US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification • Hacker News Board

Re: US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

#201

Post by Neikius » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 1:53 PM UTC

m4ck_ wrote: post #195

I look forward to having to age verify the dbus and chrony and root accounts on every linux-based "smart" device in the future. That should be fun. Will my children be able to use my smart oven/thermostat after I verify I'm 18+ on those devices? I also wonder what verification will look like for containers and and VMs that might have a short life. Maybe that's how we keep IT jobs for a little while longer? Human age…

Obviously it does not make sense to age verify root stuff. Also as root you can set whatever age you want to your accounts.

Re: US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

#202

Post by snaking0776 » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 1:56 PM UTC

shevy-java wrote: post #153

snaking0776 wrote: post #116

Politicians will do any draconian measure to help kids except try and improve the lives of their parents so that they can actually dedicate time to parenting. Making it slightly harder to access the internet fixes nothing. What if instead of having the largest prison population in the world our government supported communities that make raising good children possible? Our society needs to lose this urge to diagnose e…

IF it were for the kids - but I don't think it is. > Making it slightly harder to access the internet fixes nothing. This assumes it is about the children. But if you do not think so then it opens up new alternatives suddenly, be it from tracking people, to targeted ads or any other information that could be gathered and eventually either monetized or put in tandem with other information. We'd get age graphs that way…

Agreed. I’m sure some house members will vote for it because they only had a random staffer read the bill and heard that it gives them a good talking point in the next election. I just wanted to point out what’s maybe obvious to everyone that this won’t help kids. I’m sure this is being pushed by Meta/whatever other ad dependent business wants to pass off liability of verifying age with the added benefit to everyone in power that it’s easier to track everyone as a result.

Re: US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

#203

Post by gnarlouse » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 1:56 PM UTC

Listen, I would actually be willing to support something like this, but Jesus Christ when will we put somebody in congress with a CS background who can literally just chime in and say "use Zero Knowledge Proofs for this, people might actually buy that you're not just building a surveillance state."

Re: US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

#204

Post by Neikius » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 1:57 PM UTC

pwg wrote: post #144

xt00 wrote: post #2

Do we know who is funding this? is this one of these things where Meta doesn't want the responsibility for this, so they are pushing to have the OS have the responsibility or something like that?

> is this one of these things where Meta doesn't want the responsibility for this Very likely, given the legal liability they are already facing from the "addictive" court cases that are turning against them. Moving the liability for "age verification" away means they will not also be facing a huge number of court cases accusing them of showing an underage person adult age content provided they followed the law's pro…

Does it matter as long as you can set whatever age you want?

Re: US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

#205

Post by Jamesbeam » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 1:59 PM UTC

minton wrote: post #194

Jamesbeam wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got a house with a 25-year roof, an indestructible Japanese shitbox car I can repair myself from scrap if I have to, and enough in the bank at three to five percent to pay my taxes, all of my hobbies, eating steak every day if I wanted and my share of the universal multi-payer health care system in my country. That puts me for the rest of my life at a level of fuck you. And if the system breaks down, I’m just going…

Digital currency can help control you. Imagine negative inflation based on your social score.

Social score is for communists and autocratic regimes, minton. I live in a democra…

Wait, 27% for the right-wing extremists in Germany? The strongest party if there were elections today? Some of them publicly state they are the friendly faces of facism?

Oh, oh. I’m in danger.

Re: US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

#206

Post by Neikius » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 2:00 PM UTC

Neikius wrote: post #198

Ajedi32 wrote: post #183

Based on the few snippets quoted in the article, I think as written this bill gets closer to a good, privacy-preserving, non-authoritarian version of "age verification" than any of the attempts so far. What it seems to be aiming for is essentially mandatory parental controls at the OS level. No ID checking or government/third party involvement, it just uses whatever age the parents enter when they set up the device/u…

Agreed. Weirdly many people are against. This really seems like the best possible option. Actually helps parents as without this there is no way to enforce kid age. So instead of having it all per account and everything linked in most privacy invading way, just your OS tells the apps/browser whatever was set in there by the parent. I want this now!

I guess we are expecting this to be backdoored with biometrics later? I don't see how anyone can force this on Linux.

I still prefer to have this in my OS above having every Random internet vendor collecting my biometrics and id documents.

Re: US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

#207

Post by m4ck_ » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 2:01 PM UTC

Neikius wrote: post #201

m4ck_ wrote: post #195

I look forward to having to age verify the dbus and chrony and root accounts on every linux-based "smart" device in the future. That should be fun. Will my children be able to use my smart oven/thermostat after I verify I'm 18+ on those devices? I also wonder what verification will look like for containers and and VMs that might have a short life. Maybe that's how we keep IT jobs for a little while longer? Human age…

Obviously it does not make sense to age verify root stuff. Also as root you can set whatever age you want to your accounts.

I agree, but the law is pretty vague. Root is a user on an operating system on a general purpose computer after all.

Re: US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

#208

Post by scrollop » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 2:04 PM UTC

laughing_man wrote: post #133

I'm glad I got to see the era where the internet was useful and exciting. I feel like every major change since about 2010 has pushed it more toward blandness and made it less useful. This will be a big one. They're building the groundwork for a world-wide dystopia.

Perhaps we could leave the crappy public internet and build better things behind Tor/darkweb.

Re: US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

#209

Post by Ajedi32 » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 2:05 PM UTC

cvoss wrote: post #200

ronsor wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Trying to tell Bob Hacker writing an OS in his basement what features his code has to include feels a little too authoritarian for my tastes. This is the one thing that risks getting the law struck down by a court.

Exactly. People often forget that Congress can only exercise a limited domain of enumerated powers. The big one is regulating Interstate Commerce, which is already huge because of how interconnected the country is today, and is even bigger because of creative stretching of its reach (did you know that the Civil Right's Act's ban on discrimination by businesses is within Congress's Interstate Commerce power, because s…

Given how broadly the commerce clause has been interpreted I don't think we can rely on that to save us here. Criminalizing Bob publishing his OS on GitHub is still too authoritarian for my liking.

Just off the top of my head, something like "physical hardware with web access sold in the US without an ID check at the checkout counter must include this feature in its preinstalled OS" would be a better way to write the law in my opinion. Plenty of ways around it if you're a hobbyist or for some reason really don't want to comply, but a big enough hassle that all the major commercial OS providers would probably find it easiest to just include the feature. (Especially since this is a feature most parents would probably appreciate anyway.)

Re: US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

#210

Post by MSFT_Edging » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 2:09 PM UTC

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #126

mapt wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft just force-updated my operating system (despite declining every option and prompt) and the first thing I noticed working differently was it offering, in an OS popup, to "connect" the computer to "Facebook". These people have root access to all our webcams. I don't think we can tolerate these entities to continue to exist.

What can we do about it? The major tech firms have nearly all the power here, including quite obviously full capture of government (not just here but other countries as well).

Internet wide coordinated DDOS?

Basically a mass-protest via network packets. Could we argue sending packets to a server is essentially a form of protest protected by speech similar to a public gathering?