- Recent and related:
US national level OS-level age verification bill proposed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47772203 - April 2026 (223 comments)
by snaking0776
7 subcomments
- Politicians will do any draconian measure to help kids except try and improve the lives of their parents so that they can actually dedicate time to parenting. Making it slightly harder to access the internet fixes nothing. What if instead of having the largest prison population in the world our government supported communities that make raising good children possible? Our society needs to lose this urge to diagnose each other and provide some forceful treatment and instead set sights on providing the pre-conditions for everyone to prosper and lead their version of a fulfilling life. Only then will we have functional, healthy children. I quite like what the mayor of Baltimore has been doing to revitalize his city and it seems to be leading to actual change there if you want a good example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XQs59YY-e2I&pp=ygUXY2hhbm5lbCA...
- This is equivalent to China’s Digital ID without branding it as such - because such branding would fail.
They are laying the foundation at the infrastructure layer to build a Digital surveillance net, look at the pieces with the eye of an Architect -
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/15/banks-citizenship-data-colle...
And
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/8250...
- > The term “operating system” means software that supports the basic functions of a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.
> The term “operating system provider” means a person that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system on a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.
So excited to see the GNU vs. Linux debate finally land in court.
- Do we know who is funding this? is this one of these things where Meta doesn't want the responsibility for this, so they are pushing to have the OS have the responsibility or something like that?
by laughing_man
4 subcomments
- I'm glad I got to see the era where the internet was useful and exciting. I feel like every major change since about 2010 has pushed it more toward blandness and made it less useful.
This will be a big one. They're building the groundwork for a world-wide dystopia.
- Based on the few snippets quoted in the article, I think as written this bill gets closer to a good, privacy-preserving, non-authoritarian version of "age verification" than any of the attempts so far. What it seems to be aiming for is essentially mandatory parental controls at the OS level. No ID checking or government/third party involvement, it just uses whatever age the parents enter when they set up the device/user account for their kid. And apps don't actually get that info so there's very little privacy impact, just exposing an API that would allow apps/websites to query "is this user underage?" seems like it would satisfy the law as written.
The only remaining issue I see here is that I think the law may be a bit too heavy handed in how it tries to legislate this system into existence. Trying to tell Bob Hacker writing an OS in his basement what features his code has to include feels a little too authoritarian for my tastes. Probably there are some economic or regulatory levers that could be pulled instead to ensure this system gains mainstream adoption without criminalizing ordinary software development.
Again though, I didn't read the whole bill, just the article, so I could be wrong here on some of the details.
by gnarlouse
4 subcomments
- Listen, I would actually be willing to support something like this, but Jesus Christ when will we put somebody in congress with a CS background who can literally just chime in and say "use Zero Knowledge Proofs for this, people might actually buy that you're not just building a surveillance state."
- People lend phones or computers to kids. The age associated with the user account means absolutely nothing.
- “Parents Decide Act”
What a crock! Parents actually getting to decide could be trivially accomplished by a first-boot date of birth prompt, at which time the device goes into ‘child mode’ until the date that birthdate becomes the age of majority. Undoing that (say to repurpose the device for an adult) should require the parent who set it up to also do the wiping, much as existing “iCloud Lock” etc requires the owner’s consent to reset.
If a kid is old enough to buy their own phone or whatever and lie that they’re an adult… I’m not that worried about it. Teens have enjoyed sneaking into R-rated movies and raiding Dad’s Penthouse Magazine collection for generations. It’s fine.
Now, whatever this BS is… this has nothing to do with parents deciding.
by harrisoned
1 subcomments
- This is tiring. The text is so vague, and if a big country adopts it software companies will comply, and there's no reason to why smaller ones wouldn't, since 'the work is already done'.
I wonder if it would be illegal for an user to use an outdated system without those functions when they roll out, or to use outdated applications, or to distribute outdated applications, or to keep mirrors of multiple versions of operating systems. I doubt they thought that far, or if they care at all.
by yabutlivnWoods
2 subcomments
- Tim Apple argued it was a violation of their engineers and managers free speech to make them engineer back doors
Wonder if they will stand up against this on the same grounds
https://www.apple.com/customer-letter/
- Salvage old free as in freedom distros. Learn about i2pd and tunneling Usenet/IRC and Email (even cool online Nethack/Wesnoth/FreeCiv gameplays over it, any turn based libre game will work).
