Many more US states are planning or already have operating system age verification laws

We've already covered how California has a new operating system age-checking law coming into force next year - but many more US states also have plans or have them already approved. And I also recently wrote about Ubuntu and Fedora developers commenting on it, with that article briefly pointing out there's also a similar law planned for Colorado - but the situation gets a lot worse the more you look into it.

As highlighted by System76's founder Carl Richell, New York are also planning their own version that will "require all manufacturers of Internet-enabled devices, operating systems, or application stores to conduct commercially reasonable and technically feasible age assurance for users at the point of device activation" as the bill states.

In a blog post Richell notes that the New York version as far worse since it "explicitly forbids self-reporting and leaves the allowed methods to regulations written by the Attorney General" and so developers of operating systems and devices would have to have more than just your date of birth to put you into some age bracket like the California law seems to allow.

Richell ends the blog post with a key point: "The challenges we face are neither technical nor legal. The only solution is to educate our children about life with digital abundance. Throwing them into the deep end when they’re 16 or 18 is too late. It’s a wonderful and weird world. Yes, there are dark corners. There always will be. We have to teach our children what to do when they encounter them and we have to trust them."

But wait, it gets worse still. Looking around, there's also these similar laws:

• Louisiana HB 570 - Effective July 1, 2026.
• Illinois SB 3977 - Effective January 1, 2027.
• Texas SB 2420 (although this appears to be specific to mobiles).
• Utah SB 142 - some bits are already in force, other parts activate in May and then December.

There's probably others I'm not aware of, and likely more coming from other states. And there's no doubt in my mind that other countries will be taking note.

Microsoft have been locking down signing into Windows without an account for a while, and this will for sure make it easier for Windows to do such checks - but for all the various many different Linux distributions, this could become really problematic.

So not only are we all dealing with the difference age laws expanding across the world that force us to give over some form of ID or face scans to access certain services, eventually it seems we'll been doing similar just to access your own computer in your own home.