This is horribly vague.

>a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.

It leaves open to interpretation if it applies to all computers, or just general purpose ones.

Does a car count as a mobile device?

Brazil just passed the exact same law, nearly unanimously. Even the wording and definitions are exactly the same. This is scary as hell.

Thank you for the laugh in these dreadful times. :D

Linux is Obsolete!

It is literally just Meta. https://www.gadgetreview.com/reddit-user-uncovers-who-is-beh... https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b... https://tboteproject.com/

Meta. Specifically to undercut Apple.

Facebook. There's a wave of child endangerment lawsuits incoming and they want to head that off at the pass by having governments shift all that liability over to the OS vendors.

It must be OS responsibility because that’s the only place that allows the next step.

Everyone is so concerned with kids pretending to be adults, what about adults pretending to be kids? Any service that has any kind of private chat or picture sharing option will be a playground for “verified” kids.

Next step, “we must go further with the verifications until everyone is verified everywhere”. This is where the OS part comes in. Wish it was sarcasm.

Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft. Maybe with a push from 3 letter agencies, because it makes their life easier.

And there obviously gonna be market for "verified" devices. Not like there is anything at all that could stop people of any ages looking at porn.

Identify devices, not people.

Distinguishing between child-locked and unlocked devices is something any website should be able to do easily. Adult-only should be a config setting.

Vendors shouldn't sell unlocked devices to kids.

Then it's up to parents take sure their kids only have locked devices. (Or not, if they're okay with it.)

Very plausible that they would outlaw this if these bills pass and consolidate. Would be seen as a loophole.

Sounds like a problem. Luckily it turns out my phone has two cameras and a laser dot projector pointed at my face right now. Not hard to imagine a future solution to this issue were we to pass this legislation, sadly…

Short answer: No. Apple already caved in advance.

Longer answer: In the UK, Apple already implements age "verification" at the OS level, starting with IOS/IPadOS 26.4. If Apple had not implemented this, it would still be in compliance with UK law. Apple is anticipatorily obedient.

A company like Apple has visibility of the legislative pipeline in its markets. Looks like the UK was a test bed.

Lots of OECD countries, all at the same time, are pushing for online age verification or OS-level age verification, both equally intrusive and implemented in privacy-violating ways by conflating identity verification and age verification.

The end result is not protecttion of minors, but abolishing anonymity on the Internet. Social media companies claim to want the former, but in reality just want to shift liability to OS and device vendors. Governments happily accept the "side effect" of being able to find and root out dissidents.

I am continuously amazed by HN's ability to engage in apple pedestalism and ignoring everything else that goes against it.

They've already been pushing age verification out in several countries.

Is that an option? Tell me more.

Yes, I am looking to sue to stop this insanity. If you're a lawyer reading this, please reach out.

We still have to provide a way for people that don’t have (smart) phones, but I would absolutely implement asking the phone instead of a 3rd party when available.

We don’t gain anything from asking a 3rd party. In fact it costs money per request.

Some people really need shit spelled out to them. This does a great job of doing that in a small package.

In short: you seem to want the Internet to parent your child. I have kids and do not want any of this for them, because all of it is a slippery slope to falling deeper into the surveillance state.

As a parent: do your job and take responsibility for your kids. While it's not trivial this also isn't overly complicated anymore.

The problem is with government mandates.

Apple and Google already ship OSes with comprehensive APIs and parental controls. There's not even any porn on the iOS App Store by policy.

Creating liability for random OS and app developers is absurd, and foreign porn websites aren't going to comply with this anyway.

I can understand the "baby mode" desire, but as the other reply pointed out, this does not need to be legislated. The big OS companies can easily offer this feature for those that want it.

I'm curious though about all this porn that apparently hides behind a rock on the device and leaps out to corrupt tiny minds when they least suspect it.

Shock websites aside, pornography generally doesn't ambush you. Unless you're a republican giving a presentation and have no idea how that porn got in there.

And, AB1043 specifically exempts websites, so it doesn't protect anyone from the goatse's of the world anyway.

