or near a position to affect change are basically here due to habit or $#itposting until we get banned. So they are right in that sense - commenting on HN is cathartic but ultimately useless. And the people who matter and are against this also don't use HN because they view this platform as toxic and reactionary.
      - prophesi 7mo ago
        There are software engineers who directly work for the platforms lobbying for this whom post here.
        alephnerd 7mo ago
        ICs don't matter. I can fire one and hire 5, and increasingly, the demographics on HN don't align with those who work in those organizations. HN is basically slashdot now.
        prophesi 7mo ago
        > and increasingly, the demographics on HN don't align with those who work in those organizations. People have been worried about that on HN for years, but I still see the same culture. There do seem to be more bots and astroturfing, but that's a systemic issue with all social media platforms today.
        alephnerd 7mo ago
        > People have been worried about that on HN for years, but I still see the same culture... And that's the crux of the issue - the industry and people have changed, but HN hasn't changed discourse wise and is growing increasingly disconnected demographically speaking. A large portion of HNers are men in their late 30s to 50s, and no longer located in the Bay Area or NYC. No one's who matters is having these kinds of conversations on HN - they're meeting IRL with Luma invites or in signal/imessage/discord group chats.
        prophesi 7mo ago
        And what I'm saying is that the people who actually matter are posting here. Because it's a trusted social platform. We want to talk to fellow experts of varied expertise, and I truly appreciate the discussions I have here. Feel free to have discussions of similar value on platforms with smaller, focused communities; I do the same for the tech I know. I do agree bots/astroturfing are prevalent here. But I've had https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com as my homepage for ages for a reason, as opposed to literally any other forum. I hope this doesn't become what reddit is now. Did "hacker news" lose its stallman flavor in favor of venture capital investors? Yes, at the get-go; but that doesn't mean people have sold out their morals. We're all frustrated. We live in a society. At least in the US, you'll just call a representative who's getting paid by lobbyists letting your message fall on deaf ears. But I have seen so many great comments here by people with beautiful minds and good intentions; and sometimes I can even debate with them and get my ass handed to me, because they're much more brilliant than I. edit: was curious on Luma. Is it basically meetup/radius/partiful/apple invites but for crypto bros?
- jjtheblunt 7mo ago
  it's entirely possible such nonsense is all show, and wouldn't be passed, however. i'm from illinois, worked in california, and no longer live in either. from afar, it seems that whatever california bureaucrats propose, after a short delay, gets proposed by their little sibling bureaucrats in illinois.
  - dmitrygr 7mo ago
    This. IL and MA follow whatever CA does with a few year lag. Considerations of sanity never enter into the discussion.
    - MarsIronPI 7mo ago
      As an Illinoisan, this kind of stuff makes me want to leave and get somewhere sane. Anybody have recommendations? What places don't have this kind of insanity?
      - jjtheblunt 7mo ago
        As an Illinoisan who left 23 years ago for work in California, worked a summer in Massachusetts, now in Arizona, i think the answer is Antarctica.
      - dmitrygr 7mo ago
        Answers will be provided after adequate proof that you will not bring the voting record that made illinois what it is with you.
      - stutstev 7mo ago
        There's some hope in New Hampshire. Our legislature just struck down our equivalent bill[1] while it was in committee. And within the last decade, privacy was enshrined in our state constitution[2], providing us with more legal teeth, on top of our free speech protections, to defeat digital age verification within the state. [1] https://legiscan.com/NH/bill/HB1658/2026 https://legiscan.com/NH/bill/HB1658/2026 [2] https://www.nh.gov/glance/state-constitution/bill-rights https://www.nh.gov/glance/state-constitution/bill-rights
- varispeed 7mo ago
  constitutional amendment to criminalise corporate lobbying with severe penalties - including capital punishment and confiscation of entire corporation.
- Aunche 7mo ago
  People are making way too big a deal of this IMO. This is basically the OS equivalent of that checkbox you click to enter a porn website that gets exposed to Meta, so they can claim that they did what they all the they could to protect children if they get sued by parents. Any determined kid would figure out a way around this, but I can see it stopping younger and less determined kids, and it's a useful tool for parents.
  - zardo 7mo ago
    Wouldn't a some kind of technical standard proposal be a more sensible way to do this than trying to pass OS laws state by state?
    - ezfe 7mo ago
      iOS (for example) already has that technical standard in place and usable.
  - 0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
    It does not stop at the check box. Someone is going to sue Google/Apple when a 13 year old gets on a porn site. Then Google/Apple will introduce "verification" that requires linking your identity to your device, and attesting this to the "operator" (porn site). Then every person using any OS is tracked, on every website and app, all the time, by law. And Linux becomes illegal without it. This is not a theory. Laws requiring this are going through the state and federal level right now.
  - acuozzo 7mo ago
    How would this work for e.g. RTOS or even TempleOS?! Does the hidden Minix installation on every Intel CPU with the Intel Management Engine count?
  - davorak 7mo ago
    Unlike the California law, I seemed to be in the minority in this opinion, this one does seem to require programs like grep to ask for a users age bracket. > (b) An operator shall request a signal with respect to a particular user from an operating system provider or a covered application store when the application is downloaded and launched. Unlike the California law I do not see anything that restricts this to child accounts only. So let say I have a program: print("Hello, World!") and I want to publish it to say npm or nixos, or some linux distribution. Not with out violating this law. This application needs to request the users age brackets at least at 'downloaded and launched' optimistically that means once on first launch, but potentially needs to be requested on each launch of the application. So lets fix the program import ageBracket ageBracket.get() print("Hello, World!") There we go, now the code is compliant with my imagined ageBracket module.
- ActorNightly 7mo ago
  I actually see the golden lining here >"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. I.e Linux will most likely to be immune, since its not tied to a particular computer. Which just means Linux stay winning. It already made big headway in the video game space, so its prime to take over personal computing too.
  - tokai 7mo ago
    All the distros are the providers here. The Linux kernel is not an operating system.
    - 1718627440 7mo ago
      Since GNU(or other)/Linux OSes allow the sysadmin to compose the OS out of parts and change them, the final OS is created by the sysadmin. That's what makes distributing binary software so annoying for maintainers, every installation can be it's own snowflake OS.
  - jmye 7mo ago
    > since its not tied to a particular computer. That's a really weird and nonsensical reading of "operating system software on a computer".
  - karmakaze 7mo ago
    Wouldn't that include using it on any cloud service that let's you pick it?
- burnt-resistor 7mo ago
  Unfortunately, a rhetorical knee-jerk response that it needs universal, specific counter legislation for a "permanent fix" is panacea, magical thinking. The root cause is a corrupt government doing the bidding of a few rich people and other countries. Fixing that will be very difficult but is nonetheless necessary and possible to largely thwart legislators from working against their own ostensible constituency.
mikestorrent 7mo ago
I don't like this whole thing, but compared to what I was fearing would happen, this idea is nowhere near as bad. What I expected was that we'd end up with the OS vendors actually being mandated to really do age verification, and then submitting that using Web Credentials and Secure Attestation so that the far end could trust the whole thing, locking open-source OS's out of the mix and creating more of a walled garden online than we already have. I was guessing it would become a simple checkbox on e.g. Cloudflare - "[ ] allow adult users only" or whatever - and that it would end up with vast swathes of the internet going off limits for anyone not on closed-source systems. Now, it looks like this is just a way for parents to tell the OS "this is a kid account" and have it flow through to websites so they can easily proactively block kids from connecting without having to implement any of that crap. Yes, it's much potentially easier for a child to circumvent; but any kid who can get around that sort of thing from within an OS could probably just wipe/reinstall anyway, so who cares? As a parent whose kids are continually trying to see what trouble they can get into, I appreciate that I will get one more potential weapon in the fight. Can someone tell me whether I am being a fool by actually being a bit relieved it's going this way?
