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An upcoming California law requires operating system providers to enforce basic mandatory age verification (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/stallmanwasright@programming.dev
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[–] [S] 7 points 8 months ago (4 children)

No, it is completely stupid to require providers of operating systems to implement any features at all.

How does this work with something like FreeDOS which AFAIK doesn't even have accounts??? Will they be required to implement that? What if I am developing a new FOSS operating system, am I prohibited from pushing its source code to a public git repo before I have implemented accounts?

I think this should be challenged in court as a free speech violation on the grounds that distributing software is a form of speech and the government cannot legally impose conditions on speech.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (3 children)

    Actually the bill seems to address those points adaquately.

    The requirement to collect the user's age bracket at account creation, so no accounts means no account creation, so no requirement to collect the flag. If FreeDOS or your new OS has no accounts but does have an app store, then I think you could collect it on first use without trouble.

    If you were developing an FOSS OS I think you could make a good arhument that you were not the “Operating system provider” as you don't control the opperating system on the end user's computer, and had no control over them installing it. That would leave the Californian end user to handle it themselves.

    If you read the bill itself it actually looks like it's designed to minimise the risks associated with age gating, and provides various get out clauses that mean that app designers can avoid collecting intrusive information and must instead rely on what they're told by this flag. Without something like this, developers instead need to rely on third parties like Persona that use ID dicuments and videos to validate users, and then, inevitably, get hacked.

    As I said before, all if this is based on the assumption that age gating will happen, and that is looking like a certainty. Given that, I'd much rather have laws like this than ones requiring privacy destroying and intrusive checks.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    I mean the definition is:

    (g) “Operating system provider” means a person or entity that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system software on a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.

    Note the three verbs there: "develops, licenses, or controls". Now the ideology of free software, of course, holds that the person or entity that "controls" the operating system software ought to be the device owner, so that one is arguably inapplicable to free software.

    But "develops" means "write the source code", and "licenses" can mean "put under a free software license". I don't see how I can argue legally that if I'm developing an experimental OS in my own git repo, putting that under an MIT license, and someone in California then installs it on their computer, I am not the person that developed and licensed it. Will any foreigner who did that now be arrested when they enter the US?

    If they had to at all, they should have written that law to apply only to operating systems that are preinstalled on devices sold in California. That would have been in the realm of product regulation that only manufacturers and vendors of computers in California have to ever care about. If some FOSS operating systems then do implement it so they can be sold preinstalled in California, there's nothing harmful about that.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    Ok, first off, I agree that limiting it to the OS that comes preinstalled on a computer would be a much less ambiguous way to write it. However, I think they're actually trying to prevent more egregious means of age verification by saying "if you get this signal, you will use it, you will not use anything else, and if you stick to that you're in the clear", so having it apply to all operating systems actually helps.

    The crux if the matter then is what is an operating system, who is the developer, and what does it mean to licence it? In your example you talk about publishing your code in a git repository. Whilst there doesn't seem to be any language in the bill clarifying this, and I am, very much, not a lawyer, it seems to me that there us a difference between publishing source code that can be compiled into an operating system, and publishing an operating system. You cannot just load the source onto a machine an have it run, you need to compile it and build it into a usable image first. From that I would say that the operating system is the compiled artefact, and so the developer and licensor of that is whoever built the image, and the controller is obviously the person who put it on the machine.

    That would mean that you are free to publish the code, and only those who package it (likely either the end user or a company that sells OSs) would have to concern themselves with implementing the user age bracket flag.

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