In recent weeks, the Linux community has focused heavily on the debate surrounding new legislation in parts of the United States, including California’s AB-1043 and Colorado’s SB26-051. In short, these measures introduce stricter age-verification requirements for certain online services and raise questions about how Linux systems could adapt to this.
In an attempt to address the complicated case, a merge request was submitted to the XDG specifications maintained by freedesktop.org. The proposal recommended adding a new D-Bus interface, org.freedesktop.AgeVerification, to allow applications to query the operating system for a user’s age bracket.
The intent was to provide applications with a general age category rather than an exact birth date. The proposed API defined five categories: Unknown, Under 13, 13–15, 16–17, and 18+. The draft specification stated that the user’s birth year would be stored locally, and only the calculated age bracket would be accessible to applications through methods such as GetAgeBracket.
The plan was for the data to be stored in the AccountsService user configuration directory (/var/lib/AccountsService/users/), ensuring the underlying information remained private while applications accessed only the derived age category.
However, expectably, the proposal quickly drew criticism from developers and community members. Concerns included privacy implications, embedding jurisdiction-specific policies into the desktop infrastructure, and whether this functionality should be part of the freedesktop core namespace.
Some also argued that linking the specification to the freedesktop namespace could create reputational risks by associating a core desktop standard with politically sensitive regulations.
So, at the end, the author just closed the merge request and indicated that future work would take place within the portal infrastructure used by technologies such as Flatpak. However, the question remains open, as no clear statements have yet been made about how Linux and the open-source community will respond to this challenge.
As a parent?
$^%& your ease!
Grow up, already. Why do you have kids when you still beg for someone to take all your responsibility (and rights, along with it) to make things easier?
Take some responsibility for the spawn you created, for a change. But then also look at your schools. My teen comes home complaining about their teachers forcing them to use corpo-fascist AIs, which are far more virulent in the risk they pose to children than pornography ever was, though maybe slightly less vile than Roblox and Discord.
Also, remember, we all got around all the joke “protections” and were playing on Newgrounds in school and chatting in “adult” rooms on Yahoo. It won’t be any different now, there were kids posting videos to TikTok after the Australia ban that pretty much amounted to “Missed me!” and the UK laws are a joke that have cut people out of encyclopedias but somehow manage to exclude the CSAM generator known as Grok?
All this will do is what it did on Roblox, block honest people in where they are “supposed” to be so they can’t see and report the activity of predators who have infiltrated children’s spaces. Remember that their response to someone baiting predators was to ban them, and Chris Hansen had to get involved before they even pretended to make an effort.
I mean…
Why else would all these governments and corporations be onboard if it wasn’t 100% Epstein Class approved?
Have any of you actually read that law? It essentially states that any device with an operating system (this includes any and all smart devices you might own, smart bulbs, smart toasters, calculators…) will require age verification to power on and use. Sooo… Do you really want your lights to require your age to turn on? How about your smart vacuum? Good luck getting your kids to vacuum after the Jan 1st! Did you also know, that multiple companies have now blocked sales and usage of their products in California because it is far easier to do that than code a mge verification into their operating systems and more have openly stated that they are seriously considering doing the same? No? Huh. Interesting how the news outlets don’t report things like that isn’t it, it could cause people to panic as more tech leaves the state. Yes, I agree we should protect our kids better, but that should start with the parents who buy the phones for their kids and are too lazy to setup parental controls and then complain that their 12 year old is in to porn (yeah, that’s the actual average age of porn viewers!) I personally grew up in front of a monitor and keyboard in the 90s. My parents limited my online time, they were proactive and kept watch on what I did online. (or thought they did but it was enuf to keep me out of trouble!) personally, I see California going tech dark. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but it’s coming. And as it does, TThe public will get scared and eventually panic. What happens when a couple thousand people panic? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? What happens to this same kids who we are trying to protect? What about little suzie who just got trampled in a riot when enough people panicked? Or Timmy who didn’t get the emergency services he needed because the tech wasn’t there in support of them? Yes, that’s a bit extreme, I know. But think. When the tech you rely on every day gives up on the entire state you live in what will you do? Go back to the 80/90s? That infrastructure isn’t there anymore. Tech has replaced it. The same tech that just walked away from you. That law was written by people who don’t know what a headless server is. Who’s going to put their age into a bunch of servers daily when they have to more a screen and keyboard between each one every time? Most companies will walk away before that happens.
