> Some of these laws impose requirements on System76 and Linux distributions in general. The California law, and Colorado law modeled after it, were agreed in concert with major operating system providers. Should this method of age attestation become the standard, apps and websites will not assume liability when a signal is not provided and assume the lowest age bracket. Any Linux distribution that does not provide an age bracket signal will result in a nerfed internet for their users.

> We are accustomed to adding operating system features to comply with laws. Accessibility features for ADA, and power efficiency settings for Energy Star regulations are two examples. We are a part of this world and we believe in the rule of law. We still hope these laws will be recognized for the folly they are and removed from the books or found unconstitutional.

Anyways, it feels like all sides of the political spectrum are trying to strip away any semblance of anonymity or privacy online both in the US and abroad. No one should have to provide any personal details to use any general computing device. Otherwise, given the pervasive tracking done by corporations and the rise of constant surveillance outdoors, there will be nowhere for people to safely gather and express themselves freely and privately.

They can provide tools, sure. But restricting adults because some parents fail at parenting is insane. That is how a totalitarian state grows: by demanding the power to monitor and control every individual.

If you cannot control your children, that is your fault. And if that is the case, you should think twice before having kids.

I saw this a lot in college. Kids that didn’t have any freedom or autonomy while living at home went wild in college. They had no idea how to self-regulate. A lot of them failed out. Those who didn’t had some rough years. Sheltering kids for too long seems to do more harm than good. At least if they run into issues while still children, their parents can be there to help them through it so they can better navigate on their own once they move out.

> I can see that there will be programs that run on general purpose computers and peripherals that will even freak me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general purpose computers will find receptive audience for their positions. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, or protocols, or messages, will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy; and as we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits; all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship, which is why all this stuff matters.

Full talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

But there's a bigger issue than just what software you're allowed to run on your own computer. What's really insidious is the combination of the corporate and government interest. If every server tracks how old you are, it's a short step to tracking more information. Eventually it's a mandatory collection of metadata on everyone that uses a computer (which is every human). Something both corporations and governments would love.

You were worried about a national ID? No need. We'll have national metadata. Just sign in with your Apple Store/Google Store credentials. Don't worry about not having it, you can't use a computer without it. Now that we have your national login, the government can track everything you do on a computer (as all that friendly "telemetry" will be sent to the corporate servers). Hope you didn't visit an anti-Republican forum, or you might get an unfortunate audit.

These days, exposing an immature brain to the raw internet is basically just handing the brain and personality over to be molded by large corporations and algorithms.

And humans have never been rational, self-contained actors that self-educate perfectly when exposed to information, converging on an objectively good and constructive worldview. Quite the opposite.

Humans develop in relation to one another, increasingly in relation to algorithms, and sometimes become messed up, and sometimes those mess-ups would have been avoidable had relations or exposure been different.

In fact I would say you as a parent is not doing your job if you are not trying to make sure a 12 year old isn't pulled into, say, an anorexia rabbit hole.

Whether that is best done through making sure exposure doesn't happen, or through exposure and education, will depend on the child and parent (and society) in question. What worked best for a highly rational self-reliant geek teen may simply be a disaster for another human. And what worked for an upper class highly educated family may not work for a poor family with alcoholized parents or working 18 hours a day to make ends meet.

And parents are not perfect -- if all parents were perfect, there also would be no alcoholics and drug addicts or poverty or war. But people are imperfect, and it's natural to make laws to mitigate at least the worst effects of that. (Again, haven't read this specific law proposal, but found the worldview of OP a bit naive.)

Their ideas are deeply unhealthy for children and worst of all, lazily shift the responsibility of parenting from the parents to the state.

Many European countries have long had a culture of slowly increasingly responsibilities and freedoms to their children gradually, letting them slowly and safely test their boundaries. At least the proposed EU solution (for identity) tries to prevent overreach. The wholesale EU spying to “save the children”, which seems to be funded by the U.S. is a different topic and we need to continue to fight it tooth and nail.

The insidiousness lies with major tech companies and their pursuit of eyeballs on screens. The Internet was supposed to be something we used to learn, gain knowledge and connect. They took the internet over, bastardized it and made deeply addictive apps and games to keep you watching ads regardless of age.

These age checks are just for data collection and spying to sell the data to the highest bidder, which is likely governments in order to control and herd their populations.

The reason for this is easy to understand in the context of AI. In the future the only valuable asset will be a data and the access to that data.

In the future, any app will be built, replicated, deployed and maintained by AI. Apps, websites, especially B2B apps - their days are numbered.

If my business needs a billing system tailored to my business in the future, I’ll describe it and have an AI built and maintain it. That is not that far away in relative terms.

