Maybe I am misunderstanding something but it seems to me that laws in various places which require age declarations for OS's are going to make all vintage machines with ROM based fixed OS's illegal in those locales.
I cannot tell my ZX Spectrum my age so that it will only load age appropriate software when I use it.
You are.
I've been following this since #MidnightBSD drew it to everyone's attention, and have directly read the bills in the 4 state legislatures that I know of, done my own analyses and compared with the analyses of others.
The problem is that legislators use fairly uncontroversial definitions that won't surprise software people of 'operating system', 'application', and 'developer'; define a really broad concept of a 'covered application store'; and place onuses on operating system makers and application developers, the latter being required to have their apps ask about age, and the former being required to have their operating system provide an API for answering the questions.
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One can tell from the fact that in v1.0 these were 'App Store Accountability Acts' and from the several published legislative histories, that the Microsoft/Google/Apple App Store systems were the targets. However, as written the legislation covers any operating system on any general purpose computer that 'downloads' applications from an 'application store'.
By my reading, loading things from cassette tape onto a Speccy (or other such) won't meet the definition of 'covered application store' by dint of it not being publicly available.
Closed source ROM from the 1980s might meet the 'available technology' exemption bar; but only 2 of 5 states have that.
Fast forward a few years to BBSes, FTP, Usenet binaries, & BitTorrent; and the definition will encompass you. As it does the BSDs and Linux-based operating systems with ports/packages systems.
It's actually quite difficult to fix the laws, with the right legalese, so that they don't overreach like this beyond what clearly the people who wrote them wanted to target.
I've thought through several possibilities.
It's difficult to make exceptions based upon age. Write an exception for operating systems first published before 1999, for example, and that lets the current Microsoft Windows, and its Microsoft Store, off the hook. Windows NT 3.1 was published in 1993.
Write an exception based upon operating system last update date, akin to the exception based upon application last update dates that's already there, and you catch out everyone who has (say) patched a ROM in an emulator.
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#USLaw #retrocomputing #AgeVerification
Raymond Russell
JdeBP