Glenn Meder warns it’s the hill to die on. Online age verification. Not optional. Not someone else’s fight. Lose here, and the digital control grid snaps into place.
His thread on X, posted April 28, 2026, frames these laws as a Trojan horse. They start with protecting kids from harmful content. End with everyone proving identity to browse, post, or speak online. Glenn Meder on X. Age checks demand digital IDs. IDs enable tracking. Tracking builds surveillance no one can dismantle.
States agree on one thing: kids need shielding from the web’s dangers. California led. AB 1043, the Digital Age Assurance Act, hits January 1, 2027. Operating systems must signal user age brackets to apps in covered stores. Enter birth date at setup. No lie—self-attestation won’t cut it long-term. Providers face fines or blocks. California AB 1043. System76 CEO Carl Richell calls it a liability dodge for Big Tech. They wrote the playbook. Politicians follow. WebProNews.
Illinois tried next. SB 3977 aimed to gate apps behind OS-level checks. Open source caught in the net. Volunteer devs lack resources for compliance. One wrong move, and they’re sued into oblivion. WebProNews. But pushback worked. Colorado blinked. Amendments to SB 26-051 exempt open source OSes, code repos like GitHub, even containers. System76 testified. Carl Richell confirmed the carve-out. Kids on Linux? Apparently safe enough. The Register; System76 Blog.
Big Tech’s Hidden Hand Shapes the Rules
Meta funds the lobby. Digital Childhood Alliance, founded 2025, pushes hard. Bloomberg traced the money. Apple and Google roll parental tools for app stores. They signal ages without full scans—yet. Reuters notes AI boosts face-scanning precision. Yoti’s latest model errs by just 1.04 years for 14-18-year-olds. NIST tests confirm: errors dropped from 4.1 to 2.5 years since 2014. Cheap. Effective. Ready for scale. Reuters.
But open source rebels. MX Linux refuses outright. Prioritizes privacy. Linux Journal. Ageless Linux defies with scripts faking “age not available.” Solus, ZorinOS, others vow no checks. Freedesktop killed a D-Bus age API proposal. Privacy wins—for now. Gaming on Linux.
Federal escalation looms. H.R. 8250, Parents Decide Act, introduced April 2026. Bipartisan: Gottheimer (D-NJ), Stefanik (R-NY). Every OS—Windows, macOS, Linux, even FreeDOS—must verify at setup and use. App devs get age data. No exemptions yet. Lunduke Journal mocks it: FreeDOS has no users. How to verify? Congress.gov; Yahoo News.
Exemptions create absurdities. Open source kids unprotected? Commercial OSS like Firefox? GitHub, owned by Microsoft? Half-measures expose flaws. EFF tallies 2025: half the U.S. mandates checks for porn or social media. Nine states live. More in 2026. Courts block some—First Amendment violations. Surveillance chills speech. EFF.
And resistance builds. MidnightBSD blocks California users. No liability. Debian, Ubuntu eye legal defenses. systemd added age storage—pulled back amid uproar. X buzzes: developers fork, go underground. Age gates push users to Linux. Irony. WebProNews.
Surveillance Infrastructure Locks In
Meder nails the endgame. Permanent. Every site tracked. Kids lose anonymity. Question authority? Logged forever. Bipartisan bills in red and blue states. Child safety shields control. Parents must fight, he says. Window closing.
Tech offers outs. Zero-knowledge proofs verify age sans identity. Internet Identity eyes credentials. But laws demand more. EU pushes app: scan ID, get anon credential. Hacked in two minutes. Cybernews. Wiz breached GitHub repos via git push glitch. Patched fast. Point: data leaks. X post by International Cyber Digest.
Open source holds the line. Distros resist. Devs patch around. States carve exemptions. Feds push nationwide. Big Tech lobbies, deploys tools. Meder’s call echoes: fight now. Or watch the cage close. Kids inherit logs, not freedom.
Half states gated porn by 2025. Social media next. OS level seals it. Linux distros fire back. System76 exposes: Big Tech dodges liability, builds surveillance. WebProNews. California sparks firestorm. Linux crossfire. WebProNews.
2027 deadline reshapes tech. Compliance costs bury small players. Users flee to forks. Underground distros rise. Verification firms boom—Yoti, Persona. AI hones scans. But errors persist. Lies easy. VPNs surge. Laws backfire.
Reason warns: incoherent rules burden devs, ignore reality. Computer scientists caution. Reason. NBC flags breaches, complications. NBC News.
Meder’s right. Once live, no rollback. Fight the infrastructure. Or surrender the open web.
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