- tracker1 7mo ago
  What do you think comes after this? This is just a first step towards exactly requiring age verification at the OS/Store level... Then comes ever more restrictive and intrusive tracking and eliminating all anonymity as a final goal. Time to start throwing up hobby BBS sites... and I think in this case text mode interfaces over web might be an advantage.
- Larrikin 7mo ago
  Websites can send down a single header indicating adult content. The device, the parent setup to indicate the users age, can respect that. Legitimate adult websites will not show the content. There is no need for any verification beyond that or it's just government mandated surveillance.
  - jacobgkau 7mo ago
    > There is no need for any verification beyond that or it's just government mandated surveillance. There is no verification beyond that in these sorts of bills (CA, CO, IL). It's the parent's responsibility to watch their kids when they set up an account. > Legitimate adult websites will not show the content. This is a big problem (that won't necessarily be solved by this particular legislation, granted). There are already voluntary rating HTML tags websites can add to indicate parental control software should block them, but they're voluntary and non-standardized. Websites can choose not to comply with no real-world consequences. And I don't think platforms like Reddit or X, which are ostensibly all-ages social media but also have an abundance of adult content, are properly set up to serve tags like that on NSFW posts but not other ones. It's a tricky problem to solve, and, imo, it's one the tech industry has demonstrated it doesn't have any desire to solve itself, hence legislation starting to get involved. > Websites can send down a single header indicating adult content. It sounds at first glance like a no-brainer that websites shouldn't have access to any information and the enforcement should be done at a local level (like the current voluntary HTML tags that locally installed parental control software can sometimes read). But some websites might want to display alternate content to minors-- e.g. a Wikipedia article with some images withheld, or Reddit sending a user back to an all-ages subreddit instead of just fully breaking or failing to load when the user stumbles upon something 18+. For anything like that, the website will need to know in some form that the user isn't able to see 18+ content.
shablulman 7mo ago
[dead]
exabrial 7mo ago
Why suddenly are all of the blue states doing this BS? What is going on and what control is this affording the government?
- dzink 7mo ago
  Meta is lobbying with millions for it.
- Nijikokun 7mo ago
  Meta is behind a huge amount of it, they have funded the majority of these
- tadfisher 7mo ago
  Lobbying from Meta. They do not want to do age-verification themselves (and pay for it).
- RankingMember 7mo ago
  See the actors behind this here (Meta is a big one): https://tboteproject.com/ https://tboteproject.com/
- anonym29 7mo ago
  Blue states: paternalism over your property, liberty for your body Red states: paternalism over your body, liberty for your property
  - gruez 7mo ago
    except for during covid, where there was a weird reversal.
    - anonym29 7mo ago
      I don't even know if that was much of a "reversal". Blue states were paternalistic over both your property (business and social gathering shutdowns) and your body (masking, social distancing enforcement), while red states (particularly Texas, Florida) were very laissez-faire for both. What's perplexing about this is that research has generally correlated higher amygdala activity (fear/worry) with political conservatism, and lower amygdala activity with political progressivism, but in this case, the effect seemed almost inverted.
thrill 7mo ago
“Use of this computer is illegal in the state of Illinois - your friendly neighborhood SWAT team has been notified.”
Slow_Hand 7mo ago
If I’m not mistaken, Meta has been lobbying heavily for all of these age-verification bills lately. It seems their strategy is to externalize their responsibility to verify age themselves, and thus reduce their exposure to liabilities when child protection acts like COPPA are violated.
- NotGMan 7mo ago
  Yes https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1rsn1tm/it_appears_meta_is_heavily_lobbying_for_linux_age/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1rsn1tm/it_a...
  - Slow_Hand 7mo ago
    Really, I’m surprised that for all of the discussions on HN around these individual statewide acts that I see so little discussion of Meta as a primary force pushing them.
    - pesus 7mo ago
      There are probably many more people that would profit off of it on HN.
    - iAMkenough 7mo ago
      I wonder if Meta monitors their employees comments on HN?
      - alephnerd 7mo ago
        They don't but frankly no one who matters actually gives a s#it about HN anyhow. HN is also much less representative of the demographics within the American tech industry now as well - almost all the references I see on here are stuff only men in their late 30s to 50s would recognize, and an increasing amount of users appear to be based in Western and Central Europe. Heck, I'm on the younger end by HN standards (early/mid 30s) and when I introduced HN to my peers over a decade ago (this is my throwaway) even back then they complained that it was "toxic", "snooty", and "unhelpful". And it's reputation amongst the younger generation has only gotten worse. HN has "SlashDot"ified, because most people are either in private groupchats on signal/imessage/discord or meeting each other with Luma invites.
TheChaplain 7mo ago
Curious how OpenBSD or Haiku will comply.
- dpe82 7mo ago
  By adding a simple birthdate field to your account info and a system API of some sort for retrieving the account owner's age range, same as everyone else.
- prmoustache 7mo ago
  For what I understand, OpenBSD could just patch useradd so that the age category is mentionned in the comment field of /etc/passwd or a random text file in /etc. Haiku could just run an automatic dialog asking you if you are minor, in Illinois or California and write a text file with the corresponding age category of said person. These bills do not mandate that the user cannot modify that information AFAIK.
- JCattheATM 7mo ago
  I can't imagine OpenBSD would be bothered by laws specific to a very small selection of US states.
- iamnothere 7mo ago
  OpenBSD devs have signaled noncompliance from their Canadian fortress of freedom.
- sanex 7mo ago
  Tbh they probably don't care about anyone other than Microsoft or Apple, though it's certainly not written that way.
hypeatei 7mo ago
What are they going to do to enforce this? Take down open source projects that "operate" in Illinois because a user downloaded the software there? Absolute joke and everyone should treat it that way; advanced compliance here means implicit support for the surveillance state.
anthk 7mo ago
Read and share "Free Software, Free Society" now. Richard Stallman advised us about it long ago. Thank god Plan9 got relicensed into GPL. 9front might not totally free, but it's a step in case GNU+Linux gets utterly broken. And, yes, please, go try Trisquel (novice users), GUIX (experts) and Hyperbola (experts and protocol purists). Avoid every Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Netflix service with nonfree JS.
- k33n 7mo ago
  When I need to use my computer, I'm not thinking about someone else's crusade. I have crusades of my own to fail miserably at and I need all the help I can get from whatever products function best.
- longislandguido 7mo ago
  The pragmatic Richard that wrote that book is long gone I'm afraid. Today his blog is filled with weird rants against voter ID, the Iran conflict, and a list of other countries he dislikes because they have national ID cards and this is a bad thing apparently. For someone who is a renowned world traveler, you would think he has heard of passports by now. Not a peep about these bills that could have a very real impact on an operating system he invented (gah-noo). Then again, since he's never installed it himself*, account creation is not something he would have to deal with or care about. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umQL37AC_YM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umQL37AC_YM Maybe the solution is as simple as having an adult create your account for you. Like paying a homeless guy to buy you booze or cigarettes, not that anyone would ever do that.
tracker1 7mo ago
I wonder how this will mix wit federal laws saying you aren't allowed to track users under the age of 13yo? Will this then be forced as a browser API/header passed to every server/request?