There are some Usenet servers (text content only, no binaries, all illegal crap it's cut down by design) listening under I2P servers. By design enforcing any cross-pond law it's impossible.
Learn about NNCP in order to tunnel messages over it, really useful for asynchronous connections such as Email and Usenet: https://nncpgo.org
Also, learn connect to a Pubnix and to use Usenet/IRC/Email/Mastodon services (tut it's a TUI Mastodon client) from remote servers. Make their own law obsolete across the world. Learn Mutt and GPG too, it's about 20 minutes of your life and for basic email a simple text editor like Nano, Mg or Mcedit would suffice to compose an email.
Try free Biltbee servers over IRC too, these can be connected even from DOS IRC clients in order to connect to modern services such as Jabber, Steam chat and even discord (join the &bitlbee channel once you connected ot a public Bitlbee server, there are several, and type down 'plugins' to get the available chat systems in that service) and thus any age bullshit for FreeDOS it's by design unenforceable without breaking network drivers and TCP/IP stacks as TSR's and whatnot. Ditto for old Amiga, RiscOS and such old releases which are unsupported. And banning retro computing would make the several civil right unions sue the state (and the judges) like crazy for huge amounts of money. Even META too as being the main lobby instigator.
Claim your freedoms back.
by kardianos
6 subcomments
- I hope people realize that most of these bills are being introduced in blue states by Democrats.
Republicans may not like porn, but they put the onus where it belongs, on the operator, not on the OS.
by greyface-
1 subcomments
- So, who's gearing up to sue the FTC for a declaratory judgment that this is unconstitutional?
- This is yet another underhanded attempt at making digital id mandatory. Child protection is just the trojan horse.
EU also released their age verification legislation. Notice how closely they are timed.
https://www.dw.com/en/eu-chief-urges-bloc-wide-push-on-age-v...
Pure coincidence?
It is all going according to plan.
- So this bill creates a commission to ensure that the information cannot be stolen or breached from operating systems, but says nothing about how the applications querying this information must protect or leverage it. I basically requires that any application get to know a user's birthday, as long as it's "necessary". What a fucking joke! I'm so sick and tired of this bullshit.
Direct link to the bill: https://docs.reclaimthenet.org/parents-decide-act-os-age-ver...
Edit: Oh, and the commission gets to make up the rules on how ages should be verified. So, prepare for a whole other level of PII leakage that isn't even captured by the text of the bill.
by _doctor_love
0 subcomment
- In East Germany under the Soviets, typewriters were registered with the government. I'm surprised we haven't seen a repeat of that for computers.
- I look forward to having to age verify the dbus and chrony and root accounts on every linux-based "smart" device in the future. That should be fun.
Will my children be able to use my smart oven/thermostat after I verify I'm 18+ on those devices?
I also wonder what verification will look like for containers and and VMs that might have a short life. Maybe that's how we keep IT jobs for a little while longer? Human age verification on every local account every time a container or VM is spun up.
- Well I'm going to keep using GrapheneOS and whatever version(s) of Linux refuse to comply.
Makes me even more glad that I've already transitioned off Windows.
- I read the bill and I feel like it's missing any technical details. It's almost like they read my suggestion [1] but then left some parts out. The technical parts. As I read it one can just enter whatever name, age and other details in the setup of a computer they desire. It's missing any checks for a header on the server to detect adult content labels. What am I missing? What forces me to enter my real information? Are operating system developers going to be granted access to the DMV databases? Or forced to use some third party that scratched the back of some politicians? If I block connectivity to this will I not be able to log in? If someone performs a successful DDoS to the site will I not be able to log in? It feels like several pages of the bill are missing. How does the OS know it is visiting an adult site?
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152074
- Here's the bill straight from congress.gov:
https://www.congress.gov/119/bills/hr8250/BILLS-119hr8250ih....
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/8250...
It's short and in plain language. The article is longer than the bill. Here's the totality of the requirements:
(a) REQUIREMENTS.—An operating system provider, with respect to any operating system of such provider, shall carry out the following:
(1) Require any user of the operating system to provide the date of birth of the user in order to—
(A) set up an account on the operating system; and
(B) use the operating system.
