Assembly Bill 1856 (AB 1856), currently moving through California’s legislature ahead of committee reviews in June, would amend the state’s earlier age-assurance law by excluding software distributed under licenses that allow users to “copy, redistribute, and modify the software.”
The amendment follows months of backlash after California passed the original Assembly Bill 1043 (AB 1043), formally known as the Digital Age Assurance Act, in late 2025. The law sought to shift online age verification away from individual websites and apps and down to the operating-system level instead.
Under the original law, operating systems would be required to request a user’s age or birth date during device setup, then expose an “age bracket signal” to apps and app stores. The law, which defined brackets such as “under 13,” “13–15,” “16–17,” and “18+,” immediately raised questions about how such requirements would apply to decentralized, open-source software ecosystems.
Unlike Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android, most Linux distributions are not centrally controlled commercial platforms. Many are community-run projects maintained by volunteers, often without user accounts, telemetry systems, or even formal corporate ownership structures. Critics argued the law’s wording was so broad that it could technically force open-source operating systems to become age-verification platforms.
Privacy advocates, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, criticized the legislation as invasive and warned it could create infrastructure for broader identity tracking online. Linux developers also questioned how California could realistically enforce such requirements on infinitely forkable open-source software projects.
The controversy became particularly heated after reports suggested platforms like SteamOS could still fall under the law due to their ties to proprietary application ecosystems. Valve
AB 1856 does not repeal the original Digital Age Assurance Act. Instead, it narrows the definition of who qualifies as an “operating system provider” under the law. Commercial platforms with proprietary app ecosystems could remain subject to California’s age-assurance requirements even if most open-source Linux distributions are ultimately exempted.
California Assembly Member Buffy Wicks introduced the amendment on February 11, 2026. However, the open-source exemption language appeared in later revisions that began drawing attention across Linux and privacy communities. The latest version is dated May 18, 2026, and as of May 19, 2026, the bill was read a second time and ordered to third reading.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Deep Blue on Thursday May 28, @04:23PM (3 children)
North-Korea called, they want their law back!
(Score: 1, Troll) by VLM on Thursday May 28, @04:31PM (2 children)
Kind of insulting to best korea as the law is worse than something they'd do.
I think people hate North Korea because K-POP and K-DRAMA exist and "our leaders" hate NK so KPOP and KDRAMA must be NKs fault. Nope nope nope blame the folks south of the 38th parallel, not NK's fault. They do a lot of dumb things like everyone else, but K-POP and K-DRAMA are not their fault.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Deep Blue on Thursday May 28, @05:50PM
What the...? That's not it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday May 29, @01:05AM
Most people hate NK's government because they kill and imprison lots of innocent people, starve lots of the rest, shoot people for trying to leave the country, and periodically threaten to blow up S Korea, Japan, and the USA with nuclear weapons.
But you're right that the N Koreans probably don't have a lot of laws about electronic devices. Mostly because (a) most of their citizens don't have electricity, (b) laws are mostly a decoration for whatever Dear Leader wants done.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Insightful) by istartedi on Thursday May 28, @04:45PM (6 children)
You can only legislate safety so much. Ultimately it comes down to parents. This is like those fancy trigger locks on guns. If your parents are irresponsible enough to not lock up a firearm, the firearm isn't the problem. It's the parents. Instead of putting training wheels on all our bikes, how about going after the parents that hand 60 mph e-bikes to kids? In fact, they finally just got around to doing that. It was in the news here in California.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday May 28, @06:15PM (5 children)
Probably a difficult analogy because e-bikes are regulated at national, state, county, muni, and park ranger level and every level at every location is different.
In my state there's lots of complaining about little kids going 45 mph on ebikes but the news reports VERY carefully omit thats already highly illegal under state law for some years. Before the 2020s electric bikes were flat out illegal in my state, one of my kids and I were going to build a kit one until we found out they're flat out illegal in our state. They passed a law limiting ebikes to like "kids electric vehicle" performance where it can't be over 750 watts and a software limit of 20 mph which is slower than pedal bikes can go (Well downhill at least).
You still can't register an e-motorcycle under scooter laws; has to burn gas (or diesel) and has to be under 50 cc to register a moped. And registration requires proof of insurance and a drivers license so its not very popular.
County won't allow ebikes on county roads. Those are mostly 45 mph farm roads and by state law ebikes are illegal over 20 mph so its a safety issue to keep them off the roads. They'd try and keep bicycles off county roads if the bikers would let them. Bicycles (and ebikes) are illegal on interstate highways for safety reasons.