Our goal collectively (as technology advocates) is to make sure that this consolidation of personal data doesn’t happen. If personal AI is to be built, then the user should have full ownership and away from the spying eyes of groups like Palantir and the NSA. They cannot be trusted. The Jews learnt that catastrophically in Germany in the 1940’s putting their trust in a government that became authoritarian and evil.

What is digital will never die and what is digitally given cannot be taken back.

Didn't regulating cigarettes kind of work?

Of course, there will be stories of smart kids doing amazing things with access to vast troves of information, but the average story is much sadder.

The EU is working on a type of digital ID that an age-restricted platform would ask for, which only gives the platform the age information and no further PII.

Companies (not talking about system76) amazingly always find the shittyest interpretations of their obligations to make sure to destroy the regulations intention as much as they can. The cookie popups should have been an option in the browser asking the user whether they want to be tracked and platforms were meant to respect this flag. Not every site asking individually, not all this dark pattern annoyance. It's mind-blowing that that was tanked so hard.

This all could've been avoided. Governments all over the world have been ringing the alarm bells about lack of self-regulation in tech and social media. And instead of doing even a minimum of regulation, anything to calm or assuage the governments, the entire industry went balls-to-the-wall "line go up" mode. We, collectively, only have ourselves to blame, and now it's too late.

If you look back, it didn't have to be this way: - Governments told game publishers to find a system to handle age rating or else. The industry developed the ESRB (and other local systems), and no "or else" happened. - Governments told phone and smart device manufacturers to collectively standardize on a charging standard, almost everyone agreed on USB-C and only many years later did the government step in and force the lone outlier to play ball. If that one hadn't been stubborn, there wouldn't have been a law.

The industry had a chance to do something practical, the industry chose not to, and now something impractical (but you better find a way anyway, or else) will be forced upon them. And I won't shed a tear for the poor companies finally having to do something.

Don't let phone manufacturers lock the bootloader on phones. Let the device owner lock it with a password if they decide to. Someone will make a child-friendly OS if there is demand. Tech-savvy parents should be able to install that on their kid's phone and then lock the bootloader.

What about non-tech-savvy parents?

There should be a toggle in the phone's settings to enable/disable app installation with a password, like sudo. This will let parents control what apps get installed/uninstalled on their kid's device.

But what about apps or online services that adults also use?

Apps and online services can add a password-protected toggle in their user account settings that enables child mode. Parents can take their child's phone, enable it, and set the password.

----

All it takes is some password-protected toggles. They will work better than every remote verification scheme.

The only problem with this solution is that it does not help certain governments build their global mass surveillence and propaganda apparatus, and tech companies can't collect more of your personal info to sell, and they can't make your devices obsolete whenever they want.

This resonates so much with me. I don’t want to control my kids. I will never be able to protect them from everything. I hope I won’t be able because I want to die before them. I want them to be able to navigate in the world and have all the cognitive tools necessary to avoid being fooled. I want to rest in peace knowing they can in turn educate their own children. I want to trust them and be relieved that I can focus on some tasks of my own without needing to constantly worry about them.

It's not enough to adhere to the OS age signal:

> (3) (A) Except as provided in subparagraph (B), a developer shall treat a signal received pursuant to this title as the primary indicator of a user’s age range for purposes of determining the user’s age.

> (B) If a developer has internal clear and convincing information that a user’s age is different than the age indicated by a signal received pursuant to this title, the developer shall use that information as the primary indicator of the user’s age.

Developers are still burdened with additional liability if they have reason to believe users are underage, even if their age flag says otherwise.

The only way to mitigate this liability is to confirm your users are of age with facial and ID scans, as it is implemented across platforms already. Not doing so opens you up to liability if someone ever writes "im 12 lol" on your app/platform.

The whole point. Very well worded post. I weep for the all digital future.

I hope things won’t go that way but I do think it’s likely they will.

What is almost more disturbing: at least some of the politicians will have been advised by consultants or lobbyists who know what they're advocating for. What's their game?

So much for privacy I guess, hence pulling out this protecting children BS that I saw too many kids at my urban CA highschool get stabbed to fall for. The fact these tactics still work, where we limit our toothless privacy protections that the firms that don't comply the state might eventually sue when someone with more money than I presses the Attorney General, but then dial it back marketing it as protecting children and people still buy it? Absurd these same people work at such bleeding edge tech firms but then again LLMs can do that busy work they actually are doing better most of the time....

This is 100% about spying and information harvesting from users who deserve privacy, and would be better off managing their own children without the help of the government.

