California requires age verification on ALL OSes

[David Spoelstra]

It's probably because:
1. They are scared of what the government might do if they don't play along.
2. It gives them massive liability if they do it, so they are working with
their lawyers to figure out what to do.

BTW, this was driven by underage online gambling. There was a recent
article (NYT?) where they exposed the problem. Data shows that "Roughly 70%
of teens aged 12-17 have gambled online in the past year." and "Over 25% of
high school students gamble frequently."

Apparently it's relatively easy to get around the online gambling site's
age checks. Hence, parents and legislators read that and now we have
proposed bills coming from non-technical people trying to fix the problem.

LOL, they obviously need to teach statistics in high school! On a tangent,
many years ago my computer graphics conference, SIGGRAPH, held our
conference in Las Vegas. We had about 50,000 attendees. As Treasurer, I was
in the debrief with the city fathers and casinos. They flat out told us
that they would never allow us back! Why? We're all engineers and
scientists and know that gambling is a losing bet, so no one gambled! The
scary thing to me was all the data they collected on our attendees gambling!

-David

On Sat, Feb 28, 2026 at 4:26 PM Bernie Hoefer <LUG-Member at themoreiknow.info>
wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> On 28/02/2026 03.29 UTC-05:00, David Spoelstra wrote:
> ===
> > Will this kill any OS not backed by a company? Who will do the age
> > verification on the hundreds of Linux distros?
> ===
>
> I know.  Colorado lawmakers proposed a similar bill, based on California's
> law, late last week:
>
>   Colorado Lawmakers Push for Age Verification at the Operating System
> Level
>
> https://www.pcmag.com/news/colorado-lawmakers-push-for-age-verification-at-the-operating-system-level
>
> Apparently the proposed Colorado goes further in that it does not
> grandfather old operating systems in (11m10s):
>
>   Colorado Wants to Age-verify Your Operating System
>   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdZlNqpFxTk
>
> Crazy world we live in.  It is very, very strange that we've not heard
> operating system manufacturers (Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu, Windows, Apple, etc.
> etc.) releasing press releases about this.
>
>
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