pluto

Four senators want every phone and computer sold in America to demand your date of birth before it will work for you. A Linux developer has already published the script that tears it out, under his real name, with an invitation to sue him. The bill is S. 5090, filed July 22 by Andy Kim, Cynthia Lummis, Adam Schiff, and John Barrasso. Two Democrats and two Republicans. It puts an age prompt inside the setup of every operating system in the country. A covered device is any general-purpose computer, so this reaches the phone in your pocket, the laptop on your desk, the console under your television. Accounts you already hold get swept in the day it takes effect. Your own machine then informs on you. It hands your age bracket to every app, every app store, and every browser, and they are required to treat that signal as the primary indicator of who you are. A browser provider under this bill is anyone who owns or maintains a browser. A man maintaining a fork in his spare time carries the same duty as Google, and the fines run $2,500 for a negligent violation and $7,500 for an intentional one, multiplied by every child affected. Section 10 promises no government ID and no face scans. Section 3(d) then says that when a provider gets clear and convincing information that your declared age is wrong, it shall verify. It never says how. Section 4(c) makes app developers report you upstream when they decide you lied. The brackets stop at 17 and file teenagers in with adults, while the state laws this is built to serve draw their line at 18. The federal signal cannot tell a 17 year old from a grown man. Every site under an 18+ mandate will need more than the signal. It will need your papers. The work has already started inside your machine. On March 18 systemd merged a birthDate field into user records, citing California, Colorado, and Brazil by name. systemd runs as the init system on nearly every major distribution, so that field is sitting on Linux boxes whose owners have never heard of any of these bills. Nobody asked you. Nobody is going to. @GrapheneOS answered in March. It will not implement age or identity verification, and if that means its phones cannot be sold in your state, so be it. John McCardle built Ageless Linux. He declared himself in "full, knowing, and intentional noncompliance" with the California statute, cited the section number himself, and invited the lawsuit. His script makes the user the distributor. The liability scatters across every machine that runs it. There is no one man left to drag into court. The script strips the systemd birthDate field and leaves a refusal notice where it stood. If any distribution ever ships a working age daemon, the project has already promised a replacement that answers every query with "unknown." Artix refuses. Devuan refuses. DB48X, an open source calculator firmware, filed a legal notice saying it "does not, cannot and will not implement age verification." A calculator had to publish a legal notice. That is the reach of what these four wrote. S. 5090 takes effect 18 months after it passes, if it passes. The script already works. Take a copy.