Absolutely. I feel like adults frequently mistake kids’ lack of education for stupidity. Lack of education about something is a temporary condition, and kids have ridiculous amounts of time, energy, and motivation to quickly become expert about something they care about. Particularly in reaction to “you can’t do that.”

One possibility: These laws forget that 18 year olds have kid siblings. The 18 year olds need money and like everyone else, enjoy the prospects of easy money. The 18-year-old has a phone bill to pay. These are the makings of a black market. Kid sibling acts as a broker for the older sibling’s services among the kid’s classmates and collect a commission.

A. If end users will mod their distros to send a "signal" (TBD?) to websites.

B. If end users will just grab a pirate OS with apps compiled to not care about age.

Hopefully the latest TAILS I downloaded is free of Big (over 18) Brother. And (A)

Or just compile, Gentoo and LFS style.

C. If pirates just take care of all this for friends and neighbors.

D. When, not if, this unconstitutional coercion is challenged in court and cancelled via petition. Remember Proposition 8?

This ties in nicely with the international movement to require ID to use social media.

Why is this an international movement? Suddenly, simultaneously, all over the Western world? It's enough to make on believe in conspiracies...

I do mind a lot of the data process. I do not want my id, personal preferences or any metadata of my self stored anywhere ever. And IF by some weird law some process has to store some data somewhere of me, i want to have very easy full access to it so i can delete it whenever i want. You can keep the process itself but anything else has to go.

Yes, i have a passport. Yes, it was verified and validated. No you may not know or store the color of my eyes.

I also do not want curious kids to be prosecuted for poking around. They should teach them and thank them for finding flaws.

More concerning than that is that it all doesn't seem because they care about teenagers and kids.

Er, how does a child install a VM from a non-admin account?

> Or the child can simply re-install the OS and not tell their parents.

It's gonna be pretty easy to detect when the parent finds programs are missing/reset or the adult account they created can't log in with their password.

The California law seems entirely tame and sane, whereas the New York bill seems pretty heavy-handed and authoritarian. They are in no way similar to each other.

That’s correct, it’s been correct for decades, and parents just won’t do it, not the majority at least. Either they want the state to raise their kids for them, or the task is so complicated and costly that they’re not willing to do it.

But the harms continue to happen, and we’re now left at the mercy of tech-illiterate lawmakers.

Now some 50-60yo politician who has never even created a folder in their desktop without help wants to dictate how I should have used my device?

Fuck'em

- Switch to a non-compliant distro. (could put me in a dead end down the line depending on what happens)

- Find a browser that can block the API access and just use two browsers.

- Have an "online accounts" computer and an "old fashioned" computer?

- Switch to books and DVDs?

The introduction of age verification is something that was to be expected with the growth in the use of the web, rather than individual programs. But there are a bunch of ways to get around it, which you do, but no one will punish you. This way, you will have parental control and transfer it to the website, while facilitating control over minors' access to unwanted content. And this way, websites do not need to implement their own terrible age verification methods. And when people complain that this is a problem for parents, this is exactly what will help parents: once they set the age in parental controls, programs and websites will have to monitor access (following the law, not goodwill).

This way, access can be controlled at the first level, i.e., at the OS level. There is a law, and there will be others to help improve it. In the same way, you can avoid the use of identifiers and, in general, face verification and a bunch of nonsense.

Ultimately, the responsibility lies with parents who did not specify the user's age on the device. But there may be “products” that ignore information from the OS.

Current parental controls do not solve the problem well, because you have to pay for a bunch of questionable products, sacrificing privacy. And it still does not protect against outdated black/white lists. Therefore, the requirement at the OS level to have such control and place responsibility on “products” is an excellent solution in my opinion.

And quite an elegant one at that. Without involving any government identifiers or anything else.

Combined with the widespread implementation of TPM, this will become even more feasible.

Let's try to figure out what a good policy solution looks like:

- entities with harmful or adult content must require proof of the user being over 18

- entities cannot ask for, store, or process more detailed information without explicit business needs (this should be phrased in a way that disallows Instagram from asking for your birth year, for example)

- entities cannot share this data with other sites, to avoid privacy leaks, unless there is an explicit business need (this is tricky to get right; someone might try to set up a centralized non-anonymous age-verification service, erasing many benefits)

- entities must in general not store or process information about the user that is not strictly relevant to their function

- there ought to be different treatment for anonymous users (which ideally these protocols will allow, just submit proof of work plus a ZKP that you are a human and authorized to access the resource) compared to pseudonymous and non-anonymous users, who are more at risk of being censored or tracked.

There's some loopholes here, but if the government can enact good policy on this I personally think it's feasible. Please share your thoughts, if you have a minute to do so.