Muni makes it illegal to ride on sidewalks and mandates registration which is essentially never enforced, along with never enforced helmet laws.
Most parks and trails ban them. I think there's one state ATV trail that allows e-bikes if you'd be insane enough to take a 750 watt 20 mph road bike on a ATV trail. At the muni level you're technically not allowed to bike thru muni parks because too many people getting run over. Just like they don't allow sidewalks.
Anyway a national computer age thing makes more sense than the bicycle regulation model of multiple layers doing random and inconsistent stuff.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by istartedi on Thursday May 28, @07:45PM (4 children)
Regulating vehicles based on performance is one thing, but treating ICE and EV separately when the motor produces the same power output is ridiculous. Banning an EV simply because it's an EV is just evil. It sounds like whoever wrote that law was heavily invested in fossil fuel. What state is it?
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Thursday May 28, @08:14PM (2 children)
Apparently 50 cc is "standard" for most states but some states have much higher limits for unlicensed mopeds so an outright motorcycle can be unlicensed in some states.
I think its the law moves REALLY slow compared to tech. I was bored enough to look it up and the 50 cc limit for mopeds was untouched from the 1970s until 2020s. fifty years is a good run for a law.
Apparently mopeds were a reaction to the 1970s oil crisis and they got real popular real quick resulting in regulation.
The state had no concept of electric bicycles in the 70s so the law is very confused about "proving to DMV registration authorities the cylinder volume is less than 50 cc". Usually government regulators are more reasonable than given credit and showing them an electric motor would probably count as proving its less than 50 cc cylinder volume, what with it being zero. Or maybe they'd be dicks and "moped law requires a cylinder to measure" so no E-bike.
Maybe in the 70s when we wrote our law a 50 cc engine might only output a fraction of a horsepower, but with infinite high revving engines you can get "some single digit horsepower" out of 50 cc in the 2020s, for awhile anyway, whereas e-bikes are limited by law to about 1 HP.
I would not be surprised if you could get 10 HP out of 50 cc for a short amount of time, like racing mods. The engines and parts are cheap, so sure. I bet they won't last long above 15K rpm but they'll go really fast for awhile...
An 1980s Honda scooter at 50 cc size might be like 4 HP, so even when the law was new, or only a decade old, it was already WAY more than the power allowed to e-bikes.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday May 29, @04:12AM (1 child)
My 16hp riding mower will do 60mph if I disable the governor... dunno for how long, but crazy people race these things!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30, @09:10AM
Meanwhile in Thailand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytKzWZp__Gs [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AjPp2puStQ [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28, @09:19PM
Probably not evil, e-bikes just weren't a thing. You could very easily write a law that for mopeds that the motor must be less than 50 cc and have it accidentally imply that it must be an ICE motor.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday May 28, @04:47PM (9 children)
I still haven't seen a coherent explanation why FOSS can't just operate in default "under 13" mode.
So I'm running the "under 13" restricted version of ANTLR, GCC, and GDB. Which will be the same as the normal version of ANTLR GCC and GDB. So this would affect my life how, exactly?
Let's say I'm pondering the JQ. The JSON processor-filter-multitool JQ. To, I donno, parse weather data because I'm bored. JQ gets handed a flag from the OS that I'm under 13. This will impact me precisely how?
Lets thought experiment and imagine I say "Go ahead make my day, ship me a copy of "hexdump" from util-linux that accepts the "under 13" date flag." The worst case outcome will be...
Let me guess, hexdump won't accept decimal 360456 as an input because that can be converted to hex 0x58008 and you type that into your calculator and flip it upside down and it reads as "boobs"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bd on Thursday May 28, @05:18PM (1 child)
I don't know. I would not want to be the person that checks if every single debian package is pg13...
Maybe hunt the wumpus gets tagged for photorealistic violence?
Would you guarantee all source code comments by Linus are safe for work?
On a more serious note, I think there are a few open source ego shooters that would at least need to be evaluated if the law applied...
And if you install steam you definitely get an app store that can provide NSFW stuff.
The idiocy is that this law requires the OS to verify. Why not the app store? Did they think every OS has an app store?
And the general idea sucks of course. Laws do not replace parenting.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday May 28, @06:01PM
Well yeah but this is a chicken vs egg thing where the law has little to no comment about what is or should be censored, its only specifying that somehow my linux-running clothes washing machine needs to know how old the operator is to pass along an age range to the software running on the OS. Or maybe I misremember and my clothes washer runs FreeRTOS it doesn't really matter the legal requirement is the same for either Linux or FreeRTOS. Its not a QNX based washing machine I'd remember that LOL. My clothes washing machine runs an OS and that OS needs to tattle on the operator's age according to various state laws. What the clothes washier application software will do with an operator age is a mystery to me.
