People should be fighting to oppose this more then trying to figure out ways to circumvent this at the moment.
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2026
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Literally how can they enforce this on Linux? It's open-source, people just won't choose those versions or edit that out of the code.
They can't, but if your OS can't verify your age, then you won't be able to access web services.
Web services which are more than likely running on Linux servers...
Is the website old enough to be online?
What if your OS just kind of... lies and says it has verified you as a respectable binary cis gendered 30 something white human with impeccable mental health who never engages in wrong think.
Oh no? I'm sure some people won't code workarounds..!
That's just verifying your age but with extra steps.
Or not just coding into it already verified so you DON'T have to do all these invasive things like ID scans?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but reading the article I don't see anything about a requirement for ID scans for this law.
The wording is very vague, not saying exactly how, but with how everything globally is going, I doubt just typing an age is what they mean.
I mean, you can read the bill yourself. I don't see anything about requiring ID verification in there.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043
FYI, I am not a lawyer. This is just from my reading and ~10 minutes of analysis.
From what I read in the bill, this is correct. Interestingly it specifies that developers shall not "Request more information from an operating system provider or a covered application store than the minimum amount of information necessary to comply with this title." But it does not have that provision for operating system providers. So OS providers could request additional information if they want.
From what I understand this should prevent apps like Discord from requesting IDs unless they have" internal clear and convincing information that a user’s age is different than the age [provided.]"
Likely this means that for linux, since people will just move distros or fork if the OS provider tries to request more information, we would actually be more protected than windows users.
I hesitate to make form an opinion on this until more experiences analysts chime in and we figure out how companies are lobbying on this. And in the worst case a ballot initiative will happen and people will kill this off.
One more reason to move to Linux. At least you can always pick another flavor in case one does this. Windows and Apple users likely won’t get much choice.
I can only imagine FreeBSD requiring something like this haha