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Posted by WalterSobchak 11 hours ago

A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification(www.pcgamer.com)
297 points | 301 commentspage 3
egorfine 8 hours ago|
Ah, so this is what Lennart Poettering has been cooking? [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572

Perenti 2 hours ago||
Will this only apply to an OS with human user accounts? I wonder how autonomous agents that are operating systems running on bare hardware are defined under this strange law. Not all OS are for humans. Consider many uni-kernel applications.
brooke2k 2 hours ago||
clearly there's something I don't understand (or is the law just really this stupid?) - but what would this even look like for linux? every user account requires an associated age?

but users don't have a 1:1 mapping to the people that log into them. linux users that aren't used by any particular person, but by a particular _service_ are common. so are linux users that could be logged into by any number of people, and which have no specific single owner.

newsoftheday 3 hours ago||
California is a confusing state, age verification for operating systems while almost releasing this monster on the public: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-02-26/serial-c...
monero-xmr 3 hours ago|
They also created an open air market for child prostitutes with their latest anti-arrest law, as observed by the NYT last November https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/19/insider/sex-trafficking-m...
wasmainiac 10 hours ago||
Does not require verification, no biggie, this is essentially a parental control system.
jmholla 8 hours ago||
As others have pointed out, this is just a foot in the door. There's also a part of the law this article doesn't cover that requires EVERY application to query this information on every launch, regardless of whether or not the application has any age related limitations.
davorak 7 hours ago||
The language I found was:

> when the application is downloaded and launched

So it looks like the law only requires it on first launch. Which makes sense if the application can only be run from that one account. Apps that can be launched from multiple accounts are not singled out in the law, but the spirt of the law would have you checking what account is launching the app and are they in the correct age range.

jmholla 6 hours ago||
That's not a guarantee. It's up to how the courts interpret that and. Given that this law is meant to handle a moving target like age, I fully expect them to interpret it as its disjunctive form.
avaer 9 hours ago|||
Keep in mind this forced parental control system in the OS is supposedly because of app stores.

So we're already pretty deep in the law deciding what shape of computing you're allowed to do. What makes you think it will stop here?

gustavus 10 hours ago|||
No but then the next step is "well we need a way to enforce it because people are just lying about their age".

I guess let me show a slope I found over here, just past the boiling frogs, watch your footing though, it's recently been greased and is quite steep.

kgwxd 4 hours ago|||
I was just at some .gov site from another HN post. It asked are you Over 18, I clicked No out of curiosity. Showed Access Denied, but the buttons stayed. I clicked Yes, and got in. I don't attribute to stupidity that which is clear malice. They'd don't actually give a flying fuck about what "kids" can get to, they only care about controlling everyone, of every age, as much as they possibly can.
wasmainiac 9 hours ago|||
I agree, I don’t like it as much as you do. I’m just saying nothing short of a mandated TPM will actually enforce this. I think they know that.

I think this is mostly for show to stay relevant wrt. What is happening in the courts. This is the Same play as it always been for registration “are you over the age of 13?”

Mountain_Skies 7 hours ago|||
Which begs the question if Microsoft's stubborn insistence on TPM 2.0 for Windows 11 to operate was something planned out in advance of this law being proposed.
gizmo686 7 hours ago|||
How does a TPM stop people from lying about their age?
varispeed 9 hours ago||
Overton window.

Wedge.

lioeters 7 hours ago||
Then ratchet.
p0w3n3d 3 hours ago||
People who cannot tell what is an operating system and what is not are writing laws
syntaxing 2 hours ago||
I don’t think the title is correct? All OS must have age profiles that external sources can query. There’s nothing explicit that checks the age itself in the law?
lacoolj 2 hours ago||
Feels like they're trying to implement a new wide-reaching protocol/spec by requiring it by law first, then expecting someone to magically develop something, and god forbid it's a different standard than anyone else's.

By next January there will be 30 different methods of age input signalling between OS and application. And then by 2030 we might have the top 3 adopted as established defacto standards.

somewhat related-ish https://xkcd.com/927/ :)

dpoloncsak 10 hours ago||
I'm under the impression anyone doing nefarious things online are probably more-than tech savvy enough to not install an OS that rats them out...right?

Isnt that literally one of the first rules of the DNM Bible?

taraindara 9 hours ago||
Will kids raised on it not know anything different? Seems a path to reduce computer literacy. Then again, being blocked from doing something I wanted is what lead me to find ways around said block. But I already had unrestricted access to the system to bend it to my will. Seems like these kinds of systems won’t allow for the user to learn how to works at all. It’s a mystery box.
hnav 7 hours ago|||
One thing that's happening is that attestation is being plumbed into the web itself. CloudFlare and Apple have a collab where Safari will inject tokens that let CF know that the request is coming from a blessed device. In a world where all websites are being crushed by bot traffic, expect that Goog pushes on their own integrity initiative in Chrome in the next year or two.
Muromec 3 hours ago||
I guess, if you can install the OS yourself, that's adult enough to see whatever adults are doing online.
rickcarlino 3 hours ago|
Who is actively lobbying against the “war on root access”? Which are the NGOs/PACs/non-profits with the best track record of getting results here? FSF and EFF come to mind, but I can’t think of others and don’t know of track records for any of them.
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