(2) If the relevant user of the operating system is under 18 years of age, require a parent or legal guardian of the user to verify the date of birth of the user.
(3) Develop a system to allow an app developer to access any information as is necessary, collected by the operating system to carry out this section and any regulation promulgated under this section, to verify the date of birth of a user of an app of the app developer.
---
This part from REGULATIONS is also nominally important:
(B) Data protection standards related to how an operating system provider shall ensure date of birth collected by the operating system provider from a user, or the parent or legal guardian of the user, to carry out this section and any regulation promulgated under this secion—
(i) is collected in a secure manner to maintain the privacy of the user or the arent or legal guardian of the user; and
(ii) is not stolen or breached.
---
by diogenes_atx
1 subcomments
- If this legislation becomes law, it will be interesting to see how the Linux hacker community reacts. Laws are virtually meaningless if there is no practical way to enforce them and if there are enough people who oppose them. Just take a look at the history of file sharing over the past three decades. For this new law to prevent the proliferation of Linux distros that are not in compliance with age verification requirements, there would need to be very powerful enforcement mechanisms, including criminal prosecution. Even then, it's difficult to see how severe criminal penalties and/or civil liabilities could stop hackers from building and distributing illicit versions of Linux. It's just basic economics: demand creates supply. Linux moves into the black market with new distros of Clandestine-OS.
by everdrive
1 subcomments
- I've been trying to download media for a while now. I don't have a huge collection; most media is not actually very good. But, the internet soon will just be an awful conglomeration of cable TV / a big shitty mall / a horrible outrage & propaganda machine. It's already most of the way there. Either destroyed from within by bots, data brokers and corporations, or destroyed from without by government, surveillance, and regulation. I recommend you start treating the internet like a mall; it's not some place you'd actually like to go. You get in, get what you need, and get out. Some people will will disagree with the analogy on the grounds that they _like_ going to malls. Well, good news, the new internet might be for you.
by josh-sematic
1 subcomments
- There’s a version of this I could support:
- pre-specified age gates baked into the protocol (perhaps just 13 and 18).
- account admins on a device get to specify which bracket is associated with the account
- an api that allows sites to query whether the current user’s account is above one of the thresholds
Leaks pretty minimal PII (the user is between 13 and 18 would be the tightest identifier obtainable with the above gates). But still allows for age gating some content without relying on self-reported age.
Am I optimistic the actual solution won’t be more invasive? Sadly no…
by jim_lawless
0 subcomment
- Related HN post "Ageless Linux- Software for humans of indeterminate age" :
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47381791
- All these bills about age verification have nothing to do with protecting kids. This is just an easier pill for folks that aren’t privacy minded to follow. In the end, all your online activity and offline activity (flock cameras) will be tracked, because it gives our politicians and national security apparatus the type of power they crave.
by shevy-java
1 subcomments
- Right now the lobbyists are winning.
I hope Josh Gottheimer will get a lot of money for his work there.
I also remember a few weeks ago, people such as Poettering and others
said this is all harmless, nothing bad would ever possibly happen.
Lo and behold, now it is the new mandatory law. All people will soon
have to go for age sniffing, in order to access information. Linux
is only for the Underground now.
- "The age check is the entry fee for owning a computer."
No, the fee is your identity and a record of your every thought and action.
- I compiled most of the operating systems I used from source code as a minor, and will parent the same way. I do not know how one age verifies a Linux From Scratch install, but I sure hope politicians try and give me a good laugh.
by drivingmenuts
0 subcomment
- I can already smell the exceptions - some companies will be exempted from these restrictions due to "national security implications", or, more realistically, "we distracted the President with a golden gewgaw and a bribe".
by 2OEH8eoCRo0
0 subcomment
- They should mandate age verification from the other direction- make serving certain content to children a liability. They'll quickly figure out how to verify age all by themselves. No need to legislate implementation details.
by ranger_danger
1 subcomments
- That means porn sites won't require me to independently verify my age right? Right?
by ChrisArchitect
1 subcomments
- Multiple discussions this week on the bill: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47772203
- If all they wanted was to prove you were over 18 or over 21, those can be checkboxes rather than birthdates. It’s clear the bill’s author is an idiot or insincere.
by ergonaught
2 subcomments
- Much of the USA accepts "gun deaths" as an unfortunate but acceptable price that must be paid for the widespread freedom to own guns.
