> The term “operating system” means software that supports the basic functions of a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.

> The term “operating system provider” means a person that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system on a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.

So excited to see the GNU vs. Linux debate finally land in court.

This is horribly vague.

>a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.

It leaves open to interpretation if it applies to all computers, or just general purpose ones.

Does a car count as a mobile device?

Car is clearly a mobile device; it has a touchscreen and an IMEI.

Going to be fun when my washing machine asks me to upload a scan of my passport to the CIA before it will open the door.

Thank you for the laugh in these dreadful times. :D

Linux is Obsolete!

Long live Linux!

I think you mean "GNU/Linux", noob

Do we know who is funding this? is this one of these things where Meta doesn't want the responsibility for this, so they are pushing to have the OS have the responsibility or something like that?

It is literally just Meta. https://www.gadgetreview.com/reddit-user-uncovers-who-is-beh... https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b... https://tboteproject.com/

The investigation you linked to is entirely hallucinated by LLMs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47659552 (tboteproject and the "Reddit researcher" are the same person).

They also added this page since I posted that comment: https://web.archive.org/web/20260411112604/https://tboteproj... where they claim their website is "under surveillance" because it got a few thousand requests from Google Cloud et al, most of them to a single page. This really shows how low their standards are.

I share your wariness of the LLM garbage, but I believe the conclusions are correct. This has Facebook's stink all over it. I worked there and know of what I speak.

So we should believe the hallucinations because they sound like something that could be true? Does the LLM in the middle somehow makes it more trustworthy than if GP had just shared their own pattern-matching conjecture?

Meta. Specifically to undercut Apple.

How does this undercut apple? This entrenches apple's position as a provider of "verified" devices.

Nope. Apple have been enthusiastic in their implementation of it even without it being required in several countries.

It must be OS responsibility because that’s the only place that allows the next step.

Everyone is so concerned with kids pretending to be adults, what about adults pretending to be kids? Any service that has any kind of private chat or picture sharing option will be a playground for “verified” kids.

Next step, “we must go further with the verifications until everyone is verified everywhere”. This is where the OS part comes in. Wish it was sarcasm.

Facebook. There's a wave of child endangerment lawsuits incoming and they want to head that off at the pass by having governments shift all that liability over to the OS vendors.

How does that help Facebook? They already have plenty of signals to guess their users' age, what would they do with an other one? They are not going to ban children anyway.

It helps them by making it somebody else's responsibility to get it right and thus shields them from liability.

The OS should start labeling everybody as a child by default. Forbid Facebook to show ads and any harming content by default. The OS has little less to lose with this approach than FB.

So it lets them know for sure who is a child. What liability does that shield them from, and how?

FB etc. may argue "device says this user is an adult", even though device may say that only because the parents don't set up separate user accounts e.g. shared family iPad, or because the kids being more tech savvy in the first place like we all were when I myself was a kid.

Yes, time for pitchforks and guillotines is long overdue. Alas, wrong crowd.

"god forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion" - Thomas Jefferson

People lend phones or computers to kids. The age associated with the user account means absolutely nothing.

Very plausible that they would outlaw this if these bills pass and consolidate. Would be seen as a loophole.

And there obviously gonna be market for "verified" devices. Not like there is anything at all that could stop people of any ages looking at porn.

Identify devices, not people.

Distinguishing between child-locked and unlocked devices is something any website should be able to do easily. Adult-only should be a config setting.

Vendors shouldn't sell unlocked devices to kids.

Then it's up to parents take sure their kids only have locked devices. (Or not, if they're okay with it.)

What for? I use family link for my kids devices. It works good enough. Everything else seems way too intrusive.

Apple is horrible in this regard. Their solutions never really work.

A joint venture for an (optional) cross-platform family app would be more than enough. This, plus a (voluntary) content rating that's offered via an API (could even be simple meta data on a webpage). Done.

Sounds like a problem. Luckily it turns out my phone has two cameras and a laser dot projector pointed at my face right now. Not hard to imagine a future solution to this issue were we to pass this legislation, sadly…

An utterly insane idea for a law.

Age verification inherently means identity verification. There's no way to prove your age without first proving that you are YOU, either by showing your face or authenticating with some third party authority, usually government or a corporation.

The idea that you should be locked out of using your own computer until you do this is utterly insane. What problem does it solve that existing parental control tools don't? A generation of parents already trust their babies with iPads for this reason. And what of the millions of Americans who don't have current ID?

This is yet another underhanded attempt at making digital id mandatory. Child protection is just the trojan horse.

EU also released their age verification legislation. Notice how closely they are timed.

https://www.dw.com/en/eu-chief-urges-bloc-wide-push-on-age-v...

Pure coincidence?

It is all going according to plan.

So this bill creates a commission to ensure that the information cannot be stolen or breached from operating systems, but says nothing about how the applications querying this information must protect or leverage it. I basically requires that any application get to know a user's birthday, as long as it's "necessary". What a fucking joke! I'm so sick and tired of this bullshit.

