Are you f**king kidding?

Recently, I found myself reminiscing on the good old days of getting into computers when I was a kid. It was a whole different world. I still remember the FCGKW key or whatever we would use to activate Windows XP back in the day. Not only did we not need a network connection, we didn't even need a real license. Everything was so fun and free and easy. And if it ever wasn't, you could just go install Linux. Nowadays, things have changed. I had to do two Windows installs a few days ago, and getting them set up without a network cuz I didn't have the driver was nearly impossible because they basically force you to sign into Windows when you're setting them up. I wish that was the only problem. It seems like a Windows account is not all you're going to need anymore. Thanks to these new laws, you're going to have to verify your identity when you set up your computer. That's really sketchy, but at the very least, you can go use Linux, right? About that. It's looking like multiple states, specifically California and Colorado, are going to start requiring all computer users to verify their age through their ID before they are allowed to use the operating system. This will include fees as high as $2,500 for every minor affected and fees of $7,500 for every minor affected with intentional violations. So, the producer of the software knowingly letting younger users use the software. That's insane. This is a great example of one of those laws that was written by people who just don't understand technology and the potential implications this has are insane. I can't believe this actually passed and we're already starting to see some of the effects of it. We need to do something about this one. This isn't going to be my usual video where I'm just reading people's articles and giving my thoughts. This one's a call to action. We need to go out of our way to make sure the people who write and enforce these laws understand how tech works or at the very least are willing to bring people in who do to prevent this type of from happening because it is clear these guys just do not understand software or how it works or developers and what they're building at all. Do you know who absolutely does understand developers though? Today's sponsor. The big AI companies can't agree on anything. Between OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Fallon, all of these businesses, it just seems like they're all fighting each other constantly. But there is one thing they all agree on. That work OS is the right way to manage your OT. That's why all of those companies and more use Work OS today. Rolling your own O is really easy until it isn't. Once you have actual enterprise customers with specific expectations that are super common across the industry, things get really hard. And I want you to be honest with me. 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Sure. I already did my video on the online safety act. I think that one's absolute And I think this goes even further. And as somebody who loves to take every opportunity that they have to on the EU and its legislation, it would be incredibly unfair of me to not do the same for my current state, California, because this is absurd. I cannot believe that the state of Silicon Valley is the same state that thought this was a good idea. This is the official assembly bill for this ruling in California from October. This digest is only three pages and it's actually only like three paragraphs because the rest is just defining specific terms. With respect to a device for which account setup was completed before January 1st, 2027, an operating system provider shall before July 1st, 2027 provide an accessible interface that allows an account holder to indicate their birth date, age, or both or the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user's age bracket to applications. is available in a covered application store. So that's going to affect iOS as well. You're going to have to tell your phone how old you are as you set it up and it will have to change what's available to you in the operating system depending on your age. And very interesting, they have the exact same fee structure as the Colorado law. One of the concerns I have about these things, and this is like not even in the details of the bill itself, which I think are I generally am really really against state level software laws like this. So before we even get into the child protection side of this, I want to talk about why I don't like this style of law in the first place. State laws about software are generally quite bad. I know, I know states rights and I also know the Europeans are going to be confused because you're thinking about states very differently from how we do because states are the equivalent here of effectively how countries work in the EU. States have a lot of their own rights, but we also have a federal government. And to be clear, I think states should absolutely be allowed to govern themselves. The problem is the logistical complications that come when you have different laws across different groups and demographics. Let's use chargers as an example. Imagine a world where California preempted the norms and enforced that all devices sold in California that can reasonably provide a standard charger do. Imagine they implemented this in like the mid2010s. That would have been a law that enforces micro USB on all devices sold in California. Now imagine another state introduces a similar law later on when USBC is a thing and this other state enforces USBC. Now you have to create different versions of the same device in order to comply with different laws in different states. That is insane. This is already the case for some things around internationalized hardware where certain countries have specific restrictions. And for example, all iPhones sold in the EU have to have a trash can with an X on it printed on them somewhere because the European Union enforces that all users are informed of the fact that they shouldn't throw away their thousand phone. And obviously Apple hates this. So they only put it on the European phones and have a whole separate pipeline for manufacturing in order to make sure the European phones get this emblem and the US ones don't. and a lot of other manufacturers just gave up and leave it on all of the phones because it's much cheaper to handle the logistics. If you have to serve special versions of your software or your hardware or your charging ports depending on which country or state or city your users are from. Your software becomes way more complex and way worse. And what you're left for with options as the developer of the software is figure out how to comply with all of these different states and countries and their unique ignore the requirements and deal with the potential of a huge fee later on, which is funny enough what most startups do nowadays. They just ignore these things. In particular, European tax law, it's just not worth the hassle. I am not giving advice here. I'm not encouraging this. I'm just observing that from my experience talking to a lot of earlystage companies, it is easier to just ignore this and deal with it when it hits you. And the third option, which I'm scared is going to become much more common, just banning the places that have these rules. If it turns out these laws are going to require me to agegate T3 chat and check your age before you can send prompts, I might have to rethink whether or not we serve T3 chat in California. And funny enough, this is what a lot of projects are already doing. Midnight BSD, which is a BSD flavor, has already updated their license to exclude residents of California from using Midnight BSD. This is a much easier method for an open- source project to verify someone's age reasonably because you can't verify someone's age reasonably. So instead, they're going to do this. I even saw a calculator