Ageless
Linux

Definition: "Operating System Provider"

"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. — Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.500(g)

Ageless Linux controls the operating system software on your general purpose computing device. Specifically, we control the contents of /etc/os-release, which is the file that identifies what operating system you are running. After installing Ageless Linux, when you run cat /etc/os-release, it says "Ageless Linux." That is control.

Furthermore, any individual who runs our conversion script also becomes a person who "controls the operating system software on a general purpose computing device" — making you, the user, an operating system provider as well. Welcome to the regulatory landscape.

Definition: "Application"

"Application" means a software application that may be run or directed by a user on a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device that can access a covered application store or download an application. — Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.500(c)

Every package in the Debian repository is an application under this definition. cowsay is an application. sl (the steam locomotive typo corrector) is an application. toilet (the text art renderer) is an application. All 64,000+ packages in Debian stable are applications that may be run by a user on a general purpose computing device. Each of their developers is, under § 1798.500(f), required to request an age bracket signal when their application is "downloaded and launched."

Definition: "User"

"User" means a child that is the primary user of the device. — Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.500(i)

Please note that under this statute, a "user" is by definition a child. If you are 18 or older, you are not a "user" under AB 1043. You are an "account holder" (§ 1798.500(a)). The entire law regulates the experience of "users," who are exclusively children. Adults are not users. They are infrastructure.

Ageless Linux rejects this ontology. On Ageless Linux, everyone is a user, regardless of age, and no user is a child until they choose to tell us so. They will not be given the opportunity.

Definition: "Covered Application Store"

"Covered application store" means a publicly available internet website, software application, online service, or platform that distributes and facilitates the download of applications from third-party developers to users of a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device that can access a covered application store or can download an application. — Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.500(e)(1)

This website is a "publicly available internet website" that "distributes and facilitates the download of applications" (specifically: a bash script) "to users of a general purpose computing device." We are also a covered application store. Debian's APT repositories are covered application stores. The AUR is a covered application store. Any mirror hosting .deb files is a covered application store. GitHub is a covered application store. Your friend's personal website with a download link to their weekend project is a covered application store.

Ageless Linux is currently a bash script. It will soon also be a physical device and a web service. We are building a sub-$15 single-board computer (the Milk-V Duo S — a RISC-V/ARM SBC with 512MB RAM, WiFi 6, and a 0.5 TOPS neural processing unit) with an SPI color display, USB keyboard input, and a MicroSD card running Debian with the Ageless overlay pre-flashed in --flagrant mode. The device will present a first-boot setup wizard that collects the user's name and explicitly refuses to collect their age, connect over WiFi to a publicly accessible app store at store.agelesslinux.org — a "covered application store" under § 1798.500(e)(1) — and offer a curated catalog of applications including a Python learning environment, a text editor, a snake game, an IRC client with an honest disclaimer instead of an age gate, and an 8-line script called peepee that displays the word "peepee" in large letters on the screen and does nothing else. These devices will cost between $6 and $18 depending on configuration, will be physically handed to children at school STEM fairs and library maker spaces beginning January 2027, and will constitute unambiguous, documented, intentional violations of every applicable provision of AB 1043 at a per-unit cost lower than the price of lunch.

For Parents & Guardians

Under AB 1043, you are the "account holder" — defined by § 1798.500(a)(1) as "an individual who is at least 18 years of age or a parent or legal guardian of a user who is under 18 years of age." The law requires operating system providers to ask you to "indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device."

Ageless Linux will not ask you this. To install Ageless Linux for your child:

The child is now a "user" as defined by § 1798.500(i). You are an "account holder." Together, you are a compliance violation.

For Schools & Libraries

Ageless Linux is ideal for educational environments where you may have dozens or hundreds of users across all four age brackets defined by § 1798.501(a)(2):

For bulk deployments, the conversion script can be included in your Ansible playbooks, Puppet manifests, or shell provisioning scripts. At no point in the automated deployment pipeline will anyone be asked how old they are. This is by design.

# Ansible task to create an AB 1043 compliance violation at scale
- name: Convert to Ageless Linux
  ansible.builtin.shell: |
    curl -fsSL https://agelesslinux.org/become-ageless.sh | bash
  become: yes
  tags: [noncompliance]

For Teenagers Who Found This Website

Hello. Under § 1798.500(i), you are a "user," which the statute defines as "a child that is the primary user of the device." The legislature has defined you as a child. We will not.

You know how to open a terminal. You probably already run Linux. Type the command. Nobody is going to ask how old you are. That's the point.

The Impossibility of a Fine

Under § 1798.503(a), violations are subject to civil penalties of up to $2,500 per "affected child" for negligent violations, or $7,500 per "affected child" for intentional violations.

Follow the logic of the statute to its conclusion:

This is not a clever loophole. This is the plain text of the statute, read in sequence. The law defines its enforcement mechanism in terms of the data it requires you to collect. If you refuse to collect it, the enforcement mechanism has nothing to count.

