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Comment by edot | original | California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law
[−]edot · 2026-08-30 Sun 06:04 UTC · link
Yeah, this is fantastic. Should be top of the page. I’m honestly shocked, I’ve fully internalized that everything is corrupt and beholden to big corporations. Somehow, a victory! Looks like the Linux Foundation and EFF pushed back, but they’re not exactly big. Good job, California lawmakers!
[−]zoobab · 2026-08-30 Sun 06:15 UTC · link
Not a victory, Android is still covered.
[−]qmarchi · 2026-08-30 Sun 06:18 UTC · link
Hard to argue that it's open source...
[−]catlikesshrimp · 2026-08-30 Sun 06:23 UTC · link
Graphene should qualify. That would be a good incentive for kids to learn to root a mobile device and run graphene on it.
[−]harvey9 · 2026-08-30 Sun 07:06 UTC · link
I used the web based installer and it was so easy that we would be complaining the kids are not really learning anything by doing it!
[−]gmueckl · 2026-08-30 Sun 08:20 UTC · link
AOSP itself shouldn't be.
[−]roenxi · 2026-08-30 Sun 07:27 UTC · link
> Good job, California lawmakers!

Is this serious or sarcasm? They passed a horrible law, now its an internally contradictory horrible law because apparently it isn't important enough to consistently enforce. So, you know. Why legislate it?

There isn't much of an angle here that reflects well on Californian lawmakers, they're still supporting this authoritarian trend of de-anonymisation and rolling back free communication on the internet. They're just going to come back for linux later once the idea of legally mandated PII on account registration is normalised. Although I do see this "In addition, lawmakers inserted a new provision prohibiting anyone from requesting an age signal from an OS provider or app store unless required by law" so we seem to be entering a wild space where they're going to try and micromanage this in a weird way.

[−]1718627440 · 2026-08-30 Sun 08:00 UTC · link
> now its an internally contradictory horrible law because apparently it isn't important enough to consistently enforce

Law is not an abstract code, but an incremental sometimes futile approach to shape society. They only want a way to hold big corporations accountable to exploiting children. They don't actually intend the effects on the consumer, so they tried to fix on easily changeable effect: "Don't worsen the privacy for people who want it." If you are using e.g. MS Windows, you have given up everything already. They do a lot of "telemetry" and for example everything you typed into MS Word is already licensed to Microsoft.

[−]roenxi · 2026-08-30 Sun 08:11 UTC · link
So what makes kid users on linux so special that they don't need nanny state protection? Are the Californian legislators just throwing them to the wolves? Or are the protections being put in place here not actually important?

Seriously, what is the message here supposed to be about the kids using linux? And why are they so different from kids using Windows or Mac? Are there other safety features we can exempt kid linux users from?

[−]1718627440 · 2026-08-30 Sun 12:38 UTC · link
There is no corporation that spies on the user at the OS level.

There is a sysadmin (likely the parent), whose responsibility is that already.

[−]johnnyanmac · 2026-08-30 Sun 08:55 UTC · link
> They only want a way to hold big corporations accountable to exploiting children.

Let me know when they pass actual laws tackling that, then. Even if this law was ironclad, this does not solve the simple factor of using a "verified" device.

You don't fix a problem of society from private corporations by restricting society. You need to actually attack the corporations itself. But governments are sheepish to go after "their own", or people who can bribe them into feeling like one of them.

It's not a great implementation either. But COPPA is an example in the right direction and made companies need to change their algorithms based on the user account's reported age. That's more of the direction to move in.