Even if this WERE a good idea, which it is NOT, it should be OPT-IN for RESTRICTION set by the PARENTS. OS level PARENTAL CONTROLS are stupid but REASONABLE.
this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2026
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There is just no way that anyone with a technical background signed off on this idea.
This is just so dumb and the fact that it's coming from Democrats feeds right into the rage-bait winger types like Lunduke.
I want the plot twist here to be that they're just trying to tank Windows and MacOS because they're big Linux fans
From what I've heard this would also apply to Linux.
How would you enforce this? Maybe I'm being thick I just truly don't understand how you'd crack down on someone not using the age verification?
I've seen it mentioned somewhere else, but while they don't mention it in the arricle. There's a chance we are possibly looking at age restriction at the isp level. This could be a way, but there will be work arounds for those tech savy enough to get around them I could forsee.
We could start our own underground p2p or LAN connection completely detached from regular isp but the logistics to that would be extremely difficult to pull off on a massive scale and more than likely would be more locally based amongst friends and neighbors. Vpns could get blocked at the isp as well, so that wouldn't be an option either to bypass it. I welcome any corrections though if I'm mistaken. Hopefully it doesn't get thay far, but a lot of these similar laws are occurring all over the world and not just in the USA.
There's usenet, freenet, hypnanet, and tor. However, the protocols could get blocked and or restricted, so not sure if there's a way around that.
As I've seen someone ask - what is the age of root? Are you going to get prompted for your age when you run sudo?
And are people seriously proposing every single time you create any user, including service level users, that there is some age restriction on that user? What about all the users that can exist inside containers? What about contexts like AWS where you have some user assume a role?
And that's not even getting into the hundreds (thousands?) of Linux distros and BSDs.
As I've seen someone else observe - Linux is not even an OS; it's a kernel. What's to keep people from just releasing and compiling their own sets of tools for managing/creating users and login, etc. If there is something proposed about actually doing this for Linux the kernel, I'm sure patches would emerge nearly immediately.
I saw some of Lunduke's commenters saying this isn't like the 00s or whatever where some clueless tech-illiterate (and older) politician is wanting something, this is more nefarious, etc. and of course these days, everything is different (sigh, no it fucking isn't).
Clearly, they must not know about or be forgetting things like the Clipper Chip and the battle over PGP or the V-chip in the 90s. There were people that were quite tech-savvy and in politics proposing things people didn't really want or need way back then, too. This is not all that new. The control freaks with bad ideas who are not really all that tech illiterate were around 30 years ago, too. At least.
"Let's follow in Texas' footsteps except go even further" - Colorado and California Dem Lawmakers
There should be no need for this to exist. The internet has been around for long enough without age verification that it doesn't need to be added now.
That being said, this is the lesser of the two evils, I think. If your age data exists at the device-level and can send an authorization to a service that says "This user is an adult" without needing to send them any additional identification, that would be better than needing to trust some nebulous cloud service with identifiable information tying your personal identity to your online habits.
This is even dumber/more nefarious than that. They want this at the OS level. So I guess even if you are using something offline and want it air-gapped, these fucking geniuses want age verification?
All I can say to them is: go fuck yourselves.
That last line says everything I wanted to say
Where's the vote blue people