Its going to be funny when there are married 17 year olds driving cars with guns and children but who can't install linux or access facebook without calling their dad.
I don't think that's what this bill is about. I think they want to be able to attach a government issued ID to logins for various services. They tried claiming it was to fight terrorism, but that didn't really work so now they're saying "it's for the children!"
Someone came up with a good theory a while ago that I'm inclined to believe: The social media companies (esp. Meta as I understand it) were looking at huge fines for showing adult content to under-18s, so they lobbied hard to ensure that the burden of proof for age verification was on anyone else but themselves, hence why the OS vendors are being targeted now.
Ultimately, they seem to have realised that they can't stop adult content from being shared, so the easiest way to get there was to mark anything even vaguely possible of being adult, and require age verification -- which comes with a lot of political cover vs. just deleting it.
Of course, if you stoke up the right people, you end up with lots of support from the puritanical brigades, and label all naysayers as putting children in harm's way.
They could stop adult content from being shown to minors; it would just take effort on their part to do so, so why not shift the effort on to everyone else?
>> They could stop adult content from being shown to minors; it would just take effort on their part to do so
If you voluntarily sensor content, you might be in danger of being held responsible for various things since you control what people see. Phone companies in the US are "common carriers" which means they just connect people, but are not responsible for what people do over the phone (plotting crime or whatever). Social Media is still trying to have it both ways - censor some stuff but not be responsible for anything. IMHO that will eventually fail.
Section 230 allows for as much censoring as you want, you are not liable for user generated content as an interactive computer service provider if you censor or don't.
Showing adult content to minors is also probably not an insignificant part of their business (certaintly a major part if the classification of social media as adult becomes more widespread), and having age be an os-user property might give children more opportunity to subvert the verification. And if enough applications end up behind the maturity wall, they can count on children to badger their parents into setting their account to adult, and the industry will absolve itself of all responsibility once more.
I'm really quite confident I don't want these companies collecting face and ID scans to prove age, so no I think this being an OS problem is actually a very reasonable solution.
Yeah, you're probably right. I couldn't find the text of the bill in the link. I'm sure the effort to do this kind of thing goes back to the 90s: like a lot of the really intense copyright bills - the CASE Act (ability for big companies to easily fine people who they think are breaching their copyright for $5,000 + legal fees without anything resembling a trial or evidentiary hearing) has been popping up in different forms for decades - but in its current name they took 5 years of trying to pass it, but the main idea was officially proposed in 2006 - so 14 years to get the bill passed, but then it was a thing long before it was officially proposed by a house comittee too.
I guess they figure if they keep trying they'll eventually get it passed - which is probably true.
Most of these "online safety" acts have been sitting around in congress for half a decade at this point. Mike Johnson keeps blocking them because he has serious doubts about their constitutionality (which keep getting borne out whenever the laws end up in court).
For years people have been able to legally murder on behalf of their country, with not have a beer. This is another item that will operate as intended.
It's not about the age, but whole identity. You know you are serving ads to a real person and not a bot and so on and you can correlate person across different services with 100% accuracy. Currently you can still reasonably easy fake a persona.
If this is the case, this can be gamed. People can use stolen documents. Nothing says a person can’t own multiple computers so what happens if someone uses your id in 20 laptops? Will the companies just claim “but the machine said they where old enough?” The law may not have teeth, but will violate privacy.
Something like https://protocol.humanidentity.io (disclaimer: I built it, sorry for the plug) or any other privacy preserving service might work better. A platform can then require that a person verifies age in a privacy preserving way before viewing adult content.
I really like your solution. Have you considered making connections with well connected individuals and potentially making small compromises on your products integrity to appeal to the people who would make this a legislated standard across the board?
Or perhaps golfing at the right clubs to make it a defacto industry standard like ID.me seems poised to become?
I hate seeing stuff like this once and then never again due to people who are capable of making something this… Good being unable to “play the game” or whatever optimize to break the social-moral glass ceiling for a given problem space.
Thank you, this is very early stages. Still trying to validate the idea. But yes, the reason there is a sovereign verifier tier is because I am sure governments will want their own rules, and the protocol is meant to be decentralized. So one govt can legislate that they are the exclusive verifier for their country, while another takes a more hand off or hybrid approach.