There's also an interesting political split to note among the opposition here. I see a lot of people vehemently against this, and as far as I can see this is largely for concerns regarding one of 1) privacy abuses, 2) censorship, or 3) restriction of general computing. Still, there is a problem with harmful content and platforms on the web. (Not just for minors, I don't think we should pretend it doesn't harm adults too.) The privacy crowd seems to be distinctly different from the computing-freedom crowd; the most obvious example is in attitudes towards iOS. As I personally generally align more towards what I perceive as the privacy-focused side, I'm very interested in what people more focused on software freedom think about zero-knowledge proofs as a politically workable solution here.

https://www.badinternetbills.com/

No, the vm is for grownups over 18.

—-system76 customer

The time is coming where we will unseat legislative traitors who use EU/Old World manipulations in the USA.

An unjust law is no law at all. That is the exception the rule of law requires to remain moral.

—-system76 customer

It really is just a parenting issue at its core.

One developer began a discussion:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2026-March/04...

Their attempts of a "solution" are quite interesting. One other user suggested that GUI tools ask for the age of the user.

Well ... I have a very strong opinion here. I have been using Linux since over 20 years and I will not ever give any information about my personal data to the computer devices I own and control. So any GUI asking for this specifically would betray me - and I will remove it. (Granted, it is easier to patch out the offending betrayal code and recompile the thing; I do this with KDE where Nate added the pester-donation daemon. Don't complain about this on reddit #kde, he will ban you. KDE needs more money! That's the new KDE. I prefer oldschool KDE but I digress so back to the topic of age "verification").

The whole discussion about age "verification" appears to be to force everyone into giving data to the government. I don't buy for a moment that this is about "protecting children". And, even IF it were, I could not care any less about the government's strategy. Even more so as I am not in the country that decided this in the first place, so why would I be forced to comply with it when it ends up with GUI tools wanting to sniff my information and then give it to others? For similar reasons, one reason I use ublock origin is to give as few information to outside entities when I browse the web (I am not 100% consistent here, because I mostly use ublock origin to re-define the user interface, which includes blocking annoying popups and what not; that is the primary use case, but to lessen the information my browser gives to anyone else, is also a good thing. I fail to see why I would want to surrender my private data, unless there is really no alternative, e. g. online financial transactions.)

I also don't think we should call this age "verification" law. This is very clearly written by a lobbiyst or several lobbyists who want to sniff more data off of people. The very underlying idea here is wrong - I would not accept Linux to become a spy-tool for the government. I am not interested in how a government tries to reason about this betrayal - none of those attempts of "explanation" apply in my case. It is simply not the job of the government to sniff after all people at all times. This would normally require a warrant/reasonable suspicion of a crime. Why would people surrender their rights here? Why is a government sniffing after people suddenly? These are important questions. That law suddenly emerging but not in the last +25 years is super-suspicious.

And modern hardware is so complex that it is impossible for individuals to build one by their own. We are no longer in the 8-bit/16-bit era. And considering the power of AI -- individuals pretty much mean nothing to the elites.

I have never thought the Dystopian future to be so close -- I always thought it would be X years away. But legislation, the lawyers, are definitely very efficient on this kind of things.

„But Jonas parents allow him to do that“ in reality Jonas parents should not have a say in this.

These laws have spread like wildfire around the world with many countries and regions rolling out similar legislation within months of each other, despite the stereotypical lethargy of any and every legislature. That's not the work of some popular uprising of parents clamouring for age verification.

I fear debating the merits of the argument is missing the point; they don't care. They don't care about children, they don't care about the argument, they just want the control.

To be more direct - if you're in any editorial position where something that smells like this might require your approval, please give it the scrutiny it deserves. That is, the same scrutiny that a malicious actor submitting a PR that introduces a PII-leaking security hole would receive. As an industry we need to civil disobedience the fuck out of this.

This is so true.

I mean Wikipedia hung some huge banners to raise awareness, the German wiki even had a "blackout" because of "Directive 2019/790", there was something similar on Reddit etc. I don't expect them to leave the US market or anything like that, but also I don’t even know what to say, as if everyone has already resigned.

I stopped reading at this point, as this is utter non-sense. I mean, it's a beautiful idea, but any person with more than two neurones knows that real-life doesn't work like that. We have law enforcement and prisons because, despite our best efforts in education, some people do go off to become criminals due to a number of factors.

I'm not saying that the present number of laws is adequate, but the solution is a different set of laws, not the complete lack of them. The idea of "simply educate children and we'll all be fine" is utterly moronic.

1. People somehow, in big enough parts of the world to overcome the “Brussels Effect”, manage to avoid age verification laws getting passed.

