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Comment by spullara | Hacker News Reader

this is completely insane. we need some kind of constitutional amendment to get rid of all this kind legislation forever.

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People are making way too big a deal of this IMO. This is basically the OS equivalent of that checkbox you click to enter a porn website that gets exposed to Meta, so they can claim that they did what they all the they could to protect children if they get sued by parents. Any determined kid would figure out a way around this, but I can see it stopping younger and less determined kids, and it's a useful tool for parents.

Wouldn't a some kind of technical standard proposal be a more sensible way to do this than trying to pass OS laws state by state?

iOS (for example) already has that technical standard in place and usable.

It does not stop at the check box. Someone is going to sue Google/Apple when a 13 year old gets on a porn site. Then Google/Apple will introduce "verification" that requires linking your identity to your device, and attesting this to the "operator" (porn site). Then every person using any OS is tracked, on every website and app, all the time, by law. And Linux becomes illegal without it.

This is not a theory. Laws requiring this are going through the state and federal level right now.

How would this work for e.g. RTOS or even TempleOS?!

Does the hidden Minix installation on every Intel CPU with the Intel Management Engine count?

Unlike the California law, I seemed to be in the minority in this opinion, this one does seem to require programs like grep to ask for a users age bracket.

> (b) An operator shall request a signal with respect to a particular user from an operating system provider or a covered application store when the application is downloaded and launched.

Unlike the California law I do not see anything that restricts this to child accounts only.

So let say I have a program:

    print("Hello, World!")

and I want to publish it to say npm or nixos, or some linux distribution. Not with out violating this law. This application needs to request the users age brackets at least at 'downloaded and launched' optimistically that means once on first launch, but potentially needs to be requested on each launch of the application. So lets fix the program

    import ageBracket
    ageBracket.get()
    print("Hello, World!")

There we go, now the code is compliant with my imagined ageBracket module.

Microsoft has already made the installation of Windows a fucking nightmare with MS account requirements. Imagine when they are forcing every new device to not only have 50+ TOPS for Copilot, but also a tiny little internal mass spectrometer autosampler which will prick your finger as you login and analyze blood to carbon date the age of the user.

Install offline, no ms cloud bullshit account required. I just did this with Win 11 enterprise 25h2. Used an activator cmd script at the end that bypassed activation.

constitutional amendment to criminalise corporate lobbying with severe penalties - including capital punishment and confiscation of entire corporation.

Unfortunately, a rhetorical knee-jerk response that it needs universal, specific counter legislation for a "permanent fix" is panacea, magical thinking.

The root cause is a corrupt government doing the bidding of a few rich people and other countries. Fixing that will be very difficult but is nonetheless necessary and possible to largely thwart legislators from working against their own ostensible constituency.

I actually see the golden lining here

>"Operating system provider" means a person or entity that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system software on a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.

I.e Linux will most likely to be immune, since its not tied to a particular computer.

Which just means Linux stay winning. It already made big headway in the video game space, so its prime to take over personal computing too.

All the distros are the providers here. The Linux kernel is not an operating system.

Since GNU(or other)/Linux OSes allow the sysadmin to compose the OS out of parts and change them, the final OS is created by the sysadmin. That's what makes distributing binary software so annoying for maintainers, every installation can be it's own snowflake OS.

Wouldn't that include using it on any cloud service that let's you pick it?

> since its not tied to a particular computer.

That's a really weird and nonsensical reading of "operating system software on a computer".

it's entirely possible such nonsense is all show, and wouldn't be passed, however.

i'm from illinois, worked in california, and no longer live in either. from afar, it seems that whatever california bureaucrats propose, after a short delay, gets proposed by their little sibling bureaucrats in illinois.

This. IL and MA follow whatever CA does with a few year lag. Considerations of sanity never enter into the discussion.

As an Illinoisan, this kind of stuff makes me want to leave and get somewhere sane. Anybody have recommendations? What places don't have this kind of insanity?

As an Illinoisan who left 23 years ago for work in California, worked a summer in Massachusetts, now in Arizona, i think the answer is Antarctica.

Answers will be provided after adequate proof that you will not bring the voting record that made illinois what it is with you.

There's some hope in New Hampshire. Our legislature just struck down our equivalent bill[1] while it was in committee. And within the last decade, privacy was enshrined in our state constitution[2], providing us with more legal teeth, on top of our free speech protections, to defeat digital age verification within the state.

[1] https://legiscan.com/NH/bill/HB1658/2026

[2] https://www.nh.gov/glance/state-constitution/bill-rights

This is 100% true

It has already passed the Colorado senate.

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