The debates over these proposed OS mandates remind me of the Clinton-era Clipper chip:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
May they meet a similar fate!
US national level OS-level age verification bill proposed
71–80 of 243 posts
Re: US national level OS-level age verification bill proposed
#72Text not available yet. > As of 04/14/2026 text has not been received for H.R.8250 - To require operating system providers to verify the age of any user of an operating system, and for other purposes. > The Government Publishing Office (GPO) makes the text of legislative measures available to the public and the Library of Congress. GPO makes the text available as soon as possible, but delays can occur when there are…
Random fun fact (?): I had a little project I let run all of last year which pulled down bills from Congress.gov's APIs and ran them through an LLM to summarize the bills and attempt to provide different political viewpoints, along with some image generation, ultimately resulting in something resembling X or Threads, but fully simulated - as though the House or Senate was "posting" bills they put forth and "people" from different political camps were responding with their thoughts.
I found that for 2025, on average, it took about 20 days for a bill to be posted before its text was made available via Congress' APIs. Sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes almost immediate... but 20 days on average last year.
I learned a lot about congressional processes and such through the project, like this[0] really cool flow chart about the legislative steps (recommend viewing the tiff and really zooming in on the details), with the action codes[1], which is data that can come from the APIs[2].
[0] https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ppmsca.33996/
[1] https://www.congress.gov/help/field-values/action-codes
edit: formatting
Re: US national level OS-level age verification bill proposed
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
That also reveals true (at least) two tier law enforcement. Banana republic level of corruption is fine as long as it's called lobbying and law enforcement looks the other way.
This is an endless complaint I've heard for many years but Americans always vote for lobbied parties. They are clearly happy with this compared to whatever other reasons they have to vote. Somehow there's always something more important that makes them think "I'll tolerate a bit of corruption because at least he's promising XYZ".
As an american voter I confess you're right.
- but also there aren't many good alternatives for us. Say you have 3 people running for senate to choose from. Canidate A and B have super PACs that spend $80 million each on ads. Canidate C doesn't. You could vote for canidate C, but he will likely lose - nobody sees anything about them, they can't employ many people to work their campaign, they don't get interviewed on tv. It feels better to vote for someone who has a chance to win. Also candiate A is a nutjob who thinks we should take over Tierra del Fuego as our 51st state and all young boys should have a year where their schooling is just learning how to throw knives really good like a Ninja, so you really want them to lose - you pretty much have to vote for Canidate B.
Re: US national level OS-level age verification bill proposed
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
That also reveals true (at least) two tier law enforcement. Banana republic level of corruption is fine as long as it's called lobbying and law enforcement looks the other way.
This is an endless complaint I've heard for many years but Americans always vote for lobbied parties. They are clearly happy with this compared to whatever other reasons they have to vote. Somehow there's always something more important that makes them think "I'll tolerate a bit of corruption because at least he's promising XYZ".
> Americans always vote for lobbied parties. They are clearly happy with this compared to whatever other reasons they have to vote.
That's kinda backwards. (Yes, I know you said "compared to".) Rather, citizen are seldom "happy" about their selection of choices, and many are so very not-happy that they don't even vote.
The main fault is in the math and mechanics of our voting system, rather than the personal-traits of the people. The spoiler effect [0] is unusually strong with plurality-voting, an archaic scheme that still dominates US politics.
It's main "feature" is how it was easy to implement 250 years ago when more people were illiterate, calculating and printing was harder, and nothing traveled faster overland than a galloping horse. Nowadays there are many alternatives [1] and most would be an unequivocal upgrade.
> "I'll tolerate a bit of corruption because at least he's promising XYZ".
Hey now, don't tar the whole electorate with a worldview that is concentrated into a much smaller bloc. There's a reason that the most blatantly corrupt President in history never got anywhere when he spent years trying to run as a Democrat.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect
[1] https://fairvote.org/resources/electoral-systems/comparing-v...
Re: US national level OS-level age verification bill proposed
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are likely at least dozens of different lobbies that can gain some advantage from pushing this.
Is the advantage corporate money lining their pockets? Or is there another one?
Dozens of different lobbies means there’s no clear cut list of advantages.
Unless you just want an exhaustive enumeration of every possible human desire.
Re: US national level OS-level age verification bill proposed
#76Interesting to not that the congressman who introduced this, Josh Gottheimer, worked for Microsoft before becoming a congressman. Even more complelling is that in the last few weeks he opened $1M of calls on Microsoft as well.
Re: US national level OS-level age verification bill proposed
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because of corruption, sorry lobbying. Big corporations want the data.
They already have the data and much more of it. This has nothing to do with “Big Corp” wanting to know how old their users are.
Meta is the largest sponsors of these bills... https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...
Re: US national level OS-level age verification bill proposed
#78Since voting is that power we say we have in the US. Does the public get to vote on this? If not... > Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster - Neil Postman
We can also call representatives and give our opinions to them
Re: US national level OS-level age verification bill proposed
#79I'm not sure who Josh Gottheimer of NJ is, but he seems to be one of those stealth "fake" Democrats. Too centrist to be a Republican, but also too centrist to be part of the DSA. He seems to also support H.R. 7540. I think the Democrats in his district need to seriously consider primarying him and replace him with someone that doesn't bend to foreign or corporate whims.
You can count on one hand the number of democrats in congress who could be part of the DSA.
But yes, Gottenheimer is a conservative democrat.
Re: US national level OS-level age verification bill proposed
#80We need to look into this sudden "spontaneous" coordination among lawmakers to implement age verification software. What is the common denominator? Whose lead are they following, and whose money are they taking?
> What is the common denominator?
Criticism of Israel and its agents will be outlawed by all means necessary and anybody who questions it will be black bagged. That is the end goal. This is total war.