According to a recent CRYPTO-GRAM issue from Schneier, it's in Meta's interest to push these regulations as their product isn't an OS. Their competition (Apple/MS/Google) are OSs though.
I'm not sure why Meta's lobbying is harped on so much when all of Big Tech benefits from this; Zuckerberg is just the fall guy. Tech companies love the idea of identity / age verification so they can target ads more effectively. My general feeling is also that privacy is a thorn in their side when it comes to integrating more deeply into people's lives.
There are also state actors at play here who would love if computing without ID became a very niche thing to do. Obviously their top line would be "fighting terrorism" and "saving the children" but in reality we've seen how these organizations (ICE, NSA, etc.) abuse their power and spy on people without warrants.
tl;dr: there is much more at play here than Facebooks interests alone.
Google and Apple certainly don't benefit from this - they can serve more ads, track more data, and assume you're authorized to spend a gazillion dollars in a game if they don't know you're a child.
One example of this was last year when high-profile apps like Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans were found to have privacy policies on their websites restricting users to 13+ so they could track and advertise more while their Android and iOS apps were designated for all ages so they could get more downloads.
Fair point on the plausible deniability they currently have w.r.t. children. I'm thinking more about the possibilities that open up when software can assume that OSes have this information and start gating access based on it. Once the APIs are there, I fear the internet will turn into a bunch of ID-related prompts before you can do anything. I haven't thought it through fully, but I imagine what we see as benign today like using an Adblocker could actually become more "serious" once they know your identity and can seek damages... we see companies wanting to use the legal system in Germany for example when people find a connection string in plaintext on the client instead of just fixing the security hole.
It seems like a more lucrative path to go down even if you lose the under-18 crowd gambling / watching ads on your platform.
This is likely because of Zuck's testimony in the very recent court case where he testified exactly that the "best place" to do "age verification" was in the operating system.
This was but a few weeks before all these, largely very identical sounding bills, suddenly started appearing in state houses across the USA.
This is one of the issues with all of the steadily eroding privacy that get accepted because youâre allowed to opt out. It doesnât take long before youâre the only one in your neighborhood who opts out, and that makes you very identifiable and suspicious.
because Meta's lobbying has been publicly identified. When the other companies are found to be spending millions of dollars to push these age verification laws, then they, too, will be harped on.
> plus they get to point the finger at someone else for age issues.
This is the real benefit to Meta/FB/etc. that many seem to overlook. Meta/FB/etc. are already staring down a lot of court cases related to "addicting youngsters" to their product (and potentially a lot [i.e. billions of dollars] of payout for settlements or penalties in cases that side against them).
But, if they can get the government to mandate that the operating system is responsible for verifying a user's age, they get to avoid liability (i.e., more billions of dollars) for serving anything from their properties to an underage user if the OS tells them that the user is "old enough" for whatever they served. So long as Meta follows the law and asks the OS "is this user old enough" and if the OS replies "old enough" then the liability for mistakes in the age identification shifts to the OS provider and away from Meta/etc.
The part that is odd here is why Microsoft, Apple and Google (the "OS providers" truly being targeted) are not massively lobbying against this due to the legal liability risk that Meta is trying to shift over to them.
Fall guy or not, Zuckerberg's influence on my life has been entirely negative. From addictive social media feeds, to anti-competitive acquisitions that ruin once good products, to crap like this - he's the worst, most destructive CEO in tech. Even Oracle at least provides some value through their database products. Meta can go die in a fire.
Its going to be funny when there are married 17 year olds driving cars with guns and children but who can't install linux or access facebook without calling their dad.
I don't think that's what this bill is about. I think they want to be able to attach a government issued ID to logins for various services. They tried claiming it was to fight terrorism, but that didn't really work so now they're saying "it's for the children!"
Someone came up with a good theory a while ago that I'm inclined to believe: The social media companies (esp. Meta as I understand it) were looking at huge fines for showing adult content to under-18s, so they lobbied hard to ensure that the burden of proof for age verification was on anyone else but themselves, hence why the OS vendors are being targeted now.
Ultimately, they seem to have realised that they can't stop adult content from being shared, so the easiest way to get there was to mark anything even vaguely possible of being adult, and require age verification -- which comes with a lot of political cover vs. just deleting it.
Of course, if you stoke up the right people, you end up with lots of support from the puritanical brigades, and label all naysayers as putting children in harm's way.
They could stop adult content from being shown to minors; it would just take effort on their part to do so, so why not shift the effort on to everyone else?
Showing adult content to minors is also probably not an insignificant part of their business (certaintly a major part if the classification of social media as adult becomes more widespread), and having age be an os-user property might give children more opportunity to subvert the verification. And if enough applications end up behind the maturity wall, they can count on children to badger their parents into setting their account to adult, and the industry will absolve itself of all responsibility once more.
>> They could stop adult content from being shown to minors; it would just take effort on their part to do so
If you voluntarily sensor content, you might be in danger of being held responsible for various things since you control what people see. Phone companies in the US are "common carriers" which means they just connect people, but are not responsible for what people do over the phone (plotting crime or whatever). Social Media is still trying to have it both ways - censor some stuff but not be responsible for anything. IMHO that will eventually fail.
I'm really quite confident I don't want these companies collecting face and ID scans to prove age, so no I think this being an OS problem is actually a very reasonable solution.
Yeah, you're probably right. I couldn't find the text of the bill in the link. I'm sure the effort to do this kind of thing goes back to the 90s: like a lot of the really intense copyright bills - the CASE Act (ability for big companies to easily fine people who they think are breaching their copyright for $5,000 + legal fees without anything resembling a trial or evidentiary hearing) has been popping up in different forms for decades - but in its current name they took 5 years of trying to pass it, but the main idea was officially proposed in 2006 - so 14 years to get the bill passed, but then it was a thing long before it was officially proposed by a house comittee too.
I guess they figure if they keep trying they'll eventually get it passed - which is probably true.
Most of these "online safety" acts have been sitting around in congress for half a decade at this point. Mike Johnson keeps blocking them because he has serious doubts about their constitutionality (which keep getting borne out whenever the laws end up in court).
For years people have been able to legally murder on behalf of their country, with not have a beer. This is another item that will operate as intended.
It's not about the age, but whole identity. You know you are serving ads to a real person and not a bot and so on and you can correlate person across different services with 100% accuracy. Currently you can still reasonably easy fake a persona.
If this is the case, this can be gamed. People can use stolen documents. Nothing says a person canât own multiple computers so what happens if someone uses your id in 20 laptops? Will the companies just claim âbut the machine said they where old enough?â The law may not have teeth, but will violate privacy.
Something like https://protocol.humanidentity.io (disclaimer: I built it, sorry for the plug) or any other privacy preserving service might work better. A platform can then require that a person verifies age in a privacy preserving way before viewing adult content.
I really like your solution. Have you considered making connections with well connected individuals and potentially making small compromises on your products integrity to appeal to the people who would make this a legislated standard across the board?
Or perhaps golfing at the right clubs to make it a defacto industry standard like ID.me seems poised to become?
I hate seeing stuff like this once and then never again due to people who are capable of making something this⌠Good being unable to âplay the gameâ or whatever optimize to break the social-moral glass ceiling for a given problem space.
Thank you, this is very early stages. Still trying to validate the idea. But yes, the reason there is a sovereign verifier tier is because I am sure governments will want their own rules, and the protocol is meant to be decentralized. So one govt can legislate that they are the exclusive verifier for their country, while another takes a more hand off or hybrid approach.
This is being pushed by dark money billionaire PACs and lobbyists all over the world. Techbro feudal lords demand total control, de-anonymization of users, and monetization of such data but sell it as "think of the children" "safety". It's also why Flock is popping up to bring Big Mommy while it's using taxpayer money to force privacy elimination and mass surveillance by continuously tracking innocent people.
That also reveals true (at least) two tier law enforcement. Banana republic level of corruption is fine as long as it's called lobbying and law enforcement looks the other way.
This is an endless complaint I've heard for many years but Americans always vote for lobbied parties. They are clearly happy with this compared to whatever other reasons they have to vote. Somehow there's always something more important that makes them think "I'll tolerate a bit of corruption because at least he's promising XYZ".
- but also there aren't many good alternatives for us. Say you have 3 people running for senate to choose from. Canidate A and B have super PACs that spend $80 million each on ads. Canidate C doesn't. You could vote for canidate C, but he will likely lose - nobody sees anything about them, they can't employ many people to work their campaign, they don't get interviewed on tv. It feels better to vote for someone who has a chance to win. Also candiate A is a nutjob who thinks we should take over Tierra del Fuego as our 51st state and all young boys should have a year where their schooling is just learning how to throw knives really good like a Ninja, so you really want them to lose - you pretty much have to vote for Canidate B.
Also the official presidential debates are a privately run event, not a public thing open to all candidates. The president isn't the only politician, but it exemplifies the problem that our election campaigns are privatized.
> Americans always vote for lobbied parties. They are clearly happy with this compared to whatever other reasons they have to vote.
