alt Hacker NewsBecause it's not at all obvious. The vast majority of people posting on Hacker News in 2026 probably had extreme exposure to the internet early in life and turned out alright. So they're probably not as concerned about children being exposed to adult content.
But clearly people in other cultures have a huge problem with it. Don't fall victim to survivorship bias + echo chamber.
There's not another obvious solution to the problem, it's debated in every thread. (no laptop + homeschool is not a real option for 99% of people)
> There's not another obvious solution to the problem
The problem with this solution is it's far too overly broad while also not working well. It leaves out the most important parts from the legislation while specifying universal compliance.
What the law should have been is "Operating systems intended to be used by minors should have this age verification specification implemented" with a nice documentation of that specification and how it should work. As written, you'll basically end up with the potential that every single OS ends up with it's own age verification system, which defeats the entire point of these laws in the first place.
Saying "all operating systems" puts us in this complicated and dumb position where now an embedded OS needs to worry about age verification of it's user.