This is being pushed by dark money billionaire PACs and lobbyists all over the world. Techbro feudal lords demand total control, de-anonymization of users, and monetization of such data but sell it as "think of the children" "safety". It's also why Flock is popping up to bring Big Mommy while it's using taxpayer money to force privacy elimination and mass surveillance by continuously tracking innocent people.
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".
- 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.
Also the official presidential debates are a privately run event, not a public thing open to all candidates. The president isn't the only politician, but it exemplifies the problem that our election campaigns are privatized.
But why not vote for a loser? Is it just some irrational pride/feeling thing? One vote is never going to determine the outcome anyway, yet a spoiler vote is still a signal to A and B about how competition is stealing their votes and how they could win you back.
That other reason you mentioned is ridiculous too. Since parties A and B always win, alternating each one or two cycles, it's not the end of the world if your hated one wins this time - if they don't, they'll just win next time anyway.
> 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.
Dark money PACs and billionaire donors have indeed engineered a system where immense wealth dictates public policy, frequently hiding their identities behind 501(c)(4) "social welfare" groups. These organizations act as "dark money ATMs," allowing a tiny fraction of the ultra-wealthy to spend hundreds of millions of dollars entirely anonymously. To sell their profit-driven agendas, they construct "astroturf" front groups designed to simulate grassroots support, relying on market-tested public relations strategies to convince ordinary citizens that these initiatives are simply about promoting society's "well-being" and "freedom".
The collaboration between tech billionaires and state surveillance is also thoroughly documented. Silicon Valley venture capitalists and tech founders—such as Peter Thiel (Palantir) and Palmer Luckey (Anduril)—have aggressively integrated themselves into the military-industrial complex. By leveraging their immense wealth and political access, they have secured billions in taxpayer-funded contracts with the Department of Defense, ICE, and local police departments. Palantir, for example, got its start with seed funding and direct guidance from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, and now provides the digital infrastructure that enables federal agents to track and arrest individuals en masse.
Data monetization and the elimination of anonymity are the financial engines of this model. The modern digital economy operates on "surveillance capitalism," offering supposedly free services to harvest user data, craft highly detailed profiles, and monetize every click and interaction while entirely deemphasizing user privacy. In the political sphere, dark money networks have poured millions into their own high-tech data firms (such as i360) to assemble meticulously detailed, de-anonymized profiles on over 190 million active voters and 250 million consumers, enabling precision targeting and psychological manipulation.
Mass surveillance justified by "safety" is precisely how these technologies are deployed against the public. The software systems sold by tech companies to law enforcement agencies explicitly ingest commercial license plate reader (LPR) data, providing authorities with access to over 5 billion data points used to continuously and physically track vehicles and individuals across the country. This geographic tracking is fused with other aggressive domestic surveillance methods like digital dragnets, "Stingray" cell phone interceptors, facial recognition, and fake social media profiles—often using photos of attractive young women—to trick youths as young as twelve into accepting friend requests. Authorities use this access to map out social networks and establish guilt by association, heavily surveilling minority youth without any concrete evidence of criminal behavior.
Ultimately, these technologies fulfill the state's historical obsession with "legibility"—the utopian, often tyrannical desire of authorities to categorize, monitor, map, and standardize every aspect of human life so that the population becomes a closed, predictable, and easily manipulated system. By merging state power with Silicon Valley's data-harvesting capabilities, this infrastructure enforces control by turning human sociality and everyday life into an endless series of trackable, monetizable data points.
I spent a lot of time reading the books on which these perspectives are based.
You probably won't read the books.
So I hope that, by writing about reality here on HN, I can expose you to some facts and ideas that you're too complacent to bother investigating, yourself.
I don't see any of the typical markers of AI slop, like "It's not this, it's that" or overuse of the rule of threes. Are they just accusing based on the length of the reply?
According to a recent CRYPTO-GRAM issue from Schneier, it's in Meta's interest to push these regulations as their product isn't an OS. Their competition (Apple/MS/Google) are OSs though.
I'm not sure why Meta's lobbying is harped on so much when all of Big Tech benefits from this; Zuckerberg is just the fall guy. Tech companies love the idea of identity / age verification so they can target ads more effectively. My general feeling is also that privacy is a thorn in their side when it comes to integrating more deeply into people's lives.
There are also state actors at play here who would love if computing without ID became a very niche thing to do. Obviously their top line would be "fighting terrorism" and "saving the children" but in reality we've seen how these organizations (ICE, NSA, etc.) abuse their power and spy on people without warrants.
tl;dr: there is much more at play here than Facebooks interests alone.