That's kinda backwards. (Yes, I know you said "compared to".) Rather, citizen are seldom "happy" about their selection of choices, and many are so very not-happy that they don't even vote.
The main fault is in the math and mechanics of our voting system, rather than the personal-traits of the people. The spoiler effect [0] is unusually strong with plurality-voting, an archaic scheme that still dominates US politics.
It's main "feature" is how it was easy to implement 250 years ago when more people were illiterate, calculating and printing was harder, and nothing traveled faster overland than a galloping horse. Nowadays there are many alternatives [1] and most would be an unequivocal upgrade.
> "I'll tolerate a bit of corruption because at least he's promising XYZ".
Hey now, don't tar the whole electorate with a worldview that is concentrated into a much smaller bloc. There's a reason that the most blatantly corrupt President in history never got anywhere when he spent years trying to run as a Democrat.
Dark money PACs and billionaire donors have indeed engineered a system where immense wealth dictates public policy, frequently hiding their identities behind 501(c)(4) "social welfare" groups. These organizations act as "dark money ATMs," allowing a tiny fraction of the ultra-wealthy to spend hundreds of millions of dollars entirely anonymously. To sell their profit-driven agendas, they construct "astroturf" front groups designed to simulate grassroots support, relying on market-tested public relations strategies to convince ordinary citizens that these initiatives are simply about promoting society's "well-being" and "freedom".
The collaboration between tech billionaires and state surveillance is also thoroughly documented. Silicon Valley venture capitalists and tech foundersâsuch as Peter Thiel (Palantir) and Palmer Luckey (Anduril)âhave aggressively integrated themselves into the military-industrial complex. By leveraging their immense wealth and political access, they have secured billions in taxpayer-funded contracts with the Department of Defense, ICE, and local police departments. Palantir, for example, got its start with seed funding and direct guidance from the CIAâs venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, and now provides the digital infrastructure that enables federal agents to track and arrest individuals en masse.
Data monetization and the elimination of anonymity are the financial engines of this model. The modern digital economy operates on "surveillance capitalism," offering supposedly free services to harvest user data, craft highly detailed profiles, and monetize every click and interaction while entirely deemphasizing user privacy. In the political sphere, dark money networks have poured millions into their own high-tech data firms (such as i360) to assemble meticulously detailed, de-anonymized profiles on over 190 million active voters and 250 million consumers, enabling precision targeting and psychological manipulation.
Mass surveillance justified by "safety" is precisely how these technologies are deployed against the public. The software systems sold by tech companies to law enforcement agencies explicitly ingest commercial license plate reader (LPR) data, providing authorities with access to over 5 billion data points used to continuously and physically track vehicles and individuals across the country. This geographic tracking is fused with other aggressive domestic surveillance methods like digital dragnets, "Stingray" cell phone interceptors, facial recognition, and fake social media profilesâoften using photos of attractive young womenâto trick youths as young as twelve into accepting friend requests. Authorities use this access to map out social networks and establish guilt by association, heavily surveilling minority youth without any concrete evidence of criminal behavior.
Ultimately, these technologies fulfill the state's historical obsession with "legibility"âthe utopian, often tyrannical desire of authorities to categorize, monitor, map, and standardize every aspect of human life so that the population becomes a closed, predictable, and easily manipulated system. By merging state power with Silicon Valley's data-harvesting capabilities, this infrastructure enforces control by turning human sociality and everyday life into an endless series of trackable, monetizable data points.
I spent a lot of time reading the books on which these perspectives are based.
You probably won't read the books.
So I hope that, by writing about reality here on HN, I can expose you to some facts and ideas that you're too complacent to bother investigating, yourself.
Looks like compelled speech to me, both for the operating system creator and the users. I do not believe that âinterstate commerceâ powers negate the first amendment.
Ever seen a giant warning on cigarette ads that nicotine is addictive? Do you think half the ad is covered by the black box out of charity?
Settled law decades ago.
On that note, today is April 15th, tax day. The day where if you donât provide hard numbers about your life against your will and at your own expense, prison opens as a possibility.
Cigarettes are a product that is sold. Many operating systems are free. I use several that are small projects entirely produced by hobbyists.
Even if they stack the courts with muppets who ignore the obvious first amendment angle to get this passed, I will never comply with this and I will happily help others defy it.
The laws about giving (not selling) tobacco to minors are state laws, not federal. Thereâs no interstate commerce there or here.
Besides, youâre comparing apples to oranges. Cigarettes are a physical product, not a form of expression. Code is speech and compelled speech violates the first amendment. That makes even state laws for OS age verification unconstitutional.
> Code is speech and compelled speech violates the first amendment.
The first amendment does not blanket ban compelled speech. You can be compelled to testify against someone if granted immunity. You can be forced to take an oath or affirmation in court. I'm sure there are other examples.
> The laws about giving (not selling) tobacco to minors are state laws, not federal. Thereâs no interstate commerce there or here.
If multiple states have differing legislation over the same area of commerce, it can affect interstate commerce. But anyway, after Wickard v Fiilburn interstate commerce is never not implicated.
> An Ohio farmer, Roscoe Filburn, was growing wheat to feed animals on his own farm. The U.S. government had established limits on wheat production, based on the acreage owned by a farmer, to stabilize wheat prices and supplies.
> Filburn grew more than was permitted and so was ordered to pay a penalty. In response, he said that because his wheat was not sold, it could not be regulated as commerce, let alone "interstate" commerce (described in the Constitution as "Commerce ... among the several states").
> The Supreme Court disagreed: "Whether the subject of the regulation in question was 'production', 'consumption', or 'marketing' is, therefore, not material for purposes of deciding the question of federal power before us. ... But even if appellee's activity be local and though it may not be regarded as commerce, it may still, whatever its nature, be reached by Congress if it exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce and this irrespective of whether such effect is what might at some earlier time have been defined as 'direct' or 'indirect'."[2]
Court proceedings have been the one place that lasting, narrow 1A exemptions like these have been granted. (The Court is willing to give itself a few exceptional powers now and then.)
> Wickard v Fiilburn
A bad decision that is slowly being undermined and which will eventually be overturned. The State is not omnipotent.
What is the age of a script that I wrote to be triggered by cron? What is the age of a script that my 10-year-old son wrote to be triggered in his dad's crontab?
If I do "sudo -l" to my son's account, what is the age of the user performing actions? If my son writes a set-user-ID program and I run it, what is the user's age now?
Spot on! So much silly engineering would be needed to make this even slightly make sense for normal Linux 'users' and even then, if you can be root then there is no limit!? root can do anything as any user, right? And it's definitely expected that the system admin (ie yourself for your own computer!) can become root!!
I'm glad I'm on a source distribution (Gentoo, even though it does require patience) so I could in-theory edit/patch out the nasty bits before they even become binaries if anything like this ever does go ahead! (Seems unlikely to really work for Linux users anyway really though, for many of the reasons you suggested!)
US should first implement a national identifier that can be used for healthcare purposes before implementing age verification, that would be a lot more helpful.
There have been bills in the past like "The improved digital identity act of 2023" that never get out of committee. The latest incarnation seems to be "H.R.7270 - Stop Identity Fraud and Identity Theft Act of 2026". There almost always have one republican and one democratic sponsor. But they don't seem to rise to the level of urgency to get past the current dysfunction in congress.
I don't know how many times this needs to be iterated, but voter ID has absolutely nothing to do with election security. It has everything to do with voter suppression, just like poll taxes and literacy tests. It gives poll workers discretion to turn people away.
There's a reason this idea is pushed solely by Republicans with the explicit goal of reducing the number of people who can vote, because fewer people voting is better for Republicans.
In the US, quality of health care is not really a problem. The problem is that the cost is too high, and also availability (in part because of the cost).
I struggle with this. Outcomes for our healthcare system are much better than critics want to accept. Most of the negative health outcomes in the United States are mostly about our built environment - people who aren't very poor and live in walkable urban centers in the US have health outcomes similar to Europe. Those reading this website in the US often have outcomes that exceed their peers in Europe - we have much better cancer treatment, for instance. US city air quality is starting to beat European cities because we don't use nearly as much natural gas (NYC is better than Berlin, for instance, at pm2.5).
Most negative US health outcome factors can be traced to suburbanization, which is also where the vast majority of the gun violence is, and systemic racial wealth disparity. We have a pretty good healthcare system, we just need to subsidize it for people who can't afford it.
"If we focus on a subset of the population that is lucky, we have a great healthcare system." Got it!
Sorry for the sarcasm, but that's how your comment reads.
Do those lucky people have healthcare insurance tied to their employment? Are they afraid to go to a demonstration or advocate a union, because they could lose their job and thus healthcare?
A good healthcare system treats everyone equally, no matter where they live in a country, their income level, being employed/unemployed, etc.
We have a pretty good healthcare system, we just need to subsidize it for people who can't afford it.