- johnisgood 7mo ago
  Yeah but if so, what does it have to do with the OS itself, i.e. outside the browser?
  - tracker1 7mo ago
    From articles I've seen, it's mostly Facebook lobbying to "pass the buck" upstream to the OS level to actually inquire... this of course will blead into the OS provided "store" interfaces most likely. And while, likely mostly targeting Apple and Google, MS/Windows and Linux are definitely going to be catching stray bullets. In particular vendors with Linux pre-installed... hence System 76 adding the feature to PopOS. Who knows if/how this will come about in practice or how consistently.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
pengaru 7mo ago
i look forward to the police showing up and explaining to me how computing is a privilege, not a right
strongpigeon 7mo ago
People here seem very against this, but I don't really see it. This only require to have a form asking about your age and provide an API to read it, right? Surely I'm missing something? Is the backlash due to fear of a slippery slope?
- toomuchtodo 7mo ago
  I am very pro social media regulation (with regards to age gating) due to the evidenced harm it causes, and which court cases have shown these companies are well aware of internally; with that said, this is an attempt by social media companies to shift liability to keep business as usual/status quo. This is no different than what oil companies have done, cigarette companies, chemical companies who have polluted at scale while knowing the harm, etc. Meta and TikTok (and YouTube shorts to an extent) are the new Sackler family and Purdue pharma. They will hold on to these profit and power engines as long and hard as possible. They will not stop causing the harm unless forced to with regulation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_United_... https://www.profgalloway.com/addiction-economy/ https://www.profgalloway.com/addiction-economy/
  - strongpigeon 7mo ago
    > This is an attempt by social media companies to shift liability to keep business as usual/status quo. Do you mind expanding on why that is? Is it because it allows them to say "well the API told us they're adults so we're all good"?
    - steviedotboston 7mo ago
      and the verification that the OS has to provide is minimal. the OS doesn't need to verify and ID or anything. Probably just a checkbox when you create the account that you're an adult, or child, etc. and then that's provided to the browser. So it effectively becomes meaningless if the goal is to get children off social media.
  - 7mo ago
1970-01-01 7mo ago
The "one weird trick" that all government hates? Stop forcing OSes to function with accounts. "User account" is an artifact of UNIX. You don't need an account to start a car, send and email, nor boot an operating system. I know it's hard to grasp, but it's true.
- gruez 7mo ago
  What's the "user account" for an iPhone? Sure you might have to sign into icloud, but that's not mandatory. It's effectively a single user system.
  - greenie_beans 7mo ago
    i'm sure there is some sorta root user on that system if you go digging far enough?? or am i just ignorant
- thoughtpalette 7mo ago
  Growing up, I vividly remember user accounts being important for our families personas on Windows XP. There's definitely a place for them, but there should be an option to not use one. Unless your specifically calling out accounts that require online registration for the OS. I'm vehemently against that requirement.
- datsci_est_2015 7mo ago
  > You don't need an account to start a car, … Don’t say this too loud please, I don’t honestly think we’re too far from this reality, at least from an “Overton Window” point of view.
  - 2postsperday 7mo ago
    [flagged]
  - IAmBroom 7mo ago
    Some cars already have accounts. If you don't pick one, it assumes the prior one is being reused - so de facto it's already here.
ottah 7mo ago
This coordinated state level attack on the legislative process is crazy. These people can't seem to be bothered to do the basics of governing, but they always find time to do this cross-state nightmare fuel.
- dmix 7mo ago
  State government is always the worst for this sort of garbage legislation. The number of "economically-impactful" regulatory pages generated by state governments far outpaces the federal government in the US. And plenty of it is just corporate or influential NIMBY appeasement.
- notepad0x90 7mo ago
  It is a fault in part in the government designed with bits and pieces of "honor system" and "well no one will ever do that!"; and the governed unable or unwilling to enact consequences.
firtoz 7mo ago
It's kinda convenient because every service needs to ask you for the age now because they can't serve under 13s in a lot of cases. Having it be a simple API would be a decent convenience, no? If you connect it with a permission system where you can choose whether to provide this information (e.g. >13 as a bool or age as an integer or the birthday as a date) that can't be too bad I guess? I haven't read the whole thing of course.
- edgyquant 7mo ago
  What if someone else is using the computer/phone/etc?
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
- pull_my_finger 7mo ago
  It WOULD be nice if it only got used appropriately. But in 2026 its just one more metric to narrow down your profile for advertisers. Wouldn't it be convenient if you could just opt-out of tracking with a convenient API like the literal "do not track" header in browsers? It exists, but none of the people who SHOULD use it pay it any attention except as, ironically, another metric used to track people. Not to mention that computing is a global thing, and in order for this to be useful it would definitely have to be providing more specific information than just a bool. Maybe chats require 13+, but pornography requires 18+. Maybe those ages are different based on location. All advertisers would need to do is ping the various different checks to get your actual or at least very approximate age. This kind of thing is a slippery slope, and its ripe for abuse by doxxers, advertisers and big brother himself. Burn this with fire. I'm totally in agreement with the others that suggest stuff like this should b just get banned from getting introduced and reintroduced constantly trying to sneak it in as a rider or hidden provision. The people DON'T want it.
- bigbuppo 7mo ago
  We got rid of the IDENT protocol a long time ago because it was stupid.
glitchc 7mo ago
The law as is written mainly targets social media platforms. For an OS to comply, all it needs to do is provide a field during account creation that records the user's date of birth as supplied by the user. There is no onus on the operator to confirm the veracity of this information, or even record it anywhere other than the local OS install itself. I think we're safe.
- JCattheATM 7mo ago
  It's the start of a very slippery slope.
  - naikrovek 7mo ago
    Slippery slopes are a logical fallacy. Every single decision moving you down the slope is intentional. No sliding occurs if nothing actively pushes things down the slide. Accordingly, it is never too late to lobby against these things.
    - mattnewton 7mo ago
      Like gravity, there is some inexorably force drawing the state towards mass surveillance tools as it makes the job easier. Removing friction that fights against that force is real
    - areoform 7mo ago
      Not if you're being pushed down the slope. It's not an accident that this appeared within a month or two of the California one. I would bet good money that there's someone shopping this bill around. If you do a frequency analysis of when these bills are being introduced, you'll notice an odd cluster internationally. Less charitably, they're coordinating / talking / being pushed by someone. More charitably, the "idea" is spreading. It's a very odd idea to spread though. Age "verification" isn't something people are truly passionate about. I suspect that, long-term, this is about surveillance. The powers that be would rather kill the golden genie that's general purpose compute than have teens and radical youth with compute. This is going to get bad.
saityi 7mo ago
Even if open source operating systems comply and add such a feature, what's to stop individual people from removing this and blocking the API requests before they install the OS? Or providing dummy responses? They're open source, after all. Is the government going to require some sort of automated checks that verify every person who connects to the internet has this API on their OS and go after individuals that aren't in compliance?
wosined 7mo ago
Karens making stupid bills. What is and what is not an OS?
albertsw 7mo ago
How old is root?
- worksonmine 7mo ago
  $today - 1970-01-01T00:00:00
TutleCpt 7mo ago
My future OS: https://agelesslinux.org https://agelesslinux.org
fredgrott 7mo ago
here is the date I will put out.... 1 10 0000 or even better 1 10 -2000 This will turn into most useless set of laws ever
clcaev 7mo ago
How will public libraries comply?
- bigbuppo 7mo ago
  Presumably they'll burn down the libraries.
balozi 7mo ago
What recourse would Illinois have against open-source operating systems? Anyone can roll their own Linux distro and share it with whomever they want.
