California has recently introduced a law that require operating systems to ask for age verification. (Colorado is appearently following with a similar law)
The Digital Age Assurance Act (Assembly Bill 1043), was signed into law on October 13, 2025 and becomes effective January 1, 2027. It requires operating system providers to collect a user’s age or birth date during account setup and provide an age-bracket “signal” to applications to support age-appropriate features and compliance.
This effects all operating systems, commercial, open source, whatever..
Does Manjaro have a strategy to deal with this? Recently MidnightBSD has stated that their license will include a clause excluding residents of California. Will Manjaro do something similar?
Same way the overton window has been yanked with making ridiculous demands and suggestions and then “compromising” after some concessions. Rinse and repeat.
Not at the moment, and hopefully we will never cave in to that madness.
Furthermore, most of what makes up Manjaro comes straight from Arch in its unmodified form. Therefore, our approach, should this political insanity persist, will be the same as whatever Arch decides.
hmm, as a newbe here, I don’t know how to include links, sorry (I’m told I cannot include links here) but search for “California Assembly Bill No. 1043”
from the 2nd paragraph:
“This bill, beginning January 1, 2027, would require, among other things related to age verification with respect to software applications, an operating system provider, as defined, to provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder, as defined, to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store …”
I also found discussions on this topic in the cachy-os reddit forum and on discussion.fedoraproject. As far as I can tell it’s real, signed into law by the governor of California last october to be effective from 1.January 2027, existing accounts seem to have a grace period until June 2027.
I read about that stupidity too. And i decided not to bother about it. I didn’t read it in original, but from the sources i read, it was pretty vague. That means with a lot of backdoors. And at the end of the day, not everybody on earth lives in California…so in worst case we will just ignore that state and let the users there use linux “illegally” or protest for their government to change it.
App Store and Device-Level Age Verification
2025 also saw the rise of device-level and app-store age verification laws, which shift the obligation to verify users onto app stores and operating system providers. These laws seriously impact users’ (adults and young people alike) from accessing information, particularly since these laws block a much broader swath of content (not only adult or sexual content), but every bit of content provided by every application. In October, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043), which takes a slightly different approach to age verification in that it requires “operating system providers”—not just app stores—to offer an interface at device/account setup that prompts the account holder to indicate the user’s birth date or age. Developers must request an age signal when applications are downloaded and launched. These laws expand beyond earlier legislation passed in other states that mandate individual websites implement the law, and apply the responsibility to app stores, operating systems, or device makers at a more fundamental level.
Again, these laws have drawn legal challenges. In October, the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) filed a lawsuit arguing that Texas’s SB 2420 is unconstitutional. A separate suit, Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT) v. Paxton, challenges the same law on First Amendment grounds, arguing it violates the free speech rights of young people and adults alike. Both lawsuits argue that the burdens placed on platforms, developers, and users outw
I am not sure if this source is universally appreciated, but you can check the latest Lunduke video on youtube, and according to Lunduke the law applies to OSes like freeDOS. Even some developer of an HP-type calculator OS has reacted to it by excluding California residents.
(1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.
The user indicates himself. No word of ID, driver license or credit cards. Just a form and everybody has to be honest. No big deal
It is because regardless of how easy the OS age verification is to get around (Now), the Application developers are still impacted, by the requirement to verify the age range of the person downloading the App.
In addition Laws are rarely static, once they are in place, and are being complied with, the chances are the screws get tightened., this applies even if they are not being complied with. Probably more so.
“For the Children” laws are usually stupid knee jerk, and often as not a cover for something else.
Well, there are companies like https://www.idnow.io/ for the European Union which would do an identity check based on your EU ID card. Then you might need to fingerprint the installation of Manjaro and also count all installations mandatory, as we originally attempted with MDD to have a base of accountability. Also the system needs to apply to laws like GDPR and such. For age verification Experience digital trust now - Verimi already exists, even they are just prototypes for now.
It will become the topic on whom I will trust such data and how secure systems and APIs will be to transfer those data-sets securely between systems. MDD was far from ready in that case, but would have been a solid starting point.
Age verification topics are already law in Australia, the UK and soon also in France. Other European countries may follow. That California and Colorado spearhead something in the USA is nothing new. It simply gets more complex to comply and there might be the case that some OSs may discontinue if those laws get enforced.
MidnightBSD’s approach isn’t easy for Manjaro - because Manjaro is a Linux distribution, not a single software w ith thousands of upstream packages; so you can’t enforce a licensing exclusion. This includes thousands of bits licenced under GPL, MIT, Apache and so on…
So Manjaro would need to fork and re-licence all of those - and how would you prevent a California resident from getting an ISO or updating their system?
So - reliance on upstream to develop mechanisms to comply and also to wait and see.
Personally I would rather the topic be How do we help prevent the proliferation of these Laws, first, rather than how do we give up and comply, as our first response.
It is not an interesting technical problem to be solved. It is an egregious and heavy handed, and ultimately futile attempt to be seen to do something rather than nothing, which takes away agency from everyone regardless of age… and may have even worse, unforeseen affects, as typically these knee jerk actions by politicians usually do.
Already, in Australia, two things are happening… the more technically proficient under sixteens, are either finding ways around the law, or others re losing years of accumulated data. Regardless of whether anyone here sees their postings as ‘great Art’ or boring trash, they are arbitrarily losing years of hard work.
The upshot is many more under sixteens may well fall foul of the very things the law pretends to protect them against.
Another likely outcome, is the big tech corporate data consumers, will likely have even more personal data to play with.
Thanks @philm yes I was aware of those dangers. Everyone should read that.
Age-verification mandates create barriers along lines of race, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, immigration status, and socioeconomic class. While these requirements threaten everyone’s privacy and free-speech rights, they fall heaviest on communities already facing systemic obstacles.
You cannot (yet) post live links – that will change as a matter of course after a interacting with the forum and other users; posting possible solutions to member issues, even “Likes” (use of emoji) contributes to the interaction.
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