this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026

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California introduces age verification law for all operating systems, including Linux and SteamOS — user age verified during OS account setup (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 2 days ago by Amoxtli@thelemmy.club to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.works 21 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

Since people aren't reading the article and the headline is misleading. The law requires:

The OS ask the user their date of birth on account creation (kinda like the Steam date of birth prompts)
The OS provide an API that returns which of four age brackets the user fits in
Companies notified by the OS that the user is under age may be liable

It was explicitly written by the authors not to mandate ID or facial recognition checks. You can lie about your date of birth. This basically creates a standard set of parental controls for parents configuring kids devices.

I think that this might actually help with the whole discord facial recognition issue in places other than the UK by allowing them to offload the issue to parents setting up devices rather than collecting kids biometrics.

[–] BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

There are still so many problems with this. In addition to the general fuck you, it’s my computer, and fuck the state for forcing creeping surveillance on people, and how the hell would you enforce this, how would this even work for any of the following:

My RaspPi, running an older version of Linux. As far as I can tell, if I compile the kernel or write some code for it I would become the OS Provider.
A multiuser computer
A multiple people using the same account computer
Retro computing
A home media server. Maybe a NAS, maybe a home built machine.
A non-internet connected computer
Anything VM related
Any server in the cloud.
FreeDOS
An embedded machine in a car that I can ssh in to that crosses state lines.
An OS that doesn’t have the concept of user accounts
Hobby OS development
Oddball hardware that has been made to work as a general purpose computer, like a Chrome stick, hard drive controller or iPod?

It also looks like it applies to “covered application store” and from how that is defined, every public deb, apt, or yum repo is an application store, along with things like PyPI, crates.io, GitHub, and probably my own fucking git server that I share with some friends.

[–] markovs_gun@lemmy.world 4 points 10 hours ago

Yeah I think this is pretty reasonable. If parents set their kids up on adult accounts that's on them.

[–] motruck@lemmy.zip 13 points 12 hours ago

No matter how hard they try, you can't legislate parenting.

[–] Digit@lemmy.wtf 19 points 16 hours ago

No biggie. I got ready for this in minutes after hearing about it.

#!/usr/bin/env fish
read -P "Are you old enough?  (yes/no)  " input
if test "$input" = "yes" -o "$input" = "Yes"
echo "Proceeding..."
else
echo "You are not old enough.  Exiting." 
exit 1
end

... What? ... Why are you all looking at me like that?

[–] arc99@lemmy.world 20 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

That would be a completely unworkable law since devices may not even have internet connectivity, or a user interface. And even if they did, it would have a chilling effect on software development in California.

[–] carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.works 2 points 11 hours ago

The headline is misleading. They are only required to ask how old you are and are not required to verify you aren't lying

[–] workgood@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 8 hours ago

its impossible to enforce. ca suck

[–] anadrark@lemmy.world 5 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Even if they could enforce it which I highly doubt, this law is clearly a "Fuck you and your free software".

Like if a "too young" user have the skills to update the OS to change or even remove the age verification, who will be responsible? Yeah I don't know either, but both will be bad.

[–] ThunderQueen@lemmy.world 1 points 10 hours ago

I mean, they could already just lie about their age like kids have been doing since the existence of adult websites. Even the facial rec stuff is easily fooled by a video game model. Just has to be able to be manipulated so you can do the head turns or whatever they ask of now.

[–] super_user_do@feddit.it 24 points 23 hours ago (4 children)

This is a whole new level for system level fingerprinting

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[–] JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 88 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (5 children)

Our president is fucking children, and you're telling me I gotta verify my date of birth to run Linux, in the name of "Protecting the Children"?

Get the fuck outta here.

[–] dellish@lemmy.world 22 points 1 day ago

They've gotta know if you're fuckable.

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[–] mechoman444@lemmy.world 64 points 1 day ago (8 children)

You guys are asking the wrong questions.

How is Linux going to do this? There's no server for the os to send the information to report the age of its users, no way of forcing its user base to comply and no single person or entity to fine, arrest or otherwise force into compliance.

They made a law they cannot enforce.

[–] Digit@lemmy.wtf 9 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Or they made a law to attempt to ban operating systems with free software licenses.

[–] mechoman444@lemmy.world 1 points 9 hours ago

But that's the thing you can't ban them.

It's just software that's freely available. There's no one corporate entity that controls Linux. Anybody can literally make a distro for it make notation for it illegal for California and be done with it.

[–] dev_null@lemmy.ml 11 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

How is Linux going to do this? There’s no server for the os to send the information to report the age of its users

The law doesn't require sending the data anywhere, so that's not a problem.

no way of forcing its user base to comply and no single person or entity to fine, arrest or otherwise force into compliance.

The law doesn't require anything of users, it requires something of OS providers. OS providers have addresses and entities to fine.

[–] Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 7 points 17 hours ago (6 children)

The law doesn't require anything of users, it requires something of OS providers.

For a FOSS OS, any user with root access would be considered an "OS Provider" under the definitions provided in this law. With FOSS, there is no real distinction between "user" and "developer".

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[–] Digit@lemmy.wtf 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

No addresses or entities tied to the distro respins I've made.

That was not a requirement in the software license.

[–] dev_null@lemmy.ml 1 points 13 hours ago

Great, but how does that help? 99.9% Linux users use a Linux distro that has, ay the very least, a website behind it, with a domain name, that has a registration info.

That the 0.01% of people that use an OS only hosted by anonymous devs on a Russian website does not make this law any better for the rest of us.

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