Mastodawn

Age Verification Laws Are Multiplying Like a Virus, and Your Linux Computer Might be Next

https://beehaw.org/post/25134707

Age Verification Laws Are Multiplying Like a Virus, and Your Linux Computer Might be Next - Beehaw

> As of today, about half of all U.S. states have some form of age verification law around. Nine of those were passed in 2025 alone, covering everything from adult content sites to social media platforms to app stores. > > Right now, California’s Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043) is all the rage right now, which targets not only websites and apps but also operating systems. Come January 1, 2027, every OS provider must collect a user’s age at account setup and provide that data to app developers via a real-time API. > > Colorado is also working on a near-identical bill, which we covered earlier. > > The EFF’s year-end review put it more bluntly: 2025 was “the year states chose surveillance over safety.” The foundation’s concern, which I concur with, is, where does this stop? Self-reported birthday today, government ID tomorrow? There appears to be no limit to these laws’ overreach.

schnurrito Mar 7

In my youth I was taught that democracy meant that the government served the people.

What do any of these laws have to do with serving the people? Do they have anything to do with the will of the people?

masterofn001 Mar 7

Billionaires are people.

They have the will to fuck everything that moves.

schnurrito Mar 7

Billionaires certainly are people, but these laws don’t even serve billionaires in any meaningful sense, so that’s hardly an explanation without more elaboration.

ComradeSharkfucker Mar 7

The government serves the class that controls production and right now that class is really really concerned about what everyone does when they aren’t slaving away for them.

OwOarchist Mar 7

In my youth I was taught that democracy meant that the government served the people.

In your youth, your teachers lied to you.

Username checks out

𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘 Mar 8

I’m assuming you’re in the USA. If this a correct assumption, then you’re not in a democracy, strictly speaking; but a republic.

schnurrito Mar 8

I am not. I am from a country whose constitution starts with the statement that it is a democratic republic.

And you believe it?

ryannathans Mar 8

The govt serves the biggest election campaign funder. In almost all cases that is Israel

driving_crooner Mar 7

Bet Microsoft is behind this.

Snot Flickerman Mar 7

Actually, when being grilled by congress, Mark Zuckerberg proposed exactly this solution: OS level age verification.

It’s actually being pushed by social media companies to take the heat and responsibility off of them.

cub Gucci Mar 7

Age Verification Laws

The most misleading title ever. They are surveillance laws

Snot Flickerman Mar 7

No, they are censorship laws aimed at preventing young people from accessing certain types of information that specific groups don’t want young people learning about, such as their sexuality, concepts like atheism, and safety information regarding drugs.

cub Gucci Mar 7

No. History taught me one thing only: if they say they want to protect kids, it’s never about the kids. It’s a slogan that helps to sell unpopular laws

Exactly, they have all this already established laws to protect kids, but everyone seem pretty chill about pedofiles

Snot Flickerman Mar 7

If you think blocking access to knowledge about sexuality, atheism, or drugs is actually protecting children and not about a controlling and unpopular law I don’t know what to tell you. Because it’s clearly not actually intended to protect children as much as it is to block inconvenient information to help indoctrinate children to be compliant and unquestioning.

cub Gucci Mar 7

They want to bind your id with the device you use and restricting queer kids from discovering that they’re queer is the best thing you have in mind?

Yeah, I think you’re arguing with clouds. This person isn’t saying these aren’t effects or even objectives of the age verification effort, but it’s a little silly to say, “No, this isn’t about surveillance, it’s about stifling LGBTQ and atheist progression.” It’s just so tunnel-visioned.

You could’ve even said it’s about centralizing education as a whole and that would’ve been better encompassing. I agree, that’s a bad thing. But it’s absolutely not the full picture.

CanadaPlus Mar 8

Yeah. Surveillance is covered already.

Snot Flickerman Mar 7

Let’s be absolutely clear here: The explosion of people being comfortable coming out as some stripe of LGBTQ+ has everything to do with an open internet where youth were not restricted from finding out about information related to how they felt inside. Instead of being made to feel like strangers in their own skin, with a world telling them that people like them didn’t or shouldn’t exist, they instead found community and self-love through internet forums and information which allowed them to pursue full, healthy lives as adults.

This “protect the children” malarkey is one more way for the religious groups who oppose LGBTQ+ culture to “protect the children” by restricting access to this kind of information, reducing their ability to find it in their formative years, in the name of protecting them while actually stunting their personal growth.

It extends beyond sexuality as well, although that is the most obvious since many religions are deeply censorious regarding sex.

