Governments around the world are currently attempting to implement strict online child safety measures, fundamentally changing how everyday devices connect to the internet. As part of this push, lawmakers are looking past individual apps and targeting the underlying operating systems. They want the OS itself to verify a user’s age during initial setup. Colorado lawmakers […]

The coordinated effort worked. When lawmakers finalized Colorado SB26-051, they added Section 6-30-105(e) to the text. This specific clause waives compliance for operating systems and applications distributed under licenses that allow copying, modifying, and redistributing without platform-imposed technical restrictions. Why the Section 6-30-105(e) Exemption Protects Decentralized Tech

This exemption establishes a formal legislative precedent for the tech industry. It legally shields free and open-source operating systems from hardware-level age attestation laws that closed ecosystems like iOS and Windows will soon have to follow.

  • Lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1·
    6 hours ago

    Edit: actually no, this feature wasn’t useless overall. It was useless for age verification, but great for parental control. The moment a kid doesn’t have root access to the computer, a parent can put whatever age to block the kid from whatever features the parent wants to block them from. Think about it, self enforcing age verification doesn’t give power to governments, it gives it to the root user of the computer, aka parents. It’s something that actually works.

    That’s absolutely a valid use case. But I just use timekpr-next on my kids’ non-root accounts and that solves it.