California just passed a law requiring age verification during operating system account setup. And when they say "all operating systems," they mean all operating systems - including Linux and SteamOS.

Let that sink in for a moment. The state wants to verify your age before you can create a user account on your own computer.

Tom's Hardware reports that the law applies to any OS that allows account creation, which means basically every OS made in the last three decades. The Reddit thread discussing this has over 1,200 upvotes and 400+ comments, most of them somewhere between confused and furious.

Here's where this gets technically absurd: how exactly do you enforce age verification on Linux? It's open source. Anyone can fork it. Are they going to require every Linux distribution to implement verification? What about custom builds? What about the thousands of existing installations?

And SteamOS - Valve's Linux-based gaming OS - is explicitly mentioned. So now game console makers need to become age verification gatekeepers?

The stated goal is protecting children online. The actual result is likely to be a privacy nightmare, a technical mess, and a gift to VPN providers. Because if California thinks people won't find workarounds to avoid uploading their ID just to use their computer, they haven't been paying attention to the last 30 years of internet history.

I'm all for protecting kids online. But this law reads like it was written by people who think "the operating system" is the same thing as "the internet." It's not. And trying to regulate them the same way is going to create more problems than it solves.

The technology exists to implement this. The question is whether anyone should.