Senate Bill 26-051 reflects that pattern. The bill does not directly regulate individual websites that publish adult or otherwise restricted content. Instead, it shifts responsibility to operating system providers and app distribution infrastructure.
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. The provider would then generate an age bracket signal and make that signal available to developers through an application programming interface when an app is downloaded or accessed through a covered application store.
App developers, in turn, would be required to request and use that age bracket signal.
Rather than mandating that every website perform its own age verification check, the bill attempts to embed age attestation within the operating system account layer and have that classification flow through app store ecosystems.
The measure represents the latest iteration in a series of Colorado efforts that have struggled to balance child safety, privacy, feasibility and constitutional limits.
This is getting ridiculous.
Linux is the only reasonable choice anymore.
Linux won’t be legal in Colorado if they pass this. You’ll need an account with some age-policing, ID-reporting corporation to be able to use a computing device.
How do they imagine they could enforce this though? Presumably quite selectively, based on the user’s political leanings.
Are they going to check people’s PCs at the state borders as they move in then?
What is in the actual bill? I haven’t read any of this but if it was just a year of birth box at local signup then this could actually be pretty good. A sort of halfway between local only parental controls & age-policing, ID-reporting corporations.
The courts should strike it down, I don’t have faith they will side with the constitution, but it’s clearly unconstititional and beyond the authority of the state as well, in the realm of interstate commerce which is explicitly given to the feds, whom can’t be trusted either obviously.
But the 1st amendment is clearly invalidating this, forcing people to identify themselves to groups that will record everything they say or do and sell it to everyone, including the government, that will chill speech, and groups will punish people for their speech.
Too bad scotus is all in on punishing people for speech though.
I don’t think it will be cut and dry on state vs federal, although if we follow trends it will get shutdown because the feds love abusing the commerce and elastic clause. And I’m not overly familiar with the Colorado constitution, but the actual text isn’t actually that invasive, it makes no requirements on data collection, it only requires for it to be obtained somehow, which could be self reporting ala parental controls, it only requires that once the data is obtained that they must provide an age bracket and only and age bracket to services that request it and only services that request it.
The very act of forcing it to be collected chills freedom of speech. Leaving it undefined how it’s done should make the law more likely to get overturned not less.
Knowing your age was collected, and is stored somewhere, connected to your computer, and that everything done on that computer can then be connected back to that positive ID, chills speech, as much as they might try to betray the bill of rights with this mealy mouthed attempt to surrender us to Tech.
I dunno, the language suggests to me it can be worked around. It states age verification to make the OS account. Linux doesn’t require accounts. This seems to target Microsoft and Apple account creation (since you won’t be able to use the OS without one) and of course Google will implement account requirements on Android
Not really, the microsoft asshole that coded systemd wants chips on hardware for linux just like 10/11. He’s going to help fuck linux the same way they fucked windows.
You might need help. If you’re unwilling to seek help, then at least learn to code and, you know, read the code.
Systemd is so much easier to use, absolutely was not a mistake.