- icwtyjj 7mo ago
  > What recourse would Illinois (!) have against open-source operating systems? None but them corporations sure do. And with a little cash in the right place I'm sure they can push recourse onto people of power. We really need to end political lobbying one of these days
fhn 7mo ago
These people are just so clueless. All they will find is that everybody on the internet is an adult.
0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
> the Children's Social Media Safety Act > > provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both Thank goodness kids can't lie about their age! > provide an operator who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user a signal that identifies the user's age by category Wait - if this is just to pass a signal to an operator ("social media site"), why can't the "operator" just ask for the age themselves? Answer: they don't want to be liable and get fined $400 Million, like Meta got fined, for letting kids on social media. (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/05/business/meta-children-data-protection-europe.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/05/business/meta-children-da...) This is why Meta is forcing this legislation through nation-wide. They are forcing Google/Apple to take the liability, despite it not actually being Google or Apple that's providing the "harmful" social media. Meta are doing this state-by-state so nobody can track that it's them. Easier than pushing at a federal level, and raises fewer red flags from news media. Since Google and Apple won't want to accept this liability either, the next step is requiring digital IDs and third-party verification to prove the user is of age. This will enable tracking of all users, whatever app or website they go to. Bills requiring this are already being passed at state and federal level.
SilverElfin 7mo ago
Every single sponsor of this bill is a Democrat. Why is that? I would think they’re against the type of puritanical moralizing that is behind most age verification bills.
- ThinkingGuy 7mo ago
  You must be too young to remember Tipper Gore... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipper_Gore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipper_Gore
  - SilverElfin 7mo ago
    Oh I remember. I just assumed things have changed enough, and that the threat of theocratic ideology - what’s behind project 2025 - would have made such stances unacceptable. My guess is this has more to do with lobbying and donor interest.
- autoexec 7mo ago
  they love money and facebook has the cash to bribe them
  - MarsIronPI 7mo ago
    "I like money." - Frito Pendejo
johndecktwo 7mo ago
Agelesslinux
longislandguido 7mo ago
The most progressive states doing exactly what their constituents elected them to do. I don't understand why everyone is so surprised.
- favorited 7mo ago
  "Progressive states" like Utah, Texas, and Louisiana? https://le.utah.gov/~2025/bills/static/SB0142.html https://le.utah.gov/~2025/bills/static/SB0142.html https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/89R/billtext/html/SB02420S.HTM https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/89R/billtext/html/SB02420S... https://www.legis.la.gov/Legis/ViewDocument.aspx?d=1427667 https://www.legis.la.gov/Legis/ViewDocument.aspx?d=1427667
  - longislandguido 7mo ago
    Literally every single thing you linked to is completely unrelated to the topic at hand. Those are all specifically targeted at mobile app stores—which already verify age—and have nothing to do with general purpose operating systems or their account creation. Try moving the goalposts more carefully next time.
    - favorited 7mo ago
      They are two sides of the same coin, both funded by Facebook to shift age verification liability from their platform to OS vendors. If you were interested in information beyond your own echo chamber, you’d realize that literally every significant app store is run by an OS vendor. Try using basic critical thinking next time. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rmhxk1/i_pulled_the_actual_bill_text_from_5_state_age/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rmhxk1/i_pulled_the...
Mars008 7mo ago
Somehow I'm not surprised. They voted for Biden in 2020 then for Kamala. Just like california with it's OS age verification.
- MarsIronPI 7mo ago
  Hey, it's mostly those northern city folk who vote blue. Down where I'm at it's all pretty much red.
desireco42 7mo ago
Why would California be dumb alone, let's show them we can be too... I don't know how else to read this.
stackedinserter 7mo ago
Too much for Dem's state.
bigbuppo 7mo ago
If allowing children access to social media is dangerous, then why aren't they enforcing existing child abuse and child endangerment laws? Throw the parents in prison for failing to control their children.
- logicchains 7mo ago
  >If allowing children access to social media is dangerous, then why aren't they enforcing existing child abuse and child endangerment laws? Because there's no remotely compelling evidence for this and it'd be thrown out by a judge as a huge parental rights violation.
  - bigbuppo 7mo ago
    So the justification for these age restrictions is bogus then?
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
bitbytebane 7mo ago
[dead]
_slih 7mo ago
three states passing the same template bill in three months isn't organic legislation
jdprgm 7mo ago
What the hell is going on. Why does it seem like largely out of nowhere there is suddenly such a dramatic push on age verification and internet censorship popping up literally all over the world at the same time.
- MarsIronPI 7mo ago
  Meta seems to be pushing for it to cover their liability.
rnxrx 7mo ago
There's something I've never seen a good answer to: why is this being mandated in the OS vs requiring it for apps - or classes of apps? There's plenty of parental controls already available for browsers - after verifying the user's age on startup, why not add a header field that the browser inserts along with AgentID (for example) and call it a day?
- mminer237 7mo ago
  1. It's easier to download a new browser than reinstall your OS. 2. Plenty of websites make their own apps, and then you're back to just having every website under the sun trying to verify everyone's age to know who to show explicit content to.
zb3 7mo ago
I didn't know a single company could just pay politicians state-by-state to pass a given law - in my country that would be a crime, but it seems in the US this is how the legislation process works :)
tsoukase 7mo ago
In a perfect world the right way to protect children from digital dangers is by proper parenting. In the real world the government steps in so that the next generation doesn't come up crippled. The solution is imperfect and might be a privacy nightmare but is better than nothing. There is a lot of bad parenting in preventing digital-related problems in children.
monksy 7mo ago
Find your rep and let them know you do not approve: https://www.elections.il.gov/electionoperations/districtlocator/districtofficialsearchbyaddress.aspx https://www.elections.il.gov/electionoperations/districtloca...
freeeek 7mo ago
How can any of this be implemented in simpler OSes like freedos?
burnt-resistor 7mo ago
Fuck this "think of the children" unnecessary, astroturfed, privacy invasive corporate corruption of government. This is just the opening salvo in erosion of individual rights.
monksy 7mo ago
Apparently you can file your arugements against it: https://www.ilga.gov/house/hearings/details/3062/22570/CreateWitnessSlip/?legislationId=167486&GaId=18&View=Create&emci=d6dc334d-d520-f111-9a48-000d3a14b640&emdi=4ee3cf20-4221-f111-9a48-000d3a14b640&ceid=12074808 https://www.ilga.gov/house/hearings/details/3062/22570/Creat...
notepad0x90 7mo ago
I was talking about middle grounds and finding a workable/tolerable solution a few days ago, but as I'm entitled to, I've changed my mind now that I've found out freaking zuckerberg is behind all this. it isn't the will of the people. That's what has me down about US politics big time. Even the most extreme voices in politics (warren, sanders, aoc,etc..) don't even come close to holding these people accountable. I don't care about taxing them, I care about prison time for interfering with a democracy like this (not retroactively of course). No one is even entertaining properly criminalizing such behavior. Even they made it illegal, they'll just make it a fine a billionaire can pay like an oopsie parking ticket. These ruling class types have always been there, and human nature is such that they will always be there. But you have to understand, this isn't feudal era England, the government and society isn't built to tolerate them. Their behavior as such is parasitical and only leads to destruction of society. In their parasitism, they've fooled themselves into believing their wealth can shield them. But the nature of the parasite is such that it can't live without a viable host. Whatever you believe about billionaires controlling politicians, it's much much worse than you think.
nerdyadventurer 7mo ago
What is their intent with this, for an OS?

