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YSK about ageless Linux, a protest to the age attestation law that was passed in CA
(agelesslinux.org)
this post was submitted on 18 May 2026
269 points (97.2% liked)
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I've been keeping my head in the sand about all this because frankly, smarter people than me are already dealing with it, and if there's a way out, they will find it.
But I chose to read this. And my major takeaway, beside the point they're trying to make, is that the California law has taken the asinine step of redefining the word "user".
I hate this apparent trend of legislatively redefining words to mean what is most convenient for a party, often a powerful one, acting in bad faith, and not what is commonly understood or could reasonably be understood by someone encountering the term for the first time.
May these redefiners each have an excruciatingly bad time with a bone in a "boneless" chicken wing. (In some jurisdictions, "boneless" is now legally "a style of cooking", and not what it outwardly appears to mean.)
And when trying to use any form of technology more advanced than a spoon, may they ever receive the message "You are trying to use this device but you are not a child. To use it would make you a user and by law all users are children. Please become a child or log off."
They don't, they're just providing a definition of the term for that specific bit of law.
As an example, this bill, it defines a relative to be "an adult who is related to the child by blood", doesn't mean that suddenly people under 18 are no longer considered relatives, just that for this one specific part it doesn't apply to them.
As I said in another comment (maybe I should have edited the original):
I thought I was relatively in the know, but didn't realize that they'd defined "user" as explicitly a child. Why do we allow them to flagrantly disregard actual fucking definitions?
Like the time Indiana legislatively redefined pi to be exactly 3.2?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill
Yeah I think the charitable way to read the law is that it requires OS, applications, etc to implement a standardized system for setting, requesting, and receiving age bracket data of a user. It doesn't require anyone to use it. By defining user as under 18 for the purpose of this section it means nothing in the section applies to users over 18.
I get protesting about this because implementation is not trivial and there's no time to do so. But creating a standard and all OS's, websites, and relavent applications adopting that standard isn't a bad thing (unrelated apps like text editors should clearly be exempt). It would make it way harder for kids to circumvent parental controls on a device.
According to the legislation, the concepts of "user" and "18 and over" are mutually exclusive. Anyone over 18 is "an account holder".
The most charitable reason I can think of that they would do this is that short phrases like "minor user", that would otherwise be far better choices, have an unwanted secondary reading that the creators of the law sought to avoid (that being "user of minors"), and they wished to keep things more terse than repeated use of the phrase "user under the age of 18".
I don't think that's a good enough excuse to blatantly redefine a well-established term, even if the scope of the redefinition is limited. Even if there's precedent for having done similarly in the past.
And it's all but guaranteed that someone will attempt to leverage that redefinition outside of the scope.
Plus they also allow a user to present an age bracket of "over 18" despite defining users as under 18. I think they just did a bad job of clearly scoping it. It should be clear that it's a tool for a parent to use and that it's merely requiring that software implement age signaling all the way from OS to website to application. A default OS configuration should have no age defined and nothing should require an age to be defined. But if a parent does define an age then that signal should be honored.