So DB48X provides a covered application store?

(e) (1) “Covered application store” means a publicly available internet website, software application, online service, or platform that distributes and facilitates the download of applications from third-party developers to users of a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing that can access a covered application store or can download an application.

Also, where does anything in the CA bill mandate age verification? It's saying the OS needs to prompt for age bracket info and allow the third party apps to query that. That is far different from verification.

• iamnothere

  today at 6:37 PM

  > Also, where does anything in the CA bill mandate age verification? It's saying the OS needs to prompt for age bracket info and allow the third party apps to query that. That is far different from verification.

  Regardless of the technical details of the law(s), the devs are sensibly refusing to prompt for age on a fricking calculator.

  Hopefully Linux distros get on board with this and announce non-CA/CO compliance as policy.

  • drnick1

    today at 6:43 PM

    Ultimately, it does not matter. This legal notice is just theater, as anyone from CA or CO can still download, build and use the program. Linux distributions will just do the same.

    • parasense

      today at 7:56 PM

      Certainly. However, The developer seems to want to avoid the $2,500 per violation by any child who accesses the calculator, and might see a dick pic... because that calculator firmware does indeed allow for image viewing, and application development. It's more powerful than your PC back in the late 1990s.

    • goda90

      today at 7:16 PM

      You might say the bills themselves are theater. Respond to theater with theater.

  • tliltocatl

    today at 6:49 PM

    For Linux it will be way more problematic because:

    - A lot of of corporate contributions comes from SV.

    - Linux Foundation is incorporated in CA.

    - Linus himself is CA's resident AFAIR.

    So there is zero chance of claiming no jurisdiction. The only hope is whoever is enforcing this batshit wouldn't go after what is essentially not an OS for the purpose of the bill, but rather an internal component (it would be like going after a vendor of bolts and nuts for noncompliance of a toaster).

    • thayne

      today at 9:12 PM

      It's more likely to be an issue for distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc.

      Although, if I'm understanding this correctly, I think all they would have to do to comply is have something during installation that asks for the age category, and write a file that is world readable, but only writable by root that contains that category that applications can read.

      • iamnothere

        today at 10:20 PM

        And then another state will pass a law mandating scanning of all local images, and another state will want automated scanning of text, and a different country will want a backdoor for law enforcement. We have to stop this here and now.

      • Brian_K_White

        today at 10:10 PM

        That is already way too much as far as I'm concerned. It's not that it's difficult, it's that it's arbitrary and a form of commanded speech or action. Smallness and easiness isn't an excuse.

        If you write a story, there must be a character in it somewhere that reminds kids not to smoke. That's all. It's very easy.

    • helterskelter

      today at 7:47 PM

      I believe Linus lives in Oregon.

    • pkaye

      today at 9:26 PM

      I think Linus Torvalds lives in Oregon.

    • mghackerlady

      today at 7:13 PM

      [flagged]

      • tliltocatl

        today at 7:43 PM

        Stop spreading disinformation. Linus and others did most of the work in the kernel. GNU project on the kernel side was architecture astronaut vaporware aka "Hurd". They were much more successful in userland (coreutils, gcc and the toolchain, gdb, Emacs, to name a few).

        • mghackerlady

          today at 7:47 PM

          I meant the userland specifically. By calling what is fundamentally a GNU system running on a different kernel just "linux" it makes people think linux and his crew made all of the userland, in part because saying a college student made "an entire operating system" is far more profitable for news agencies than acknowledging his important but overall relatively small role in what they call "linux"

          • tliltocatl

            today at 8:01 PM

            Because the kernel is the irreplaceable piece. None of what GNU did is: there are numerous implementations of coreutils and shells and at least one non-GNU production-quality compiler toolchain (clang-llvm), a few alternative libcs. And many distribution do actively use the non-GNU parts. But none of this is useful without the kernel that is compatible with computers people have. And the only usable kernel we have is Linux (while BSDs are out there too, they take a much different tightly-integrated approach to userspace).

            • spijdar

              today at 8:14 PM

              To add to this: I can appreciate the significance of GNU, especially in early Linux distributions, but the position of "GNU was the real OS, Linux was just the kernel" is also deceptive, IMO.

              Sure, a lot of the userspace was GNU, but a lot of it ... wasn't. Things like PAM, the init system, and the network config tools, off the top of my head. A lot of system-specific tools come from "not-GNU", too.