No, it is broken. The US healthcare capita costs twice as much per capita as most West European countries and the 'outcomes per capita' are worse. The problem is, similar to the prison system etc., the privatization of the system. It's run by companies that go for profit maximization, which entails rejecting as many claims as possible, driving up medicine prices, etc.
The US should first implement an equivalent to the GDPR that puts a stop to the ongoing abuses of the current identification systems. After we see that is working, then we can talk about increasing the technical strength of identification systems.
Yeah it does seem to be a new 'thing'. I'm betting it's like the heritage foundation who figured out age-restrictions give them a new end-run around the first amendment. Started with porn (because who is going to defend porn) and now they're going to slide down the slippery slope.
Don't underestimate the grassroots popularity of these measures. Look at any Hacker News thread regarding age verification and you will find a lot of comments coming out in support of age verification. Most of them are assuming that age verification is something that will only apply to sites they don't use like Facebook.
There are a couple parallel moral panics intersecting on this topic. Again even on HN you'll find people parroting dodgy statistics about child trafficking on social media, proclaiming that short form video is equivalent to highly addictive drugs, or making sweeping claims that under-18s should be banned from having smart phones. It's apparent none of them ever considered that the age restrictions they've been inviting might apply to something they use. It's always assumed to apply only to the kids on the TikTok or something.
"Rep Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) announced the Parents Decide Act, bipartisan, commonsense legislation to strengthen online protections for children and give parents greater control over what their kids can access on phones, tablets, and other devices. Gottheimerâs new Parents Decide Act will:
- Require operating system developers like Apple and Google to verify usersâ ages when setting up a new device, rather than relying on self-reported ages.
- Allow parents to set age-appropriate content controls from the start, including limiting access to social media, apps, and AI platforms.
- Ensure that age and parental settings securely flow to apps and AI platforms, so content is tailored appropriately for children.
- Prevent children from accessing harmful or explicit contentâincluding inappropriate AI chatbot interactionsâby creating a consistent, trusted standard across platforms."
This is the summary [0] from the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, who seem to be in support of the legislation. I get the feeling the definition of 'operating system' within the legislation isn't how many on HN, or in real life, would define what an OS is, since its implied to be aimed at mobile devices, but we shall see once the actual text is posted.
Seems like legislation should come after senators and members of congress directly call Tim Cook en masse to complain that:
1. Screen time reporting has been 100% broken for decades. Just does not work as advertised. False advertising is indeed illegal.
2. The parental controls are a joke. Can't block apps that were ever downloaded by a member of the household. Don't want the kid to have TikTok? You better not have downloaded it on any device ever.
I do not disagree that there is A LOT that Apple could, and should, be doing to enable parents. The problem that we have is, that if a vendor, like Apple, just decides to continue to have broken systems, there isn't a way to compel them to fix the problem outside of legislation. And, because most people in the House/Senate have a complete lack of technical literacy, we get situations where they define things poorly or special interests get to set those definitions in their favor/for ideological reasons, rather than to make good policy.
We agree that legislation won't work because legislators aren't competent.
But you claim that only legislation can force behavior, and I'm pretty sure that if a few senators just relayed their frustration with broken screen time reporting to Tim Cook personally we could get some results.
If I had a dollar to bet, I would say that such global effort would highly benefit Microsoft that is loosing grounds in high proportion in the area of desktop OS and is trying very hard to impose mandatory microsoft "cloud" accounts to be able to use computers.
Criticism of Israel and its agents will be outlawed by all means necessary and anybody who questions it will be black bagged. That is the end goal. This is total war.
Unfortunately all we have are the title and sponsors right now. I'm much more interested in the text of this bill which is not posted here yet. I don't expect it to be particularly reasonable, but at least we will have something to discuss once the text is available.
How is all the tracking we have today not already sufficient for mass surveillance? What does age verification add if the goal is just more surveillance?
I hate to say it and it's not the future we all wanted, but as long as social media can be weaponized by foreign powers, the only solution is verifying internet users. It's inevitable.
> As of 04/14/2026 text has not been received for H.R.8250 - To require operating system providers to verify the age of any user of an operating system, and for other purposes.
> The Government Publishing Office (GPO) makes the text of legislative measures available to the public and the Library of Congress. GPO makes the text available as soon as possible, but delays can occur when there are many or very large legislative measures for GPO to prepare and print at the same time.
Random fun fact (?): I had a little project I let run all of last year which pulled down bills from Congress.gov's APIs and ran them through an LLM to summarize the bills and attempt to provide different political viewpoints, along with some image generation, ultimately resulting in something resembling X or Threads, but fully simulated - as though the House or Senate was "posting" bills they put forth and "people" from different political camps were responding with their thoughts.
I found that for 2025, on average, it took about 20 days for a bill to be posted before its text was made available via Congress' APIs. Sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes almost immediate... but 20 days on average last year.
I learned a lot about congressional processes and such through the project, like this[0] really cool flow chart about the legislative steps (recommend viewing the tiff and really zooming in on the details), with the action codes[1], which is data that can come from the APIs[2].
At the very least, if this passes, the resulting court challenge will provide precedent that shuts it down in all 50 states at once.
The downside will be riding out the intervening months before the court decision comes through. Stock up on ISOs and full git clones of your favorite OS sources.
Paxton's decision was incredibly narrow (because it specifically targeted sites that served pornography and only pornography) and it's unlikely the court is willing to grant anymore ground.
There is precedent that indicates otherwise, as this is a clear First Amendment violation.
Requiring commercial services to adhere to certain guidelines is constitutional, even though the Texas law is a bad one and I think a different court may have slapped down the law. Mandating speech (code is speech) is clearly not, especially for noncommercial projects.
I think the key would be getting the right person to explain how this would be like requiring all authors to include a certain sentence in their novel.
I kind of doubt that most judges are going to agree with a "code is speech" argument. I think it's more likely that the courts view code as a mechanism, and so this is more like requiring cars to have airbags.
Though this does bring to fore the issue of enforcement. Nobody can stop you from building a custom car which has no airbags. Where enforcement happens is when you try to get it registered (thus making it legal to drive on public roads). That's when the government would stop you.
Curious how such enforcement would work for operating systems. We could all just mod our OS's to remove/bypass age verification. The government doesn't (currently, yet) have a legal nor physical mechanism to prevent this.
Since voting is that power we say we have in the US. Does the public get to vote on this? If not...
> Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster - Neil Postman
The US is a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. You don't get to vote on specific federal policies, you vote on the people who vote for those policies.
Voting with your wallet doesn't exist. Try to boycott Amazon by blocking the AWS IP ranges and see how unusable the internet becomes for everyday tasks. Corporations continue to push the personal responsibility narrative so they can externalize costs of unethical business practices.
how are you making them lose money by blocking their ip ranges? Your are pretty much giving them money because now they dont need to pay for bandwidth.
We can also engage in direct action the other 364.9 days of the year. Call/email your representatives, go to a town hall, call the leaders of both parties of both senate and house, go to a march or protest. There are other ways we can be heard, be substantive and thoughtful, they tally and track messages which are not hyperbole or copy-paste. If you can make it personal, even better. It only needs to be a few sentences.
Anything that even slightly has to do with LGBTQ people will likely end up getting blocked from childrenâs eyes, while anything to do with non-LGBTQ people wonât.
Age appropriate books intended for that still get banned, so the assumption is just that the decisions about it won't be made in good faith. "X has two dads" kind of books aren't really adult, and yet...
unless they're gonna bribe Clarence Thomas and the rest of the Bush appointees with more $$$ and goods that their current backers that approach is going to fail
the Tea Party's main goal was to get their people into local / state / federal circuit / SOCTUS positions, and they have succeeded.
I'm currently reading Foucault's history of sexuality, and the reason you might want this is because population!
Obviously we are facing a population crisis, and we will need more bodies for the factories and retirement homes. Or at least this was the idea in the 1800s. We might have morally coated it with religion, but biopower is a real thing.
The current hypothesis is that the ever evolving LGBTQ+ is a way to sell niche products to these groups. You can imagine that with every new gender, there is a facebook ad and amazon order to be sold.
I don't really believe this, I'm an anti-realist and I think continental philosophy is BS... but this is a classic. Also, there are sooo many ways our sexual taboos are all about economics. Once you see it, you cant unsee.
discussion of sex ed / lgbtq topics often falls under obscenity laws or age filtering, so queer youth might not be able to read it anymore, is the general worry.
Project 2025 includes a multi-prong plan specifically targeting LGBTQ and generally enforcing "christian values".
One of the prongs is requiring ID to go online. Another is to use a combination of media mergers with 'voluntary' government-controlled self-censorship to clamp down on unregulated speech.
So, its blast radius will be centered on LGBTQ issues, but it's designed to cover your comment too.
It might have some sense if we are talking about desktop environments and mobile platforms, where you have a more or less clear user using it to access websites. And for Windows and Mac that is mostly true, but not always, and for linux is not even half of the picture.
But what about all the rest of things you use operating systems for? Will they stop using cars or any kind of transport that have one or several running operating systems inside? Routers or internet connectivity? Finance, clusters, whatever? Have facebook in all the operating systems on their servers for all the platforms an age verification check for whoever logs in, or not?