K, shutting up now. If you read all that, I hope it made sense. Actually, I hope I’m just some raving fool honestly. I sincerely, desperately hope I’m wrong. Extremely wrong. But I don’t see me being far from the eventual truth. (all futjreneevents are speculative. Current ones tho are fact. Search the web for that info, it’s there)
~Someone Else
Why are you focusing on California specifically? Illinois, Colorado, New York, and Brazil are all working on similar policies.
Because Illinois, Colorado, New York, and Brazil don’t have major tech companies based in them. California is going to require it if it HQ or main operation hub is in the state. They are leaning on the companies to do something that should be a national issue. The companies won’t make multiple products for different requests. That why you can buy something in Nebraska and it has a prop 65 warming from California on it.
It’s going to end up getting changed to
int getAge()
{
return 18;
}
I applaud and celebrate the government protecting our children from harmful apps and granting malicious actors looking to exploit our children for CSAM a nice, convenient way to filter for vulnerable targets. From downloading our children’s photo collection to remotely activating webcams to invade our children’s privacy with a precision of selecting the intended target now amplified by our courageous lawmakers.
May our privacy be violated and our children be exploited!
As a parent this would be really helpful, ie setting up a child’s account that apps respect. Doesn’t need to store DOB, just current age bracket. It would be useful as a default on boarding process for mobiles ie set owner account then ask if user will be a child leading to child account with apps respecting the setting. No government censorship or age verification needed. If devs don’t want to implement then their apps require an adult account. Gives device owners (parents) control in a way that doesn’t require major IT knowledge (I have a significant background in IT and can’t keep up), keeps government away from censorship and keeps personal data out of government/company hands.
A voluntary code so devices or OS’s that comply can be marked as such?
I’m aware that there may be issues with the details, but this seems a reasonable compromise.
It starts with just tapping in some numbers that may resemble your age or birthday, it ends with showing a physical id complete with name and address, facial recognition, turning your head for the camera to make sure you’re human, etc.
Think that’s not the progression? You must be new to earth. It will show that it isn’t effective just getting dates without ID so it will progress “naturally.”
This is for the kids as much as my big toe, and if you think otherwise your skills are only high due to the Dunning Kruger effect.
These laws arent gonna walk you through parenting its your job to make your kid safe
Yes, so I’d like a system to help. Even having devices in family spaces doesn’t ensure they can’t access inappropriate material and phones are even harder to secure. Making parents have to police every app or device using different interfaces or tools is ridiculous. I mean no-one can monitor everything a child is doing all of the time, and saying they can is delusional. Security built in is always better than layering it on top. And building the security into the device makes way more sense than having to use third party age verification with all the privacy risks that entails.
Kids are smart, they will find work arounds, they always do. If sites set themselves up to block users of certain age groups, all that’s really gonna do is drive them to the sketchier more dangerous sites that don’t bother with verification.
The only real ways you can protect your kids is either:
1. Teach them internet safety, and make sure you’re a safe person they can talk to if they encounter something wrong. Or,
2. Don’t let them use the Internet at all.
The internet really isn’t a place for kids, so every kid on the internet should either be hyper aware of that, or should not be online.
And making non-parents and developers jump through hoops to make your decision to be a parent easier is even more ridiculous. Have you read these bills? Do you understand the language in them? A simple utility that snaps windows to the edge of a screen now has to ask the OS for someone’s age? Implementing this “feature” takes time and effort, and a lot of good software is written by volunteers in their free time. These bills will do nothing to protect children. They are based on a narrow interpretation of how software is actually used. Not every device has an “account” or an “app store” or even needs parental controls. When I was an innocent minor in need of protection, I was the one setting up the computers and “accounts” for our household. These are short-sighted, feel-good “solutions” written by people with good intentions, but no technical knowledge or awareness of the difficulties they are creating. The wording of the bills shows that very lack of technical knowledge. Age signal? Operating system provider? These are nonsense.
As a parent, this is one of the dumbest and most dangerous things to expose a child to that has ever been proposed.
You really want anyone who gains access to your device to know how old your child is, in addition to the already existing ability to determine your location? Jesus.
why would they know how old, just age bracket, and if they have gained access then there are bigger problems than age. Seriously – parental controls on apps or a installed parental control system would give that anyway.
The Internet will just have the oldest user base in history. When yahoo games was a thing, if they asked for my age I just scrolled down to the earliest year they allowed. Going to be a lot of 100 year olds.
