H.R.8250 – To require operating system providers to verify the age of any user

This will be fun to implement in washing machines, and car ECUs; and for users that aren't humans, and...

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?

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?

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.

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?

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.

"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. Gottheimer’s new Parents Decide Act will:

- Require operating system developers like Apple and Google to verify users’ 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 content—including inappropriate AI chatbot interactions—by 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...

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.

What if the user is another machine? Sorry, my API won’t talk to another API unless it’s old enough to drink.

How do we still have no people in government with basic computer literacy?

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.

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

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?

Still no text? What, are they uploading it via dial-up?

I suspect this is really a surveillance bill, but we won't know until the text is revealed.

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.

Personally I don’t 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.

a bit off-topic but always great when you visit an official government website and are greeted with a Cloudflare captcha...

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.

Anyone have the text of the bill? It doesn't seem to be on congress.gov yet.

I see that Meta (if that’s still the case) is going for the gold here.

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?

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.

Another github repo to bypass another annoyance? They're so annoying.

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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.