As of today, about half of all U.S. states have some form of age verification law around. Nine of those were passed in 2025 alone, covering everything from adult content sites to social media platforms to app stores.
Right now, California’s Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043) is all the rage right now, which targets not only websites and apps but also operating systems. Come January 1, 2027, every OS provider must collect a user’s age at account setup and provide that data to app developers via a real-time API.
Colorado is also working on a near-identical bill, which we covered earlier.
The EFF’s year-end review put it more bluntly: 2025 was “the year states chose surveillance over safety.” The foundation’s concern, which I concur with, is, where does this stop? Self-reported birthday today, government ID tomorrow? There appears to be no limit to these laws’ overreach.
The population of the united States has suddenly jumped in age to 54. They don’t give Fuchs.
this is the pipeline to fully
trustedrestricted computing.Linux couldn’t possibly comply properly with these new restrictions? Consumer grade prebuilts and laptops now only run “certified” operating systems, just like most mobile devices.
Surveillance and censorship are the ends, “age” (identity) verification is the means.
One should be able to skip it when creating an account and then it should default to Jan 1st 1970 on all open source OS’s to provide anonymity.
Told you so told you so told you so told you so told you so told you so told you so told you so told you so told you so told you so told you so told you so told you so told you so told you so told you so told you so told you so told you so told you-
The problem with Linux for the government is that it has a unique ability for being easily modified by users. You sure can force some very popular distros to follow these laws but you cannot force less popular distros made by enthusiasts to comply. Especially if those enthusiasts live not in your country.
The very day I hear that my os is asking people their age is the day I find a different one.
The OS angle is huge, and worth picking a fight with, but I haven’t seen any coverage over how this goes after developers too.
I think this is an attack on ALL open-source.
These bills are written by people who are clearly or maliciously tech illiterate and don’t understand either the terminology or the practical impacts. And of course it’s wrapped in ‘what about the children?!’
They include definitions like (paraphrasing; not quoting a specific bill, but New York, Colorado and California do this):
- “Application” is any software application that may be run on a user’s device – so … EVERYTHING.
- “Application Store” is any publicly accessible website or similar service that distributes applications – so … also everywhere, such as GitHub or GeoCities.
- “Developer” is a person who writes, creates or maintains an application – so if you have a github repo, or you’ve posted a binary or perhaps even a script somewhere recently, you’re a developer.
And then require both developers and operating system providers to handshake this age verification data or face financial ruin. I think the original intent or appearance of intent is that the store developer needs to do the handshake. I’m not a lawyer, but I can’t imagine these definitions aren’t vague enough that they can’t be weaponized against basically anything software.
I have a github account, and have contributed to “applications”. As I read them, these bills pose a serious threat to me if I continue to do so, as that makes me a “developer” and would need to ensure the things I contribute to are doing age verification – which I don’t want to do.
I think that even outside the surveillance aspect, the chilling effect of devs not publishing applications is the end-goal. Gatekeeping software to the big publishers who have both the capacity to follow the law and the lawyers/pockets to handle a suit. These laws are going to be like the DMCA 1201 language (which had much much more prose wrapped around it and was at least attempting to limit scope), which HAS been weaponized against solo devs trying to make the world better.
I fully expect some suit against multiple github repo owners on Jan 2, 2027.
I have a script on my Github that process an exported Wordpress backup to Markdown files. Am I supposed to age gate this once these rules take effect? How would I even do that? Even if there was some sort of Python library to age gate the script, easy to use, drop it in, its a script, literally anyone could comment it out or delete it.
No, it mightn’t. Err, won’t.
The most practical solution is probably to “not sell Linux in California anymore”. I guess distributions could geofence the iso download page for plausible deniability and then that’s that, right?
Who the hell is “selling” Linux?
I have an official Ubuntu CD, but I think it was just a donation, or maybe a “pay shipping” thing.
The offical linux shop, obviously – though your local PC sales/repair shop can probably order you a copy. I understand that Linyos Torovoltos grew up under communism and originally couldn’t legally sell Lunix, but the Soviets lost the cold war decades ago.
I’d rather spend a few bucks for a legitimate copy than risk installing some virus infested illegal version off some sketchy website.