              You can't discount how much of early Linux was "GNU", and how big a deal GCC and GNU libc (and the rest!) were, but it's disingenuous in my opinion to call GNU an "operating system" that you just plugged Linux, the kernel, into. Even today, as far as I can tell, there is still not a true GNU system. Guix comes close, in terms of being "GNU-ish", but the most usable Hurd distro (AFAIK!) is Debian, where, again, a lot of components come from Debian, rather than GNU.

              And, as you say, modern systems have drifted even further from being GNU. They have lots of GNU components, but so did, say, the Sprite OS, or a lot of 4.4BSD derivatives.

• burnte

  today at 9:34 PM

  It's also still bound only to companies in CA. I'm in GA, I don't have to comply, for example, if I were making operating systems. People REALLY need to push back when governments try to extend their reach beyond their borders, like EU regulations. The more we let them the more enshrined in law it will become. We have the right and duty to say no, that only applies in your jurisdiction.

> Colorado residents may no longer use DB48x after Jan 1st, 2028.

This law hasn't even passed

Ignoring the calculator side of things (fair enough if they don't wanna implement it) is this just requiring an age value for the user of the operating system?

Because if so, that seems a lot more sensible than the online crap where you need to give ID or something. I remember someone suggesting requiring an `X-User-Age` header, and having adults responsible for having their children's account setup with their age, which this proposal seems to be more in line with.

From some of the other responses people seem against this proposal, am I missing something? (I only briefly skimmed the links) Is there some kind of attestation/ID required when the age is input?

• iamnothere

  today at 10:15 PM

  It’s the camels nose into the tent of regulating how an OS should behave. This is anathema for FOSS operating systems. It will cause complete madness if different jurisdictions start regulating operating systems in their own way and could honestly kill FOSS OSes.

  • cyanydeez

    today at 10:28 PM

    is it though? If you setup a PC for a 12 year old and prompts you something like [12~16] and thats reported to whatever, what exactly is the fear? You can scream slippery slope but these laws are just going to boil down to technical capability because enforcement isn't realistic.

    There's real harms by large businesses such as Meta. Should we pretend those arms don't exist?

I think the winning move is just to ignore the legislation, and drag the government into an EFF or ACLU-funded First Amendment lawsuit if they try to enforce anything.

• dmitrygr

  today at 8:05 PM

  the winning move is to publicly post every bit of data that anyone has or ever had about the politicians who wrote this law, VERY publicly, and see how fast they change their mind on privacy. I suggest starting with SMSs and photos in "private" folders.

I don't see a definition for "operating system" in this legislation (California).

"Operating system provider" is defined, but that's kinda useless unless "operating system" is defined first.

• netsharc

  today at 7:08 PM

  It seems there's also a definition error:

  > 1798.500. For the purposes of this title:

  > (i) “User” means a child that is the primary user of the device.

  Child is defined:

  > (d) “Child” means a natural person who is under 18 years of age.

  But that means this is impossible:

  > (b) (4) Whether the user is at least 18 years of age.

Does it run applications? The point of the law is to collect (and device setup) the age of the (I guess primary?) user, and communicate that (as a range?) to any applications it runs.

So, if you don't run applications, does this matter? Also, enforcement is by the CA attorney general, so random people can't go after you.

• wrs

  today at 6:20 PM

  Well, it’s a programmable calculator, so…how does the law define “applications”?

  • meatmanek

    today at 7:17 PM

    (c) “Application” means a software application that may be run or directed by a user on a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device that can access a covered application store or download an application.

    • riskable

      today at 8:37 PM

      The calculator firmware is a "software application" that's run by a user on a mobile device but it can't access an application store or download applications. For that you need a PC.

      So github.com is the violator, here, since it's a software application that may be run by a user on a computer and can download applications (loads of them!).

      • onionisafruit

        today at 9:59 PM

        I've read through the CA law a couple of times and can't figure out what an application store is supposed to do. What part of the law would github violate?

• kmeisthax

  today at 8:40 PM

  The California bill basically says any OS with an app store needs to collect an age signal and provide age bucketing to an app store (presumably even third-party ones, but notably NOT extension stores) so it can forward that information onto developers in that store.

