> That sounds like an OS feature that parents would like to have. Probably has some market value. Maybe just let the market figure that one out.

If there was a competitive market for OSs this probably would work, but we do not really have that. Getting the market to be competitive likely either takes considerable time, or other forms of government intervention. If there really was a competitive market then this would have been a solved problem ~15-20 years ago since parents have been complaining about this for ~25-30 years at this point.

> Or, we could have an overbroad law passed that torpedoes every open-source OS in existence. If I were MS, Google, or Apple, that'd be a great side benefit of this law. Heck, they probably already have this functionality in place.

I do not think the law does that. Either a additional feature making age/birth date entry and age bracket query available, or indicated the os is not intended for use in California, both seem to let developers continue along like normal. edit Or, I think, indicate that it is not for use by children.

> The problem here is legally-mandated age verification, not where it is placed (although forcing it into all OSes is absolutely ...). The gains are minimal for children and the losses are gigantic for children and adults. I'm not keen to have children avoid blisters by cutting off their feet.

In this case the mandate is entering an age/birth date at account creation where you can lie about said age/birth date. The benefit is the ability of an adult to set up parental controls for a child account.

> Put control back with the parents. Let them buy tech that restricts their children's access. This law doesn't protect children from the mountains of damaging content online.

This puts control in the parents hands. When they set up their child's account they can put in their child's age, or not, they can make it an adult account.

> And let all the adults run Linux if they want to without requiring Torvalds to put some kind of age question in the kernel and needing `ls` to check it every single run.

So from the literal reading of the law the age checks are only required when "a child that is the primary user of the device". It does not need to effect accounts where the primary user is not a child. Nor does it seem like any application needs to run the check every time the application is launched.

The law unfortunately does require:

> (b) (1) A developer shall request a signal with respect to a particular user from an operating system provider or a covered application store when the application is downloaded and launched.

So in the case where a child is the primary account/device user. The app needs to request the signal at least once when first launched, though it is not required to do anything with it. Delegating that to the package manager would make sense, but this part of the law should be modified, apps that can not use the signal for anything should not be required to request it, 'ls' for example.

Even ignoring everything else, at a minimum it is backwards.

There is no reason to tell the application, and by extension their developers, how old the user is. The application should tell the user what bracket it is appropriate for and then the operating system could filter appropriately without any of the user’s identifying information leaving their system.

This is also technically superior because it moves the logic for filtering out of being custom implemented by each and every single application to a central common user-controlled location; you do not have to rely on every application developer doing it right simultaneously.

Well, it's not a bad thing. And if you can root your own computer, that's adult enough

Y'all are like Dilbert with the shock collar on, "It's not so bad." It's requiring all operating systems, apps, and online services to add age checks. It adds friction to the process of developing stuff. If there's something you do not want to do especially in California of all Goddamn places (swear to God, Wozniak would be spinning in his grave if he had one) it's add friction to the software development process with government-mandated code paths. But what do I know. This is a site actually called Hackernews, where the answer to all large-scale social problems is "that's why we need more government regulation".

Why do you think you will still be able to install Linux?

I think doing this on an OS level might be the most privacy focused way to do this but the issue is that this is not going to be the way this is implemented.

Like, I’m not American and in Germany we have ID cards that actually have your age encoded on an NFC chip in the card and an ID number that encodes the age. Like, age is part of the ID number and checksum.

You could totally do all of this age verification offline on device and just expose an API that offers the age of the user to applications. You’d never need to talk to the internet for this, the API just says if you are a minor or adult, the browser can pass that to websites who don’t need to collect personal data and everything is fine.

But that’s not going to happen. It’s gonna be some AI facial recognition kinda garbage that is gonna send your face in every angle to Apple or Microsoft or another third party.

As is common these days they are going to try really hard to absolve you as the user of any responsibility for the sake of protecting kids so they can’t let this be a simple offline thing where your personal information never ever have to leave the device because what if kids find a way around it? Well the obvious answer is don’t let your kids just use a computer without supervision but if people would do that we’d not be in need of this garbage anyway.

So basically, you have no morals? Weird thing to admit online, but whatever.