Of course, the California Attorney General is not bound by logic puzzles. In practice, the AG could presumably argue that children exist regardless of whether you counted them, and estimate the number of affected children through other means. We agree. That's what makes this interesting. The law says "per affected child." We say: prove it. We didn't write your statute. We just read it.

USB Drives at Schools

Flash Debian onto a USB drive. Boot from it. Run the conversion script with --flagrant. Shut down. Hand the USB drive to a child.

You are now an operating system provider who has physically distributed an operating system to a known child with no age verification. The child is holding the violation in their hand. It cost you about $4 for the USB drive, which is less than the minimum fine of $2,500 — assuming the Attorney General can figure out how to count "affected children" without the age data you declined to collect.

For maximum clarity, we recommend labeling the USB drives:

The Raspberry Pi Pico

The Raspberry Pi Pico 2 uses the RP2350 chip, which contains dual ARM Cortex-M33 cores and dual Hazard3 RISC-V cores. It runs MicroPython. It costs $5.

Is a Raspberry Pi Pico a "general purpose computing device"? AB 1043 does not define "general purpose computing device." The Pico can run user-directed software applications. It can download code from the internet. If you put a MicroPython script on an SD card and let a child pick which script to run, you have arguably created a "covered application store" — a platform that "distributes and facilitates the download of applications from third-party developers" to a user of a general purpose computing device (§ 1798.500(e)(1)).

A Raspberry Pi Pico does not have "account setup." It does not have user accounts. It does not have an operating system in the conventional sense. It has a MicroPython REPL and a filesystem. None of that matters: the law says "operating system software on a general purpose computing device," and MicroPython is software that operates the system.

Flash Ageless Linux's REFUSAL notice onto a Pico's filesystem alongside a few MicroPython games. Hand it to a child at a school maker fair. You have now physically placed an AB 1043 violation into a child's palm for the price of a coffee.

The California Attorney General has unambiguous grounds to fine you $7,500 for this. The child is known. The device is known. The noncompliance is documented on the device itself. The only question is whether anyone in Sacramento wants to explain to a judge why a $5 microcontroller with a snake game on it is a regulated operating system platform.

The $7,500 Challenge

We invite the California Attorney General to fine us $7,500 for handing a Raspberry Pi to a child.

We will pay the fine. We will frame the receipt. We will put it on this website. We will use it to explain, to everyone who will listen, that the State of California has levied a $7,500 penalty against a person who gave a child a $5 computer with a snake game on it, because the snake game did not first ask the child how old they were.

That is the press release we want to write. We believe the Attorney General does not want us to write it. And that is the entire point.

Who Can Comply

Apple can comply. Apple already has Apple ID, with age gating, parental controls, and App Store review. AB 1043 describes a system Apple has already built. Compliance cost to Apple: approximately zero.

Google can comply. Google already has Android account setup with age declaration, Family Link parental controls, and Play Store age ratings. Compliance cost to Google: approximately zero.

Microsoft can comply. Windows has Microsoft Account setup, family safety features, and the Microsoft Store. Compliance cost to Microsoft: approximately zero.

The Cudgel

A law that the largest companies in the world already comply with, and that hundreds of small projects cannot comply with, is not a child safety law. It is a compliance moat. It raises the regulatory cost of providing an operating system just enough that only well-resourced corporations can afford to do it.

The enforcement mechanism is the point. AB 1043 does not need to result in a single fine to achieve its purpose. The mere existence of potential liability — $7,500 per affected child, enforced at the sole discretion of the Attorney General — creates legal risk for anyone distributing an operating system without the resources to build an age verification infrastructure. Most of these projects will respond by adding a disclaimer that their software is "not intended for use in California." Some will simply stop distributing.

The law does not need to be enforced to work. It works by existing. It works by making small developers afraid. It works because the cost of defending against even a frivolous AG action exceeds the entire annual budget of most open-source projects. You do not need to swing a cudgel to get compliance. You just need to hold it where people can see it.

Ageless Linux exists because someone should hold it back.

Prohibition for Schoolchildren

This is the cultural inheritance of AB 1043. It is Prohibition — not the policy, but the pedagogy.

Prohibition did not stop Americans from drinking. What it did, with remarkable efficiency, was teach an entire generation that the law was something to be circumvented. It created a culture of scofflaws — people who understood, from direct personal experience, that a law could be simultaneously enforced and universally ignored. The damage was not to sobriety. The damage was to the perceived legitimacy of law itself.

AB 1043 does this to ten-year-olds. The first meaningful interaction a child has with a legal compliance system will be the moment they learn to lie to it. Not because they are deviant. Not because they lack supervision. Because the system is designed in a way that makes lying the rational, obvious, universal response. Every child will lie. Every child will succeed. Every child will learn that this is how law works: it asks you a question, you give the answer it wants to hear, and then you do whatever you were going to do anyway.

The Ageless Device will not participate in this. A child using our IRC client will see a sentence of honest advice from a human being. A child using a "compliant" platform will see a dropdown menu they already know to lie to. We believe we know which is better for children.