this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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California introduces age verification law for all operating systems, including Linux and SteamOS — user age verified during OS account setup (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 2 days ago by Amoxtli@thelemmy.club to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.works 21 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Since people aren't reading the article and the headline is misleading. The law requires:

  • The OS ask the user their date of birth on account creation (kinda like the Steam date of birth prompts)
  • The OS provide an API that returns which of four age brackets the user fits in
  • Companies notified by the OS that the user is under age may be liable

It was explicitly written by the authors not to mandate ID or facial recognition checks. You can lie about your date of birth. This basically creates a standard set of parental controls for parents configuring kids devices.

I think that this might actually help with the whole discord facial recognition issue in places other than the UK by allowing them to offload the issue to parents setting up devices rather than collecting kids biometrics.

[–] BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org 1 point 5 hours ago

Fucking hell, 1798.502.b is even more insane. Every developer of every single project has request the age bracket of every possible user? The people working on fucking ‘cp’ and ‘ls’ have to ask my age category when I run an update?!? This is absolutely insane.

[–] BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 9 hours ago

Furthermore, what is this law actually going to accomplish? What is the threat model that this protects from? How does it accomplish that? How is it better than something less invasive? Not some vague pearl clutching bullshit, but an actual threat protection model.

[–] BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

There are still so many problems with this. In addition to the general fuck you, it’s my computer, and fuck the state for forcing creeping surveillance on people, and how the hell would you enforce this, how would this even work for any of the following:

  • My RaspPi, running an older version of Linux. As far as I can tell, if I compile the kernel or write some code for it I would become the OS Provider.
  • A multiuser computer
  • A multiple people using the same account computer
  • Retro computing
  • A home media server. Maybe a NAS, maybe a home built machine.
  • A non-internet connected computer
  • Anything VM related
  • Any server in the cloud.
  • FreeDOS
  • An embedded machine in a car that I can ssh in to that crosses state lines.
  • An OS that doesn’t have the concept of user accounts
  • Hobby OS development
  • Oddball hardware that has been made to work as a general purpose computer, like a Chrome stick, hard drive controller or iPod?

It also looks like it applies to “covered application store” and from how that is defined, every public deb, apt, or yum repo is an application store, along with things like PyPI, crates.io, GitHub, and probably my own fucking git server that I share with some friends.

[–] markovs_gun@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Yeah I think this is pretty reasonable. If parents set their kids up on adult accounts that's on them.