2. Laws get passed, but because it was likely to be the case, the tech industry prepared and has an age verification system ready to go that’s “as good as possible” with regards to privacy.

3. Laws get passed, and because the tech industry spent more time fighting it than preparing for it, they’re now forced to implement something suboptimal.

4. Laws get passed, and the tech industry refuses to comply, then more laws get implemented stipulating exactly how the age verification system has to work, and it’s much worse than anything they could’ve come up with had they not been stubborn.

Right now, I think option 1 is so unlikely as to be safe to ignore as an option. And from what dialogue I’m reading, 2 is unlikely as well because some tech bros still think that code can win over laws. I just hope that the stick gets extracted from some of the relevant asses before option 3 turns into option 4.

At the moment only some countries banning porn, social media and gambling. But how soon will I have to do it for a work app? And will I lose my job then if I refuse?

Unless I'm missing something, I have zero concern for companies who sell out by complying.

The code was "free as in freedom" when you decided to build your company on it; and while you're not legally obligated to defend that freedom, and I, and hopefully other consumers, find that you are morally obligated to.

I live in the UK, I work in London. I can go on X and look at what Elon Musk is posting about the UK and as a reasonable person I can quite reasonably say he's gone mental. The algorithm has broken that mans brain. And it's not just him, a whole slew of establishment women lost their absolute minds about the trans issue (and Graham Linehan). Mumsnet became a centre for radicalization. You know and some one who grew up on the internet at quite a sweet spot I'm very comfortable looking at that stuff and going "Oh yeah, you guys are being groomed by these algorithms and you're defenceless to it".

There's a whole load of "How do we protect the children from this", but I don't think there's actually been much a reckoning with how grown adults are getting sucked into this vortex. The algorithms on the internet clearly have some trap doors that just absolutely funnel people into crazy places.

All of which is to say: We have a serious problem that's effecting everyone not just kids, and I think we've got almost no answers for how to tackle it.

The result is this- poorly thought through sweeping laws that aren't solving the problem, and have massive negative side effects. I think Jonathon Haidt has a lot to answer for in funnelling this complex issue affecting everyone into this reactionary "won't someone think of the children!" campaign for banning technology for kids.

1) The issue doesn't matter much. Corporate takeover of the internet caused severe damage, but overrunning social media with LLM generated content is a mortal wound. Roughly the same number of humans will be using social media in 2030 as currently use CB radio. Remember near a fifth of the population was using CB radio at the peak in the late 70s. Its too little, too late, closing the barn door after the horses have left is pointless. Like re-arranging deck chairs on the titanic after it hit the iceberg. Once the advertisers get wise to the scam that nobody is seeing their ads except bots, the problem will kind of fix itself. I think TPTB want to use "protecting kids from social media" as the public face of why social media will crash and burn soon to avoid discussion of how LLMs actually killed it, because authoritarians love LLMs and they're in charge (although seemingly everyone else hates LLMs, so I'm sure this will end well).

2) Most of the anti commentary reads a lot like addict speak IRL. Talk to a drunk about how it would be a great idea not to drink or a carb addict about how they should not eat donuts and you'll get absolutely rage blasted in return for threatening their addiction, which in the case of an addict, is their identity. "Well it would be the end of the world if people (me) were not drunk and other people (projection of me) will do anything to feed their addiction so obviously no effort should be made to limit addictions and it won't work anyway because other people (me) will even drink mouthwash or homebrew their own moonshine to get drunk" etc. Note I'm not completely against the anti's and they make some very good points that should be considered, but raging like an addict after their drug of choice is threatened is a VERY bad look and is not helping their case at all, if anything it strengthens the case against the anti's. What the pro's don't understand is you can't fix an addiction externally, addicts gotta addict and punishing them and making them miserable might help the pro's feel superior or at least thankful they're not addicted, but it never helped no one. Social media is "an ill of society" and should be treated as such including sensible regulation, protection of threatened groups, treatment for the addicts, and some compassion and acceptance of the addicts either returning to the real world or dying in the addicted world.

>Limiting a child’s ability to explore what they can do with a computer limits their future.

Parents don't want to limit their children from writing software. Saying that limiting minors from accessing porn will limit their future is another argument I doing think many will agree with.

I mean... How else would you educate children about computers and evading stupid restrictions?

Make it optional and assume an adult otherwise, it's a good idea if it's optional and doesn't have dumb fines, you could have fines for not enforcing it / not using the api [porn sites] that already exists [and it doesn't work since 1 button is not age verification].

I see this as a good way for parents and institutions to set up their phones, school laptops etc and would pretty much solve the large majority of these issues while having a fraction of the invasiveness.