Google and Apple certainly don't benefit from this - they can serve more ads, track more data, and assume you're authorized to spend a gazillion dollars in a game if they don't know you're a child.
One example of this was last year when high-profile apps like Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans were found to have privacy policies on their websites restricting users to 13+ so they could track and advertise more while their Android and iOS apps were designated for all ages so they could get more downloads.
Fair point on the plausible deniability they currently have w.r.t. children. I'm thinking more about the possibilities that open up when software can assume that OSes have this information and start gating access based on it. Once the APIs are there, I fear the internet will turn into a bunch of ID-related prompts before you can do anything. I haven't thought it through fully, but I imagine what we see as benign today like using an Adblocker could actually become more "serious" once they know your identity and can seek damages... we see companies wanting to use the legal system in Germany for example when people find a connection string in plaintext on the client instead of just fixing the security hole.
It seems like a more lucrative path to go down even if you lose the under-18 crowd gambling / watching ads on your platform.
This is likely because of Zuck's testimony in the very recent court case where he testified exactly that the "best place" to do "age verification" was in the operating system.
This was but a few weeks before all these, largely very identical sounding bills, suddenly started appearing in state houses across the USA.
This is one of the issues with all of the steadily eroding privacy that get accepted because you’re allowed to opt out. It doesn’t take long before you’re the only one in your neighborhood who opts out, and that makes you very identifiable and suspicious.
> plus they get to point the finger at someone else for age issues.
This is the real benefit to Meta/FB/etc. that many seem to overlook. Meta/FB/etc. are already staring down a lot of court cases related to "addicting youngsters" to their product (and potentially a lot [i.e. billions of dollars] of payout for settlements or penalties in cases that side against them).
But, if they can get the government to mandate that the operating system is responsible for verifying a user's age, they get to avoid liability (i.e., more billions of dollars) for serving anything from their properties to an underage user if the OS tells them that the user is "old enough" for whatever they served. So long as Meta follows the law and asks the OS "is this user old enough" and if the OS replies "old enough" then the liability for mistakes in the age identification shifts to the OS provider and away from Meta/etc.
The part that is odd here is why Microsoft, Apple and Google (the "OS providers" truly being targeted) are not massively lobbying against this due to the legal liability risk that Meta is trying to shift over to them.
because Meta's lobbying has been publicly identified. When the other companies are found to be spending millions of dollars to push these age verification laws, then they, too, will be harped on.
Fall guy or not, Zuckerberg's influence on my life has been entirely negative. From addictive social media feeds, to anti-competitive acquisitions that ruin once good products, to crap like this - he's the worst, most destructive CEO in tech. Even Oracle at least provides some value through their database products. Meta can go die in a fire.
What is the age of a script that I wrote to be triggered by cron? What is the age of a script that my 10-year-old son wrote to be triggered in his dad's crontab?
If I do "sudo -l" to my son's account, what is the age of the user performing actions? If my son writes a set-user-ID program and I run it, what is the user's age now?
Spot on! So much silly engineering would be needed to make this even slightly make sense for normal Linux 'users' and even then, if you can be root then there is no limit!? root can do anything as any user, right? And it's definitely expected that the system admin (ie yourself for your own computer!) can become root!!
I'm glad I'm on a source distribution (Gentoo, even though it does require patience) so I could in-theory edit/patch out the nasty bits before they even become binaries if anything like this ever does go ahead! (Seems unlikely to really work for Linux users anyway really though, for many of the reasons you suggested!)
Yeah it does seem to be a new 'thing'. I'm betting it's like the heritage foundation who figured out age-restrictions give them a new end-run around the first amendment. Started with porn (because who is going to defend porn) and now they're going to slide down the slippery slope.
From Project 2025[0], published by the Heritage Foundation:
Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it
should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be
classed as registered sex offenders.
Don't underestimate the grassroots popularity of these measures. Look at any Hacker News thread regarding age verification and you will find a lot of comments coming out in support of age verification. Most of them are assuming that age verification is something that will only apply to sites they don't use like Facebook.
There are a couple parallel moral panics intersecting on this topic. Again even on HN you'll find people parroting dodgy statistics about child trafficking on social media, proclaiming that short form video is equivalent to highly addictive drugs, or making sweeping claims that under-18s should be banned from having smart phones. It's apparent none of them ever considered that the age restrictions they've been inviting might apply to something they use. It's always assumed to apply only to the kids on the TikTok or something.