290 points by terminalbraid 7mo ago

What is the reasoning behind this exactly? Yeah, I know Meta is behind it, but surely they will throw it out if it is absord, right... right?

spullara 7mo ago

this is completely insane. we need some kind of constitutional amendment to get rid of all this kind legislation forever.

chronic20001 7mo ago
[flagged]
- prophesi 7mo ago
  > For the record, I don’t care enough about age verification. Whether the law passes or not, I don’t really care. Sounds like there actually would be some benefit commenting about it on HN.
  - alephnerd 7mo ago
    No one who matters uses HN or cares about HN. The handful of us on HN who are in or near a position to affect change are basically here due to habit or $#itposting until we get banned. So they are right in that sense - commenting on HN is cathartic but ultimately useless. And the people who matter and are against this also don't use HN because they view this platform as toxic and reactionary.
    - prophesi 7mo ago
      There are software engineers who directly work for the platforms lobbying for this whom post here.
      - alephnerd 7mo ago
        ICs don't matter. I can fire one and hire 5, and increasingly, the demographics on HN don't align with those who work in those organizations. HN is basically slashdot now.
        prophesi 7mo ago
        > and increasingly, the demographics on HN don't align with those who work in those organizations. People have been worried about that on HN for years, but I still see the same culture. There do seem to be more bots and astroturfing, but that's a systemic issue with all social media platforms today.
        alephnerd 7mo ago
        > People have been worried about that on HN for years, but I still see the same culture... And that's the crux of the issue - the industry and people have changed, but HN hasn't changed discourse wise and is growing increasingly disconnected demographically speaking. A large portion of HNers are men in their late 30s to 50s, and no longer located in the Bay Area or NYC. No one's who matters is having these kinds of conversations on HN - they're meeting IRL with Luma invites or in signal/imessage/discord group chats.
        prophesi 7mo ago
        And what I'm saying is that the people who actually matter are posting here. Because it's a trusted social platform. We want to talk to fellow experts of varied expertise, and I truly appreciate the discussions I have here. Feel free to have discussions of similar value on platforms with smaller, focused communities; I do the same for the tech I know. I do agree bots/astroturfing are prevalent here. But I've had https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com as my homepage for ages for a reason, as opposed to literally any other forum. I hope this doesn't become what reddit is now. Did "hacker news" lose its stallman flavor in favor of venture capital investors? Yes, at the get-go; but that doesn't mean people have sold out their morals. We're all frustrated. We live in a society. At least in the US, you'll just call a representative who's getting paid by lobbyists letting your message fall on deaf ears. But I have seen so many great comments here by people with beautiful minds and good intentions; and sometimes I can even debate with them and get my ass handed to me, because they're much more brilliant than I. edit: was curious on Luma. Is it basically meetup/radius/partiful/apple invites but for crypto bros?
jjtheblunt 7mo ago
it's entirely possible such nonsense is all show, and wouldn't be passed, however. i'm from illinois, worked in california, and no longer live in either. from afar, it seems that whatever california bureaucrats propose, after a short delay, gets proposed by their little sibling bureaucrats in illinois.
- dmitrygr 7mo ago
  This. IL and MA follow whatever CA does with a few year lag. Considerations of sanity never enter into the discussion.
  - MarsIronPI 7mo ago
    As an Illinoisan, this kind of stuff makes me want to leave and get somewhere sane. Anybody have recommendations? What places don't have this kind of insanity?
    - jjtheblunt 7mo ago
      As an Illinoisan who left 23 years ago for work in California, worked a summer in Massachusetts, now in Arizona, i think the answer is Antarctica.
    - dmitrygr 7mo ago
      Answers will be provided after adequate proof that you will not bring the voting record that made illinois what it is with you.
    - stutstev 7mo ago
      There's some hope in New Hampshire. Our legislature just struck down our equivalent bill[1] while it was in committee. And within the last decade, privacy was enshrined in our state constitution[2], providing us with more legal teeth, on top of our free speech protections, to defeat digital age verification within the state. [1] https://legiscan.com/NH/bill/HB1658/2026 https://legiscan.com/NH/bill/HB1658/2026 [2] https://www.nh.gov/glance/state-constitution/bill-rights https://www.nh.gov/glance/state-constitution/bill-rights
varispeed 7mo ago
constitutional amendment to criminalise corporate lobbying with severe penalties - including capital punishment and confiscation of entire corporation.
Aunche 7mo ago
People are making way too big a deal of this IMO. This is basically the OS equivalent of that checkbox you click to enter a porn website that gets exposed to Meta, so they can claim that they did what they all the they could to protect children if they get sued by parents. Any determined kid would figure out a way around this, but I can see it stopping younger and less determined kids, and it's a useful tool for parents.
- zardo 7mo ago
  Wouldn't a some kind of technical standard proposal be a more sensible way to do this than trying to pass OS laws state by state?
  - ezfe 7mo ago
    iOS (for example) already has that technical standard in place and usable.
- 0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
  It does not stop at the check box. Someone is going to sue Google/Apple when a 13 year old gets on a porn site. Then Google/Apple will introduce "verification" that requires linking your identity to your device, and attesting this to the "operator" (porn site). Then every person using any OS is tracked, on every website and app, all the time, by law. And Linux becomes illegal without it. This is not a theory. Laws requiring this are going through the state and federal level right now.
- acuozzo 7mo ago
  How would this work for e.g. RTOS or even TempleOS?! Does the hidden Minix installation on every Intel CPU with the Intel Management Engine count?
- davorak 7mo ago
  Unlike the California law, I seemed to be in the minority in this opinion, this one does seem to require programs like grep to ask for a users age bracket. > (b) An operator shall request a signal with respect to a particular user from an operating system provider or a covered application store when the application is downloaded and launched. Unlike the California law I do not see anything that restricts this to child accounts only. So let say I have a program: print("Hello, World!") and I want to publish it to say npm or nixos, or some linux distribution. Not with out violating this law. This application needs to request the users age brackets at least at 'downloaded and launched' optimistically that means once on first launch, but potentially needs to be requested on each launch of the application. So lets fix the program import ageBracket ageBracket.get() print("Hello, World!") There we go, now the code is compliant with my imagined ageBracket module.
ActorNightly 7mo ago
I actually see the golden lining here >"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. I.e Linux will most likely to be immune, since its not tied to a particular computer. Which just means Linux stay winning. It already made big headway in the video game space, so its prime to take over personal computing too.
- tokai 7mo ago
  All the distros are the providers here. The Linux kernel is not an operating system.
  - 1718627440 7mo ago
    Since GNU(or other)/Linux OSes allow the sysadmin to compose the OS out of parts and change them, the final OS is created by the sysadmin. That's what makes distributing binary software so annoying for maintainers, every installation can be it's own snowflake OS.
- jmye 7mo ago
  > since its not tied to a particular computer. That's a really weird and nonsensical reading of "operating system software on a computer".
- karmakaze 7mo ago
  Wouldn't that include using it on any cloud service that let's you pick it?
burnt-resistor 7mo ago
Unfortunately, a rhetorical knee-jerk response that it needs universal, specific counter legislation for a "permanent fix" is panacea, magical thinking. The root cause is a corrupt government doing the bidding of a few rich people and other countries. Fixing that will be very difficult but is nonetheless necessary and possible to largely thwart legislators from working against their own ostensible constituency.

