Re: California law CA AB1043

I second this.

I am no legal expert, but...
What I understand from searching around a bit is that this purely comes 
down to a question during installation/setup that asks for the age or 
birth date of the user, from which an 'age bracket' is derived.

Obviously, the 'age bracket' then supposed is to be applied to 'access' 
(ports, media, Internet, etc).

It seems purely a 'surface' check that is easily circumvented.
Any juvenile, installing/setting up any OS that supports this, that 
knows answering this question with actual age/birth date will limit 
access, would be able to offset age/birth date, and completely 
circumvent the system.

It seems a typical State of California style solution that is going to 
cost a lot of effort/money to implement while providing no true solution 
to the problem of (failed) parental responsibility.

Indeed! Who is John Galt?

Grateful to see others have read... 🙂


On 2/26/26 13:48, Tomek CEDRO wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 26, 2026 at 4:12 PM Lucas Holt <[email protected]> wrote:
>> California is requiring age verification checks for account creation at
>> the OS level with a signal API to provide information to applications in
>> 2027.  They explicitly call out individual developers or companies with
>> fines of 2500 dollars per child affected.
>>
>> I wondered if anyone has started looking into this on the FreeBSD side.
>> The way I read this, we would need to implement changes when creating
>> accounts, provide a mechanism to check from apps (library), and provide
>> support within package managers to filter apps?  Then browsers would
>> need to implement this and call the respective OS APIs for age
>> verification for desktop use.
>>
>> It seems like it makes sense for multiple *NIX systems to implement a
>> similar mechanism across platforms.
>>
>> The paragraph near the bottom seems to indicate that it wouldn't apply
>> to server use since indirect signals aren't required to be honored.
>>
>> For reference:
>>
>> https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB1043/id/3269704
> How about refusing to bend to bureaucratic tyranny and respond with
> ban from the Open-Source side in such cases right from start? Give
> them finger and they will take the whole hand next.. unless it's the
> middle finger and blessing to build their communist utopia on their
> own. They can steal what is free but they cannot force us to work for
> them for free. Whole Open-Source community should stand united and
> strong against this nonsense.
>
> They for sure know reaction of the free crowd, and they have already
> planned some sort of business behind this. We are their asset, and our
> consent. Do not consent.
>
> Let thinking people leave and see what happens next. Socialism turns
> communism when there is no more other people money and there is no
> food left. We had that in Eastern Europe, but some people need to feel
> on their own four letters.
>
> Who is John Galt?
>
> --
> CeDeROM, SQ7MHZ, http://www.tomek.cedro.info
>