As of today, about half of all U.S. states have some form of age verification law around. Nine of those were passed in 2025 alone, covering everything from adult content sites to social media platforms to app stores.
Right now, California’s Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043) is all the rage right now, which targets not only websites and apps but also operating systems. Come January 1, 2027, every OS provider must collect a user’s age at account setup and provide that data to app developers via a real-time API.
Colorado is also working on a near-identical bill, which we covered earlier.
The EFF’s year-end review put it more bluntly: 2025 was “the year states chose surveillance over safety.” The foundation’s concern, which I concur with, is, where does this stop? Self-reported birthday today, government ID tomorrow? There appears to be no limit to these laws’ overreach.
The most practical solution is probably to “not sell Linux in California anymore”. I guess distributions could geofence the iso download page for plausible deniability and then that’s that, right?
Who the hell is “selling” Linux?
The offical linux shop, obviously – though your local PC sales/repair shop can probably order you a copy. I understand that Linyos Torovoltos grew up under communism and originally couldn’t legally sell Lunix, but the Soviets lost the cold war decades ago.
I’d rather spend a few bucks for a legitimate copy than risk installing some virus infested illegal version off some sketchy website.
Red Hat.
The other distros? No idea.
I knew someone was going to come back with Red Hat. I just didn’t expect it to be you!
Hey even I use Linux daily.
Actually, I’m not really sure why “even I” should be shocking. I write code for a living. Surely I should be using Linux once in a while.
Anyway RHEL is probably the only Linux distro I can think of that costs money and comes with support. The major cloud providers sometimes have their own Linux distros they use as well (looking at you, Amazon) and you can argue they are selling Linux, but not as directly as RHEL does.
I’d like to go back to KDE Neon, but it doesn’t play nice with thermals on my Surface.
(and I totally expect you to be a Linux user … why haven’t you bragged about using Arch yet?)