mikestorrent 7mo ago

I don't like this whole thing, but compared to what I was fearing would happen, this idea is nowhere near as bad. What I expected was that we'd end up with the OS vendors actually being mandated to really do age verification, and then submitting that using Web Credentials and Secure Attestation so that the far end could trust the whole thing, locking open-source OS's out of the mix and creating more of a walled garden online than we already have. I was guessing it would become a simple checkbox on e.g. Cloudflare - "[ ] allow adult users only" or whatever - and that it would end up with vast swathes of the internet going off limits for anyone not on closed-source systems. Now, it looks like this is just a way for parents to tell the OS "this is a kid account" and have it flow through to websites so they can easily proactively block kids from connecting without having to implement any of that crap. Yes, it's much potentially easier for a child to circumvent; but any kid who can get around that sort of thing from within an OS could probably just wipe/reinstall anyway, so who cares? As a parent whose kids are continually trying to see what trouble they can get into, I appreciate that I will get one more potential weapon in the fight. Can someone tell me whether I am being a fool by actually being a bit relieved it's going this way?

tracker1 7mo ago
What do you think comes after this? This is just a first step towards exactly requiring age verification at the OS/Store level... Then comes ever more restrictive and intrusive tracking and eliminating all anonymity as a final goal. Time to start throwing up hobby BBS sites... and I think in this case text mode interfaces over web might be an advantage.
Larrikin 7mo ago
Websites can send down a single header indicating adult content. The device, the parent setup to indicate the users age, can respect that. Legitimate adult websites will not show the content. There is no need for any verification beyond that or it's just government mandated surveillance.
- jacobgkau 7mo ago
  > There is no need for any verification beyond that or it's just government mandated surveillance. There is no verification beyond that in these sorts of bills (CA, CO, IL). It's the parent's responsibility to watch their kids when they set up an account. > Legitimate adult websites will not show the content. This is a big problem (that won't necessarily be solved by this particular legislation, granted). There are already voluntary rating HTML tags websites can add to indicate parental control software should block them, but they're voluntary and non-standardized. Websites can choose not to comply with no real-world consequences. And I don't think platforms like Reddit or X, which are ostensibly all-ages social media but also have an abundance of adult content, are properly set up to serve tags like that on NSFW posts but not other ones. It's a tricky problem to solve, and, imo, it's one the tech industry has demonstrated it doesn't have any desire to solve itself, hence legislation starting to get involved. > Websites can send down a single header indicating adult content. It sounds at first glance like a no-brainer that websites shouldn't have access to any information and the enforcement should be done at a local level (like the current voluntary HTML tags that locally installed parental control software can sometimes read). But some websites might want to display alternate content to minors-- e.g. a Wikipedia article with some images withheld, or Reddit sending a user back to an all-ages subreddit instead of just fully breaking or failing to load when the user stumbles upon something 18+. For anything like that, the website will need to know in some form that the user isn't able to see 18+ content.

shablulman 7mo ago

[dead]

exabrial 7mo ago

Why suddenly are all of the blue states doing this BS? What is going on and what control is this affording the government?

dzink 7mo ago
Meta is lobbying with millions for it.
Nijikokun 7mo ago
Meta is behind a huge amount of it, they have funded the majority of these
tadfisher 7mo ago
Lobbying from Meta. They do not want to do age-verification themselves (and pay for it).
RankingMember 7mo ago
See the actors behind this here (Meta is a big one): https://tboteproject.com/ https://tboteproject.com/
anonym29 7mo ago
Blue states: paternalism over your property, liberty for your body Red states: paternalism over your body, liberty for your property
- gruez 7mo ago
  except for during covid, where there was a weird reversal.
  - anonym29 7mo ago
    I don't even know if that was much of a "reversal". Blue states were paternalistic over both your property (business and social gathering shutdowns) and your body (masking, social distancing enforcement), while red states (particularly Texas, Florida) were very laissez-faire for both. What's perplexing about this is that research has generally correlated higher amygdala activity (fear/worry) with political conservatism, and lower amygdala activity with political progressivism, but in this case, the effect seemed almost inverted.

thrill 7mo ago

“Use of this computer is illegal in the state of Illinois - your friendly neighborhood SWAT team has been notified.”

Slow_Hand 7mo ago

If I’m not mistaken, Meta has been lobbying heavily for all of these age-verification bills lately. It seems their strategy is to externalize their responsibility to verify age themselves, and thus reduce their exposure to liabilities when child protection acts like COPPA are violated.

NotGMan 7mo ago
Yes https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1rsn1tm/it_appears_meta_is_heavily_lobbying_for_linux_age/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1rsn1tm/it_a...
- Slow_Hand 7mo ago
  Really, I’m surprised that for all of the discussions on HN around these individual statewide acts that I see so little discussion of Meta as a primary force pushing them.
  - pesus 7mo ago
    There are probably many more people that would profit off of it on HN.
  - iAMkenough 7mo ago
    I wonder if Meta monitors their employees comments on HN?
    - alephnerd 7mo ago
      They don't but frankly no one who matters actually gives a s#it about HN anyhow. HN is also much less representative of the demographics within the American tech industry now as well - almost all the references I see on here are stuff only men in their late 30s to 50s would recognize, and an increasing amount of users appear to be based in Western and Central Europe. Heck, I'm on the younger end by HN standards (early/mid 30s) and when I introduced HN to my peers over a decade ago (this is my throwaway) even back then they complained that it was "toxic", "snooty", and "unhelpful". And it's reputation amongst the younger generation has only gotten worse. HN has "SlashDot"ified, because most people are either in private groupchats on signal/imessage/discord or meeting each other with Luma invites.

TheChaplain 7mo ago

Curious how OpenBSD or Haiku will comply.

dpe82 7mo ago
By adding a simple birthdate field to your account info and a system API of some sort for retrieving the account owner's age range, same as everyone else.
prmoustache 7mo ago
For what I understand, OpenBSD could just patch useradd so that the age category is mentionned in the comment field of /etc/passwd or a random text file in /etc. Haiku could just run an automatic dialog asking you if you are minor, in Illinois or California and write a text file with the corresponding age category of said person. These bills do not mandate that the user cannot modify that information AFAIK.
JCattheATM 7mo ago
I can't imagine OpenBSD would be bothered by laws specific to a very small selection of US states.
iamnothere 7mo ago
OpenBSD devs have signaled noncompliance from their Canadian fortress of freedom.
sanex 7mo ago
Tbh they probably don't care about anyone other than Microsoft or Apple, though it's certainly not written that way.

hypeatei 7mo ago

What are they going to do to enforce this? Take down open source projects that "operate" in Illinois because a user downloaded the software there? Absolute joke and everyone should treat it that way; advanced compliance here means implicit support for the surveillance state.

anthk 7mo ago

Read and share "Free Software, Free Society" now. Richard Stallman advised us about it long ago. Thank god Plan9 got relicensed into GPL. 9front might not totally free, but it's a step in case GNU+Linux gets utterly broken. And, yes, please, go try Trisquel (novice users), GUIX (experts) and Hyperbola (experts and protocol purists). Avoid every Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Netflix service with nonfree JS.

k33n 7mo ago
When I need to use my computer, I'm not thinking about someone else's crusade. I have crusades of my own to fail miserably at and I need all the help I can get from whatever products function best.
longislandguido 7mo ago
The pragmatic Richard that wrote that book is long gone I'm afraid. Today his blog is filled with weird rants against voter ID, the Iran conflict, and a list of other countries he dislikes because they have national ID cards and this is a bad thing apparently. For someone who is a renowned world traveler, you would think he has heard of passports by now. Not a peep about these bills that could have a very real impact on an operating system he invented (gah-noo). Then again, since he's never installed it himself*, account creation is not something he would have to deal with or care about. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umQL37AC_YM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umQL37AC_YM Maybe the solution is as simple as having an adult create your account for you. Like paying a homeless guy to buy you booze or cigarettes, not that anyone would ever do that.

