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.

  • CosmicTurtle0 [he/him]@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    10 hours ago

    I’m going to argue that you share it because one thing you can count on is very determined nerds to defeat it.

    Every time legislators tried to enforce some sort of dystopian thing, developers saw it as damage and routed around it.

    • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
      3·
      10 hours ago

      You’re not wrong, security through obscurity eventually fails. In this case however, time counts, the longer it can be cut off, the more chance of some sanity returning, of backlash building politically. The time to route around is after a law is made, preferably as flawed a law as possible.