Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill

spullara

this is completely insane. we need some kind of constitutional amendment to get rid of all this kind legislation forever.

mikestorrent

I don't like this whole thing, but compared to what I was fearing would happen, this idea is nowhere near as bad. What I expected was that we'd end up with the OS vendors actually being mandated to really do age verification, and then submitting that using Web Credentials and Secure Attestation so that the far end could trust the whole thing, locking open-source OS's out of the mix and creating more of a walled garden online than we already have. I was guessing it would become a simple checkbox on e.g. Cloudflare - "[ ] allow adult users only" or whatever - and that it would end up with vast swathes of the internet going off limits for anyone not on closed-source systems. Now, it looks like this is just a way for parents to tell the OS "this is a kid account" and have it flow through to websites so they can easily proactively block kids from connecting without having to implement any of that crap. Yes, it's much potentially easier for a child to circumvent; but any kid who can get around that sort of thing from within an OS could probably just wipe/reinstall anyway, so who cares? As a parent whose kids are continually trying to see what trouble they can get into, I appreciate that I will get one more potential weapon in the fight. Can someone tell me whether I am being a fool by actually being a bit relieved it's going this way?

exabrial

Why suddenly are all of the blue states doing this BS? What is going on and what control is this affording the government?

thrill

“Use of this computer is illegal in the state of Illinois - your friendly neighborhood SWAT team has been notified.”

Slow_Hand

If I’m not mistaken, Meta has been lobbying heavily for all of these age-verification bills lately. It seems their strategy is to externalize their responsibility to verify age themselves, and thus reduce their exposure to liabilities when child protection acts like COPPA are violated.

TheChaplain

Curious how OpenBSD or Haiku will comply.

hypeatei

What are they going to do to enforce this? Take down open source projects that "operate" in Illinois because a user downloaded the software there? Absolute joke and everyone should treat it that way; advanced compliance here means implicit support for the surveillance state.

anthk

Read and share "Free Software, Free Society" now. Richard Stallman advised us about it long ago. Thank god Plan9 got relicensed into GPL. 9front might not totally free, but it's a step in case GNU+Linux gets utterly broken. And, yes, please, go try Trisquel (novice users), GUIX (experts) and Hyperbola (experts and protocol purists). Avoid every Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Netflix service with nonfree JS.

tracker1

I wonder how this will mix wit federal laws saying you aren't allowed to track users under the age of 13yo? Will this then be forced as a browser API/header passed to every server/request?

johnisgood

What is the reasoning behind this exactly? Yeah, I know Meta is behind it, but surely they will throw it out if it is absord, right... right?

pengaru

i look forward to the police showing up and explaining to me how computing is a privilege, not a right

strongpigeon

People here seem very against this, but I don't really see it. This only require to have a form asking about your age and provide an API to read it, right? Surely I'm missing something? Is the backlash due to fear of a slippery slope?

1970-01-01

The "one weird trick" that all government hates? Stop forcing OSes to function with accounts. "User account" is an artifact of UNIX. You don't need an account to start a car, send and email, nor boot an operating system. I know it's hard to grasp, but it's true.

ottah

This coordinated state level attack on the legislative process is crazy. These people can't seem to be bothered to do the basics of governing, but they always find time to do this cross-state nightmare fuel.

firtoz

It's kinda convenient because every service needs to ask you for the age now because they can't serve under 13s in a lot of cases. Having it be a simple API would be a decent convenience, no? If you connect it with a permission system where you can choose whether to provide this information (e.g. >13 as a bool or age as an integer or the birthday as a date) that can't be too bad I guess? I haven't read the whole thing of course.

glitchc

The law as is written mainly targets social media platforms. For an OS to comply, all it needs to do is provide a field during account creation that records the user's date of birth as supplied by the user. There is no onus on the operator to confirm the veracity of this information, or even record it anywhere other than the local OS install itself. I think we're safe.

saityi

Even if open source operating systems comply and add such a feature, what's to stop individual people from removing this and blocking the API requests before they install the OS? Or providing dummy responses? They're open source, after all. Is the government going to require some sort of automated checks that verify every person who connects to the internet has this API on their OS and go after individuals that aren't in compliance?

wosined

Karens making stupid bills. What is and what is not an OS?

albertsw

How old is root?

TutleCpt

My future OS: https://agelesslinux.org