Be careful, you open yourselves up to be used by companies like iDenfy, AgeChecker.Net, IDscan.net, and others as they would HATE to see a local-first solution like what's been proposed in CA and IL to take hold.

They want to kill those bills so that their laws that they passed in TN and TX are expanded and they make more money.

I don't really like either solution, but I definitely don't want to help the companies that want to keep a copy of my ID and face scan.

I read some of the Ubuntu thread about potential implementations and it sure made me pine for some rose tinted good old days when AccountsServices, xdg-portals, dbus, systemd-login, et al. weren’t things one had to know or care about. Everything seems so complicated these days.

I guess this can potentially make it easy for the overzealous lawmakers & individuals harass those os/distributions to introduce age verification.

I prefer a satirical 'ShouldItAgeVerify' page that points the ridiculousness of shoving verification at unexpected places.

So once an OS has your age then what it is just handed out to sites so they can target children for better kidnapping?

I... Kinda think this will work out ok? Hear me out: Linux is open source. Someone's gonna make an application/kernelmodule that lets you configure your reported age on a application/website basis.

In some jurisdictions it's illegal to target kids with advertisement, and I believe also to track them? Reporting your age as 8-12 is gonna be the new, but actually functional "no tracking" header.

Age verification is simple! A Kelvar strap must be attached to the user before the device will power up. A probe in the strap takes a drop of blood from the user and analyzes the protein markers to determine the user's age. (See the Stanford U. study for details.)

Surprised G. Orwell or A. Huxley didn't think of it first.

This seems to be a shorter list than the one collected by Ageless Linux (https://agelesslinux.org/distros.html), although the GH issues seem to have the status of some additional distros.

See also https://github.com/AntiSurv/oss-anti-surveillance for a project to patch out any future age verification code.

lol, why not just createa law and state that "people must be happy, environment must be good, everyone must get along with everyone, also no wars".

Law doesn't work like this.

This is not law, this is impersonating God, or a bad prompt to LLM I guess.

what if a distro uses systemd and systemd implements age verification?

If it's open source then the user can remove "age verification" before compiling

Or the user can compile a version that predates "age verification"

Can anyone tell me exactly what these laws do? Is it just going to ask for a birthday when I run `adduser`? What's the point? Is it meant for one admin account to restrict other user accounts?

The browser needs to actually read this for it to be meaningful. Where is that list?

The omarchy statement is just DHH dropping the r-word in a DM.

I love omarchy, but manchild/edgelord behaviour from the lead doesn’t exactly instill confidence.

artix linux is a joy to use

Here is the exact text of the california law, make your own opinion.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

What I got out of it was that an os has to provide an interface to applications so that if they make an age request(note that the law says nothing about when or what applications will make a age request) the os can provide something. and it has to provide an interface for the user to enter the information.

So when we map this requirement onto the mechanism of how the os provides information to applications. and how users set up the system. I have come to the conclusion that compliance on a unix-like platforms is as simple as

echo ${AGE_CATEGORY} > ~/.config/ca_ab_1043

Then the program can get the age category anytime it wants to. the user is able to put this information in at account setup just like the law asks using an accessible interface, the same interface everything else on a unix-like platform uses, the shell.

I believe the California law (which has passed) requires operating systems to collect the DoB or Age of the user when setting up a user account, and then expose an API that shares the users age range (not their actual age or birthdate) when requested by an application.

It does not require the OS to actually verify the age, collect government IDs, or any other data.

The intention, I think, is to put the responsibility for communicating the users age on the OS, instead of having each application or service do their own age verification (by scanning IDs, requesting user data, etc). Since it’s set on the machine, a parent can set it once for their kid when setting up the device.

The short answer is that a lot of states now require KYC by service providers under the guise of adult content prohibition, "protecting the children", or mass surveillance. So the service providers like Facebook are trying to foist off the responsibility to the operating system. The pesky details of storing and managing PII becomes Somebody Else's Problem, and if the operating system implements an easily bypassed KYC e.g. a simple check box and then the kid get radicalized or get exposed to problematic content, the service provider can just shrug and point the finger at the OS. In other words it shifts the responsibility to the lowest level instead of the platform companies.

In the original article there are some blue underlined words. “California” is one of them. If you click it, you will get a nifty video answer to your question.

According to an opinion piece at The Register, California's is vague and nobody knows, including the law's proponents: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47398798

Depends on the law. Some of them say that the age range must be provided to all applications through an API, and all apps and “app stores” must filter content based on this value. Others say that this isn’t enough and you actually have to verify the age based on some commercial scheme like CC or ID verification. Some say you have to send the age to websites. Many of these laws seem to be in direct conflict about what is allowed and not allowed.

In all cases, at least in the US, these laws violate the first amendment (as code is a form of speech), and freedom respecting users and devs need to resist them until they can be defeated in court.

Honestly the laws don’t consider open source operating systems at all. They’re meant for the overwhelming majority who are using commercial operating systems. They imagine something like android or iOS or windows where yeah they ask the question during user creation and then handle the age gating in their app stores, anything outside that model isn’t something they’re going to spend any time thinking about, because why would they?