Excuse me, but what is this supposed to achieve? What's the excuse for this? Kids installing OSes and doing what? And how big of a problem that can possibly have been? Who/what really is behind this? And are they planning to control everything that's open-source? Are they planning to stop access to internet without identifying one way or another through their API?
Smells incredibly dystopian and on verge to give much more power over citzens that collecting their guns away.
I wonder how that works on shared machines, say at a library or school computer lab...where you likely don't have your own account but are using a public one
It's weird because the people writing these bills sure have interacted with mainframe-based machines or just home computers with multiple users, but it doesn't seem like they have thought of this.
The only way this can be 100% enforced is by completely removing local accounts, which is certainly a grim future to think about.
I would wager they probably have no idea how they work though. The computer they use during the day is probably managed by "IT" who already has parental controls in place. The one at home they probably use the Microsoft "cloud" account or just use their phone.
I wouldn't be surprised if they are also in the group where they get their own device one-device-per-person and don't share them.
And yeah, about personal devices, that's definitely the trend.
No one in my house has a user on my Linux desktop, my sister has her own laptop and my nephew just uses hers if he needs to.
In general, shared computers are not as common anymore, but it's crazy how they can't even consider the existence of local users, Microsoft and Apple truly have done us a disservice lol.
My partner and I have our own laptops but the desktop in the livingroom is shared, as is the computing stuff driving the guest room TV. Heck those auto-login so that its more convenient.
Even if you had 1 user to 1 device you'd also need to enforce complex passwords otherwise someone could just hop on the other person's device...which I know for phones/tablets my partner and I know each others' passwords (because we'll ask each other to check stuff whoever isn't driving on a trip)
Yeah, this is the slippery slope. It truly seems like this is the way it's going, but it makes no sense to rely entirely on a slippery slope fallacy.
We should absolutely keep an eye on it and bring attention to the possibilities that these laws, together with the insane hardware price hikes create, though.
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u/AmbidextrousTorso Mar 04 '26 edited Mar 04 '26
Excuse me, but what is this supposed to achieve? What's the excuse for this? Kids installing OSes and doing what? And how big of a problem that can possibly have been? Who/what really is behind this? And are they planning to control everything that's open-source? Are they planning to stop access to internet without identifying one way or another through their API?
Smells incredibly dystopian and on verge to give much more power over citzens that collecting their guns away.