"Rep Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) announced the Parents Decide Act, bipartisan, commonsense legislation to strengthen online protections for children and give parents greater control over what their kids can access on phones, tablets, and other devices. Gottheimer’s new Parents Decide Act will:
- Require operating system developers like Apple and Google to verify users’ ages when setting up a new device, rather than relying on self-reported ages.
- Allow parents to set age-appropriate content controls from the start, including limiting access to social media, apps, and AI platforms.
- Ensure that age and parental settings securely flow to apps and AI platforms, so content is tailored appropriately for children.
- Prevent children from accessing harmful or explicit content—including inappropriate AI chatbot interactions—by creating a consistent, trusted standard across platforms."
This is the summary [0] from the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, who seem to be in support of the legislation. I get the feeling the definition of 'operating system' within the legislation isn't how many on HN, or in real life, would define what an OS is, since its implied to be aimed at mobile devices, but we shall see once the actual text is posted.
Seems like legislation should come after senators and members of congress directly call Tim Cook en masse to complain that:
1. Screen time reporting has been 100% broken for decades. Just does not work as advertised. False advertising is indeed illegal.
2. The parental controls are a joke. Can't block apps that were ever downloaded by a member of the household. Don't want the kid to have TikTok? You better not have downloaded it on any device ever.
I do not disagree that there is A LOT that Apple could, and should, be doing to enable parents. The problem that we have is, that if a vendor, like Apple, just decides to continue to have broken systems, there isn't a way to compel them to fix the problem outside of legislation. And, because most people in the House/Senate have a complete lack of technical literacy, we get situations where they define things poorly or special interests get to set those definitions in their favor/for ideological reasons, rather than to make good policy.
We agree that legislation won't work because legislators aren't competent.
But you claim that only legislation can force behavior, and I'm pretty sure that if a few senators just relayed their frustration with broken screen time reporting to Tim Cook personally we could get some results.
Calls don't have enforcement mechanisms/consequences needed to ensure compliance with the desired outcome. The whole point of government is not to ask nicely that something be done, it is to use the power of the state to ensure that something is done. Assuming that the state decides to actually enforce its laws, but that is an entirely different conversation.
If I had a dollar to bet, I would say that such global effort would highly benefit Microsoft that is loosing grounds in high proportion in the area of desktop OS and is trying very hard to impose mandatory microsoft "cloud" accounts to be able to use computers.
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.
Looks like compelled speech to me, both for the operating system creator and the users. I do not believe that “interstate commerce” powers negate the first amendment.
Ever seen a giant warning on cigarette ads that nicotine is addictive? Do you think half the ad is covered by the black box out of charity?
Settled law decades ago.
On that note, today is April 15th, tax day. The day where if you don’t provide hard numbers about your life against your will and at your own expense, prison opens as a possibility.
Unfortunately all we have are the title and sponsors right now. I'm much more interested in the text of this bill which is not posted here yet. I don't expect it to be particularly reasonable, but at least we will have something to discuss once the text is available.
> 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 many or very large legislative measures for GPO to prepare and print at the same time.
It is currently in commitee the energy and commerce committee. If one of your reps sits on this committee my suggestion is to reach out to them and voice your opposition to this measure. Consider writing a letter or email as well.
US should first implement a national identifier that can be used for healthcare purposes before implementing age verification, that would be a lot more helpful.
Google did the hard work for everyone last year...
>"In layperson’s terms, ZKP makes it possible for people to prove that something about them is true without exchanging any other data. So, for example, a person visiting a website can verifiably prove he or she is over 18, without sharing anything else at all."
At the very least, if this passes, the resulting court challenge will provide precedent that shuts it down in all 50 states at once.
The downside will be riding out the intervening months before the court decision comes through. Stock up on ISOs and full git clones of your favorite OS sources.
Since 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
225 comments
Why are so many bi-partisan bills so bad?
Ultimately, they seem to have realised that they can't stop adult content from being shared, so the easiest way to get there was to mark anything even vaguely possible of being adult, and require age verification -- which comes with a lot of political cover vs. just deleting it.
Of course, if you stoke up the right people, you end up with lots of support from the puritanical brigades, and label all naysayers as putting children in harm's way.
