It would make it illegal to sell our products there, as our central control unit has an OS, too. I know, I have written it, and I have no plans of implementing an age veryfication system for the people logging in to set and control parameters.
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2026
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I'll just copy my comment from a similar bill in colorado, I will leave the link to the colorado bill in, but here is the california bill as well if you want to read it yourself.
The title is very misleading. This is the actual bill that they are trying to pass. The link already includes a summary, so I will just give you an even simpler explanation and some practical examples why this is actually really neat.
First of all, this is not age verification. No IDs have to be submitted, no selfies or videos will be submitted to any age estimation AIs, so put your pitchforks away (for now, until they decide to expand the bill to include these measures as well, then it's time to burn it down). The name of the bill already tells you what it is: Age Attestation. Aka what every piece of software already does before it shows you explicit content.
With the bill in place, every "operating system provider" has to ask you for your age or date of birth during OS setup, which will then be made available to other software via an API. So instead of having to fill in your date of birth or checking "Are you 18+/21+?" boxes, software will use the new API to check instead, saving you the trouble of doing it manually every time for every application that is not made for all ages.
What makes it even better is that the OS does not have to provide your actual age or birth date, the bill has a minimum requirement of just disclosing age-bracket data. So it could work just like age ratings, which also rely on age groups rather than specific years. Also, the bill explicitly forbids asking for more than your age, sharing more than that via the new API and using the entered age data for anything else than the described purpose, like sending it to a server for tracking purposes.
And finally, as mentioned in the beginning, no IDs or anything else as it is with age verification necessary. You can still lie, just enter 1.1.2000 or whatever you want. Nothing changes, except that you will only have to do it once every time you reinstall/reset your OS or buy a new device.
This is actually incredible.
- Buy all the RAM and video cards. RAM and video cards become too expensive for the average person to purchase.
- Push AI for everything until dependency develops.
- Sell remote access to computing power. (AI, Streaming video games, remote desktop, etc.)
- As the "Operating System Provider," collect all of the personal information necessary to validate that each user is telling the truth about their age.
Result: Zero Individual Privacy- Everything you compute is processed by a computer owned by a big corporation with a backdoor built-in for your authoritarian government (which is owned by billionaires) to surveil.
Anyone who says there is no plan by large groups to control people is a fool. They aren't some secret shadowy group that will vanish into thin air the moment some obese tinfoil hat wearing nutjob with a gun flashes a flashlight at them, but they're so incredibly obvious that it is incredible many are still in denial about it.
Yes, the people at the top are incredibly stupid, but their plan isn't something that needs genius level intellect to work. It just needs a fuckload of money and a compliant legislative branch, and they have both.
Republicans: Full of pedophiles and pedophiles protectors. Hated by every sane person with any kind of conscience.
Democrats: Not on my watch! I can be an asshole too!
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Interesting post from Fedora on this https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/california-age-verification/181968/6
Gavin Newsom should drop out of politics and stick to shitposting about trump. He's much better at that.
His intern is, at least.
Would rather his intern run for president based on the posts.
gavin newsom was never effective out of local elections, hes well known for that, HES EVEn worst than biden and kamala.
Literally
standing on a San Francisco street corner, opening my trench coat revealing 40 USB sticks
Hey kid, wanna buy illegal Linux?
"Naw, BSD or GTFO, lol."
It doesn't matter if you're, say, Debian, because they'll just put up some symbolic "not intended for use in state X" and then continue doing whatever they were doing, but if you're Red Hat and actually selling something like Red Hat Enterprise Linux to companies in the state, stuff like this is actually a pain in the ass.
And to reiterate a previous comment, the Democrats have a trifecta in both California and Colorado, and the legislation here is something that they are squarely to blame for. I'd really rather that they knock this kind of horseshit off so that I can go back to being upset with the Republican Party.
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Read the legislation. It's not just operating systems, its applications as well! All applications, there are no exceptions. Everything from GIMP to the EHR your Doctor uses to a custom Open Claude bot on Github. ALL of them.
Good thing this will be unenforceable for open source software, or at least things can be forked if they are maintained by bigger companies that need to comply.
Not just Linux, but embedded OS's too. Also, the age verification requirement is a "reasonable attempt", so maybe a prosecutor decides full face scan checks are the minimum "reasonable effort". Will it hold up? Who knows, but can you afford to litigate it?
Note, there are not exceptions for headless installs, or OS's without an account.
Impossible to enforce. Pro version of Windows allows for local account creation also with Linux too.
