Assembly Bill No. 1043 was approved by California governor Gavin Newsom in October of last year, and becomes active on January 1, 2027 (via The Lunduke Journal). The bill states, among other factors, that "An operating system provider shall do all of the following:"
"(1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.
"(2) Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies, at a minimum, which of the following categories pertains to the user."
Wonder if Microslop will back-port this to Windows 10 because of the great opportunity to demand IDs and logging into a Microslop account on your machine.
Doubt it since it's EOL. But you should not use Windows. Move to Linux or atleast use Windows LTSC.
LTSC is still an operating system with network connectivity. IF they were back-porting it to Windows 10 they'd include it there as well most likely because these laws don't tend to provide intelligent exemptions like for server OSes or embedded stuff.
In California's case I can forgive them for now IF they don't amend it and make it worse (big IF) as I suspect this will be a stepping stone to saying "now that you have this basic thing, implement a workflow to check an ID at set-up as well". As it stands at PRESENT it's just parental controls where a parent can set their kid's age as young and restrict them from inappropriate stuff which isn't a bad goal necessarily (though fraught with actual problems in a reactionary society like ours).
If I were writing these laws at a minimum I'd exclude OSes that lack a GUI as well as those that have a GUI but lack an ability for unrestricted internet access as well as those that reasonably are not used by consumers such as those intended to be installed on server hardware and which are not sold generally to average end users.
More than likely other states pass this but require an ID or something and companies like Microslop, Google, Apple say fuck it and though initially restricting such requirements to those states announce a nationwide rollout because trying to comply with various laws is hard so might as well just comply with the strictest version floating around more than one state.
So I doubt we'll be worrying about this for long. They'll be outlawing Linux in practice before the decade is up except for certified CIA run editions with closed source ID checking modules from Palantir or whatever. Which means hardware vendors will likely lock out those versions or at least not make hardware compatible with them or offer drivers. Valve can pull off maintaining their own flavored fork that complies but it'll only run on certified hardware, everyone else will use a version of Microslop Linux which is just Linux by Microslop with their AI and lots of proprietary code compiled on top of it. But all the other editions will become hard pressed to be run on anything your average consumer can buy. Dark times ahead.
I'll use what I need to in order to run what I need to run. For now I must maintain Windows machines. LTSC? Why yes I do. Thanks for your concern.
tell that to developers