WRT censorship my primary personal experience is the local Barnes and Noble very much non-free bookstore always has a table up of "banned books on sale" and my public library usually has a "banned books" shelf/section. And people complain about book banning being bad and evil and awful usually while very carefully avoiding any discussion of whats being banned because it should probably have been burned and ironically nothing increases sales and availability like banning it. Really the best thing junk food companies could do to increase profits is get the government to try and ban junk food. Likewise, a fedgov initiative to "ban little kids from seeing pr0n" will inevitably result in little kids getting MUCH more exposure to pr0n, probably forced exposure at schools and stores. So I'm ironically somewhat opposed to the whole thing, because the outcome will just be infinite groomers pushing "access to censored material as a free speech issue" making it worse than skipping the problem.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Thursday May 28, @05:20PM (3 children)
You might use your linux box as a dev box but plenty of people use linux boxes as media centres (me included). You just screwed up a use case. What about SteamOS? Thanks for screwing up my stuff.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by VLM on Thursday May 28, @05:51PM (1 child)
I don't think anything on my media center has a valid rating/age coding. Emby is just direct streaming a sequence of bytes from an officially unknown source to my Roku streamer boxes. The Roku's are not FOSS and you need a credit card to buy one and install the emby app from their app store. Similar to how my OPNsense firewall doesn't do deep packet inspection of user age, the emby streamer doesn't care, feed it a file and it slowly squirts it out to a streamer hardware device like a Roku.
A fair number of video files can't ever have a legal rating applied to them. "grandma's 80th birthday party.mp4" and "kids little league season 2007.mp4" and similar home movie stuff. Yeah sure by percentage the files are mostly "yo ho ho and a bottle of rum" but those guys have nothing to gain from distributing age-locked files either.
This would make things weird for SteamOS I'd agree with that. But they're not a FOSS org, its an entirely non-FOSS ecosystem with entirely non-FOSS problems.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28, @09:27PM
The problem is the obvious next step is the banning of media without the age verification. You're saying it will only control stuff that is flagged as over PG13, but it's much more likely to be implemented as requiring default deny, not default allow.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 28, @08:58PM
How about Gentoo which can be built from source using the "F the man!" patch? I would guess that the powers that be don't want to train more kids how to do that.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28, @08:08PM (1 child)
Some pot would do you wonders. What the fuck is ANTLR?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday May 29, @06:56PM
Boomers invented lex/yacc, the gen X-ers suffered for their parent's sins, and the zoomies invented antlr to avoid lex/yacc
antlr does the same thing, but differently enough to be a PITA.
Let me guess, now you're going to ask what is a lex/yacc. Back in the day you had to be able to compile your own C software get get on the internet and it was glorious.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday May 29, @01:12AM
1. Adults should be able to look at adult material if they want to, and not have to install proprietary software in order to do it.
2. These laws aren't really about protecting kids from anything, they're about collecting personally identifying information so authorities can now figure out exactly who is doing what online. Including but not limited to their adult material habits.
3. If FOSS does not allow the viewing of adult material under any circumstances, and proprietary OS's do, then most people will continue to adopt proprietary OS's, even if FOSS is technically superior. See VHS vs Betamax.
4. This breaks a key principle of FOSS, which is if it's my machine, I should be able to control what it does and not somebody else.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28, @08:31PM
Everybody knows you can only do real age verification in the hardware which will be mandated for all computers, tablets, and phones, and it's not really that difficult. The government can issue an ID card (a SIM for your phone) when you turn 16, you insert into the machine to use it, and that's that. That's how authoritarians work
(Score: 5, Touché) by PinkyGigglebrain on Friday May 29, @04:30AM
This and other laws like it have nothing to do with "Protecting Children" (tm) or any other justification to make common things illegal
This is now and has always been about the governments giving themselves ways to control the people and enforce what those in power want, not what is best for the people they govern.
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws." -- Ayn Rand
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jb on Friday May 29, @08:24AM
What about other free software OSes?
Do the Californians have something against BSD? (quite ironic, given it originated at UCB!)
Or Plan 9? Or AROS? etc. etc.
Perhaps their politicians don't like OpenIndiana (simply because it has "someone else's State" in its name), but even that had its distant origins in California (SunOS was developed at Stanford)...