Don't celebrate yet – more states are considering them
As more US states push to mandate OS-level age checks, System76 is taking its fight directly to lawmakers.
Last week, The Reg reported that some US states are enacting legislation that would oblige OS vendors to include mandatory age verification. There is some very limited good news on that front from the state of Colorado. On the other hand, multiple US states are also considering it.
We mentioned that one of the more insightful commentaries that we've read was "System76 on Age Verification Laws" by CEO Carl Richell. System76 is one of the most visible companies in the world that makes PCs specifically to run Linux, and The Register first mentioned Richell all the way back in 2009.
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Yesterday, he tweeted some encouraging news:
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Today, I met with Colorado Senator Matt Ball, co-author of Colorado OS Age Attestation Bill SB26-051.
Sen. Ball suggested excluding open source software from the bill. This appears to be a real possibility.
Amendments are expected for the CA age attestation bill. It's my hope we can move fast enough to influence excluding open source in the CA bill amendments.
No illusions, it's an uphill battle, but we have an open door to advocate for the open source community.
The relevance here being that System76 is based in Denver, Colorado's state capital. However, the battlefront seems to be widening. Last time, we mentioned California, Colorado, and New York State. Comparable bills are being debated in various other states, including Illinois Senate Bill 3977, Louisiana House Bill 570, Texas SB 2420, and Utah SB 142.
This Reddit thread goes into more detail, including the organizations pushing for the legislation and more.
It is not limited to the US either. Brazil's similar Law Number 15.211/2025, known as the "Brazilian Statute for the Protection of Children and Adolescents Online," was passed in September 2025.
The problem of tech-illiterate campaign groups pressuring tech-illiterate legislators is only going to grow. After an early mention on The Simpsons, this is sometimes called Lovejoy's Law: "Won't somebody please think of the children?" The Reg's own Rupert Goodwins looked at this in 2024 – but the first occurrence we can find was a full quarter of a century earlier.
We rather liked this suggestion:
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We don't want to sound like we're advertising System76 here. Other vendors offering Linux preloaded also exist, including Linux laptops and mini PCs. ®
Simple age check for Linux:
Just have the shell ask the user to check the host IP on first boot.
If they type ifconfig they are old enough, if they type ip addr they deserve to be restricted from their computer 😇