Direct link to the bill: https://docs.reclaimthenet.org/parents-decide-act-os-age-ver...

Edit: Oh, and the commission gets to make up the rules on how ages should be verified. So, prepare for a whole other level of PII leakage that isn't even captured by the text of the bill.

Tim Apple argued it was a violation of their engineers and managers free speech to make them engineer back doors

Wonder if they will stand up against this on the same grounds

https://www.apple.com/customer-letter/

Short answer: No. Apple already caved in advance.

Longer answer: In the UK, Apple already implements age "verification" at the OS level, starting with IOS/IPadOS 26.4. If Apple had not implemented this, it would still be in compliance with UK law. Apple is anticipatorily obedient.

A company like Apple has visibility of the legislative pipeline in its markets. Looks like the UK was a test bed.

Lots of OECD countries, all at the same time, are pushing for online age verification or OS-level age verification, both equally intrusive and implemented in privacy-violating ways by conflating identity verification and age verification.

The end result is not protecttion of minors, but abolishing anonymity on the Internet. Social media companies claim to want the former, but in reality just want to shift liability to OS and device vendors. Governments happily accept the "side effect" of being able to find and root out dissidents.

> abolishing anonymity on the Internet.

This is what Facebook wants.

> abolishing anonymity on the Internet.

Firstly, you keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means.

On the Internet, especially forums such as HN, you are "pseudonymous". That is, you made up a name for yourself, and that's how you're known to others. At the very least, we are all identified by IP addresses, which are again, fairly stable and unique pseudonyms. There are nearly zero truly anonymous corners of the Internet, because anonymous communications are chaotic and anarchic.

Secondly, it was the NSF who mandated that everyone accessing the Internet must have an associated and authenticated account with an identity that is known to their provider. These rules went into effect in the early 1990s. Perhaps they have been discarded or observed only in the breach, but truly, nobody is a stranger on the Internet. Even if nobody knows you're not a dog, your ISP or your coffeehouse still know who you are, when you connected, what device and so forth.

So, please let us stop pretending there is "anonymity" here, or that there ever has been. Whatever you've done in the past, it will eventually be unmasked. Yes, people on Discord and Wikipedia alike are freaking out over this prospect, but it was always going to happen. We've been laying down a very permanent record for over 50 years. Eventually it will all be correlated with real identities, Facebook or not.

i think Apple turned on age verification in Singapore, South Korea and the UK:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/125666

what a dystopian world we live in.

I am continuously amazed by HN's ability to engage in apple pedestalism and ignoring everything else that goes against it.

They've already been pushing age verification out in several countries.

What pedestal did I put Apple on by highlighting past behavior? Oh right I didn't. You're just inferring incorrectly. Another HN specialty.

Other countries are not the US, btw. There are groups here ready to challenge such a move.

Continually amazed at HN ignorance of geography.

So, who's gearing up to sue the FTC for a declaratory judgment that this is unconstitutional?

Is that an option? Tell me more.

Yes, I am looking to sue to stop this insanity. If you're a lawyer reading this, please reach out.

Discussion on the bill source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47772203

That means porn sites won't require me to independently verify my age right? Right?

We still have to provide a way for people that don’t have (smart) phones, but I would absolutely implement asking the phone instead of a 3rd party when available.

We don’t gain anything from asking a 3rd party. In fact it costs money per request.

All this fake good intent to prevent another TikTok which was the only media which transmited the reality on the ground during the Gaza genocide. And its aftermath in the youth mind and in the University campuses. Fascists and industrialists have to take control, again, of the minds. (See oligarchy's appetite for social and media companies)

Glad to see that Elise Stefanik came out of fucking hiding in NY-21 to dump this stupid "parents decide" bill on us when she couldn't even be assed to help her constituents over the past several months when one of the main hospitals in her district is bankrupt and closing.

Last time we saw her anywhere near here was her "farewell tour" when she was supposed to go be Trump's UN stooge. Haven't seen her up here since.

Glad to know we get to die up here for on-device age verification for everyone else.

Writing like this is frankly so exhausting. I don’t think anyone not already in the choir could make it through.

Some people really need shit spelled out to them. This does a great job of doing that in a small package.

I have a kid. All I want is the ability to put a "there's a baby driving" bumper sticker on their devices. And to have pornhub et al steer around them.

I'd suggest that this is actually a pretty common desire from parents. We don't want to collect your IDs. We don't want to install spyware in your webcams. We do want a way to signal there's a kid driving a device.

This article is long on hyperbole and short on facts. I gave up about six paragraphs in, being far more informed about what the author feared about this legislation than its actual content.

Sure, if it would mandate ID harvesting, I'm against it. If it requires biometric verification, no. But if we can just have a way to put bright orange vests on devices that require special treatment... That doesn't feel invasive to me.

I'd prefer to cut all the "think of the children!" charlatans off at the pass. Your kid got traumatized by some crazy hyper porn? Why the heck didn't you flag their device?

The problem is with government mandates.

Apple and Google already ship OSes with comprehensive APIs and parental controls. There's not even any porn on the iOS App Store by policy.

