Apparently this will include Linux…
No one is going to enforce this. It’s political theater, and will in no way protect children.
Easy enough to send threatening cease and desist letters to distro maintainers that may not have a penny in savings. This is a huge gift to Apple and Microsoft that probably had enough of Linux hoarding in on their market share.
Were that to happen, I imagine it would be a relatively simple matter to move everything out of state, or even out of the country if need be.
Well… don’t live in rogue nations then, I guess?
Linux distributions should react by asking users to confirm they’re not in California. They’ll backpedal fast.
Eveny single website running should do this, and refuse to display for Californians
All this age verification crap. Where is the fucking parents? I get that big tech has some responsability in all this. But how about we just make the responsible choice, of not letting a 8 year old near tiktok forinstance? Oh, it is just another excuse for private survailance you say? I see, I see…
I’m a parent and legit think that majority of parents should not have been parents and have no minimum required skill to raise a human being. It’s sad because it’s really not that hard but most people don’t think a day ahead when raising their kids and just follow a “vibe”, so spending a weekend on parental controls is an insurmountable task.
I’m not a parent and wish there was some kind of minimum requirement.
I AM a parent. And I will take the fight. Even though all other parrents will call me the “tin foil hat” rather that, than letting my child become a predators next meal online… These parrents has no idea what social media is all about. It’s a fucking addiction. The children can’t see this, this is why it’s our job to protect them.
As usual, the solution is education. Parental education needs to be prioritized imo. That said, I have no idea how we would implement such a thing. Most likely better general education would help at least.
“Won’t anyone think of the cHiLdReN?!”
Everyone needs to realize that all the age verification stuff is just a step towards the purpose, which is having any and all computer operation tied to the person — i.e. as Cory Doctorow has put it, the war on general computation.
Just want to clarify that nowhere in the actual law does it require verifying the age of the user. It does not require IDs or face scans.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043
Please read it. It is a very short law <15 minute read tbh.
The law does exactly what you ask for. Parents setup the device and put their child’s age. If they lie or circumvent the system then the parents get fined if their child is affected by content on the internet.
As a Californian parent, I’m teaching my kids to use Linux to be safer against surveillance and control. It is 100% my responsibility because I chose to have children and let them use computers. It’s a dangerous world out there.
IDs in databases get leaked.
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This operating system contains code known to the State of California to cause cancer or reproductive harm.
Too bad that reproductive harm doesn’t work eliminating the birth of politicians
I’ll just copy my comment from a similar bill in colorado, I will leave the link to the colorado bill in, but here is the california bill as well if you want to read it yourself.
The title is very misleading. This is the actual bill that they are trying to pass. The link already includes a summary, so I will just give you an even simpler explanation and some practical examples why this is actually really neat.
First of all, this is not age verification. No IDs have to be submitted, no selfies or videos will be submitted to any age estimation AIs, so put your pitchforks away (for now, until they decide to expand the bill to include these measures as well, then it’s time to burn it down). The name of the bill already tells you what it is: Age Attestation. Aka what every piece of software already does before it shows you explicit content.
With the bill in place, every “operating system provider” has to ask you for your age or date of birth during OS setup, which will then be made available to other software via an API. So instead of having to fill in your date of birth or checking “Are you 18+/21+?” boxes, software will use the new API to check instead, saving you the trouble of doing it manually every time for every application that is not made for all ages.
What makes it even better is that the OS does not have to provide your actual age or birth date, the bill has a minimum requirement of just disclosing age-bracket data. So it could work just like age ratings, which also rely on age groups rather than specific years. Also, the bill explicitly forbids asking for more than your age, sharing more than that via the new API and using the entered age data for anything else than the described purpose, like sending it to a server for tracking purposes.
And finally, as mentioned in the beginning, no IDs or anything else as it is with age verification necessary. You can still lie, just enter 1.1.2000 or whatever you want. Nothing changes, except that you will only have to do it once every time you reinstall/reset your OS or buy a new device.
Sure. But this is step 1. Things never stop at step 1.
Of course, and I will fight the next steps with pleasure, but I welcome a qol feature anytime, even one enforced by law.