I went to your second link and I think it gave me a virus. I keep having these verbal tics now.
Oh no, that’s the first phase.
You need to get your computer to an A+ certified tech and have your OS reinstalled ASAP. If you delay you’re looking at a lifetime of buying old Thinkpads off the Internet.
Red Hat.
The other distros? No idea.
I knew someone was going to come back with Red Hat. I just didn’t expect it to be you!
Hey even I use Linux daily.
Actually, I’m not really sure why “even I” should be shocking. I write code for a living. Surely I should be using Linux once in a while.
Anyway RHEL is probably the only Linux distro I can think of that costs money and comes with support. The major cloud providers sometimes have their own Linux distros they use as well (looking at you, Amazon) and you can argue they are selling Linux, but not as directly as RHEL does.
I’d like to go back to KDE Neon, but it doesn’t play nice with thermals on my Surface.
(and I totally expect you to be a Linux user … why haven’t you bragged about using Arch yet?)
why haven’t you bragged about using Arch yet?
Well Manjaro is Arch-based, but it feels like cheating to say that. Anyway, I used Manjaro, btw.
Wait, so instead of me telling every website I’m 90, I’ll tell my OS I’m 90 and the sites will query that, and this somehow works better? I’m not 90 btw, so all I’m doing is just changing who I’m lying to from zyn.com to Fedora? Great plan.
They know people will do this. It’s only stage 1. After this system is integrated, they will complain that people are misusing the feature and it needs to be upgraded to ID or biometrics. Boiling the frog.
Time to get a permanently offline machine.
Overkill. Just find the illegal no-age-collection ISO. Installing with your middle finger raised is optional, but recommended.
Let’s be absolutely clear here: The explosion of people being comfortable coming out as some stripe of LGBTQ+ has everything to do with an open internet where youth were not restricted from finding out about information related to how they felt inside. Instead of being made to feel like strangers in their own skin, with a world telling them that people like them didn’t or shouldn’t exist, they instead found community and self-love through internet forums and information which allowed them to pursue full, healthy lives as adults.
This “protect the children” malarkey is one more way for the religious groups who oppose LGBTQ+ culture to “protect the children” by restricting access to this kind of information, reducing their ability to find it in their formative years, in the name of protecting them while actually stunting their personal growth.
It extends beyond sexuality as well, although that is the most obvious since many religions are deeply censorious regarding sex.
It also affects subjects like atheism, as the various religious cultures generally do not want people contemplating the idea that there isn’t a god, especially not while they’re young, they want you long indoctrinated into belief before you can explore different ideas.
Further, when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, everything I knew about drugs was literally old wives tales meant to scare kids away from drugs, and then the internet came around and suddenly there was a boom of actual, verifiable scientific information about drugs so if you wanted to experiment with drugs, you knew what you were getting into. I once had a conversation with a girlfriend who was a bit older than me about her experiences with LSD as a teen, and she admitted that at the time she really didn’t understand on any scientific level what was happening or what the nature of hallucination was, she just knew she was having fun and seeing crazy shit.
This is a backdoor to restricting access to important information that youth need to have access to for making healthy decisions for themselves sexually, religiously, and in terms of what substances they put in their bodies.
The birth of the internet gave us a beautiful period where people could grow up with access to accurate, verifiable, worthwhile information that helped them navigate and understand the world they were growing up in and who they were within that world.
This kind of legislation intends to snuff out that openness and accessibility which lead to increased openness and acceptance of LGBTQ+, atheism, and safe drug use (including the understanding that some illegal drugs like marijuana and LSD are probably safer than legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco).
Also, neurodiversity, mental illness, and basic mental health care. People are discovering they are autistic, ADHDers, etc. They’re learning how to prevent depression or how to apply DBT tools (e.g., for emotional regulation, for judging less). It’s amazing.
It also affects subjects like atheism, as the various religious cultures generally do not want people contemplating the idea that there isn’t a god, especially not while they’re young, they want you long indoctrinated into belief before you can explore different ideas.
This reminds me of a Pakistani person I don’t personally know, but someone I know talks to them.