These bills will not do what they purport to do, but they will do a whole lot of bad stuff.

You put your child in the driver’s seat and expect others to make sure it doesn’t make a wrong turn? Did you really have to give it the keys to this hypothetical car instead of, say, LEGO?

> "there's a baby driving"

Why does your baby need internet?

> We do want a way to signal there's a kid driving a device.

Which is extremely irresponsible. It creates a false sense of security and abandons your child to the whims of strangers. This seems akin to putting a "please don't hurt me" sticker on your child and then letting them roam around downtown unsupervised.

> But if we can just have a way to put bright orange vests on devices that require special treatment

There is software you can already use which will lock the device down and only allow it to go to pre-approved sites. I'm unwilling to give up any of my civil rights for your level of convenience above this.

I have a kid. Actually two kids. They have their usage controlled by google family. I review weekly their internet usage, screen time is limited to 2 hours/day. They dont have social media. School research and etc, they do at home, in the "main computer" in our dinning room. Youtube too. In the end is our responsibility to educate and protect our kids. I truly dont see a need for such extra controls if the parents aren't interested in enforcing it.

You wouldn’t drop a toddler in the cbd and expect them to be fine, why would you expect a device to be any different?

You need to be a parent and stop expecting the people around you to do it for you.

Edit: and there are already device level parental controls.

This needs to be simply fought because it's a measure that is supposed to fight the reluctance of the society, not actual problem. For the actual problem it's ineffective. This will be met by surprise once it's fully implemented and new, worse measures will be proposed. Hence, it needs to be cut off as early as possible to spare everyone the trouble.

Like the authors of these bills, you appear not to understand the technology.

Consider AB1043. It mandates that applications check the age of the user each time the application is launched.

Think about what that means when you run `make` in a source directory. How many times is the compiler application launched?

No, derangement is declaring "The writing has been on the wall for some time now: the era of completely unrestricted internet is coming to an end." without fighting it at all and just mindlessly accepting it because you were told it was going to happen.

It should be really easy to get your bank account information then. You're just going to give it to me, right? What is this? You're fighting me tooth and nail instead of celebrating giving me your banking info?

Well, perhaps your mental model of the actual objections to it are incomplete. There are a few problems and I'm curious what you have to say about them. First, "The benefit of this is that it can short-circuit support for more onerous age verification". Do you think that it "can" or that it "will"? Big difference. It could also go the other way, right? Opening the door to a more onerous version? Why do you think that isn't worth considering? Secondly, "This is probably the least bad out of all possible ways to implement age checking". What about parental controls that exist already? Someone seriously tried to tell me last time that parental controls "suck", but that's irrelevant, they don't have to suck, and in fact anything can suck. That's just happenstance. So, assuming parental controls were correctly implemented, why do you think this is "least bad" including parental controls? Thirdly, this "age verification" doesn't actually verify anything, because underage people can just choose "adult" anyway. What do you have to say to that? In that case, parental controls actually give you more power, and make this new age check completely obsolete. Thoughts? Lastly, maybe you're not from the USA, but we have a concept of "free speech" which includes the idea that people cannot be "compelled" to certain speech. If people were required to add a "sign here to confirm you're an adult" in every romance novel, that would be fine right? It's also a nothingburger, right? But then, you've compelled people to put something in every published book. Actually, that's a bad analogy. We should say that ALL BOOKS require this signature field on the first page. After all, we don't know what kinds of expletives and horrible things people might have written in the margins of the book (assuming it's being sold second-hand). That would be okay with you, right? Nothingburger? But it compels people to write something, and that's a door most legal scholars know not to open.

> The writing has been on the wall for some time now: the era of completely unrestricted internet is coming to an end.

And books..? And the newspaper? What if a child reads about a horrible murder in the newspaper that keeps them up at night? What if the government outlaws books and newspapers because they can contain bad things? We'd better add a "adult/ not adult" checkbox to the first page to "short-circuit support for more onerous age verification".