Thanks for putting this here. Kinda getting sick of people that only read the headlines or have only seen the Lunduke journal video that has so many clear inaccuracies.
The laws aren’t perfect but they do have some nice protections for the users as you mention.
The only thing that I think is missing is that developers are restricted from collecting additional information but the OS providers are not, at least as far as I understand from reading the California law. At the very least, they still have the restriction on using the information in other places or sending it to third parties.
I posted this in another thread but I’ll repeat it here. I think it is shortsighted that some linux distros are taking the kneejerk reaction of leaving/banning California residents. We need to band together and figure out a solution.
Oh, I have one solution in mind. Two, actually:
- leave California
- ask some questions ™ to authors of the bill. Like who is going to benefit from this, who was paid how much for what etc.
What about distros that don’t use automated account creation (or have optional automation), like Arch for example or Gentoo? The law isn’t made to accommodate those people:
“Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.”
The odd thing is the wording that it “requires” an account holder to indicate age or DOB. As with anything *nix, there is always a workaround. There is no way to require anything of the user. There’s also no definition for “accessible interface.”
Sounds like California needs to try out the ligma OS because they can suck my nuts.
Nailed it.
of all the shit out there, that’s what needed attention?!
Curious for what it’s a distraction, eh?
And are they going to require ID to verify birth dates, or is this just going to be a drop down menu? If the latter, I’m pretty sure everyone’s birth date is 1/1/1901. I’m so tired of this surveillance shit masquerading as “save the children” nonsense. I hate to say it, but this is a parenting problem and if your kids are more tech-savvy than you are, they WILL find a way around these safegaurds.
I’m pretty sure everyone’s birth date is 1/1/1970
FTFY
In essence, while the bill doesn’t seem to require the most egregious forms of age verification (face scans or similar), it does require OS providers to collect age verification of some form at the account/user creation stage—and to be able to pass a segmented version of that information to outside developers upon request.
So you just fake a date and call it a day… thank you Cali…
For real though I can’t imagine the sysadmin and docker nightmares that arise from having to completely overhaul your account orchestration scripts to input a garbage birthday.
I don’t think anyone thought of the fact that an account on an OS doesn’t always correspond to a human.
The law only specifies “computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.”
Which is extremely vague. It appears that the intention was to just affect end user devices. Not specific purpose systems.
Gavin Gruesome at it again
Ye, now I’ve got a reason for hating him as well.
Gonna make provisioning servers a lot more interesting…
This is being pushed by social media companies that don’t want to be responsible for age verification
I think it’s from proprietary OS makers that want to squash open source competition.
It can be both!
Gotta love it when people who have no understanding of how Linux works writes laws about how Linux should work…
It goes way beyond Linux. Think any device that could download something at some point. Gas station pump, calculator, FreeDos, VxWorks, etc.
There is a lot of language like “or can download an application”, so if you can download something, then that thing could be an application, and thus that device and it’s OS is covered.
And every point of sale system everywhere
I have never internally facepalmed harder in my life
The law only specifies “computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.”
Which is extremely vague. It appears that the intention was to just affect end user devices. Not specific purpose systems.
“Lets fight ICE” also “you need an id to use your laptop and be verifed by big tech to use it” Worse then clowns. Fucking traitors
Please explain to a complete doofus how can someone enforce this?
Cant they just download any linux distro from millions of different places and install them on any machine, even offline?
Bios are becoming more and more locked down, that’ll be the next thing, at the tech lobbyists behest.
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The law only penalizes instances that affect children. So by circumventing this law does not mean you would be charged with any fines. But if you circumvent it and your child uses the device then you would be liable no more than 7500$ (since in this case it would be an intentional violation).
I am not a lawyer. This is just what I understand the law to penalize.
OS providers and developers are also not liable if you set an incorrect age for your child intentionally or by mistake, only you would be.
But if they flaunt this law (do not try to comply with best effort) then they would be liable for each affected child.
Edit: sorry this didn’t exactly answer your question. How they enforce it would be that it is tacked onto other charges from what I understand.
Edit 2: oh and children can’t be charged, only adults (18+).