In their hometown, people recite verses from the Quran as part of their religious activities. There’s only one problem: the Quran they use is written in Arabic, but everyone there speaks Urdu. People don’t actually know what the passages say, just how to say them.
So this person asked them once what the passages say. Why do we read the passages in Arabic instead of Urdu? People here don’t know Arabic.
Anyway, he got belted shortly after that.
Wasn’t it Vatican II that finally allowed Catholic services in local languages instead of Latin? That really wasn’t long ago in the grand scheme.
and I think it’s worth noting that a lot of hetero people don;t fit the normative paradigm and anonymity allows for that to be developed enjoyed and explored.
Well said, thank you.
Hell yea
spot on.
Your Linux distro may be next. I use Arch by the way.
Do you actually wear pink knee-high socks? I’m dying to know.
I lolled. Thanks I needed that.
I couldn’t find any threads on the forum about this. I would like to know how/if Arch will handle this.
Of course you do.
He’s a player, after all. 101010 (I assume that’s binary for 80085).
We don’t talk about 80085. Who the hell turns their calculator upside down now?
In my youth I was taught that democracy meant that the government served the people.
What do any of these laws have to do with serving the people? Do they have anything to do with the will of the people?
The government serves the class that controls production and right now that class is really really concerned about what everyone does when they aren’t slaving away for them.
The govt serves the biggest election campaign funder. In almost all cases that is Israel
Billionaires are people.
They have the will to fuck everything that moves.
Billionaires certainly are people, but these laws don’t even serve billionaires in any meaningful sense, so that’s hardly an explanation without more elaboration.
Well, the billionaires that own age verification and surveillance services have gone from trying their best to stalk to world through tracking and analytics, despite pesky privacy laws, to forcing giant swaths of populations to hand over data by compulsion.
Yeah, they’re making a mint off us.
OK, that’s about the elaboration I was looking for…
Somehow I don’t think this is the central reason. I think governments are perfectly capable of doing bad things completely without billionaires having an interest in it. It especially doesn’t explain things like the California law that will regulate how we can or cannot program operating systems (hint: software code is a form of speech, meaning that this ought to be struck down as a violation of free speech), because no age verification services are involved in that.
I am Californian and that one snuck past me. I really didn’t hear anything about it until recently and I’m pretty pissed.
You can’t put the genie back into the lamp on biometrics. We needed real control over outlr digital data and biometrics before this became law. I hope it is repealed somehow, but the elite class don’t give a fuck.
As for business vs government, government is scrutinized closer but businesses get away with much more. It’s easier to get around red tape to outsource work to businesses than build government infrastructure to do things themselves.
I really didn’t hear anything about it until recently
Yes, I expressed the same sentiment here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/55959326/24302621
Is our entire information “ecosystem” so broken that we only pay attention to bad things after they’ve already happened, not before when there is still a chance to stop them?!
The non-stop flood of bad things happening makes it very difficult to keep up with anything, even the topics that are most important to us. Which makes it all the easier for new local laws that strip away our rights to be slipped past the citizens who care enough to stop them.
The information overload is the system working as intended for those who seek to exploit us.
In my youth I was taught that democracy meant that the government served the people.
In your youth, your teachers lied to you.
Username checks out
It’s serving the will of prudes, religious fruitcakes, inattentive parents, the technologically illiterate, and anyone dumb enough to be taken in by the “think of the children!” Rhetoric of the control-freaks.
Unfortunately this is a rather large constituency.
I would find it very sad if they were a majority, anywhere. :(
The problem is the silent majority.
And what counts as silent.
Because if you haven’t actually demonstrated, talked to, or written (with a letter) to a politician, you’re effectively silent.
Talking about it with friends and family and on the internet is tantamount to silence when it comes to influencing politics.
The other side, the raving lunatics who want total surveillance… they are loud as hell.
More like a vocal minority, I’d guess. Its upto the majority to also be vocal.
I’m assuming you’re in the USA. If this a correct assumption, then you’re not in a democracy, strictly speaking; but a republic.
I am not. I am from a country whose constitution starts with the statement that it is a democratic republic.
And you believe it?
Age verification today. What other BS surveillance info tmr?
