California lawmakers are moving to exempt most open-source operating systems from the state’s upcoming age-verification law after backlash from Linux and privacy advocates who warned that the original rules could force decentralized projects to collect users’ ages. The amendment would likely shield major Linux distributions, though SteamOS and other Linux-based platforms tied to proprietary app stores may still face compliance questions.
On a positive note, that news shows it might provide an incentive for many users to start asking more questions and considering migrating towards Linux and open source.
The Authority Paradox - the more rigorous the verification requirement, the more authority you must centralize. But centralize authority is exactly what open source architecture is design to eliminate. These are formally opposing forces. The math doesn’t add up - even quantum physics alone doesn’t solve for it, where two things can be true at the same time, until observed. And that’s the point, observation is necessary to verify the age.
The only approach I can think about where this might work is using Zero-Knowledge Proofs. And implementing this at scale would require an massive investment and coordination across the industry. It would need to address current realities (current math) and be built for the quantum era (harder math). Here’s a video I watched a years ago that I found helpful to learn a bit about Zero-Knowledge Proofs which great to learn the basic concepts.
Zero Knowledge Proofs
Age verification with today’s methods solves one problem with a cascading collection of bigger N-order problems. The tradeoffs is absolutely not worth it (at least for the masses).
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I agree this is a good step forward and also on the comment this will hopefully be an incentive to ask questions.
However, as more people (and perhaps families) migrate to Linux based systems is it worth looking at how this can be implemented, assuming an installs the system, in the case of mint the primary user has sudo access too, then that user should be a parent / guardian and set up user accounts for family members which could allow them to set if that user is under 18, or perhaps under 13, under 16 and under 18.
If apps in software manager can be flagged as suitable for specific ages then it would prevent that user (who would be a normal user anyway) from accessing certain apps.
The primary user, can of course turn the whole thing off. It would help free software solutions to perhaps keep up especially as more and more parents are expressing concern about technology and even Meta (rightly or wrongly) have said it is up to Google/Apple to control their app store.
Just a thought
Paul
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No, unless you are a developer that can handle public backlash.
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Good point, I was thinking more like this being on a local level, so install the OS, then when setting up user accounts flag the age or age range of users.
Doesn’t Microsoft have this implemented in windows, so you can set up an account for children and flag as such.,
The difference is, that we as the FLOSS community would do this in such away very little (if any) data is collected, and it is simply.
This could be a good step towards wider rollout if these features in Windows are one reason people go for that as a desktop rather than other solutions as these don’t exist.
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@zleap For parental controls, Linux does actually have very good support for these now. More work is underway, but as @FranklyFlawless mentioned, is controversial (e.g. providing an API via an XDG portal to attest whether something should be shown based on the user’s age as declared by their legal guardian). Add parental controls
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You can certainly try to enforce technical boundaries, but minors are easily capable of bypassing them due to having motivation alongside curiousity, physical access, unlimited time, and strong social incentives to share workarounds with their peers, so if you are trying to frustrate them, it would only be a temporary measure at best.
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