tracker1 7mo ago

I wonder how this will mix wit federal laws saying you aren't allowed to track users under the age of 13yo? Will this then be forced as a browser API/header passed to every server/request?

johnisgood 7mo ago
Yeah but if so, what does it have to do with the OS itself, i.e. outside the browser?
- tracker1 7mo ago
  From articles I've seen, it's mostly Facebook lobbying to "pass the buck" upstream to the OS level to actually inquire... this of course will blead into the OS provided "store" interfaces most likely. And while, likely mostly targeting Apple and Google, MS/Windows and Linux are definitely going to be catching stray bullets. In particular vendors with Linux pre-installed... hence System 76 adding the feature to PopOS. Who knows if/how this will come about in practice or how consistently.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

pengaru 7mo ago

i look forward to the police showing up and explaining to me how computing is a privilege, not a right

strongpigeon 7mo ago

People here seem very against this, but I don't really see it. This only require to have a form asking about your age and provide an API to read it, right? Surely I'm missing something? Is the backlash due to fear of a slippery slope?

toomuchtodo 7mo ago
I am very pro social media regulation (with regards to age gating) due to the evidenced harm it causes, and which court cases have shown these companies are well aware of internally; with that said, this is an attempt by social media companies to shift liability to keep business as usual/status quo. This is no different than what oil companies have done, cigarette companies, chemical companies who have polluted at scale while knowing the harm, etc. Meta and TikTok (and YouTube shorts to an extent) are the new Sackler family and Purdue pharma. They will hold on to these profit and power engines as long and hard as possible. They will not stop causing the harm unless forced to with regulation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_United_... https://www.profgalloway.com/addiction-economy/ https://www.profgalloway.com/addiction-economy/
- strongpigeon 7mo ago
  > This is an attempt by social media companies to shift liability to keep business as usual/status quo. Do you mind expanding on why that is? Is it because it allows them to say "well the API told us they're adults so we're all good"?
  - steviedotboston 7mo ago
    and the verification that the OS has to provide is minimal. the OS doesn't need to verify and ID or anything. Probably just a checkbox when you create the account that you're an adult, or child, etc. and then that's provided to the browser. So it effectively becomes meaningless if the goal is to get children off social media.
- 7mo ago

1970-01-01 7mo ago

The "one weird trick" that all government hates? Stop forcing OSes to function with accounts. "User account" is an artifact of UNIX. You don't need an account to start a car, send and email, nor boot an operating system. I know it's hard to grasp, but it's true.

gruez 7mo ago
What's the "user account" for an iPhone? Sure you might have to sign into icloud, but that's not mandatory. It's effectively a single user system.
- greenie_beans 7mo ago
  i'm sure there is some sorta root user on that system if you go digging far enough?? or am i just ignorant
thoughtpalette 7mo ago
Growing up, I vividly remember user accounts being important for our families personas on Windows XP. There's definitely a place for them, but there should be an option to not use one. Unless your specifically calling out accounts that require online registration for the OS. I'm vehemently against that requirement.
datsci_est_2015 7mo ago
> You don't need an account to start a car, … Don’t say this too loud please, I don’t honestly think we’re too far from this reality, at least from an “Overton Window” point of view.
- 2postsperday 7mo ago
  [flagged]
- IAmBroom 7mo ago
  Some cars already have accounts. If you don't pick one, it assumes the prior one is being reused - so de facto it's already here.

ottah 7mo ago

This coordinated state level attack on the legislative process is crazy. These people can't seem to be bothered to do the basics of governing, but they always find time to do this cross-state nightmare fuel.

dmix 7mo ago
State government is always the worst for this sort of garbage legislation. The number of "economically-impactful" regulatory pages generated by state governments far outpaces the federal government in the US. And plenty of it is just corporate or influential NIMBY appeasement.
notepad0x90 7mo ago
It is a fault in part in the government designed with bits and pieces of "honor system" and "well no one will ever do that!"; and the governed unable or unwilling to enact consequences.

firtoz 7mo ago

It's kinda convenient because every service needs to ask you for the age now because they can't serve under 13s in a lot of cases. Having it be a simple API would be a decent convenience, no? If you connect it with a permission system where you can choose whether to provide this information (e.g. >13 as a bool or age as an integer or the birthday as a date) that can't be too bad I guess? I haven't read the whole thing of course.

edgyquant 7mo ago
What if someone else is using the computer/phone/etc?
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
pull_my_finger 7mo ago
It WOULD be nice if it only got used appropriately. But in 2026 its just one more metric to narrow down your profile for advertisers. Wouldn't it be convenient if you could just opt-out of tracking with a convenient API like the literal "do not track" header in browsers? It exists, but none of the people who SHOULD use it pay it any attention except as, ironically, another metric used to track people. Not to mention that computing is a global thing, and in order for this to be useful it would definitely have to be providing more specific information than just a bool. Maybe chats require 13+, but pornography requires 18+. Maybe those ages are different based on location. All advertisers would need to do is ping the various different checks to get your actual or at least very approximate age. This kind of thing is a slippery slope, and its ripe for abuse by doxxers, advertisers and big brother himself. Burn this with fire. I'm totally in agreement with the others that suggest stuff like this should b just get banned from getting introduced and reintroduced constantly trying to sneak it in as a rider or hidden provision. The people DON'T want it.
bigbuppo 7mo ago
We got rid of the IDENT protocol a long time ago because it was stupid.

glitchc 7mo ago

The law as is written mainly targets social media platforms. For an OS to comply, all it needs to do is provide a field during account creation that records the user's date of birth as supplied by the user. There is no onus on the operator to confirm the veracity of this information, or even record it anywhere other than the local OS install itself. I think we're safe.

JCattheATM 7mo ago
It's the start of a very slippery slope.
- naikrovek 7mo ago
  Slippery slopes are a logical fallacy. Every single decision moving you down the slope is intentional. No sliding occurs if nothing actively pushes things down the slide. Accordingly, it is never too late to lobby against these things.
  - mattnewton 7mo ago
    Like gravity, there is some inexorably force drawing the state towards mass surveillance tools as it makes the job easier. Removing friction that fights against that force is real
  - areoform 7mo ago
    Not if you're being pushed down the slope. It's not an accident that this appeared within a month or two of the California one. I would bet good money that there's someone shopping this bill around. If you do a frequency analysis of when these bills are being introduced, you'll notice an odd cluster internationally. Less charitably, they're coordinating / talking / being pushed by someone. More charitably, the "idea" is spreading. It's a very odd idea to spread though. Age "verification" isn't something people are truly passionate about. I suspect that, long-term, this is about surveillance. The powers that be would rather kill the golden genie that's general purpose compute than have teens and radical youth with compute. This is going to get bad.

saityi 7mo ago

Even if open source operating systems comply and add such a feature, what's to stop individual people from removing this and blocking the API requests before they install the OS? Or providing dummy responses? They're open source, after all. Is the government going to require some sort of automated checks that verify every person who connects to the internet has this API on their OS and go after individuals that aren't in compliance?

wosined 7mo ago

Karens making stupid bills. What is and what is not an OS?

albertsw 7mo ago

How old is root?

worksonmine 7mo ago
$today - 1970-01-01T00:00:00

TutleCpt 7mo ago

My future OS: https://agelesslinux.org https://agelesslinux.org

fredgrott 7mo ago

here is the date I will put out.... 1 10 0000 or even better 1 10 -2000 This will turn into most useless set of laws ever

clcaev 7mo ago

How will public libraries comply?

bigbuppo 7mo ago
Presumably they'll burn down the libraries.

balozi 7mo ago

What recourse would Illinois have against open-source operating systems? Anyone can roll their own Linux distro and share it with whomever they want.

icwtyjj 7mo ago
> What recourse would Illinois (!) have against open-source operating systems? None but them corporations sure do. And with a little cash in the right place I'm sure they can push recourse onto people of power. We really need to end political lobbying one of these days

fhn 7mo ago

These people are just so clueless. All they will find is that everybody on the internet is an adult.

