People are making way too big a deal of this IMO. This is basically the OS equivalent of that checkbox you click to enter a porn website that gets exposed to Meta, so they can claim that they did what they all the they could to protect children if they get sued by parents. Any determined kid would figure out a way around this, but I can see it stopping younger and less determined kids, and it's a useful tool for parents.

It does not stop at the check box. Someone is going to sue Google/Apple when a 13 year old gets on a porn site. Then Google/Apple will introduce "verification" that requires linking your identity to your device, and attesting this to the "operator" (porn site). Then every person using any OS is tracked, on every website and app, all the time, by law. And Linux becomes illegal without it.

This is not a theory. Laws requiring this are going through the state and federal level right now.

How would this work for e.g. RTOS?

Does the hidden Minix installation on every Intel CPU with the Intel Management Engine count?

Wouldn't a some kind of technical standard proposal be a more sensible way to do this than trying to pass OS laws state by state?

iOS (for example) already has that technical standard in place and usable.

Unlike the California law, I seemed to be in the minority in this opinion, this one does seem to require programs like grep to ask for a users age bracket.

> (b) An operator 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.

Unlike the California law I do not see anything that restricts this to child accounts only.

So let say I have a program:

    print("Hello, World!")

and I want to publish it to say npm or nixos, or some linux distribution. Not with out violating this law. This application needs to request the users age brackets at least at 'downloaded and launched' optimistically that means once on first launch, but potentially needs to be requested on each launch of the application. So lets fix the program

    import ageBracket
    ageBracket.get()
    print("Hello, World!")

There we go, now the code is compliant with my imagined ageBracket module.

Microsoft has already made the installation of Windows a fucking nightmare with MS account requirements. Imagine when they are forcing every new device to not only have 50+ TOPS for Copilot, but also a tiny little internal mass spectrometer autosampler which will prick your finger as you login and analyze blood to carbon date the age of the user.

Install offline, no ms cloud bullshit account required. I just did this with Win 11 enterprise 25h2. Used an activator cmd script at the end that bypassed activation.

it's entirely possible such nonsense is all show, and wouldn't be passed, however.

i'm from illinois, worked in california, and no longer live in either. from afar, it seems that whatever california bureaucrats propose, after a short delay, gets proposed by their little sibling bureaucrats in illinois.

This is 100% true

It has already passed the Colorado senate.

This. IL and MA follow whatever CA does with a few year lag. Considerations of sanity never enter into the discussion.

As an Illinoisan, this kind of stuff makes me want to leave and get somewhere sane. Anybody have recommendations? What places don't have this kind of insanity?

There's some hope in New Hampshire. Our legislature just struck down our equivalent bill[1] while it was in committee, so that's counting for something. And within the last decade, privacy was enshrined in our state constitution[2], providing us with some legal teeth to defeat local digital age verification laws.

From the New Hampshire Constitution (Part 1, Article 2-b - Right of Privacy):

>"An individual's right to live free from governmental intrusion in private or personal information is natural, essential, and inherent."

[1] https://legiscan.com/NH/bill/HB1658/2026

[2] https://www.nh.gov/glance/state-constitution/bill-rights

As an Illinoisan who left 23 years ago for work in California, worked a summer in Massachusetts, now in Arizona, i think the answer is Antarctica.

Answers will be provided after adequate proof that you will not bring the voting record that made illinois what it is with you.

constitutional amendment to criminalise corporate lobbying with severe penalties - including capital punishment and confiscation of entire corporation.

I actually see the golden lining here

>"Operating system provider" means a person or entity that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system software on a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.

I.e Linux will most likely to be immune, since its not tied to a particular computer.

Which just means Linux stay winning. It already made big headway in the video game space, so its prime to take over personal computing too.

Wouldn't that include using it on any cloud service that let's you pick it?

> since its not tied to a particular computer.

That's a really weird and nonsensical reading of "operating system software on a computer".

All the distros are the providers here. The Linux kernel is not an operating system.

Since GNU(or other)/Linux OSes allow the sysadmin to compose the OS out of parts and change them, the final OS is created by the sysadmin. That's what makes distributing binary software so annoying for maintainers, every installation can be it's own snowflake OS.

> For the record, I don’t care enough about age verification. Whether the law passes or not, I don’t really care.