  There's no further elaboration on what age signals are preferred, so my assumption is that a DoB field in the user profile and a system service to request the age bucket is good enough. It's absolutely silly, but DB48X could implement that.

  There's a related question of who is actually liable under this law - it seems written to target just Apple, Google, and Microsoft; and it only makes sense in the context of consumer electronics. Like, how does this work with enterprise systems? Servers? Is IBM going to have to rush out a patch for z/VM to ask the system administrator what their date of birth is?

*Formerly open source

Seems to violate the open source definition paragraph 5, no?

Performative indeed!

IANAL, but the whole thing feels quite problematic. Should we interpret the prohibition as a licensing condition "a resident using our IP is violating the contract" or as an informative note "we are not compliant and we are not ever going to be compliant so a resident using the IP is violating local laws"? I'd expect the intent to be the latter, but would it hold in front of a judge? If the notice is a licensing condition, the whole thing is problematic as hell:

- Does such prohibition has any legal force at all? Does it do anything to prevent responsibility according to the bill? Wouldn't just saying "CA/CO have zero jurisdiction over us, get screwed" be a saner choice (of course it would be better if the project wouldn't host on M$'s servers).

- The main project license is GPLv3. GPLv3 clearly has no provisions to introduce arbitrary prohibitions into the license without losing compatibility. But they still keep GPLv3 LICENSE.txt, which is problematic in itself - if LICENSE.txt says one thing and LEGAL-NOTICE.txt another, the conclusion might be that no license applies so no one may use the software at all!

- If they are reusing any GPL software that they don't hold copyright on, they might be or might not be in violation (would need a real lawyer to say if that's the case or not).

And on the actual matter of things, it's really sad to see California to be on the front line of this crap (this screams ageism). And, dear "adults", screw your parental authority so much. Whatever skills I've gained before the university I've done against an explicit parental prohibition. This is what I live off now. Screw you all.

• cosmic_cheese

  today at 7:37 PM

  > And on the actual matter of things, it's really sad to see California to be on the front line of this crap (this screams ageism). And, dear "adults", screw your parental authority so much. Whatever skills I've gained before the university I've done against an explicit parental prohibition. This is what I live off now. Screw you all.

  It's yet another surface that totalitarian parental control has crept into, and it's a serious problem. Young people kept strictly within the iron grip of their guardians generally aren't the ones who become happy actualized all-star adults.

  Obviously there should be some limits on what teenagers and children can access, it shouldn't be entirely free reign, but robbing them of space to bend the rules severely limits their potential for growth and incurs a strong risk of extinguishing their spark.

  • mcmcmc

    today at 7:43 PM

    > Obviously there should be some limits on what teenagers and children can access

    Is it? The only people who should be deciding those limits are parents. If they fail to set and enforce those limits then any negative outcomes for the child are due to their own negligence, and can be adjudicated as child abuse per those laws.

    • cosmic_cheese

      today at 7:59 PM

      I agree fully. Limits should be on the shoulders of parents, not the government or any other institution.

From the other post about this law.

> That's likely no big deal for Windows, which already requires you to enter your date of birth during the Microsoft Account setup procedure

This seems like an over reaction because of a simple date field

• conartist6

  today at 9:30 PM

  Why would I need a Microsoft account to use Windows.

[dead]

Clickbait title, the legal notice explicitly states that an open source project cannot and will not implement age verification.

• hlieberman

  today at 6:31 PM

  There is no carve out in the law for open source. I don’t think it matters for this calculator’s firmware, because there’s no covered App Store, but it certainly would for most Linux distributions.

  • drnick1

    today at 6:38 PM

    The law is irrelevant when it comes to open source. There is no one to turn to and bully for compliance. A government could presumably request that GitHub delete the repo, but the software will then simply move somewhere else, in a jurisdiction where these laws don't apply, or be distributed peer-to-peer. These attempts at curbing the freedom to write and distribute software are pathetic and will fail.

    • mhurron

      today at 6:46 PM

      > simply move somewhere else, in a jurisdiction where these laws don't apply, or be distributed peer-to-peer

      Each of these options lead software to become less and less discoverable leading to the fact that most people will never use anything that isn't complying with these laws. So the end result still hits the desired effect.

    • tliltocatl

      today at 7:53 PM

      > There is no one to turn to and bully for compliance > These attempts at curbing the freedom to write and distribute software are pathetic and will fail.

      You sweet summer child.