We've already covered how California has a new operating system age-checking law coming into force next year - but many more US states also have plans.
We've already covered how California has a new operating system age-checking law coming into force next year - but many more US states also have plans or have them already approved. And I also recently wrote about Ubuntu and Fedora developers commenting on it, with that article briefly pointing out there's also a similar law planned for Colorado - but the situation gets a lot worse the more you look into it.
As highlighted by System76's founder Carl Richell, New York are also planning their own version that will "require all manufacturers of Internet-enabled devices, operating systems, or application stores to conduct commercially reasonable and technically feasible age assurance for users at the point of device activation" as the bill states.
In a blog post Richell notes that the New York version is far worse since it "explicitly forbids self-reporting and leaves the allowed methods to regulations written by the Attorney General" and so developers of operating systems and devices would have to have more than just your date of birth to put you into some age bracket like the California law seems to allow.
Richell ends the blog post with a key point: "The challenges we face are neither technical nor legal. The only solution is to educate our children about life with digital abundance. Throwing them into the deep end when they’re 16 or 18 is too late. It’s a wonderful and weird world. Yes, there are dark corners. There always will be. We have to teach our children what to do when they encounter them and we have to trust them."
But wait, it gets worse still. Looking around, there's also these similar laws:
There's probably others I'm not aware of, and likely more coming from other states. And there's no doubt in my mind that other countries will be taking note.
Microsoft have been locking down signing into Windows without an account for a while, and this will for sure make it easier for Windows to do such checks - but for all the various many different Linux distributions, this could become really problematic.
So not only are we all dealing with the different age laws expanding across the world that force us to give over some form of ID or face scans to access certain services, eventually it seems we'll been doing similar just to access your own computer in your own home.
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Comments
By y0eswddl 2026-03-1013:33 it's ironic how many people believe the lie that this country cares about child safety when not a single law has been changed to stop school shootings nor a single investigation since The Release of the Files...
By mindslight 2026-03-103:50 A friendly reminder that if any of this were about good faith attempting to protect children, the focus would be on end devices having software to facilitate parents directly controlling what types of sites their children can use. While this is rudimentarily possible now, the lack of it is a market failure and the point of legislation would be to prime the pump of network effects.
The straightforward implementation would be a mandate that every website over a certain size must publish tags about what types of content their site contains, the user-user communication features, the moderation policies, etc. These would be legally-binding assertions on the part of the site operators. Browsers would then allow setting parental controls based on these tags, or other criteria the parents choose (eg no social media, even if social media companies go out of their way to make sites their lawyers deem child-appropriate). And with this setup, the only thing locked down owner-hostile computing devices would be necessary for is for the devices parents would want to give to their kids.
The only way to view a mandate for an architecture with the complete opposite information flow is as a push to start exerting top down control over what can be published on the Internet for viewing by everybody. Basically, a governmental repudiation of the idea of the Internet as a permissionless communications medium, in favor of decreeing it must be a sanitized kid-friendly space by default, only becoming less restricted after you share your real-world identity.
By tmtvl 2026-03-102:48 Red Star. I'd sooner use Berry, Kylin, or SUSE if I wanted to avoid the Noid- I mean, avoid U.S.-based distros.
By selfhoster11 2026-03-102:47 Red Star OS.