When those same people are hysterical about Protecting The Children, you should understand that "protecting the children" is a distraction from whatever the actual intent may be.
The general public is thoughtless, and there's little reason to think the decision-makers are much more thoughtful, but Protecting The Children is merely this age's Trojan Horse.
by nickslaughter02
0 subcomment
- This will be required in firmware eventually.
- just occured to me, there will be some cohort that gives this the windows treatment, refusing to update, or upgrade versions, and retain present OS.
the next step if this bill passes seems to nessecarily involve excluding holdouts from content rated beyond toddler safe.
- An utterly insane idea for a law.
Age verification inherently means identity verification. There's no way to prove your age without first proving that you are YOU, either by showing your face or authenticating with some third party authority, usually government or a corporation.
The idea that you should be locked out of using your own computer until you do this is utterly insane. What problem does it solve that existing parental control tools don't? A generation of parents already trust their babies with iPads for this reason. And what of the millions of Americans who don't have current ID?
- "To require operating system providers to verify the age of any user of an operating system, and for other purposes."
- And For Other Purposes.
am i the only one seeing that?
i see a lot of discussion pro and con age verification, there should be much more concern about the purpose of that phrase for other puposes.
is some one actually trying to sneak a catch all like that into it, or is it a bargaining chip. [see we removed "for other purposes", its all better, now we can pass it]
by micromacrofoot
1 subcomments
- the US will kill every third space by any means necessary
their dwindling to irrelevance, like the UK, could not happen faster
by BatteryMountain
1 subcomments
- This is so dumb. There are 100 other ways to protect children that would be more effective than this. Not only will this approach not actually protect children, this will violate the privacy of billions of people. It will introduce identity theft at mass scale (good luck solving that on short notice) and it will make activist/journalists/military/political opposition vulnerable. Perhaps this is the purpose. Who would benefit from such a scenario...mmm?
- Not a mandate at this point. The bill was only introduced on April 13th.
- > "Once the operating system knows your age with verified certainty, it can tell any app to deliver, restrict, or withhold content accordingly."
Instead of "age verification", call it (and everything like it) Epstein law. The government wants the information of who is a kid and who isn't broadcasted to all the apps, safe AND malicious. There's no good reason to let random developers freely collect lists of kids out of those people who choose to try an app. It's Epstein law.
Being able to easily bypass an age gate makes such info unreliable, verification removes the unreliability such that the data can then be used for both good and evil reasons.
- who asked for this?
- Glad to see that Elise Stefanik came out of fucking hiding in NY-21 to dump this stupid "parents decide" bill on us when she couldn't even be assed to help her constituents over the past several months when one of the main hospitals in her district is bankrupt and closing.
Last time we saw her anywhere near here was her "farewell tour" when she was supposed to go be Trump's UN stooge. Haven't seen her up here since.
Glad to know we get to die up here for on-device age verification for everyone else.
by abdelhousni
0 subcomment
- All this fake good intent to prevent another TikTok which was the only media which transmited the reality on the ground during the Gaza genocide. And its aftermath in the youth mind and in the University campuses.
Fascists and industrialists have to take control, again, of the minds.
(See oligarchy's appetite for social and media companies)
by vscode-rest
1 subcomments
- Writing like this is frankly so exhausting. I don’t think anyone not already in the choir could make it through.
- It is just crazy how much of a tech billionaire centric the US government is, they can come up with Thanos' idea of wiping out 50% of the population and politicians would do it as long as Zuckerberg or anyone else in the techno bubble asked for it.
- LOL, fuck that
- [dead]
by AnIrishDuck
10 subcomments
- [flagged]
by ChrisArchitect
0 subcomment
- Discussion on the bill source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47772203
by hackinthebochs
9 subcomments
- The breathless fearmongering over an age field on account set up is just completely over-the-top. This is probably the least bad out of all possible ways to implement age checking. The benefit of this is that it can short-circuit support for more onerous age verification. The writing has been on the wall for some time now: the era of completely unrestricted internet is coming to an end. The question is how awful will the new normal be? Legislation like this is a win all around, a complete nothingburger. We should be celebrating it, not fighting it tooth and nail.
The tech crowds utter derangement over this minor mandate is truly a sight to behold.
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