Actually as a parent, being able to create a child’s account and have apps respect the age bracket would make keeping devices appropriate so much easier – doesn’t even have to include DOB just the current age bracket for the account. Having this as part of the onboarding fire mobiles as default would make life much easier eg
It should as it has always been. The parents responsibility. They should install parental controls on their children’s devices. There is absolutely no reason to make the internet child friendly, the Children should be kept seperate by the parents. And of it’s a big deal make it illegal to not install parental controls and get the schools involved more.
Fascists just checking on people’s limits for next oppression wave. Yet another pretentious move. No law passes in checking how much money someone spends or earns is related to wars killing innocents and children, or greedy people, but they are sensitive about age in software. Go figure, “why improve education level of people when we can just oppress them to earn more money ourselves and elite friends?”
Bro stepped outside if his echo chamber to educate us plebes.
Thank you commissar.
Wow. A lot of unhinged replies. Love the one saying Cali should be bombed. Insane.
Your anger is justified but misplaced. This is happening because of Apple and Microsoft(but mostly Microsoft). They’ve turned OS’ into nothing but ad-space and nobody would argue that advertising to impressionable minors is a good idea.
Govt should be telling these companies doing shady practices to stop their BS and not making blanket laws that cast a net so large it effects people/groups it shouldn’t.
No, they’re right. California should be bombed over this. This is government overreach nobody wants. Same tyranny as the TSA
I don’t think the age verification for an operating system is needed. Age verification should be done by the seller of whatever app you want to buy or download, by the sites you want to access. If you want to acces Facebook or Tick-tock they should require age verification.
I wonder if there is a workaround to distributions having to comply with the law. They just need to distribute the components and not bundle them all together. The operating system is the whole. The end user can piece the components together themselves.
I’d rather see them put a clause in the terms of the respective operating systems to deny access to the states demanding this, with the expectation that end users will just ignore it.
What people focused on preventing age verification dont see is the cost to some projects. I create SbK spins. https://spinsbykilz.com/releases.html Creating them for both Manjaro and Debian. It is a labor of love to give back to the Linux community. I make no money from it.
But I am also retired and disabled living in IL. If nothing is added to address the laws SbK will shut down in December of 2026. I use free resources to distribute and cant block states with these laws. A lawsuit dragging me into court would financially ruin me even if I won.
I hope Linux devs will ignore these laws. Linux isn’t a corporation that can be sued; it’s a decentralized software movement, where if one is taken down, two more will spring up in its place. Resist! Do not comply!
When projects shutdown, some paid developers will lose their jobs. Exactly how many are you willing to pay a full salary while they look for employment?
Could we euthanize those developers. Doctor supervised obviously.
He’s willing to sacrifice as many jobs as it takes as long they are not his.
The community cannot have it both ways. They cannot say they want to keep releasing software for public use while not allow software to allow the software to follow the law. The solution is not civil disobedience is not the way. The way to fix this is in the courts.
Imo not that I release software, but if I did I ain’t complying, California can suck it as well as any distro that caves to such ridiculous demands. Don’t let that bullshit distract you from the real reason they want age data and that’s to restart their pedo farms.
It was the court’s that decided to implement the law.. and they nothing of how the tech works. According to the law even servers (which is an os) would have to get the admins age on install.. and if more account are added to the server, I as the admin would have to put in their age. But it gets worse.. the law pretty much states any executable is an application so then php, python Apache and other services I manage would have to implement a signal to get the users age.. the law is to broad and is worded as a catch all.
You forgot your router, fridge, bike and car. Oh, DSLRs, calculators and washing machines, too. The law does not distinguish between operating systems, so zephyr, AmigaOS and OSEK fit, too.
I’d like to see clever people declaring their age to an airbag.
They just moved it somewhere, outside the public spotlight:
https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/1922
What’s next, I will need the government to concent so that I will be able to have sex with my wife ?
Reject this shit dictatorship
do not comply with dictatorship laws
Time to tell CA to take a long walk off a short pier.
Jeez I’ve not heard that for decades – when I was a teenager, thats how we’d insult the “cool” (dumb) crowd, the look of confusion whilst they tried to unwrap it was priceless!
Other ones were:
– Go play with traffic on the (m25, if you in the UK)
– You need some dehydrated water
– You’re as bright as dull light bulb
– You’re 2 vouchers short of a free pop-up toaster
What a world….