Comment by MisterTea

2 days ago

So where does this leave open source operating systems?

I also want to know how they think this assinine system will guarantee no one can lie to the computer about how old they are.

12 comments

MisterTea

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pocksuppet  1 day ago

Debian, Fedora et al. will just comply. It's really no problem to do so - it just requires an age input on the user creation page, and for that to be saved somewhere. Porn apps mustn't work if the user is under 18, but I don't think they distribute porn apps.

If you build your own operating system out of open-source parts, then of course you don't need to comply with consumer product law, since you're not making a consumer product.

If you import an operating system from outside of the US and sell it, responsibility for compliance is on you, like any other imported consumer product.

  • iamnothere  1 day ago

    Debian has not signaled compliance and current discussion on the mailing list seems to be against it.

    NixOS does not plan to comply.

    OpenBSD will not comply.

    Gentoo devs don’t seem to believe it applies to them since they technically just provide a blueprint for you to build a system from source.

    FreeBSD seems to be leaning against compliance.

    System76 PopOS seems to be willing to comply with California but no states that require attestation like the NY bill.

    Omarchy is aggressively noncompliant.

    There will be many options.

    • pocksuppet  1 day ago

      I wish the widespread fervent hatred against the "user is over 18" checkbox was applied to, like, Cloudflare captchas, or something that actually matters.

      3 replies →

matheusmoreira  1 day ago

They don't matter. They'll be outlawed soon enough. Their ultimate objective is to make it illegal for a computer to run unauthorized software. One day they will make it so it's illegal for a computer to boot into a non-government approved operating system.

dietr1ch  2 days ago

If there's any good intentions in the bill, I guess the end-state must be having a way to mark an account as a kid's account and have that user's access limited. This is what old parental controls look like on phones that can be handed off to kids.