Creating liability for random OS and app developers is absurd, and foreign porn websites aren't going to comply with this anyway.

This.

If your child needs a helmet to use the internet, as the politicians announcing HR8250 seem to think[1], Apple or whomever is free to offer that as a feature. There is no need for this to be legislated, especially when the legislation does not work in open source environments.

[1] Not hyperbole. They said that. It was an analogy, but one that highlights how ignorant of the technology the authors of these bills are.

Reddit and X are on the stores. I guess browsers are on the stores, at least on Android where they aren't necessarily Safari reskins.

I have a kid. Actually two kids. They have their usage controlled by google family. I review weekly their internet usage, screen time is limited to 2 hours/day. They dont have social media. School research and etc, they do at home, in the "main computer" in our dinning room. Youtube too. In the end is our responsibility to educate and protect our kids. I truly dont see a need for such extra controls if the parents aren't interested in enforcing it.

I can understand the "baby mode" desire, but as the other reply pointed out, this does not need to be legislated. The big OS companies can easily offer this feature for those that want it.

I'm curious though about all this porn that apparently hides behind a rock on the device and leaps out to corrupt tiny minds when they least suspect it.

Shock websites aside, pornography generally doesn't ambush you. Unless you're a republican giving a presentation and have no idea how that porn got in there.

And, AB1043 specifically exempts websites, so it doesn't protect anyone from the goatse's of the world anyway.

These bills will not do what they purport to do, but they will do a whole lot of bad stuff.

> "there's a baby driving"

Why does your baby need internet?

> We do want a way to signal there's a kid driving a device.

Which is extremely irresponsible. It creates a false sense of security and abandons your child to the whims of strangers. This seems akin to putting a "please don't hurt me" sticker on your child and then letting them roam around downtown unsupervised.

> But if we can just have a way to put bright orange vests on devices that require special treatment

There is software you can already use which will lock the device down and only allow it to go to pre-approved sites. I'm unwilling to give up any of my civil rights for your level of convenience above this.

You wouldn’t drop a toddler in the cbd and expect them to be fine, why would you expect a device to be any different?

You need to be a parent and stop expecting the people around you to do it for you.

Edit: and there are already device level parental controls.

This needs to be simply fought because it's a measure that is supposed to fight the reluctance of the society, not actual problem. For the actual problem it's ineffective. This will be met by surprise once it's fully implemented and new, worse measures will be proposed. Hence, it needs to be cut off as early as possible to spare everyone the trouble.

Like the authors of these bills, you appear not to understand the technology.

Consider AB1043. It mandates that applications check the age of the user each time the application is launched.

Think about what that means when you run `make` in a source directory. How many times is the compiler application launched?

No, derangement is declaring "The writing has been on the wall for some time now: the era of completely unrestricted internet is coming to an end." without fighting it at all and just mindlessly accepting it because you were told it was going to happen.

It should be really easy to get your bank account information then. You're just going to give it to me, right? What is this? You're fighting me tooth and nail instead of celebrating giving me your banking info?

Well, perhaps your mental model of the actual objections to it are incomplete. There are a few problems and I'm curious what you have to say about them. First, "The benefit of this is that it can short-circuit support for more onerous age verification". Do you think that it "can" or that it "will"? Big difference. It could also go the other way, right? Opening the door to a more onerous version? Why do you think that isn't worth considering? Secondly, "This is probably the least bad out of all possible ways to implement age checking". What about parental controls that exist already? Someone seriously tried to tell me last time that parental controls "suck", but that's irrelevant, they don't have to suck, and in fact anything can suck. That's just happenstance. So, assuming parental controls were correctly implemented, why do you think this is "least bad" including parental controls? Thirdly, this "age verification" doesn't actually verify anything, because underage people can just choose "adult" anyway. What do you have to say to that? In that case, parental controls actually give you more power, and make this new age check completely obsolete. Thoughts? Lastly, maybe you're not from the USA, but we have a concept of "free speech" which includes the idea that people cannot be "compelled" to certain speech. If people were required to add a "sign here to confirm you're an adult" in every romance novel, that would be fine right? It's also a nothingburger, right? But then, you've compelled people to put something in every published book. Actually, that's a bad analogy. We should say that ALL BOOKS require this signature field on the first page. After all, we don't know what kinds of expletives and horrible things people might have written in the margins of the book (assuming it's being sold second-hand). That would be okay with you, right? Nothingburger? But it compels people to write something, and that's a door most legal scholars know not to open.

> The writing has been on the wall for some time now: the era of completely unrestricted internet is coming to an end.

And books..? And the newspaper? What if a child reads about a horrible murder in the newspaper that keeps them up at night? What if the government outlaws books and newspapers because they can contain bad things? We'd better add a "adult/ not adult" checkbox to the first page to "short-circuit support for more onerous age verification".

This was a great comment, you challenged them but in a reasonable way and with really good questions

I wish public discourse were more this way - if someone is arguing in good faith, actually answering what you asked moves the conversation forward, it’s just on the person to give you a serious answer