Agreed. The whole topic is a Trojan horse for surveillance companies to siphon off data. We need to start asking which politicians are pushing this and whoâs pushing them to do it. Theyâre either doing it for money or being blackmailed into it by the existing surveillance apparatus.
What's the definition of "operating system provider"
The binary distribution operating systems provided by so-called "tech" companies all suck anyway
I prefer to compile the operating system from source. I can add or remove any code I want. Will the nonprofit open source projects distributing the source code that I use be "operating system providers" under this legislation. That would seem pointless
I just can't wait for the day when AWS or Azure goes down because Claude Code forgot to include the account age flag when deploying a CVE fix found by Claude Mythos in a control plane microservice.
It is currently in commitee the energy and commerce committee. If one of your reps sits on this committee my suggestion is to reach out to them and voice your opposition to this measure. Consider writing a letter or email as well.
Nonsense bills get introduced all the time. Iâm not saying this shouldnât be taken seriously, but this eventually getting codified is a long shot.
There are so many issues with how this can work in practice. Best case it just asks how old you are like a website that shows mature content, and the user lies. So from a liability perspective that shifts it to the user who gave false information. Beyond that thereâs no practical way to actually verify someoneâs age at the OS level.
Age verification in general rolled out so fast, I'm more inclined to think that nonsense gets passed more easily if it enables going after drastically more control.
The government doesn't care if it's nonsensical and contradictory and enforcement would be a dumpster fire because all that essentially grants their buddies (if not now then in the future) in the executive more power.
Why do people with no understanding or ability to clearly think through the implementation and consequences of said implementation, have the ability to initiate a vote changing everything for everyone? This is just about the dumbest thing I've read this week which says way too much these days.
The people pulling the strings behind all this do indeed have a clear understanding or ability to clearly think through the implementation and consequences of said implementation. They know exactly what they're doing and why.
Many distributions have decided not to comply. Debian has settled on not making anything like this mandatory, as they are an international project, although they may (after discussion and likely voting) agree to optionally package age verification stuff for users who want it for some reason.
The cynic in me says the Win 11 "you must have a TPM" push (along with passkey's "big tech owns all your accounts" design) were rammed through specifically to centralize control of the open web.
At this point, if the federal government actually forced OS-level censorship, most literate folks would just download Linux. So, first, they need to close the remaining door.
I'm not exactly holding a candle for debian. SystemD has already started adding support for this, and, in the past, downstream has been able to force unpopular debian votes through.
SystemD only added an optional birthdate field to userdb, and many distros donât even use userdb by default. And there exist distros without SystemD. So I wouldnât worry too much about the SystemD angle, although IMHO they were spineless for adding the field.
Interesting to not that the congressman who introduced this, Josh Gottheimer, worked for Microsoft before becoming a congressman. Even more complelling is that in the last few weeks he opened $1M of calls on Microsoft as well.
F this BS. I will never send a single dime or packet to any company or politician that supports this. I will tell everyone I know to boycott their service or products.
The latest absurd power grab in the guise of protecting the children.
> Do you think they will care that some cyberpunk refuse to compromise, or get around it?
Not me individually, no, but I hope that by speaking up I am doing a very small part to encourage others to speak up. If enough of us speak up, it can make a difference. The alternative (keeping my mouth shut) is complying in advance, IMO.
> Some people refuse to fly, judging security checks at airport dystopian. Business goes on.
Funny you should mention that. I fly frequently (at least 3 times, sometimes up to 8-10 times a year), and I have literally never gone through the body scanning machines at a US airport, because I opt out and get groped by the TSA officer every time. I believe in small acts of resistance, and I think at the very least I'm consistent in that.
I'm not sure who Josh Gottheimer of NJ is, but he seems to be one of those stealth "fake" Democrats. Too centrist to be a Republican, but also too centrist to be part of the DSA.
He seems to also support H.R. 7540.
I think the Democrats in his district need to seriously consider primarying him and replace him with someone that doesn't bend to foreign or corporate whims.
I really think left-right and honest-dishonest are useless dimensions to evaluate Congress members on. The job practically requires ideological fuzziness and truth stretching to get anything done. This is a feature: legislatures that require high ideological purity tend to become rubber stamps. DPRK is a good example.
Honestly, I'm from NJ and I'm still shocked they actually charged Gold Bar Bob for what he did. He's so influential in NJ politics, I thought they'd let him get away with it like he did all the other bribes he's taken over the years. I guess literal gold bars from Egypt with obvious provenance was just too on the nose.
My belief is that to a large extent the art of politics is the art of bothsidesing and rationalizing away your integrity for common aims. And that when applied correctly, these common aims can be used to benefit the public. Look at systems where you can't bothesides (also known as finding common ground and compromising) or rationalize the integrity of other members (also known as acting in good faith). I suspect you will not find the results of these political bodies to have preferable results to the American Congress!
According to a recent CRYPTO-GRAM issue from Schneier, it's in Meta's interest to push these regulations as their product isn't an OS. Their competition (Apple/MS/Google) are OSs though.
I'm not sure why Meta's lobbying is harped on so much when all of Big Tech benefits from this; Zuckerberg is just the fall guy. Tech companies love the idea of identity / age verification so they can target ads more effectively. My general feeling is also that privacy is a thorn in their side when it comes to integrating more deeply into people's lives.
There are also state actors at play here who would love if computing without ID became a very niche thing to do. Obviously their top line would be "fighting terrorism" and "saving the children" but in reality we've seen how these organizations (ICE, NSA, etc.) abuse their power and spy on people without warrants.
tl;dr: there is much more at play here than Facebooks interests alone.
Google and Apple certainly don't benefit from this - they can serve more ads, track more data, and assume you're authorized to spend a gazillion dollars in a game if they don't know you're a child.
One example of this was last year when high-profile apps like Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans were found to have privacy policies on their websites restricting users to 13+ so they could track and advertise more while their Android and iOS apps were designated for all ages so they could get more downloads.
for the youngest ones, a lot of these are "mom's phone" or something like that, it's not even accurate to say you are identifying the user
Fair point on the plausible deniability they currently have w.r.t. children. I'm thinking more about the possibilities that open up when software can assume that OSes have this information and start gating access based on it. Once the APIs are there, I fear the internet will turn into a bunch of ID-related prompts before you can do anything. I haven't thought it through fully, but I imagine what we see as benign today like using an Adblocker could actually become more "serious" once they know your identity and can seek damages... we see companies wanting to use the legal system in Germany for example when people find a connection string in plaintext on the client instead of just fixing the security hole.
It seems like a more lucrative path to go down even if you lose the under-18 crowd gambling / watching ads on your platform.
> Zuckerberg is just the fall guy
This is likely because of Zuck's testimony in the very recent court case where he testified exactly that the "best place" to do "age verification" was in the operating system.
This was but a few weeks before all these, largely very identical sounding bills, suddenly started appearing in state houses across the USA.
This is one of the issues with all of the steadily eroding privacy that get accepted because youâre allowed to opt out. It doesnât take long before youâre the only one in your neighborhood who opts out, and that makes you very identifiable and suspicious.
because Meta's lobbying has been publicly identified. When the other companies are found to be spending millions of dollars to push these age verification laws, then they, too, will be harped on.
> I'm not sure why Meta's lobbying is harped on so much when all of Big Tech benefits from this
Because meta will not have to spend real $ to add/support age verification, plus they get to point the finger at someone else for age issues.
> plus they get to point the finger at someone else for age issues.
This is the real benefit to Meta/FB/etc. that many seem to overlook. Meta/FB/etc. are already staring down a lot of court cases related to "addicting youngsters" to their product (and potentially a lot [i.e. billions of dollars] of payout for settlements or penalties in cases that side against them).
But, if they can get the government to mandate that the operating system is responsible for verifying a user's age, they get to avoid liability (i.e., more billions of dollars) for serving anything from their properties to an underage user if the OS tells them that the user is "old enough" for whatever they served. So long as Meta follows the law and asks the OS "is this user old enough" and if the OS replies "old enough" then the liability for mistakes in the age identification shifts to the OS provider and away from Meta/etc.
The part that is odd here is why Microsoft, Apple and Google (the "OS providers" truly being targeted) are not massively lobbying against this due to the legal liability risk that Meta is trying to shift over to them.
Fall guy or not, Zuckerberg's influence on my life has been entirely negative. From addictive social media feeds, to anti-competitive acquisitions that ruin once good products, to crap like this - he's the worst, most destructive CEO in tech. Even Oracle at least provides some value through their database products. Meta can go die in a fire.
Its going to be funny when there are married 17 year olds driving cars with guns and children but who can't install linux or access facebook without calling their dad.
Why are so many bi-partisan bills so bad?
I don't think that's what this bill is about. I think they want to be able to attach a government issued ID to logins for various services. They tried claiming it was to fight terrorism, but that didn't really work so now they're saying "it's for the children!"
