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People are making way too big a deal of this IMO. This is basically the OS equivalent of that checkbox you click to enter a porn website that gets exposed to Meta, so they can claim that they did what they all the they could to protect children if they get sued by parents. Any determined kid would figure out a way around this, but I can see it stopping younger and less determined kids, and it's a useful tool for parents.

0xbadcafebee 2 hours ago [ - ]

It does not stop at the check box. Someone is going to sue Google/Apple when a 13 year old gets on a porn site. Then Google/Apple will introduce "verification" that requires linking your identity to your device, and attesting this to the "operator" (porn site). Then every person using any OS is tracked, on every website and app, all the time, by law. And Linux becomes illegal without it.

This is not a theory. Laws requiring this are going through the state and federal level right now.

davorak an hour ago [ - ]

Unlike the California law, I seemed to be in the minority in this opinion, this one does seem to require programs like grep to ask for a users age bracket.

> (b) An operator shall request a signal with respect to a particular user from an operating system provider or a covered application store when the application is downloaded and launched.

Unlike the California law I do not see anything that restricts this to child accounts only.

So let say I have a program:

    print("Hello, World!")

and I want to publish it to say npm or nixos, or some linux distribution. Not with out violating this law. This application needs to request the users age brackets at least at 'downloaded and launched' optimistically that means once on first launch, but potentially needs to be requested on each launch of the application. So lets fix the program

    import ageBracket
    ageBracket.get()
    print("Hello, World!")

There we go, now the code is compliant with my imagined ageBracket module.

zardo 3 hours ago [ - ]

Wouldn't a some kind of technical standard proposal be a more sensible way to do this than trying to pass OS laws state by state?

ezfe 3 hours ago [ - ]

iOS (for example) already has that technical standard in place and usable.

acuozzo 2 hours ago [ - ]

How would this work for e.g. RTOS or even TempleOS?!

Does the hidden Minix installation on every Intel CPU with the Intel Management Engine count?