app that made this change. And I suspect there will be many more open- source projects that choose to go this route. I want to be clear about one more thing with this change before we go too much further. The legislation does not require that you do ID scanning. The way it is currently written, it should be okay for them to just put in a tell us how old you are field. But that's these two pieces of legislation from these two states. Now that these are going to happen, other states are going to implement their own versions. And they're going to implement things that are different, like actual ID verification, which has already become a thing for porn sites in various states. Terrifying. And this is all data that you shouldn't have to trust all software vendors with. As great as a corn companies are at software, I don't want them to have my ID. I also, as much as I love these Linux maintainers, don't want them necessarily to have my exact age, much less my license if I have to scan it because I happen to move to a state that enforces that. It changes the like security surface area of that you have to worry about, like the area of concern massively. If you have to worry about that type of data and a lot of these projects don't want that. Let's be real, no one under 18 is installing Linux. And if they are, they've already chosen to inflict that harm themselves. As much as I think the government should probably protect people from Linux, I think the government should be putting more effort into protecting us from Windows. That OS is cursed. You get the idea, though. This will require including collecting age information during account setup and providing age bracket signals to devs when apps are downloaded. What that means is if you install an app on the iPhone, the app should be able to see the age bracket a user is in so that it can enforce different things in the app. like maybe they have a different mode like on YouTube, the YouTube Kids version versus the normal version. This also means that apps now have way more information on you than they might before. Apple's put a lot of work into making it hard for apps to identify you, which is why every app has a sign-in screen now, cuz there's almost no other way they could figure out who you are. They can't get info from other apps and metadata on your phone anymore. Now, I can identify the age group that you're in just by you opening my app the first time. That is that's scary. That's one of the many scary things here. An Ubuntu dev proposed a debus interface orfreeestop. One. So this is an open standard for doing this inside of Linux operating systems in particular in this case Ubuntu which could be implemented by arbitrary applications as a distra sees fit. But Canonicle the company that makes Ubuntu responded today. The company does not yet have a solution to announce for age declarations in Ubuntu. Canonical is aware of the legislation and is reviewing it internally with legal counsel, but there are currently no concrete plans on how or even whether Ubuntu will change in response. The recent mailing list proposal is an informal conversation among Ubuntu community members, not an announcement. While the discussion contains potentially useful ideas, none have been adopted or committed to by Canonicle. This is going to be such a show for open-source maintainers, such a comm's problem, and as chat is already pointing out, an absurd waste of time for these poor devs who are just trying to build useful things for free. If this was only affecting big companies like Microsoft and Apple, I'd be slightly less annoyed, but this is such a waste of time and mental energy for the maintainers of all of these things, and this discourages potential future innovation. This is yet another reason I won't do an operating system. And as much as I'm sure you guys don't want yet another JS Soy boy pretending you can make an OS, I did have fun ideas and I'm not going to bother exploring them now. But remember, this isn't just operating systems. This applies to app stores like FlatHub or Snap Store or iOS's App Store or the Android Google Play Store, as well as the Mac Store and the Windows Store, but no one uses either of those. Let's be real. I have a really bad feeling this isn't going to be a one-off thing that Colorado's proposal and California's enforced law aren't going to just happen and then get revoked and then we move on with our lives. This is going to become a theme. We already saw this earlier with Discord starting to require face scans or IDs to have full access to Discord going forward. That is bad. I I love Discord. I trust them with a lot of my company secrets. I run my businesses through Discord. I do not trust them with my ID. I don't even trust them with my API keys. This is horrible. And this is going to keep getting worse before it gets better. This is one of those times where it's really important that we have our voices heard. For a lot of the people who represent us in government, they just don't know better. They don't have access to this information in a way that they know how to get it. You would be amazed at how much a single phone call or email can do if you come in and explain that you're an experienced software developer. I know you guys are devs and I know a lot of y'all live in California. Go to the state representative finder. I have it linked in the description below. It's contactrep.org. You can put in your zip code. It will tell you who your representatives are and then you can contact them and give them your thoughts and your thoughts are more valuable than you might think. The fact that you are an actual citizen that is represented by these people and you have useful information about what software is, how it works, and why this is bad. You should take advantage of that. You'd be amazed at how many of these people just don't talk to developers. Hit them up. It's worth a shot. and you might just might be able to prevent these things from happening. You'd be amazed how many terrible laws got stopped by a single email from the right person. Just learned that the state representative finder might be out of date. So, if you are in California and you want to do this, I'll put another link in for SOS California. Makes it easier to find your specific representatives. There's also a house gov site for doing this in general. And if you're not in California, I still recommend doing this with your senators and legislators because you don't want your state to have a similar law. And if your email is on the mind of a random person representing your state, when someone brings something like this up, they can step in and say, "Hey, I talked to a developer about this. I got a bunch of emails about this. I don't think it's as simple as California made it out to be. Maybe we should reconsider." And you might stop it before it even happens. So, if you are in the US, I highly recommend contacting representatives. And if you're not, you probably still should. We need to take advantage of the fact that we understand technology and help these people either understand or at least let them know that they're screwing up because they don't understand. And that's all I have to say on this one. I really hate these types of laws that interfere with how software is made and distributed. Obviously, we should be doing everything we can to make the internet and software as safe as possible for everyone. But doing this type of enforcement at a state level that can fundamentally break the way open source software is produced, that's not okay at all. The California version is a terrible law. The proposal in Colorado is just as bad, and we need to stop these things before they become more prolific. Let me know how y'all feel. And please hit up your senator and your representatives about this. It's so important. You have no idea. Let me know how y'all feel. And until next time, peace nerds.