It also affects subjects like atheism, as the various religious cultures generally do not want people contemplating the idea that there isn’t a god, especially not while they’re young, they want you long indoctrinated into belief before you can explore different ideas.

Further, when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, everything I knew about drugs was literally old wives tales meant to scare kids away from drugs, and then the internet came around and suddenly there was a boom of actual, verifiable scientific information about drugs so if you wanted to experiment with drugs, you knew what you were getting into. I once had a conversation with a girlfriend who was a bit older than me about her experiences with LSD as a teen, and she admitted that at the time she really didn’t understand on any scientific level what was happening or what the nature of hallucination was, she just knew she was having fun and seeing crazy shit.

This is a backdoor to restricting access to important information that youth need to have access to for making healthy decisions for themselves sexually, religiously, and in terms of what substances they put in their bodies.

The birth of the internet gave us a beautiful period where people could grow up with access to accurate, verifiable, worthwhile information that helped them navigate and understand the world they were growing up in and who they were within that world.

This kind of legislation intends to snuff out that openness and accessibility which led to increased openness and acceptance of LGBTQ+, atheism, and safe drug use (including the understanding that some illegal drugs like marijuana and LSD are probably safer than legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco).

d3adpaul77 Mar 8

spot on.

d3adpaul77 Mar 8

and I think it’s worth noting that a lot of hetero people don;t fit the normative paradigm and anonymity allows for that to be developed enjoyed and explored.

Also, neurodiversity, mental illness, and basic mental health care. People are discovering they are autistic, ADHDers, etc. They’re learning how to prevent depression or how to apply DBT tools (e.g., for emotional regulation, for judging less). It’s amazing.

It also affects subjects like atheism, as the various religious cultures generally do not want people contemplating the idea that there isn’t a god, especially not while they’re young, they want you long indoctrinated into belief before you can explore different ideas.

This reminds me of a Pakistani person I don’t personally know, but someone I know talks to them.

In their hometown, people recite verses from the Quran as part of their religious activities. There’s only one problem: the Quran they use is written in Arabic, but everyone there speaks Urdu. People don’t actually know what the passages say, just how to say them.

So this person asked them once what the passages say. Why do we read the passages in Arabic instead of Urdu? People here don’t know Arabic.

Anyway, he got belted shortly after that.

Powderhorn Mar 8

Wasn’t it Vatican II that finally allowed Catholic services in local languages instead of Latin? That really wasn’t long ago in the grand scheme.

Hell yea

RedFrank24 Mar 7

Presumably even if Linux must provide a means of reporting an age, you can always modify that distro to always report the oldest age?

Yes

The California law is just "put this column in your DB and make a getAge() call.

P03 Locke Mar 7

sysctl user.legal_bullshit.pretend_age_quote_verification_unquote=99

My Linux is not ever going to have any age verification.

I’m not living in those backwards contry and if that push ever comes to shove, there will always be way around it. It’s the beauty of open source, no entity is liable to comply. And we’re in the brink of ad-hoc internet which would render that stupid centralized and overgoverned shit to zero.

That security guard has a tiny head.

The thing about doing age verification at the OS level is the user could just install a crack that rewrites the necessary code. It’ll take some heavy DRM type stuff to block that. Possibly hardware support, like a specialised TPM.

No way can that be standardised and then rolled out quickly. If they rush it then it’ll be some proprietary power grab.

The alternative is each website and app does it separately which will be spotty and provide endless security breaches.

It’ll be a shitshow either way.

The thing is, this shouldn’t really a problem.

I am still against where all this age verification crap is coming from, and I’m against what specifically “age verification” entails; but here’s the thing: We keep saying, “It should be the parent’s responsibility to secure their kids”—and while that’s true, you can do all the talking and educating you want, but the fact is, the internet is now nigh-fully integrated with our lives, and unless you are surveilling your kid at every moment they are on the internet (don’t recommend), not every parent has the time, resources, or know-how to keep their children safe on the internet without help.

So to play naive for a moment and ignore the well-understood reality that “child safety” is an atom-thick veil for mass surveillance: Why did we give up so fast on device parental controls? The OS-level verification actually isn’t so bad of an idea if the implementation valued both safety and privacy. Upon setting up the device, it is the parent’s responsibility to create a password or biometric or whatever to activate/deactivate the safety mode. It should be pretty easy. Are there technically ways for the kid to get around this? Yes, but that’d be breaking the trust. In the same way you’d deal with your kid sneaking out of the house, you deal with that separately. The existence of websites that don’t perform the check is inevitable no matter what you do.

