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.

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.

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?

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?

This is 100% true

It has already passed the Colorado senate.

This. IL and MA follow whatever CA does with a few year lag. Considerations of sanity never enter into the discussion.

All the distros are the providers here. The Linux kernel is not an operating system.

Wouldn't that include using it on any cloud service that let's you pick it?

> since its not tied to a particular computer.

That's a really weird and nonsensical reading of "operating system software on a computer".

> For the record, I don’t care enough about age verification. Whether the law passes or not, I don’t really care.

Sounds like there actually would be some benefit commenting about it on HN.