The always-wrong California legislature has unanimously passed — and the state’s always-wrong governor has signed — legislation to compel makers of computer operating systems to verify the owner’s age. The information from Linux, MacOS, Windows, iOS and Android would then be transmitted to the software (“apps”) running on each respective platform.
Reclaim the Net observes that in a “different timeline, wiring an age-surveillance layer into the boot sequence of every computing device in California is an idea that would have died in committee.”
AB1043 doesn’t require any upload of government ID or facial scan, just that the user report age when setting up the OS. I am not relieved.
All the shmexperts eager to erode our privacy say that requiring web surfers to type a number into a box to report age is insufficient. If California’s new law is allowed to stand, perhaps in part because it seems fairly innocuous — any plucky 12-year-old could type “89” when ordered to report age — would the politicians stop there?
Some kind of ID verification would be mandated sooner or later. Then use of fake IDs would lead to calls for biometric confirmation. Etc.
Reclaim the Net explains that Linux distributions don’t even have a way to comply with the silly California law. Decentralized Linux exists for people who don’t want to be surveilled when doing their computing, and “there’s no entity to mandate, no account system to modify, no API to build.”
These and many more objections appear to me to be just common sense — now illegal in California.
I’m Paul Jacob.
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5 replies on “All Your OS Are Belong to Us”
This legislation appears to be an attempt to force the camel’s nose into the tent. Obviously, without eventually requiring users to install only approved operating systems and to certify their ages, the measure cannot prevent minors from accessing software and data; and so, if this measure were to be approved, we should expect further constraints to follow.
Can we just expel California from the union?
Pat, better to expel a set of counties at or near the coast, running from Los Angeles County (or perhaps from Orange or San Diego County) to Sacramento County. A majority in the northern counties and in the eastern countries are more typical Americans.
The state supreme court would not permit even an advisory referendum on partitioning California, because the result would so clearly show how unhappy people outside those coastal and near-coastal counties are with rule by the urban population, which population determined the composition of the aforementioned court.
California is still persuing CalExit to leave the US and possibly become a UN ‘protecorate’. I kid you not.
Not So Free, only a small minority are pursuing that plan, and it will collapse once the implications are made clear.
The secession movement presumes that they would take all of California with them, but a precedent was set during the Civil War, when West Virginia was allowed to secede from Virginia as the latter attempted to secede from the United States.
Were California to attempt secession from the United States, most of the counties to the north and east would insist on a right to form one or more states remaining in the United States. With them, they would take the agricultural land and water.