And if you don’t believe your kid needs a safety lock on the internet, then that’s your prerogative.

It’s apparent that parents need better tools, but privacy doesn’t need to be compromised in order to achieve a safer internet. I got lazy while writing this, and I’m sure that’s clear in some spots, but I’m just gonna post it. There’s possibly something huge that I’m overlooking, so I’ll just let someone else point it out.

Infernal_pizza Mar 8

You’re not overlooking anything. You hit the nail on the head, these laws are about surveillance and censorship and that’s why they’re being implemented in the worst and least privacy respecting way possible. The next step is to make sure it’s impossible to circumvent by enforcing locked bootloaders and secure boot. Phones are 90% of the way there already and it probably wouldn’t be too hard for them to fuck up the desktop/laptop side of things either.

The issue still remains that with a check like this, who is to say what content need be age-restricted now lies with the state. They could (and will) restrict content and information that I think my kid should have access to.

Provided the above, I’d say the centralizing of information is the chief concern @[email protected].

I don’t know what a satisfying solution looks like here with that considered.

Powderhorn Mar 8

It’s a bit crazy to think about how things have changed. When I was a kid, the only computer in the house that was online was in the office/living room, so my parents could walk past at any time and see what I was up to. This was in the MSN beta days, and I was usually in teen chat, which, given the beta, meant that we were all teens whose parents had gotten prerelease Win95 discs (actually, in my case, it was the head of my high school math department who “loaned” me his CD).

As a result, it was pretty chill. Having your phone at all hours and no oversight seems an absurd situation.

Player101010 Mar 8

Your Linux distro may be next. I use Arch by the way.

I couldn’t find any threads on the forum about this. I would like to know how/if Arch will handle this.

robador51 Mar 8

I lolled. Thanks I needed that.

Powderhorn Mar 8

Of course you do.

He’s a player, after all. 101010 (I assume that’s binary for 80085).

Powderhorn Mar 9

We don’t talk about 80085. Who the hell turns their calculator upside down now?

FosterMolasses Mar 9

Do you actually wear pink knee-high socks? I’m dying to know.

Unfortunately, it falls right into the whole authoritarian taking control, surveillance, and manipulation push that became not only pretty open in activities but also pretty transparent through published findings and contextualized previously published materials. Seems likely that it’s all connected.

danielhanrahantng Mar 8

This is not going to work people will distribute linux distros on mesh networks like libremesh or meshtastic networks.

ArcaneSlime Mar 8

I don’t think Meshtastic would work for that with a 200char limit.

Usenet and torrents otoh, already can’t stop that. Not to mention lying is still a thing. I’m 136 years old so I should know.

danielhanrahantng Mar 9

I said that people would use mesh networks like meshtastic or libremesh. Not those exact mesh networks.

ArcaneSlime Mar 9

Fair enough

Sylvartas Mar 9

Me and the other 99% of Steam users allegedly born on January 1st agree with you

ArcaneSlime Mar 8

Wait, so instead of me telling every website I’m 90, I’ll tell my OS I’m 90 and the sites will query that, and this somehow works better? I’m not 90 btw, so all I’m doing is just changing who I’m lying to from zyn.com to Fedora? Great plan.

Fraction9170 Mar 9

They know people will do this. It’s only stage 1. After this system is integrated, they will complain that people are misusing the feature and it needs to be upgraded to ID or biometrics. Boiling the frog.

FreddiesLantern Mar 8

Time to get a permanently offline machine.

CanadaPlus Mar 8

Overkill. Just find the illegal no-age-collection ISO. Installing with your middle finger raised is optional, but recommended.

romanticremedy Mar 8

Age verification today. What other BS surveillance info tmr?

craftrabbit Mar 8

The most practical solution is probably to “not sell Linux in California anymore”. I guess distributions could geofence the iso download page for plausible deniability and then that’s that, right?

Powderhorn Mar 8

Who the hell is “selling” Linux?

Red Hat.

The other distros? No idea.

Powderhorn Mar 9

I knew someone was going to come back with Red Hat. I just didn’t expect it to be you!

Hey even I use Linux daily.

Actually, I’m not really sure why “even I” should be shocking. I write code for a living. Surely I should be using Linux once in a while.

Anyway RHEL is probably the only Linux distro I can think of that costs money and comes with support. The major cloud providers sometimes have their own Linux distros they use as well (looking at you, Amazon) and you can argue they are selling Linux, but not as directly as RHEL does.

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