Sounds like there actually would be some benefit commenting about it on HN.

No one who matters uses HN or cares about HN. The handful of us on HN who are in or near a position to affect change are basically here due to habit or $#itposting until we get banned.

So they are right in that sense - commenting on HN is cathartic but ultimately useless.

And the people who matter and are against this also don't use HN because they view this platform as toxic and reactionary.

There are software engineers who directly work for the platforms lobbying for this whom post here.

ICs don't matter. I can fire one and hire 5, and increasingly, the demographics on HN don't align with those who work in those organizations.

HN is basically slashdot now.

> and increasingly, the demographics on HN don't align with those who work in those organizations.

People have been worried about that on HN for years, but I still see the same culture. There do seem to be more bots and astroturfing, but that's a systemic issue with all social media platforms today.

> People have been worried about that on HN for years, but I still see the same culture...

And that's the crux of the issue - the industry and people have changed, but HN hasn't changed discourse wise and is growing increasingly disconnected demographically speaking.

A large portion of HNers are men in their late 30s to 50s, and no longer located in the Bay Area or NYC.

No one's who matters is having these kinds of conversations on HN - they're meeting IRL with Luma invites or in signal/imessage/discord group chats.

And what I'm saying is that the people who actually matter are posting here. Because it's a trusted social platform. We want to talk to fellow experts of varied expertise, and I truly appreciate the discussions I have here. Feel free to have discussions of similar value on platforms with smaller, focused communities; I do the same for the tech I know. I do agree bots/astroturfing are prevalent here. But I've had https://news.ycombinator.com as my homepage for ages for a reason, as opposed to literally any other forum. I hope this doesn't become what reddit is now.

Did "hacker news" lose its stallman flavor in favor of venture capital investors? Yes, at the get-go; but that doesn't mean people have sold out their morals. We're all frustrated. We live in a society. At least in the US, you'll just call a representative who's getting paid by lobbyists letting your message fall on deaf ears. But I have seen so many great comments here by people with beautiful minds and good intentions; and sometimes I can even debate with them and get my ass handed to me, because they're much more brilliant than I.

edit: was curious on Luma. Is it basically meetup/radius/partiful/apple invites but for crypto bros?

> And what I'm saying is that the people who actually matter are posting here. Because it's a trusted social platform

I am one of the those people who matter and work with other people who do as well yet I'm the only one in my peer group of VCs, CISOs, CPOs, CTOs, CEOs, Founders, SWEs, PMs, etc who still uses HN today.

Hell, Nvidia GTC has been going on for 3 days now and not a single post about it has come up. That shows how out of the loop HN has become.

> Did "hacker news" lose its stallman flavor in favor of venture capital investors

To me, it's become even more Stallman-esque and less relevant to founders, operators, or investors. And this is a growing sentiment amongst newer YCombinator founders as well.

Conversations that are actually relevant to founders and VCs don't happen on HN anymore. And an increasing number of HNers use VC and PE interchangeably - this is such a basic mistake that betrays how out of the loop and lack of context HNers have now.

> was curious on Luma. Is it basically meetup/radius/partiful/apple invites but for crypto bros

It's the new meetup. If you are seeing crypto bros on there then you are not located in a major tech hub.

Opening up Luma this morning I see invites to a fireside chat with Fei-Fei Li (ImageNet), a spring showcase by a VC fund that has invested in dozens of YC startups, a couple raves, a Quantum Computing breakfast at Stanford sponsored by the Danish and Norwegian Consulates, and an event by the Japanese Consulate on the intersection of manga, AI, and creativity. These events and others are where people who matter and can impact change are hanging out and chatting with each other.

> I hope this doesn't become what reddit is now.

At least as an American in tech, HN already has become as low signal-to-noise as Reddit.

Based on the time you posted along with your pattern of speech, I'm guessing you live in Central or maybe Western Europe. You have a very "DACH" coded speech pattern.

Unfortunately, a rhetorical knee-jerk response that it needs universal, specific counter legislation for a "permanent fix" is panacea, magical thinking.

The root cause is a corrupt government doing the bidding of a few rich people and other countries. Fixing that will be very difficult but is nonetheless necessary and possible to largely thwart legislators from working against their own ostensible constituency.