0xbadcafebee 7mo ago

> the Children's Social Media Safety Act > > provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both Thank goodness kids can't lie about their age! > provide an operator who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user a signal that identifies the user's age by category Wait - if this is just to pass a signal to an operator ("social media site"), why can't the "operator" just ask for the age themselves? Answer: they don't want to be liable and get fined $400 Million, like Meta got fined, for letting kids on social media. (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/05/business/meta-children-data-protection-europe.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/05/business/meta-children-da...) This is why Meta is forcing this legislation through nation-wide. They are forcing Google/Apple to take the liability, despite it not actually being Google or Apple that's providing the "harmful" social media. Meta are doing this state-by-state so nobody can track that it's them. Easier than pushing at a federal level, and raises fewer red flags from news media. Since Google and Apple won't want to accept this liability either, the next step is requiring digital IDs and third-party verification to prove the user is of age. This will enable tracking of all users, whatever app or website they go to. Bills requiring this are already being passed at state and federal level.

SilverElfin 7mo ago

Every single sponsor of this bill is a Democrat. Why is that? I would think they’re against the type of puritanical moralizing that is behind most age verification bills.

ThinkingGuy 7mo ago
You must be too young to remember Tipper Gore... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipper_Gore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipper_Gore
- SilverElfin 7mo ago
  Oh I remember. I just assumed things have changed enough, and that the threat of theocratic ideology - what’s behind project 2025 - would have made such stances unacceptable. My guess is this has more to do with lobbying and donor interest.
autoexec 7mo ago
they love money and facebook has the cash to bribe them
- MarsIronPI 7mo ago
  "I like money." - Frito Pendejo

johndecktwo 7mo ago

Agelesslinux

longislandguido 7mo ago

The most progressive states doing exactly what their constituents elected them to do. I don't understand why everyone is so surprised.

favorited 7mo ago
"Progressive states" like Utah, Texas, and Louisiana? https://le.utah.gov/~2025/bills/static/SB0142.html https://le.utah.gov/~2025/bills/static/SB0142.html https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/89R/billtext/html/SB02420S.HTM https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/89R/billtext/html/SB02420S... https://www.legis.la.gov/Legis/ViewDocument.aspx?d=1427667 https://www.legis.la.gov/Legis/ViewDocument.aspx?d=1427667
- longislandguido 7mo ago
  Literally every single thing you linked to is completely unrelated to the topic at hand. Those are all specifically targeted at mobile app stores—which already verify age—and have nothing to do with general purpose operating systems or their account creation. Try moving the goalposts more carefully next time.
  - favorited 7mo ago
    They are two sides of the same coin, both funded by Facebook to shift age verification liability from their platform to OS vendors. If you were interested in information beyond your own echo chamber, you’d realize that literally every significant app store is run by an OS vendor. Try using basic critical thinking next time. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rmhxk1/i_pulled_the_actual_bill_text_from_5_state_age/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rmhxk1/i_pulled_the...

Mars008 7mo ago

Somehow I'm not surprised. They voted for Biden in 2020 then for Kamala. Just like california with it's OS age verification.

MarsIronPI 7mo ago
Hey, it's mostly those northern city folk who vote blue. Down where I'm at it's all pretty much red.

desireco42 7mo ago

Why would California be dumb alone, let's show them we can be too... I don't know how else to read this.

stackedinserter 7mo ago

Too much for Dem's state.

bigbuppo 7mo ago

If allowing children access to social media is dangerous, then why aren't they enforcing existing child abuse and child endangerment laws? Throw the parents in prison for failing to control their children.

logicchains 7mo ago
>If allowing children access to social media is dangerous, then why aren't they enforcing existing child abuse and child endangerment laws? Because there's no remotely compelling evidence for this and it'd be thrown out by a judge as a huge parental rights violation.
- bigbuppo 7mo ago
  So the justification for these age restrictions is bogus then?

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

bitbytebane 7mo ago

[dead]

_slih 7mo ago

three states passing the same template bill in three months isn't organic legislation

jdprgm 7mo ago

What the hell is going on. Why does it seem like largely out of nowhere there is suddenly such a dramatic push on age verification and internet censorship popping up literally all over the world at the same time.

MarsIronPI 7mo ago
Meta seems to be pushing for it to cover their liability.

rnxrx 7mo ago

There's something I've never seen a good answer to: why is this being mandated in the OS vs requiring it for apps - or classes of apps? There's plenty of parental controls already available for browsers - after verifying the user's age on startup, why not add a header field that the browser inserts along with AgentID (for example) and call it a day?

mminer237 7mo ago
1. It's easier to download a new browser than reinstall your OS. 2. Plenty of websites make their own apps, and then you're back to just having every website under the sun trying to verify everyone's age to know who to show explicit content to.

zb3 7mo ago

I didn't know a single company could just pay politicians state-by-state to pass a given law - in my country that would be a crime, but it seems in the US this is how the legislation process works :)

tsoukase 7mo ago

In a perfect world the right way to protect children from digital dangers is by proper parenting. In the real world the government steps in so that the next generation doesn't come up crippled. The solution is imperfect and might be a privacy nightmare but is better than nothing. There is a lot of bad parenting in preventing digital-related problems in children.

monksy 7mo ago

Find your rep and let them know you do not approve: https://www.elections.il.gov/electionoperations/districtlocator/districtofficialsearchbyaddress.aspx https://www.elections.il.gov/electionoperations/districtloca...

freeeek 7mo ago

How can any of this be implemented in simpler OSes like freedos?

burnt-resistor 7mo ago

Fuck this "think of the children" unnecessary, astroturfed, privacy invasive corporate corruption of government. This is just the opening salvo in erosion of individual rights.

monksy 7mo ago

Apparently you can file your arugements against it: https://www.ilga.gov/house/hearings/details/3062/22570/CreateWitnessSlip/?legislationId=167486&GaId=18&View=Create&emci=d6dc334d-d520-f111-9a48-000d3a14b640&emdi=4ee3cf20-4221-f111-9a48-000d3a14b640&ceid=12074808 https://www.ilga.gov/house/hearings/details/3062/22570/Creat...

notepad0x90 7mo ago

I was talking about middle grounds and finding a workable/tolerable solution a few days ago, but as I'm entitled to, I've changed my mind now that I've found out freaking zuckerberg is behind all this. it isn't the will of the people. That's what has me down about US politics big time. Even the most extreme voices in politics (warren, sanders, aoc,etc..) don't even come close to holding these people accountable. I don't care about taxing them, I care about prison time for interfering with a democracy like this (not retroactively of course). No one is even entertaining properly criminalizing such behavior. Even they made it illegal, they'll just make it a fine a billionaire can pay like an oopsie parking ticket. These ruling class types have always been there, and human nature is such that they will always be there. But you have to understand, this isn't feudal era England, the government and society isn't built to tolerate them. Their behavior as such is parasitical and only leads to destruction of society. In their parasitism, they've fooled themselves into believing their wealth can shield them. But the nature of the parasite is such that it can't live without a viable host. Whatever you believe about billionaires controlling politicians, it's much much worse than you think.

nerdyadventurer 7mo ago

What is their intent with this, for an OS?