this video is like a day old, and its basically saying that ai age verification will come to all operating systems in california (usa) effective new year 2027
my question is what will this have for haiku
i am not really active here so im not sure what the project wants to do
however i know many people (like humdingerb, wddlesplash) must be in europe. however i would not be surprised if the eu and other countries pass a bill like this, considering they made cookies mandatory a few years back
for me, i am in india, which means government is a joke, so maybe they wont even pass such a bill, so i dont think i will be effected
but most of haiku are in eu / usa so i am worried about it effecting development , etc etc
I actually read the law’s text yesterday; it just says “An operating system provider shall do all of the following” and then lists the age attestation requirements.
(It at no point requires anyone to actually verify the age that the user claims to be so it’s not really an age verification law.)
I wrote a shell script yesterday that should make an OS fully compliant with the new CA law; I put it on my blog alongside the rant about how bad the law is at https://this.needsfixin.net/2026/03/03/complying-with-stupid-ca-ab1043-is-a-bad-law/. It took 38 lines of bash, and doesn’t even have to be executed for the system to be compliant.
A) This law only applies to you if you distribute something with the OS in California
B) This law only mandates that users voluntarily input an age, without any verification
The EU made it mandatory for websites to tell you when they used cookies, not to force them to use cookies. The most effective way to comply with this law is still to just not use cookies where they are not required.
In the short term, I would just block the regions that have these laws and carry on as normal. If the laws spread so far that this is no longer an option, then you might need to reevaluate.
Why even block regions with stupid laws?
As long as it isn’t the jurisdiction Haiku Inc. is registered in,why care at all?
Those who make stupid laws are responsible for blocking stuff they dislike that is outside of their jurisdiction.
I mean,you can’t expect everyone to follow every single law on the planet.
In the case of California,I understand it the same way as @nephele already explained and following it won’t be a huge burden for Haiku.
But if other countries follow with even more privacy-invasive ways like demanding scans of the passport,I’d say we can just ignore that.
You do have to be aware of treaties, sometimes; your nation may have a treaty with the problematic nation that could make you susceptible to some foreign laws. It’s stupid, it sucks and nations shouldn’t be making treaties like that, but they do.
(And here in the U.S., it’s possible for some state laws to cross state boundaries that way too. It’s a mess.)
The law in this case needs to get repealed or blocked; since I live in California, I guess I’m one of the people who will have to do something about it.
On a moral level, I agree that we should just be able to ignore these laws. In practice, this can be very difficult. Western countries have a nasty habit of enforcing their own local laws globally. You may be fully in line with your local laws, but then you travel to the US and get arrested. Or they just kidnap you where you are and ship you to a jurisdiction where they can prosecute you. This kind of thing happens all the time.
I don’t think anyone is going to kidnap you for not following foreign laws in this case,or even arrest you as a contributor (and not Haiku Inc. as a legal entity that is responsible) if you travel there.
That’s stuff that happens if you threat a government by leaking some secret information or attacking the president or things like that,but I honestly doubt this nonsensical age check law is of such high importance.
It can easily and will be used by regions and countries that do business with California even if you don’t live in the state, just as the moronic age verification of the UK has been global now.
The law itself says to provide the interface “at account setup”. Of course, being a single-user OS, Haiku doesn’t have “accounts”. It’s not clear what has to be done in this situation, and it’ll be interesting to see how e.g. FreeDOS or Risc OS handle this since they also don’t have accounts.
