System76 on Age Verification Laws

I don’t like to shill for companies, but I’m glad System76 made a statement. The addendum does feel like their legal team made them add it though:

> Some of these laws impose requirements on System76 and Linux distributions in general. The California law, and Colorado law modeled after it, were agreed in concert with major operating system providers. Should this method of age attestation become the standard, apps and websites will not assume liability when a signal is not provided and assume the lowest age bracket. Any Linux distribution that does not provide an age bracket signal will result in a nerfed internet for their users.

> We are accustomed to adding operating system features to comply with laws. Accessibility features for ADA, and power efficiency settings for Energy Star regulations are two examples. We are a part of this world and we believe in the rule of law. We still hope these laws will be recognized for the folly they are and removed from the books or found unconstitutional.

Anyways, it feels like all sides of the political spectrum are trying to strip away any semblance of anonymity or privacy online both in the US and abroad. No one should have to provide any personal details to use any general computing device. Otherwise, given the pervasive tracking done by corporations and the rise of constant surveillance outdoors, there will be nowhere for people to safely gather and express themselves freely and privately.

> Throwing them into the deep end when they’re 16 or 18 is too late.

I saw this a lot in college. Kids that didn’t have any freedom or autonomy while living at home went wild in college. They had no idea how to self-regulate. A lot of them failed out. Those who didn’t had some rough years. Sheltering kids for too long seems to do more harm than good. At least if they run into issues while still children, their parents can be there to help them through it so they can better navigate on their own once they move out.

I can't fathom all the rage and confusion here about these laws. It's been a well-known effect since forever that when a government deems that something needs to be done, they'll go for the first "something-shaped" solution.

This all could've been avoided. Governments all over the world have been ringing the alarm bells about lack of self-regulation in tech and social media. And instead of doing even a minimum of regulation, anything to calm or assuage the governments, the entire industry went balls-to-the-wall "line go up" mode. We, collectively, only have ourselves to blame, and now it's too late.

If you look back, it didn't have to be this way: - Governments told game publishers to find a system to handle age rating or else. The industry developed the ESRB (and other local systems), and no "or else" happened. - Governments told phone and smart device manufacturers to collectively standardize on a charging standard, almost everyone agreed on USB-C and only many years later did the government step in and force the lone outlier to play ball. If that one hadn't been stubborn, there wouldn't have been a law.

The industry had a chance to do something practical, the industry chose not to, and now something impractical (but you better find a way anyway, or else) will be forced upon them. And I won't shed a tear for the poor companies finally having to do something.

So much for freedom and democracy lectured by Americans and westerners to the rest of the world. This is just censorship of every form of freedom of speech. This got nothing to do with children or youth. They will eventually censor and track everyone.

Don't see how anyone is gonna make me do anything. Just evade anything like this through various means and opt out of things that reduce your quality of life (by destroying your freedom and making you a slave)

It's sad to see such big brother crap in Linux, which sees like the exact opposite of the hacker ethos it was originally built upon.

Are these laws not 1A violations due to code being speech and the gov not being allowed to compel speech?

requiring the OS to broadcast an age bracket to every app and website is building a new tracking vector and calling it child safety lol

I wonder who is behind this sudden push for these age verification laws. This wasn't an issue until recently and suddenly there are not just laws in California and Colorado, but also New York and Brazil.

Just a reminder of what liability the CA age verification law imposes upon developers and providers.

It's not enough to adhere to the OS age signal:

> (3) (A) Except as provided in subparagraph (B), a developer shall treat a signal received pursuant to this title as the primary indicator of a user’s age range for purposes of determining the user’s age.

> (B) If a developer has internal clear and convincing information that a user’s age is different than the age indicated by a signal received pursuant to this title, the developer shall use that information as the primary indicator of the user’s age.

Developers are still burdened with additional liability if they have reason to believe users are underage, even if their age flag says otherwise.

The only way to mitigate this liability is to confirm your users are of age with facial and ID scans, as it is implemented across platforms already. Not doing so opens you up to liability if someone ever writes "im 12 lol" on your app/platform.

These lawd prove one thing: the politicians know nothing about the subject matter.

What is almost more disturbing: at least some of the politicians will have been advised by consultants or lobbyists who know what they're advocating for. What's their game?

I have to wonder

A. If end users will mod their distros to send a "signal" (TBD?) to websites.

B. If end users will just grab a pirate OS with apps compiled to not care about age.

Hopefully the latest TAILS I downloaded is free of Big (over 18) Brother. And (A)

Or just compile, Gentoo and LFS style.

C. If pirates just take care of all this for friends and neighbors.

D. When, not if, this unconstitutional coercion is challenged in court and cancelled via petition. Remember Proposition 8?

I don't really see a problem where there is a standard api (or even syscall!) to rethrieve a persons age bracket and for various apps being able to easily implement it. But please make it fucking optional.

Make it optional and assume an adult otherwise, it's a good idea if it's optional and doesn't have dumb fines, you could have fines for not enforcing it / not using the api [porn sites] that already exists [and it doesn't work since 1 button is not age verification].