>> They could stop adult content from being shown to minors; it would just take effort on their part to do so
If you voluntarily sensor content, you might be in danger of being held responsible for various things since you control what people see. Phone companies in the US are "common carriers" which means they just connect people, but are not responsible for what people do over the phone (plotting crime or whatever). Social Media is still trying to have it both ways - censor some stuff but not be responsible for anything. IMHO that will eventually fail.
I guess they figure if they keep trying they'll eventually get it passed - which is probably true.
Something like https://protocol.humanidentity.io (disclaimer: I built it, sorry for the plug) or any other privacy preserving service might work better. A platform can then require that a person verifies age in a privacy preserving way before viewing adult content.
Or perhaps golfing at the right clubs to make it a defacto industry standard like ID.me seems poised to become?
I hate seeing stuff like this once and then never again due to people who are capable of making something this… Good being unable to “play the game” or whatever optimize to break the social-moral glass ceiling for a given problem space.
- 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.
That other reason you mentioned is ridiculous too. Since parties A and B always win, alternating each one or two cycles, it's not the end of the world if your hated one wins this time - if they don't, they'll just win next time anyway.
> 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...
The collaboration between tech billionaires and state surveillance is also thoroughly documented. Silicon Valley venture capitalists and tech founders—such as Peter Thiel (Palantir) and Palmer Luckey (Anduril)—have aggressively integrated themselves into the military-industrial complex. By leveraging their immense wealth and political access, they have secured billions in taxpayer-funded contracts with the Department of Defense, ICE, and local police departments. Palantir, for example, got its start with seed funding and direct guidance from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, and now provides the digital infrastructure that enables federal agents to track and arrest individuals en masse.
Data monetization and the elimination of anonymity are the financial engines of this model. The modern digital economy operates on "surveillance capitalism," offering supposedly free services to harvest user data, craft highly detailed profiles, and monetize every click and interaction while entirely deemphasizing user privacy. In the political sphere, dark money networks have poured millions into their own high-tech data firms (such as i360) to assemble meticulously detailed, de-anonymized profiles on over 190 million active voters and 250 million consumers, enabling precision targeting and psychological manipulation.
Mass surveillance justified by "safety" is precisely how these technologies are deployed against the public. The software systems sold by tech companies to law enforcement agencies explicitly ingest commercial license plate reader (LPR) data, providing authorities with access to over 5 billion data points used to continuously and physically track vehicles and individuals across the country. This geographic tracking is fused with other aggressive domestic surveillance methods like digital dragnets, "Stingray" cell phone interceptors, facial recognition, and fake social media profiles—often using photos of attractive young women—to trick youths as young as twelve into accepting friend requests. Authorities use this access to map out social networks and establish guilt by association, heavily surveilling minority youth without any concrete evidence of criminal behavior.
Ultimately, these technologies fulfill the state's historical obsession with "legibility"—the utopian, often tyrannical desire of authorities to categorize, monitor, map, and standardize every aspect of human life so that the population becomes a closed, predictable, and easily manipulated system. By merging state power with Silicon Valley's data-harvesting capabilities, this infrastructure enforces control by turning human sociality and everyday life into an endless series of trackable, monetizable data points.
You probably won't read the books.
So I hope that, by writing about reality here on HN, I can expose you to some facts and ideas that you're too complacent to bother investigating, yourself.
There are also state actors at play here who would love if computing without ID became a very niche thing to do. Obviously their top line would be "fighting terrorism" and "saving the children" but in reality we've seen how these organizations (ICE, NSA, etc.) abuse their power and spy on people without warrants.
tl;dr: there is much more at play here than Facebooks interests alone.
One example of this was last year when high-profile apps like Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans were found to have privacy policies on their websites restricting users to 13+ so they could track and advertise more while their Android and iOS apps were designated for all ages so they could get more downloads.
It seems like a more lucrative path to go down even if you lose the under-18 crowd gambling / watching ads on your platform.
> Zuckerberg is just the fall guy
This is likely because of Zuck's testimony in the very recent court case where he testified exactly that the "best place" to do "age verification" was in the operating system.
This was but a few weeks before all these, largely very identical sounding bills, suddenly started appearing in state houses across the USA.
> I'm not sure why Meta's lobbying is harped on so much when all of Big Tech benefits from this
Because meta will not have to spend real $ to add/support age verification, plus they get to point the finger at someone else for age issues.
> plus they get to point the finger at someone else for age issues.