Someone came up with a good theory a while ago that I'm inclined to believe: The social media companies (esp. Meta as I understand it) were looking at huge fines for showing adult content to under-18s, so they lobbied hard to ensure that the burden of proof for age verification was on anyone else but themselves, hence why the OS vendors are being targeted now.
Ultimately, they seem to have realised that they can't stop adult content from being shared, so the easiest way to get there was to mark anything even vaguely possible of being adult, and require age verification -- which comes with a lot of political cover vs. just deleting it.
Of course, if you stoke up the right people, you end up with lots of support from the puritanical brigades, and label all naysayers as putting children in harm's way.
They could stop adult content from being shown to minors; it would just take effort on their part to do so, so why not shift the effort on to everyone else?
Showing adult content to minors is also probably not an insignificant part of their business (certaintly a major part if the classification of social media as adult becomes more widespread), and having age be an os-user property might give children more opportunity to subvert the verification. And if enough applications end up behind the maturity wall, they can count on children to badger their parents into setting their account to adult, and the industry will absolve itself of all responsibility once more.
>> They could stop adult content from being shown to minors; it would just take effort on their part to do so
If you voluntarily sensor content, you might be in danger of being held responsible for various things since you control what people see. Phone companies in the US are "common carriers" which means they just connect people, but are not responsible for what people do over the phone (plotting crime or whatever). Social Media is still trying to have it both ways - censor some stuff but not be responsible for anything. IMHO that will eventually fail.
I'm really quite confident I don't want these companies collecting face and ID scans to prove age, so no I think this being an OS problem is actually a very reasonable solution.
because stock price must go up
Yeah, you're probably right. I couldn't find the text of the bill in the link. I'm sure the effort to do this kind of thing goes back to the 90s: like a lot of the really intense copyright bills - the CASE Act (ability for big companies to easily fine people who they think are breaching their copyright for $5,000 + legal fees without anything resembling a trial or evidentiary hearing) has been popping up in different forms for decades - but in its current name they took 5 years of trying to pass it, but the main idea was officially proposed in 2006 - so 14 years to get the bill passed, but then it was a thing long before it was officially proposed by a house comittee too.
I guess they figure if they keep trying they'll eventually get it passed - which is probably true.
Most of these "online safety" acts have been sitting around in congress for half a decade at this point. Mike Johnson keeps blocking them because he has serious doubts about their constitutionality (which keep getting borne out whenever the laws end up in court).
For years people have been able to legally murder on behalf of their country, with not have a beer. This is another item that will operate as intended.
Because of corruption, sorry lobbying. Big corporations want the data.
They already have the data and much more of it. This has nothing to do with âBig Corpâ wanting to know how old their users are.
Meta is the largest sponsors of these bills... https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...
It's not about the age, but whole identity. You know you are serving ads to a real person and not a bot and so on and you can correlate person across different services with 100% accuracy. Currently you can still reasonably easy fake a persona.
If this is the case, this can be gamed. People can use stolen documents. Nothing says a person canât own multiple computers so what happens if someone uses your id in 20 laptops? Will the companies just claim âbut the machine said they where old enough?â The law may not have teeth, but will violate privacy.
Something like https://protocol.humanidentity.io (disclaimer: I built it, sorry for the plug) or any other privacy preserving service might work better. A platform can then require that a person verifies age in a privacy preserving way before viewing adult content.
I really like your solution. Have you considered making connections with well connected individuals and potentially making small compromises on your products integrity to appeal to the people who would make this a legislated standard across the board?
Or perhaps golfing at the right clubs to make it a defacto industry standard like ID.me seems poised to become?
I hate seeing stuff like this once and then never again due to people who are capable of making something this⌠Good being unable to âplay the gameâ or whatever optimize to break the social-moral glass ceiling for a given problem space.
Thank you, this is very early stages. Still trying to validate the idea. But yes, the reason there is a sovereign verifier tier is because I am sure governments will want their own rules, and the protocol is meant to be decentralized. So one govt can legislate that they are the exclusive verifier for their country, while another takes a more hand off or hybrid approach.
This is being pushed by dark money billionaire PACs and lobbyists all over the world. Techbro feudal lords demand total control, de-anonymization of users, and monetization of such data but sell it as "think of the children" "safety". It's also why Flock is popping up to bring Big Mommy while it's using taxpayer money to force privacy elimination and mass surveillance by continuously tracking innocent people.
That also reveals true (at least) two tier law enforcement. Banana republic level of corruption is fine as long as it's called lobbying and law enforcement looks the other way.
This is an endless complaint I've heard for many years but Americans always vote for lobbied parties. They are clearly happy with this compared to whatever other reasons they have to vote. Somehow there's always something more important that makes them think "I'll tolerate a bit of corruption because at least he's promising XYZ".
As an american voter I confess you're right.
- but also there aren't many good alternatives for us. Say you have 3 people running for senate to choose from. Canidate A and B have super PACs that spend $80 million each on ads. Canidate C doesn't. You could vote for canidate C, but he will likely lose - nobody sees anything about them, they can't employ many people to work their campaign, they don't get interviewed on tv. It feels better to vote for someone who has a chance to win. Also candiate A is a nutjob who thinks we should take over Tierra del Fuego as our 51st state and all young boys should have a year where their schooling is just learning how to throw knives really good like a Ninja, so you really want them to lose - you pretty much have to vote for Canidate B.
Also the official presidential debates are a privately run event, not a public thing open to all candidates. The president isn't the only politician, but it exemplifies the problem that our election campaigns are privatized.
> Americans always vote for lobbied parties. They are clearly happy with this compared to whatever other reasons they have to vote.
That's kinda backwards. (Yes, I know you said "compared to".) Rather, citizen are seldom "happy" about their selection of choices, and many are so very not-happy that they don't even vote.
The main fault is in the math and mechanics of our voting system, rather than the personal-traits of the people. The spoiler effect [0] is unusually strong with plurality-voting, an archaic scheme that still dominates US politics.
It's main "feature" is how it was easy to implement 250 years ago when more people were illiterate, calculating and printing was harder, and nothing traveled faster overland than a galloping horse. Nowadays there are many alternatives [1] and most would be an unequivocal upgrade.
> "I'll tolerate a bit of corruption because at least he's promising XYZ".
Hey now, don't tar the whole electorate with a worldview that is concentrated into a much smaller bloc. There's a reason that the most blatantly corrupt President in history never got anywhere when he spent years trying to run as a Democrat.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect
[1] https://fairvote.org/resources/electoral-systems/comparing-v...
Dark money PACs and billionaire donors have indeed engineered a system where immense wealth dictates public policy, frequently hiding their identities behind 501(c)(4) "social welfare" groups. These organizations act as "dark money ATMs," allowing a tiny fraction of the ultra-wealthy to spend hundreds of millions of dollars entirely anonymously. To sell their profit-driven agendas, they construct "astroturf" front groups designed to simulate grassroots support, relying on market-tested public relations strategies to convince ordinary citizens that these initiatives are simply about promoting society's "well-being" and "freedom".
The collaboration between tech billionaires and state surveillance is also thoroughly documented. Silicon Valley venture capitalists and tech foundersâsuch as Peter Thiel (Palantir) and Palmer Luckey (Anduril)âhave aggressively integrated themselves into the military-industrial complex. By leveraging their immense wealth and political access, they have secured billions in taxpayer-funded contracts with the Department of Defense, ICE, and local police departments. Palantir, for example, got its start with seed funding and direct guidance from the CIAâs venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, and now provides the digital infrastructure that enables federal agents to track and arrest individuals en masse.
Data monetization and the elimination of anonymity are the financial engines of this model. The modern digital economy operates on "surveillance capitalism," offering supposedly free services to harvest user data, craft highly detailed profiles, and monetize every click and interaction while entirely deemphasizing user privacy. In the political sphere, dark money networks have poured millions into their own high-tech data firms (such as i360) to assemble meticulously detailed, de-anonymized profiles on over 190 million active voters and 250 million consumers, enabling precision targeting and psychological manipulation.
Mass surveillance justified by "safety" is precisely how these technologies are deployed against the public. The software systems sold by tech companies to law enforcement agencies explicitly ingest commercial license plate reader (LPR) data, providing authorities with access to over 5 billion data points used to continuously and physically track vehicles and individuals across the country. This geographic tracking is fused with other aggressive domestic surveillance methods like digital dragnets, "Stingray" cell phone interceptors, facial recognition, and fake social media profilesâoften using photos of attractive young womenâto trick youths as young as twelve into accepting friend requests. Authorities use this access to map out social networks and establish guilt by association, heavily surveilling minority youth without any concrete evidence of criminal behavior.
Ultimately, these technologies fulfill the state's historical obsession with "legibility"âthe utopian, often tyrannical desire of authorities to categorize, monitor, map, and standardize every aspect of human life so that the population becomes a closed, predictable, and easily manipulated system. By merging state power with Silicon Valley's data-harvesting capabilities, this infrastructure enforces control by turning human sociality and everyday life into an endless series of trackable, monetizable data points.
