The world has gone insane
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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California should be the state championing privacy laws, not authoritarianism and surveillance.
If California wants to protect the children they should remove their countries president. Cars have operating systems now, should we age check there as well?
Cars have an age check already, it's called a license.
An estimate of 10-15% of US population drives without a license, and that's just based on confirmed cases.
I made no claim as to it's effectiveness. Just as an age verification in an OS would also have a failure rate.
My research shows 9% at most. Source?
Me ballparking half a dozen different contradicting sources over the past five-ish years. Again, each one is only confirmed numbers, but nobody would announce such a thing, let alone give an honest answer, sooo...
Are you joking? California hates Trump. We can't just "remove him", lol.
This verification reportedly doesn't require ID, just the honor system.
just the honor system.
for now... "If you build it, they will come"
Step 1: don't worry you don't even need to give it ID!
Step 2: now pretty much everyone has implemented this, we will require ID
Although if we put this all in the OS, as Linux users could we just replace the package? Could it be better than age verification per website
At least there's some nontrivial additional challenges to make the jump, such as authenticating the user is on an approved OS, and the infrastructure for identity verification itself. I like this better than other age verification mandates because those make the latter the first step, fueling the growth of surveillance tech and the companies providing it as a service.
I don’t want an “approved OS”, I want to run my own customized Linux. Forcing everyone to use an approved OS is draconian.
This is part of the war on general purpose computation, which could and should be viewed as an attack on human freedom in general.
Cory Doctorow was talking about this over 15 years ago.
Forcing everyone to use an approved OS is draconian.
I agree, but my point is that it wouldn't be that easy to do either. I am hopeful that a system where servers take the OS's word for it that you are in a certain age category would not smoothly transition into one where they also need proof that the owner of the hardware cannot decide that category, and that the system working this way would be accepted as a long-term status quo like those age selection menus were, because it would be actually a bit more effective at stopping kids who don't know how to reinstall an OS so legislators could plausibly claim they did something without extra changes.
If its on the OS at least there is just 1 thing to bypass I suppose is the main benefit I can see with that method. Still got the question of what is an operating system? Linux isn't an operating system, its just the kernel.
At least it's not requiring ID, and it's kind of easy to circumvent, but it's a slippery slope. Also it's definitely just virtue signalling to the dumbest among us, which is generally a bad thing.
California does this sometimes. One of our more notoriously stupid laws put up cancer warnings on virtually everything with a certain unnamed substance, making it almost impossible to identify things that might be seriously unhealthy. Like you enter a Starbucks and it says something in the Starbucks causes cancer. Like, gee, thanks.
Overprotective, not well thought out, bullshit laws.
Actually, that one was interestingly both corporate sabotage as well as poor design. The law detailed that all products containing materials known to increase risk of cancer have labeling as such, at first listing only things that the common person would definitely want to know about. Formaldehyde for example. Companies producing products with these chemicals did not like this, and sued to add a laundry list of additional chemicals to the bill under the context that in lab settings they've been shown to increase the risk of cancer... And well go figure, they didn't specify a "significant risk" or anything sane like that in the law, so now pretty much everything that has even a inkling of cancer risk increase gets labeled. Good intent, terrible execution, corporately ruined.
Oh yeah, that makes sense. Does make you wonder where the corporate interests lie in the age verification case, but it's probably the usual suspects in tech and surveillance.
If anyone actually looks through the legislature and the discourse around it:
It is not age verification like you need for pornhub. You aren't giving a photocopy of your license to some org to verify you exist.
It is literally the same logic as "please enter your birthday to continue". Just say you were born on jan 1 1900 or whatever. That will then be fetchable by the app/browser to send when a site requests it.
Which... seems like a really good system? It allows people who care about what their kids do to lock down their accounts. And it provides no meaningful PII for adults (or kids whose parents don't care).
It is a REALLY stupid law but also... it is likely to get something on the books before the "You need to send us your long form birth certificate to install VLC" laws start getting pushed.
Please atleast use Jan 1 1970
Oh wow, if this is it, then it's really not bad at all - easy to setup, client side, easy to ignore, and easy enough for teens to get around it when they feel like learning how. I don't hate this, other than the potential for a dangerous slide towards ID.