Fun fact: Dell now offers their ready made desktops in linux and windows. That never happened before. Windows had to really suck to get that shit go that bad.
They've sold their XPS line with Ubuntu as an option for like 10 years. Maybe they stopped for some time, but it's not new
And steam has linux too in their devices. Linux is going mainstream, and i feel like this time is real.
Which is why they are going to war against it.
My Steam account is 21 years old and can now buy alcohol. Does that count?
They don't care. They want your face, retina, fingerprints, DNA. All for their LLMs and so they can sell you something else.
Also to blackmail you later if they think they can or just feel like it... because they will put all that shit on an insecure server and some 13 year old hacker in Turkmenistan will leak it and make a killing (literally and figuratively) with it.
wrose yet blackmail you with their ai created child pron.
Or just use real CSAM from their own private collection and place it on your machine. Or even make a deepfake using your face pasted on theirs and those of your children or young relatives or random kids pasted onto the children. If you point out that this is a deepfake and you have the technical knowledge to prove it, they will use that as proof that you are actually trying to frame THEM.
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Good luck trying to strongarm foss. Forks and backups included. Also making all linux servers illegal. This will totally not be circumvented. Get lost with your law. Let the parents do the parenting instead of overreaching on mass surveillance and trying to end any form of online anonymity.
More liberal fascism? No surprise.
i was going to say, this has MICROSOFT stink all over it, or at least palintir.
This was passed and signed last October. Why is this just hitting the news cycle?
No idea.
This will immediately get struck down in court even if it passes, though everyone should make their voices heard in saying this is complete nonsense.
Yet another case of antiquated politicians not understanding technology whatsoever.
No doubt the law is hopeful and leaves out many details in regards to how such a system could/would/might be implemented.
But I am not seeing anything in the law that would be unconstitutional. But I'm not a lawyer so what do I know.
Not a lawyer, but deeply involved in the law from the tech side for many years at various deeper levels from the engineering side and bridge to product and so forth.
It doesn't need to be unconstitutional to be struck down as the constitution doesn't cover all laws, especially not state and local laws. All you need to do is prove that the language or intent of the law is either:
- impossible to enforce (ex: software processes cannot be patented or controlled/patrolled)
- the language is too broad (ex: What is an OS exactly?)
- it violates a prexisting law or creates a verifiable conundrum (ex: this would violate California's own data privacy laws)
- it creates an undue tax or burden on existing technology (ex: devices out in the wild can't be retrofitted to comply, which sort of fits with #1)
- it DOES actually violate a constitutional right (ex: 4th amendment)
Being on my side of things, the legal team would most likely start a case with something like "So you say the OS needs to be locked with age verification. Does that mean every TV, router, public computer, tablet...blah blah blah", so it's very likely to get tossed on #1 quite easily because these folks have no idea what an OS actually is, and that every piece of technology you interact with on a daily basis has an OS. The lack of specificity alone would get this tossed in a heartbeat.
If that failed, they'd argue there is no way to police or enforce this law because sites who rely on this rule existing are putting themselves in legal jeopardy by simply allowing any traffic from California to access their services. What if someone from another state or country is in California and wants to watch porn in their hotel, or play a game with friends on Discord? Police have zero right to verify that any device entering California complies with the law, so the provider of the service would have to be on the hook to do the verification, which means they would just block any device from California that doesn't meet whatever flag is sent to say it safe. THEN you have the infrastructure that is required to ensure those devices...blah blah blah.
It's just a stupid idea by dumbass technically illiterate people. It won't go anywhere.
As soon as these idiots figure out what an OS is, this is dead in the water because of the above.
I appreciate the insight. And you are right, that was my lack of understanding about how it could be struck down in court.
I do want to talk briefly on your point about these other devices where the law might actually apply since I have seen a few people bring up this point.
I the definition of an OS provider the law asserts that an OS is "computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device." (emphasis mine)
To me this clearly excludes those other types of devices because routers, tvs, etc are not general purpose.
As far as public computers I think that is a really good point and speaks to the vagueness of the law. There is no clear direction on how that works in such a common use case.
Coming from the engineering side as well and I've put more time, thought, and effort into project proposals than it feels like they put into this law.
Solid point on the "single purpose" nature of some devices, but that's also the legalese going to work here in that "Depends what the meaning of IS, is" sort of way 🤣
Making laws with vague definitions will get challenged, as you point out.
You're right. I had the same thought about the definition of "account".
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