Why waste the time generating slop like this?
I spent a lot of time reading the books on which these perspectives are based.
You probably won't read the books.
So I hope that, by writing about reality here on HN, I can expose you to some facts and ideas that you're too complacent to bother investigating, yourself.
Looks like compelled speech to me, both for the operating system creator and the users. I do not believe that âinterstate commerceâ powers negate the first amendment.
If you really want to get constitutional on it, I think a better angle might be 4A (unreasonable search) or 5A (due process).
Requiring disclosure of my age is effectively a search, without specific probable cause, and there are no means for me to challenge this in court.
It's really a violation of all of the above.
Ever seen a giant warning on cigarette ads that nicotine is addictive? Do you think half the ad is covered by the black box out of charity?
Settled law decades ago.
On that note, today is April 15th, tax day. The day where if you donât provide hard numbers about your life against your will and at your own expense, prison opens as a possibility.
Cigarettes are a product that is sold. Many operating systems are free. I use several that are small projects entirely produced by hobbyists.
Even if they stack the courts with muppets who ignore the obvious first amendment angle to get this passed, I will never comply with this and I will happily help others defy it.
I pledge to defy it.
So if I hand out free cigarettes, Iâd be in the clear.
The laws about giving (not selling) tobacco to minors are state laws, not federal. Thereâs no interstate commerce there or here.
Besides, youâre comparing apples to oranges. Cigarettes are a physical product, not a form of expression. Code is speech and compelled speech violates the first amendment. That makes even state laws for OS age verification unconstitutional.
> Code is speech and compelled speech violates the first amendment.
The first amendment does not blanket ban compelled speech. You can be compelled to testify against someone if granted immunity. You can be forced to take an oath or affirmation in court. I'm sure there are other examples.
> The laws about giving (not selling) tobacco to minors are state laws, not federal. Thereâs no interstate commerce there or here.
If multiple states have differing legislation over the same area of commerce, it can affect interstate commerce. But anyway, after Wickard v Fiilburn interstate commerce is never not implicated.
> An Ohio farmer, Roscoe Filburn, was growing wheat to feed animals on his own farm. The U.S. government had established limits on wheat production, based on the acreage owned by a farmer, to stabilize wheat prices and supplies.
> Filburn grew more than was permitted and so was ordered to pay a penalty. In response, he said that because his wheat was not sold, it could not be regulated as commerce, let alone "interstate" commerce (described in the Constitution as "Commerce ... among the several states").
> The Supreme Court disagreed: "Whether the subject of the regulation in question was 'production', 'consumption', or 'marketing' is, therefore, not material for purposes of deciding the question of federal power before us. ... But even if appellee's activity be local and though it may not be regarded as commerce, it may still, whatever its nature, be reached by Congress if it exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce and this irrespective of whether such effect is what might at some earlier time have been defined as 'direct' or 'indirect'."[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
Court proceedings have been the one place that lasting, narrow 1A exemptions like these have been granted. (The Court is willing to give itself a few exceptional powers now and then.)
> Wickard v Fiilburn
A bad decision that is slowly being undermined and which will eventually be overturned. The State is not omnipotent.
This is such a bad decision - its infuriating. Incredible overreach of state power. This decision laughs at values such as liberty and freedom.
What is the age of a script that I wrote to be triggered by cron? What is the age of a script that my 10-year-old son wrote to be triggered in his dad's crontab?
If I do "sudo -l" to my son's account, what is the age of the user performing actions? If my son writes a set-user-ID program and I run it, what is the user's age now?
Spot on! So much silly engineering would be needed to make this even slightly make sense for normal Linux 'users' and even then, if you can be root then there is no limit!? root can do anything as any user, right? And it's definitely expected that the system admin (ie yourself for your own computer!) can become root!!
I'm glad I'm on a source distribution (Gentoo, even though it does require patience) so I could in-theory edit/patch out the nasty bits before they even become binaries if anything like this ever does go ahead! (Seems unlikely to really work for Linux users anyway really though, for many of the reasons you suggested!)
Ultimately, there's people out there who don't expect you to have root access on your own computer.
Programs don't run themselves though... well technically that's what AI agents do but forget that
If those people writing the Bills could sudo they would be very upset.
US should first implement a national identifier that can be used for healthcare purposes before implementing age verification, that would be a lot more helpful.
There have been bills in the past like "The improved digital identity act of 2023" that never get out of committee. The latest incarnation seems to be "H.R.7270 - Stop Identity Fraud and Identity Theft Act of 2026". There almost always have one republican and one democratic sponsor. But they don't seem to rise to the level of urgency to get past the current dysfunction in congress.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/7270...
Oh, but that could be used for voting and we don't want that.
Voter ID changes would be a lot easier to swallow with a free national id that you don't have to register or fill out paperwork to get.
Maybe add in automatic voter registration to sweeten the pot?
It would give the federal government inappropriate control of state elections.
I don't know how many times this needs to be iterated, but voter ID has absolutely nothing to do with election security. It has everything to do with voter suppression, just like poll taxes and literacy tests. It gives poll workers discretion to turn people away.
There's a reason this idea is pushed solely by Republicans with the explicit goal of reducing the number of people who can vote, because fewer people voting is better for Republicans.
I can see another group getting very upset "They want to see my what before letting me buy a gun!"
Yes but they would need a functional healthcare system first.
In the US, quality of health care is not really a problem. The problem is that the cost is too high, and also availability (in part because of the cost).
I struggle with this. Outcomes for our healthcare system are much better than critics want to accept. Most of the negative health outcomes in the United States are mostly about our built environment - people who aren't very poor and live in walkable urban centers in the US have health outcomes similar to Europe. Those reading this website in the US often have outcomes that exceed their peers in Europe - we have much better cancer treatment, for instance. US city air quality is starting to beat European cities because we don't use nearly as much natural gas (NYC is better than Berlin, for instance, at pm2.5).
Most negative US health outcome factors can be traced to suburbanization, which is also where the vast majority of the gun violence is, and systemic racial wealth disparity. We have a pretty good healthcare system, we just need to subsidize it for people who can't afford it.
"If we focus on a subset of the population that is lucky, we have a great healthcare system." Got it!
Sorry for the sarcasm, but that's how your comment reads.
Do those lucky people have healthcare insurance tied to their employment? Are they afraid to go to a demonstration or advocate a union, because they could lose their job and thus healthcare?
A good healthcare system treats everyone equally, no matter where they live in a country, their income level, being employed/unemployed, etc.
We have a pretty good healthcare system, we just need to subsidize it for people who can't afford it.
No, it is broken. The US healthcare capita costs twice as much per capita as most West European countries and the 'outcomes per capita' are worse. The problem is, similar to the prison system etc., the privatization of the system. It's run by companies that go for profit maximization, which entails rejecting as many claims as possible, driving up medicine prices, etc.
The US should first implement an equivalent to the GDPR that puts a stop to the ongoing abuses of the current identification systems. After we see that is working, then we can talk about increasing the technical strength of identification systems.
Welllll, the land of GDPR keeps pushing for the chat control. Not sure there are any good guys left.
[delayed]
I'd love to know which funds/wealthy individuals are bankrolling this rush of age verification mandates. It's certainly not a grass roots phenomenon.
Here is a glimpse
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47530718
Here is some more breakdown
https://x.com/moo9000/status/2037184457069760717?s=20
Thank you, that's informative. Interpol? Orwellian stuff.
Interpol would be legitimately for child porn prevention reasons here, actually.
Yeah it does seem to be a new 'thing'. I'm betting it's like the heritage foundation who figured out age-restrictions give them a new end-run around the first amendment. Started with porn (because who is going to defend porn) and now they're going to slide down the slippery slope.
Heritage foundation? Lol give me a break.
Meta
Also, it's not only in the USA. In Europe too, all at the same time. Don't worry though, it's just conspiracy theory that those things are related.
Don't underestimate the grassroots popularity of these measures. Look at any Hacker News thread regarding age verification and you will find a lot of comments coming out in support of age verification. Most of them are assuming that age verification is something that will only apply to sites they don't use like Facebook.
There are a couple parallel moral panics intersecting on this topic. Again even on HN you'll find people parroting dodgy statistics about child trafficking on social media, proclaiming that short form video is equivalent to highly addictive drugs, or making sweeping claims that under-18s should be banned from having smart phones. It's apparent none of them ever considered that the age restrictions they've been inviting might apply to something they use. It's always assumed to apply only to the kids on the TikTok or something.
"Rep Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) announced the Parents Decide Act, bipartisan, commonsense legislation to strengthen online protections for children and give parents greater control over what their kids can access on phones, tablets, and other devices. Gottheimerâs new Parents Decide Act will:
- Require operating system developers like Apple and Google to verify usersâ ages when setting up a new device, rather than relying on self-reported ages.