This is the real benefit to Meta/FB/etc. that many seem to overlook. Meta/FB/etc. are already staring down a lot of court cases related to "addicting youngsters" to their product (and potentially a lot [i.e. billions of dollars] of payout for settlements or penalties in cases that side against them).
But, if they can get the government to mandate that the operating system is responsible for verifying a user's age, they get to avoid liability (i.e., more billions of dollars) for serving anything from their properties to an underage user if the OS tells them that the user is "old enough" for whatever they served. So long as Meta follows the law and asks the OS "is this user old enough" and if the OS replies "old enough" then the liability for mistakes in the age identification shifts to the OS provider and away from Meta/etc.
The part that is odd here is why Microsoft, Apple and Google (the "OS providers" truly being targeted) are not massively lobbying against this due to the legal liability risk that Meta is trying to shift over to them.
If I do "sudo -l" to my son's account, what is the age of the user performing actions? If my son writes a set-user-ID program and I run it, what is the user's age now?
I'm glad I'm on a source distribution (Gentoo, even though it does require patience) so I could in-theory edit/patch out the nasty bits before they even become binaries if anything like this ever does go ahead! (Seems unlikely to really work for Linux users anyway really though, for many of the reasons you suggested!)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47530718
Here is some more breakdown
https://x.com/moo9000/status/2037184457069760717?s=20
They're specially trying to get people to believe this is a right wing thing. Effective strategy as we can see by the comments.
> This matters because it preempts the easiest dismissal: that age verification mandates are a right-wing culture war project. They are not.
Check it[0] out. I think you'll find it illuminating.
[0] https://www.techdirt.com/2026/04/16/the-right-wing-origins-a...
If, by you, the Heritage Foundation isn't right wing then what would be?
That's not a rhetorical question.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
There are a couple parallel moral panics intersecting on this topic. Again even on HN you'll find people parroting dodgy statistics about child trafficking on social media, proclaiming that short form video is equivalent to highly addictive drugs, or making sweeping claims that under-18s should be banned from having smart phones. It's apparent none of them ever considered that the age restrictions they've been inviting might apply to something they use. It's always assumed to apply only to the kids on the TikTok or something.
- Require operating system developers like Apple and Google to verify users’ ages when setting up a new device, rather than relying on self-reported ages.
- Allow parents to set age-appropriate content controls from the start, including limiting access to social media, apps, and AI platforms. - Ensure that age and parental settings securely flow to apps and AI platforms, so content is tailored appropriately for children. - Prevent children from accessing harmful or explicit content—including inappropriate AI chatbot interactions—by creating a consistent, trusted standard across platforms."
This is the summary [0] from the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, who seem to be in support of the legislation. I get the feeling the definition of 'operating system' within the legislation isn't how many on HN, or in real life, would define what an OS is, since its implied to be aimed at mobile devices, but we shall see once the actual text is posted.
[0] https://www.benton.org/headlines/rep-gottheimer-announces-bi...
1. Screen time reporting has been 100% broken for decades. Just does not work as advertised. False advertising is indeed illegal.
2. The parental controls are a joke. Can't block apps that were ever downloaded by a member of the household. Don't want the kid to have TikTok? You better not have downloaded it on any device ever.
But you claim that only legislation can force behavior, and I'm pretty sure that if a few senators just relayed their frustration with broken screen time reporting to Tim Cook personally we could get some results.
What is the common denominator? Whose lead are they following, and whose money are they taking?
Or is there another one?
Unless you just want an exhaustive enumeration of every possible human desire.
> 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.
Requiring disclosure of my age is effectively a search, without specific probable cause, and there are no means for me to challenge this in court.
Settled law decades ago.
On that note, today is April 15th, tax day. The day where if you don’t provide hard numbers about your life against your will and at your own expense, prison opens as a possibility.
> 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 many or very large legislative measures for GPO to prepare and print at the same time.
How do we still have no people in government with basic computer literacy?
Committee members can be found here: https://energycommerce.house.gov/representatives
>"In layperson’s terms, ZKP makes it possible for people to prove that something about them is true without exchanging any other data. So, for example, a person visiting a website can verifiably prove he or she is over 18, without sharing anything else at all."
- https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...
- https://github.com/google/longfellow-zk
The downside will be riding out the intervening months before the court decision comes through. Stock up on ISOs and full git clones of your favorite OS sources.
> 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