This is getting ridiculous.

Linux is the only reasonable choice anymore.

Under the bill, an operating system provider would be required to collect a user’s date of birth or age information when an account is established.

It's so fucking obvious the people who wrote this have no idea other operating systems than iOS, Windows and Android exist.

"OPERATING SYSTEM PROVIDER" MEANS A PERSON THAT DEVELOPS, LICENSES, OR CONTROLS THE OPERATING SYSTEM SOFTWARE ON A DEVICE.

great, for my devices then, that would be me

I fully expect this to become a move to hamper linux, or any non-windows desktop usage, because "we can't trust a user who has full access to their OS" or some other bullshit.

Age verification is identity verification.

It's already laughably easy to parent these days. Parental controls are on every device and require so little effort. You dont even have to pay that much attentjo - the software literally analyzes use and reports notification. It's so stupidly easy and still people can't do it. Literally ask any of supporters of this what parental control system they use and most are dumbfounded and just change the topic.

It's never about protecting kids.

Now instead of asking to verify age, make the parents input the age bracket and you reinvented parental controls. The correct way to protect children.

Holy fuck this is bad

Colorodo democrats have always been lousy. Here they are following texas and montana and tennessee, locking down the internet with dishonest arguments. No one in reality thinks this is about protecting kids, and it's not the state's place to do so, it's the parents, it's a violation of the 1st amendment to make adults expose their identities to people recording everything they do online and using it against them, and selling it to the government.

We need to repeal these bills, and we need a popular open source of model legislation to counter-act ALEC, that writes these bills and state lawmakers just fill in the blanks, after the united corporations give them a plausible excuse to and pay them off

Account is created? Who said were making accounts for our operating systems

Moving the responsibility to anyone but the parents.

Just think: Without legislation like this, kids will be able to see people having sex! Thus, ending their lives. Not so different from staring into the eyes of Medusa!

The amount of children exposed to sex that have died—or suffered worse consequences like early onset conservatism—may have been zero so far but the dangers are clear! We must skip right over parental involvement in child rearing and go straight to the source of the problem: Computers.

Computers have been giving everyone access to too much information for too long! We must restrict it! The first step is to get an implementation that actually works to censor information—to save the children (wink wink)—then later, we will have the tools necessary to censor whatever we want!

When glorious dictator decides that information about trans-genic mice must be erased from the Internet, we shall have the power to do so!

At this point, it's probably cheaper and more effective to have proper sex education in schools...

For fuck's sake.

What are parental controls?

Goodbye tech ownership in Colorado if this passes. We're moving one step closer to the government issuing out thin clients that only they control.

HOLY HELL

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

Not the OS.

The OS "provider"

Linus Torvalds ain't gonna check my ID. And i don't want him to, either.

This goes in a better direction than web sites doing it themselves, I think. The government put out an open source tool that runs locally and the browser just gets a yay/nay return code from it.

Fuck no.

They are coming for android first.

These people are idiots

If I could trust that the people in government know how computers work I'd be down but well I can't

Fucking idiots don't know how operating systems work or what they're for.

Why can’t we just have better parental controls? I’m a parent and I do want to protect my kids but I will not upload a photo or anything else.

What would be the point of that? If the check was done locally it would be trivial to spoof.

Technically, this can't work. It's a bad idea.

Sorry for the stupid question, but what would an “operating system provider” mean here? Does that mean “the organization that builds and distributes the operating system”? If so, Linux is sort of screwed in CO; even The Linux Foundation can’t act for Linux the same way Apple or Microsoft can for macOS or Windows respectively. Maybe Red Hat could, but only for their flagship distro RHEL, and the E stands for Enterprise, lest we forget.

If “operating system provider” were interpreted to mean “system administrator”, however (which is a stretch, but still), that might be a decent solution, since it has the effect of age-limiting content in an enforceable way, but keeps identity information from being centralized under a government or (single) private agency. The sysadmin for children would be parents, who are the only ones who would be providing the hardware, and that could work, especially if there was only the child’s account on the device (like a cell phone).

I dunno if the above is horribly ignorant; if so, I’m open to being more educated on the topic.

Another aspect beyond making Linux legally dubious is this: How do they actually secure the age-data?

Age is generally two characters with a limited character set [0-9] even with an extremely well hashed and salted you're looking at only less than 70 combinations being very likely.

There are penalties for sharing with a third party, but what if it's trivial for a third party to exfiltrate this data?