- Allow parents to set age-appropriate content controls from the start, including limiting access to social media, apps, and AI platforms. - Ensure that age and parental settings securely flow to apps and AI platforms, so content is tailored appropriately for children. - Prevent children from accessing harmful or explicit contentâincluding inappropriate AI chatbot interactionsâby creating a consistent, trusted standard across platforms."
This is the summary [0] from the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, who seem to be in support of the legislation. I get the feeling the definition of 'operating system' within the legislation isn't how many on HN, or in real life, would define what an OS is, since its implied to be aimed at mobile devices, but we shall see once the actual text is posted.
[0] https://www.benton.org/headlines/rep-gottheimer-announces-bi...
You know it's bad when they call it the opposite of what it is.
Seems like legislation should come after senators and members of congress directly call Tim Cook en masse to complain that:
1. Screen time reporting has been 100% broken for decades. Just does not work as advertised. False advertising is indeed illegal.
2. The parental controls are a joke. Can't block apps that were ever downloaded by a member of the household. Don't want the kid to have TikTok? You better not have downloaded it on any device ever.
I do not disagree that there is A LOT that Apple could, and should, be doing to enable parents. The problem that we have is, that if a vendor, like Apple, just decides to continue to have broken systems, there isn't a way to compel them to fix the problem outside of legislation. And, because most people in the House/Senate have a complete lack of technical literacy, we get situations where they define things poorly or special interests get to set those definitions in their favor/for ideological reasons, rather than to make good policy.
We agree that legislation won't work because legislators aren't competent.
But you claim that only legislation can force behavior, and I'm pretty sure that if a few senators just relayed their frustration with broken screen time reporting to Tim Cook personally we could get some results.
This will be fun to implement in washing machines, and car ECUs; and for users that aren't humans, and...
It's like explaining to IT that you can't, in fact, install global protect/UEM on a satellite just because it runs a Linux operating system.
We need to look into this sudden "spontaneous" coordination among lawmakers to implement age verification software.
What is the common denominator? Whose lead are they following, and whose money are they taking?
https://agelesslinux.org/lobbyists.html
There are likely at least dozens of different lobbies that can gain some advantage from pushing this.
Is the advantage corporate money lining their pockets?
Or is there another one?
Dozens of different lobbies means thereâs no clear cut list of advantages.
Unless you just want an exhaustive enumeration of every possible human desire.
If I had a dollar to bet, I would say that such global effort would highly benefit Microsoft that is loosing grounds in high proportion in the area of desktop OS and is trying very hard to impose mandatory microsoft "cloud" accounts to be able to use computers.
> What is the common denominator?
Criticism of Israel and its agents will be outlawed by all means necessary and anybody who questions it will be black bagged. That is the end goal. This is total war.
I didn't even know a bill could be listed without the text being out.
Too early to discuss much though?
Unfortunately all we have are the title and sponsors right now. I'm much more interested in the text of this bill which is not posted here yet. I don't expect it to be particularly reasonable, but at least we will have something to discuss once the text is available.
What if the user is another machine? Sorry, my API wonât talk to another API unless itâs old enough to drink.
How do we still have no people in government with basic computer literacy?
It's the opposite. This is for mass surveillance. Politicians love control and silencing anon Twitter critics.
How is all the tracking we have today not already sufficient for mass surveillance? What does age verification add if the goal is just more surveillance?
All Internet users will be verified. No going online without a government issued id. It's not about verifying the age.
I hate to say it and it's not the future we all wanted, but as long as social media can be weaponized by foreign powers, the only solution is verifying internet users. It's inevitable.
> This is for mass surveillance
Source:
Here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47772459
They asked you for the source of a claim you in a comment above.
Posting a link to that very same comment is not a link to a source.
> no people in government with basic computer literacy? There are a few. See Wyden, Markey.
Text not available yet.
> As of 04/14/2026 text has not been received for H.R.8250 - To require operating system providers to verify the age of any user of an operating system, and for other purposes.
> The Government Publishing Office (GPO) makes the text of legislative measures available to the public and the Library of Congress. GPO makes the text available as soon as possible, but delays can occur when there are many or very large legislative measures for GPO to prepare and print at the same time.
Random fun fact (?): I had a little project I let run all of last year which pulled down bills from Congress.gov's APIs and ran them through an LLM to summarize the bills and attempt to provide different political viewpoints, along with some image generation, ultimately resulting in something resembling X or Threads, but fully simulated - as though the House or Senate was "posting" bills they put forth and "people" from different political camps were responding with their thoughts.
I found that for 2025, on average, it took about 20 days for a bill to be posted before its text was made available via Congress' APIs. Sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes almost immediate... but 20 days on average last year.
I learned a lot about congressional processes and such through the project, like this[0] really cool flow chart about the legislative steps (recommend viewing the tiff and really zooming in on the details), with the action codes[1], which is data that can come from the APIs[2].
[0] https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ppmsca.33996/
[1] https://www.congress.gov/help/field-values/action-codes
[2] https://api.congress.gov/
edit: formatting
At the very least, if this passes, the resulting court challenge will provide precedent that shuts it down in all 50 states at once.
The downside will be riding out the intervening months before the court decision comes through. Stock up on ISOs and full git clones of your favorite OS sources.
You are assuming that courts will shut this down. Guess what? The Supreme Court is responsible for these laws: https://publicinterestprivacy.org/paxton-age-verification/
Paxton's decision was incredibly narrow (because it specifically targeted sites that served pornography and only pornography) and it's unlikely the court is willing to grant anymore ground.
There is precedent that indicates otherwise, as this is a clear First Amendment violation.
Requiring commercial services to adhere to certain guidelines is constitutional, even though the Texas law is a bad one and I think a different court may have slapped down the law. Mandating speech (code is speech) is clearly not, especially for noncommercial projects.
I think the key would be getting the right person to explain how this would be like requiring all authors to include a certain sentence in their novel.
I kind of doubt that most judges are going to agree with a "code is speech" argument. I think it's more likely that the courts view code as a mechanism, and so this is more like requiring cars to have airbags.
Though this does bring to fore the issue of enforcement. Nobody can stop you from building a custom car which has no airbags. Where enforcement happens is when you try to get it registered (thus making it legal to drive on public roads). That's when the government would stop you.
Curious how such enforcement would work for operating systems. We could all just mod our OS's to remove/bypass age verification. The government doesn't (currently, yet) have a legal nor physical mechanism to prevent this.
intervening years
Since voting is that power we say we have in the US. Does the public get to vote on this? If not...
> Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster - Neil Postman
The US is a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. You don't get to vote on specific federal policies, you vote on the people who vote for those policies.
Mark Zuckerberg and such?
Yes, it's called voting with your wallet. They are better at it that you or I presumably.
Voting with your wallet doesn't exist. Try to boycott Amazon by blocking the AWS IP ranges and see how unusable the internet becomes for everyday tasks. Corporations continue to push the personal responsibility narrative so they can externalize costs of unethical business practices.
how are you making them lose money by blocking their ip ranges? Your are pretty much giving them money because now they dont need to pay for bandwidth.
Dollars speak louder than ballots.
We can also call representatives and give our opinions to them
We can also engage in direct action the other 364.9 days of the year. Call/email your representatives, go to a town hall, call the leaders of both parties of both senate and house, go to a march or protest. There are other ways we can be heard, be substantive and thoughtful, they tally and track messages which are not hyperbole or copy-paste. If you can make it personal, even better. It only needs to be a few sentences.
https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials
Donât forget civil disobedience, should the bill come to pass.
This is a stupid bill, but how is this an anti-LGBTQ issue?
Anything that even slightly has to do with LGBTQ people will likely end up getting blocked from childrenâs eyes, while anything to do with non-LGBTQ people wonât.
I find it interesting this criticism assumes age-appropriate LGBTQ content isnât a thing.
Age appropriate books intended for that still get banned, so the assumption is just that the decisions about it won't be made in good faith. "X has two dads" kind of books aren't really adult, and yet...
Then sue, at that point, and win.
unless they're gonna bribe Clarence Thomas and the rest of the Bush appointees with more $$$ and goods that their current backers that approach is going to fail
the Tea Party's main goal was to get their people into local / state / federal circuit / SOCTUS positions, and they have succeeded.
Ah yes, I have a lot of faith that the stacked Supreme Court will return a fair result in this issue.
SCOTUS says no.
Because the people who will use the law as a club to enforce their morality will assert that there is no such thing.
I'm currently reading Foucault's history of sexuality, and the reason you might want this is because population!
Obviously we are facing a population crisis, and we will need more bodies for the factories and retirement homes. Or at least this was the idea in the 1800s. We might have morally coated it with religion, but biopower is a real thing.
The current hypothesis is that the ever evolving LGBTQ+ is a way to sell niche products to these groups. You can imagine that with every new gender, there is a facebook ad and amazon order to be sold.
I don't really believe this, I'm an anti-realist and I think continental philosophy is BS... but this is a classic. Also, there are sooo many ways our sexual taboos are all about economics. Once you see it, you cant unsee.
discussion of sex ed / lgbtq topics often falls under obscenity laws or age filtering, so queer youth might not be able to read it anymore, is the general worry.
