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.
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.
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.
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?
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
- 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...
What is the common denominator? Whose lead are they following, and whose money are they taking?
> 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