Colorado Lawmakers Push for Age Verification at the Operating System Level
www.pcmag.com
Rather than having people verify their age on every app they use, Colorado's SB26-051 would implement a way for devices to share an 'age-bracket' signal to third-party apps.

Senator Matt Ball and Representative Amy Paschal presented this bill, Age Attestation on Computing Devices (SB26-051), to the Colorado Senate, where it was assigned to the Business, Labor, and Technology Committee.

California has also made a similar push for such a bill. We really need technology experts talking to these politicians to explain how dangerous bills like these are and actually focus on the real issues of the cost of living, affordable, and healthcare. This is why people think Democrats are controlled opposition.

    • MynameisAllen@lemmy.zip
      12·
      23 hours ago

      How would you enforce this? Maybe I’m being thick I just truly don’t understand how you’d crack down on someone not using the age verification?

      • Rijunox@lemmy.worldOP
        10·
        21 hours ago

        I’ve seen it mentioned somewhere else, but while they don’t mention it in the arricle. There’s a chance we are possibly looking at age restriction at the isp level. This could be a way, but there will be work arounds for those tech savy enough to get around them I could forsee.

        We could start our own underground p2p or LAN connection completely detached from regular isp but the logistics to that would be extremely difficult to pull off on a massive scale and more than likely would be more locally based amongst friends and neighbors. Vpns could get blocked at the isp as well, so that wouldn’t be an option either to bypass it. I welcome any corrections though if I’m mistaken. Hopefully it doesn’t get thay far, but a lot of these similar laws are occurring all over the world and not just in the USA.

        There’s usenet, freenet, hypnanet, and tor. However, the protocols could get blocked and or restricted, so not sure if there’s a way around that.

      • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        22 hours ago

        As I’ve seen someone ask - what is the age of root? Are you going to get prompted for your age when you run sudo?

        And are people seriously proposing every single time you create any user, including service level users, that there is some age restriction on that user? What about all the users that can exist inside containers? What about contexts like AWS where you have some user assume a role?

        And that’s not even getting into the hundreds (thousands?) of Linux distros and BSDs.

        As I’ve seen someone else observe - Linux is not even an OS; it’s a kernel. What’s to keep people from just releasing and compiling their own sets of tools for managing/creating users and login, etc. If there is something proposed about actually doing this for Linux the kernel, I’m sure patches would emerge nearly immediately.

        I saw some of Lunduke’s commenters saying this isn’t like the 00s or whatever where some clueless tech-illiterate (and older) politician is wanting something, this is more nefarious, etc. and of course these days, everything is different (sigh, no it fucking isn’t).

        Clearly, they must not know about or be forgetting things like the Clipper Chip and the battle over PGP or the V-chip in the 90s. There were people that were quite tech-savvy and in politics proposing things people didn’t really want or need way back then, too. This is not all that new. The control freaks with bad ideas who are not really all that tech illiterate were around 30 years ago, too. At least.