Project 2025 includes a multi-prong plan specifically targeting LGBTQ and generally enforcing "christian values".
One of the prongs is requiring ID to go online. Another is to use a combination of media mergers with 'voluntary' government-controlled self-censorship to clamp down on unregulated speech.
So, its blast radius will be centered on LGBTQ issues, but it's designed to cover your comment too.
It isnât, the author of the criticism is desperately trying to attach another issue to get people to pay attention.
It also doesnât make sense a Democrat from New Jersey writing the bill saw it that way at all.
This. That crowd is constantly shoehorning themselves into non-pertinent issues as part of their pathological attention seeking behavior.
Iâm old enough to tell you Iâm old enough.
It might have some sense if we are talking about desktop environments and mobile platforms, where you have a more or less clear user using it to access websites. And for Windows and Mac that is mostly true, but not always, and for linux is not even half of the picture.
But what about all the rest of things you use operating systems for? Will they stop using cars or any kind of transport that have one or several running operating systems inside? Routers or internet connectivity? Finance, clusters, whatever? Have facebook in all the operating systems on their servers for all the platforms an age verification check for whoever logs in, or not?
I suspect this is really a surveillance bill, but we won't know until the text is revealed.
Agreed. The whole topic is a Trojan horse for surveillance companies to siphon off data. We need to start asking which politicians are pushing this and whoâs pushing them to do it. Theyâre either doing it for money or being blackmailed into it by the existing surveillance apparatus.
What's the definition of "operating system provider"
The binary distribution operating systems provided by so-called "tech" companies all suck anyway
I prefer to compile the operating system from source. I can add or remove any code I want. Will the nonprofit open source projects distributing the source code that I use be "operating system providers" under this legislation. That would seem pointless
I guess we'll be selecting Canada or Mexico at the country selection screen.
More likely Mexico
Good luck, our Canadian government loves data collection and "sticking it to big tech". This will be Canadian law very soon, I'm sure.
in most cases it is same lobbyists pushing the same agenda for the same billionaires as the US
I just can't wait for the day when AWS or Azure goes down because Claude Code forgot to include the account age flag when deploying a CVE fix found by Claude Mythos in a control plane microservice.
It is currently in commitee the energy and commerce committee. If one of your reps sits on this committee my suggestion is to reach out to them and voice your opposition to this measure. Consider writing a letter or email as well.
Committee members can be found here: https://energycommerce.house.gov/representatives
Personally I donât imagine wanting to give my PII to some companies, and I imagine pulling away from some internet services and communities.
Never thought it would end this way.
Nonsense bills get introduced all the time. Iâm not saying this shouldnât be taken seriously, but this eventually getting codified is a long shot.
There are so many issues with how this can work in practice. Best case it just asks how old you are like a website that shows mature content, and the user lies. So from a liability perspective that shifts it to the user who gave false information. Beyond that thereâs no practical way to actually verify someoneâs age at the OS level.
>Beyond that thereâs no practical way to actually verify someoneâs age at the OS level.
KYC for windows, MacOS, iOS, Android, and internet players like Google and Cloudflare being forced to block unverified devices.
There probably would still be a way around it, but it would be a headache for most people.
Age verification in general rolled out so fast, I'm more inclined to think that nonsense gets passed more easily if it enables going after drastically more control.
You're assuming that politicians are competent, thorough, and consider all the implications before writing a bill or voting on a bill.
That is a _very_ dangerous assumption.
The government doesn't care if it's nonsensical and contradictory and enforcement would be a dumpster fire because all that essentially grants their buddies (if not now then in the future) in the executive more power.
Why do people with no understanding or ability to clearly think through the implementation and consequences of said implementation, have the ability to initiate a vote changing everything for everyone? This is just about the dumbest thing I've read this week which says way too much these days.
The people pulling the strings behind all this do indeed have a clear understanding or ability to clearly think through the implementation and consequences of said implementation. They know exactly what they're doing and why.
a bit off-topic but always great when you visit an official government website and are greeted with a Cloudflare captcha...
Will this make Linux illegal?
Not if the software complies, which is in discussion.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Undecided-Age-Laws
Many distributions have decided not to comply. Debian has settled on not making anything like this mandatory, as they are an international project, although they may (after discussion and likely voting) agree to optionally package age verification stuff for users who want it for some reason.
I'm worried that Poettering's new startup is designed to ban unapproved Linux, BSDs, etc.
https://linuxiac.com/systemd-creator-lennart-poettering-join...
The cynic in me says the Win 11 "you must have a TPM" push (along with passkey's "big tech owns all your accounts" design) were rammed through specifically to centralize control of the open web.
At this point, if the federal government actually forced OS-level censorship, most literate folks would just download Linux. So, first, they need to close the remaining door.
I'm not exactly holding a candle for debian. SystemD has already started adding support for this, and, in the past, downstream has been able to force unpopular debian votes through.
SystemD only added an optional birthdate field to userdb, and many distros donât even use userdb by default. And there exist distros without SystemD. So I wouldnât worry too much about the SystemD angle, although IMHO they were spineless for adding the field.
Still no text? What, are they uploading it via dial-up?
The debates over these proposed OS mandates remind me of the Clinton-era Clipper chip:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
May they meet a similar fate!
Interesting to not that the congressman who introduced this, Josh Gottheimer, worked for Microsoft before becoming a congressman. Even more complelling is that in the last few weeks he opened $1M of calls on Microsoft as well.
This did not take long, we all knew this was coming but I am surprised on how quick this appeared.
Lets hope they carve out exemptions for Free Operating Systems based upon revenue. But we know that will not happen.
F this BS. I will never send a single dime or packet to any company or politician that supports this. I will tell everyone I know to boycott their service or products.
The latest absurd power grab in the guise of protecting the children.
You will be charged with child endangerment if you let your kid use your phone.
Input age here:
100'); DROP TABLE Age;--
lizard
-32,768
0.000023s
As Iâve said before, itâs a great time to invest in a pallet of SFF computers and source/ISO archives of all the best distros.
Anyone have the text of the bill? It doesn't seem to be on congress.gov yet.
1. Would this not be unconstitutional? i.e. is computer software not enough of a form of expression/speech to eschew such a requirement?
2. Are OS "providers" the same as OS "authors"? And - with a GNU/Linux distribution, who would be the providers, really?
1. It would be
2. They havenât thought about it and donât care
I will not give a copy of my identification to any tech platform or operating system provider, full stop.
I will stop using technology before I compromise on this.
Techbros and politicians, please take note.
Do you think they will care that some cyberpunk refuse to compromise, or get around it?
Some people refuse to fly, judging security checks at airport dystopian. Business goes on.
> Do you think they will care that some cyberpunk refuse to compromise, or get around it?
Not me individually, no, but I hope that by speaking up I am doing a very small part to encourage others to speak up. If enough of us speak up, it can make a difference. The alternative (keeping my mouth shut) is complying in advance, IMO.
> Some people refuse to fly, judging security checks at airport dystopian. Business goes on.
Funny you should mention that. I fly frequently (at least 3 times, sometimes up to 8-10 times a year), and I have literally never gone through the body scanning machines at a US airport, because I opt out and get groped by the TSA officer every time. I believe in small acts of resistance, and I think at the very least I'm consistent in that.
I see that Meta (if thatâs still the case) is going for the gold here.
Another github repo to bypass another annoyance? They're so annoying.
I'm not sure who Josh Gottheimer of NJ is, but he seems to be one of those stealth "fake" Democrats. Too centrist to be a Republican, but also too centrist to be part of the DSA.
He seems to also support H.R. 7540.
I think the Democrats in his district need to seriously consider primarying him and replace him with someone that doesn't bend to foreign or corporate whims.
> NJ
there is your answer, mate. lotta private interests swaying NY and NJ elections
You can count on one hand the number of democrats in congress who could be part of the DSA.
But yes, Gottenheimer is a conservative democrat.
I really think left-right and honest-dishonest are useless dimensions to evaluate Congress members on. The job practically requires ideological fuzziness and truth stretching to get anything done. This is a feature: legislatures that require high ideological purity tend to become rubber stamps. DPRK is a good example.
You're bothesidesing and rationalizing a complete lack of integrity.
AIPAC money, PAC money, and gold bar bribe takers are definitely corrupt and need to be in prison.
Honestly, I'm from NJ and I'm still shocked they actually charged Gold Bar Bob for what he did. He's so influential in NJ politics, I thought they'd let him get away with it like he did all the other bribes he's taken over the years. I guess literal gold bars from Egypt with obvious provenance was just too on the nose.
My belief is that to a large extent the art of politics is the art of bothsidesing and rationalizing away your integrity for common aims. And that when applied correctly, these common aims can be used to benefit the public. Look at systems where you can't bothesides (also known as finding common ground and compromising) or rationalize the integrity of other members (also known as acting in good faith). I suspect you will not find the results of these political bodies to have preferable results to the American Congress!
Will there be a shooting because of this?
Do ICE count?