I see this as a good way for parents and institutions to set up their phones, school laptops etc and would pretty much solve the large majority of these issues while having a fraction of the invasiveness.

I was gifted my first computer, running Windows 95, at 11 years of age. By age 13 I was probably within the five people who better understood how to do stuff on a computer in my town. By age 16 I was making Pokemon hackroms, flash animations for newgrounds and translating manga for pirate sites in photoshop. By then I knew my entire life would be tied to computers somehow.

Now some 50-60yo politician who has never even created a folder in their desktop without help wants to dictate how I should have used my device?

Fuck'em

So this has recently also affected Ubuntu.

One developer began a discussion:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2026-March/04...

Their attempts of a "solution" are quite interesting. One other user suggested that GUI tools ask for the age of the user.

Well ... I have a very strong opinion here. I have been using Linux since over 20 years and I will not ever give any information about my personal data to the computer devices I own and control. So any GUI asking for this specifically would betray me - and I will remove it. (Granted, it is easier to patch out the offending betrayal code and recompile the thing; I do this with KDE where Nate added the pester-donation daemon. Don't complain about this on reddit #kde, he will ban you. KDE needs more money! That's the new KDE. I prefer oldschool KDE but I digress so back to the topic of age "verification").

The whole discussion about age "verification" appears to be to force everyone into giving data to the government. I don't buy for a moment that this is about "protecting children". And, even IF it were, I could not care any less about the government's strategy. Even more so as I am not in the country that decided this in the first place, so why would I be forced to comply with it when it ends up with GUI tools wanting to sniff my information and then give it to others? For similar reasons, one reason I use ublock origin is to give as few information to outside entities when I browse the web (I am not 100% consistent here, because I mostly use ublock origin to re-define the user interface, which includes blocking annoying popups and what not; that is the primary use case, but to lessen the information my browser gives to anyone else, is also a good thing. I fail to see why I would want to surrender my private data, unless there is really no alternative, e. g. online financial transactions.)

I also don't think we should call this age "verification" law. This is very clearly written by a lobbiyst or several lobbyists who want to sniff more data off of people. The very underlying idea here is wrong - I would not accept Linux to become a spy-tool for the government. I am not interested in how a government tries to reason about this betrayal - none of those attempts of "explanation" apply in my case. It is simply not the job of the government to sniff after all people at all times. This would normally require a warrant/reasonable suspicion of a crime. Why would people surrender their rights here? Why is a government sniffing after people suddenly? These are important questions. That law suddenly emerging but not in the last +25 years is super-suspicious.

I have been saying this all along. You can't prevent kids from getting around restrictions. All you can do is try to help them understand what they find on the other side and what some options are. Age-gating is just a way to push forward a surveillance agenda. The fact thats happening everywhere all at once proves my point.

Let's be clear: this is a first step. The obvious next step is to require proof of age.

This ties in nicely with the international movement to require ID to use social media.

Why is this an international movement? Suddenly, simultaneously, all over the Western world? It's enough to make on believe in conspiracies...

Good words, glad to see more companies taking a principled stance on these important matters. That leading quote is great for sharing with non-technical friends. We have 365d 23h of non-voting time to take direct action to make our world better.

this is how and adult sounds like in a room full of children.

This is the one thing that truly scares me. I've decided I'm not going to verify my age anywhere or use facial recognition apps to login anywhere. And this is a much bigger fear for my job than AI.

At the moment only some countries banning porn, social media and gambling. But how soon will I have to do it for a work app? And will I lose my job then if I refuse?

California and Colorado do not get to govern out of state residence, thats interstate commerce and its federal domain, period.

The time is coming where we will unseat legislative traitors who use EU/Old World manipulations in the USA.

An unjust law is no law at all. That is the exception the rule of law requires to remain moral.

I mean, genuine question, is Linux Mint or MX Linux endangered by this?

Unless I'm missing something, I have zero concern for companies who sell out by complying.

The code was "free as in freedom" when you decided to build your company on it; and while you're not legally obligated to defend that freedom, and I, and hopefully other consumers, find that you are morally obligated to.

I love Pop!_OS (and Cosmic) but if they start with this bullshit I need to switch to other Linux distributions. Worst case, will build my own...

I don't think the argument that children might bypass parental controls therefore devices should not have parental controls.

>Limiting a child’s ability to explore what they can do with a computer limits their future.

Parents don't want to limit their children from writing software. Saying that limiting minors from accessing porn will limit their future is another argument I doing think many will agree with.

Aaaaand to throw it all away at the end with "well when the rubber meets the road we'll comply anyway, thanks for inhaling my hot air." Take a damn stand and dare them to sue the hacker known as Linux or whatever.

The prostitutes pushing for this do not deserve words. They deserve ridicule, public humiliation, and worse. The computer is a tool. Whoever would encumber it is an obvious shill for the corporations (google/apple/microsoft) who would like to attach an identity (i.e. tolls and controls) to actions prior generations could do freely and without surcharge. It is a modern-day enclosure movement. Its proponents should be juicily spat upon.

The age verification laws are awesome!

I mean... How else would you educate children about computers and evading stupid restrictions?

[dead]

tl;dr they don't like them and don't want them in place but will comply