alt Hacker News> how would this even work with embedded systems that have no UI to input this data?
Doesn't the bill explain all this pretty clearly? https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
>> An operating system provider shall [...] provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user [...]
>> “Operating system provider” means a person or entity that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system software on a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.
Your hypothetical "embedded system" almost certainly neither has an account setup process in the first place, nor is it a general-purpose computing device, a mobile phone, or a computer.
> Reaction 3: how would this ever be enforced?
Pretty easily? They enforce it against the OS vendor for not providing such a process. They aren't enforcing the correctness of the age, nor are they claiming to.
> Someone needs to maliciously comply, in advance, on all California government systems.
...what? This is a law demanding compliance from OS vendors. Whose compliance is it even demanding in government systems for them to be malicious about it?
> general-purpose computing device
This term doesn't seem defined in the law at all. How general is general?
Graphing calculators that support apps and Python? Of course, they don't usually have "accounts" either. But to a technologist it's a "general purpose computer" insofar as it can run new code that the user loads into it, it can definitely run games that it didn't come from the factory with, etc. It's a tiny multipurpose computing device.