Illinois Just Passed a Law That Puts Linux on the Hook for Age Verification
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> The signal itself isn’t a birthday, it’s a bracket: under 13, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, or 18 and up. Operating systems have until January 1, 2028 to have this built.> Nothing in the bill requires a passport scan or a face scan at setup. It’s self-declared, the same way most apps ask your birthday today, just centralized once at the OS level instead…
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1773350468 | Illinois introduces OS-level age verification law | https://legiscan.com/IL/bill/SB3977/2025 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=473572941773770767 | Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill | https://www.ilga.gov/Legislation/BillStatus?DocTypeID=HB&Doc... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=474161311786248239 |…
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I agree with literally everyone who thinks this is pointless and probably malignant. The problem isn't the visibility or the fact that weird stuff "exists" on the internet. The problem is advertisers "showing" it to people who didn't go looking for it. Ads and algorithms that decide what a person to see are 99.8% of this actual problem, and meta…
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I get the privacy concern in regards to advertising ones age, but I wonder if this is akin to a underage walking into a liquor store, interacting with stranger adults, etc. There are obvious appropriate and inappropriate behaviors to minors.Let's confine only of consumer OS and is provisioned with an underage bracket (you set it to what you want…
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Serious question: This is a out-of-box "ask for age" requirement. No one is "verifying" anything. Why are we using this misleading headline? Face scans, ID cards, all that stuff that makes everyone nervous, are specifically not a part of this. To imply that it is verification is propaganda.As a parent, I'd be very happy with this "age declaration"…
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I feel like all of these laws are being designed backwards. Content providers, like MPAA films, should have to identify what sort of content they are providing. Then I can give my kids a device configured to allow some or all of that at my discretion.Requiring my kids' devices to advertise their age (or their age "bucket", as if that was a…
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Can someone tell me why all of the sudden everyone's totally cool with letting political hacks choke the internet to death?We used to make fun people like Ted Stevens for calling the internet "a series of tubes" and now we're just totally cool with letting a failed, bankrupt state in the US dictate what code needs to go into voluntary open source…
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> ”Linux distro founder here (stagex)… designed to work offline-first, with some variants not even supporting network drivers”If your OS doesn’t access the internet or isn’t intended to run browsers / social apps, then you are outside the scope of this legislation. That would be a bit like requiring a toaster to ask for your age before letting you…
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Not that I'm condoning it, but this law requires self-declaration, not verification. It might sound pedantic but the practical difference is huge.Self-declaration means that the system asks the user to declare if they are a minor. Nothing is verified.Age verification typically means a system which checks ID or has other enforcement measures to try…
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RedHat/IBM does have an Illinois presence so will likely be compelled to add it to their distro, and will likely do it through systemd. So to avoid it getting into any consumer distro you'd have to ship a patch to remove it from systemd.This is probably all completely irrelevant to StageX since it's a distro designed to be used in containers…