America needs this

'I'm a 960 SAT guy'

'Grave concerns'

'People are acknowledging that she imploded'

'His remaining time is short'

Column SFF Bestiary Sentience, Sapience, and Animal Intelligence To what extent are animals aware of their existence? By Judith Tarr | Published on February 23, 2026 Photo by Michael Dziedzic [via Unsplash] Comment 1 Share New Share Photo by Michael Dziedzic [via Unsplash] Last week’s article on Flerkens spawned a discussion as they often do, correcting and expanding on a somewhat offhand comment about Flerken cognition. Specifically I asked, Are they sentient? That’s not what I should have asked, I was informed. The word I should have used was sapient. I was actually riffing off the article before that, about Star Trek and Data’s cat, Spot. In the Star Trek universe, sentience is used in the sense of sapience. It goes beyond the processing of sensory data to the capacity for intelligence and self-awareness. The essential episode in this context aired during Season 2, in 1989: “The Measure of a Man.” It was written by Melinda Snodgrass, and it’s considered to be one of the best episodes in the whole of the Trek Universe—some would say the best. It distills the philosophy of Trek into a single point: the nature of humanity, in the sense of both the human species and humane behavior. The question is whether Data is a person or a piece of property. Whether he belongs to himself or to Starfleet. It’s a powerful episode on a number of levels. It’s strikingly apposite to questions we’re asking now about what we’re calling Artificial Intelligence. But what’s relevant here, in this series, is how it defines sentience (or sapience). Dr. Maddox, the cyberneticist who wants to take Data apart and make a limitless number of copies, argues that Data is not a sentient being and is not entitled to the rights granted such a being in the Federation. The three criteria of sentence in this context are intelligence, self-awareness, and consciousness. Intelligence, says Maddox, is the ability to learn and understand and to cope with new situations. Self-awareness means that “you are conscious of your existence and actions. You’re aware of yourself and your own ego.” Consciousness is wrapped up in those two things. You know who you are, and that you are. You’re aware of your place in the universe. In the episode, Captain Picard is able to convince both Maddox and the judge in the hearing that Data meets all three criteria and is therefore a sentient being. (Or sapient if you will.) That’s the context in which Data composes the “Ode to Spot,” in which he says, And though you are not sentient, Spot, and do not comprehend,I nonetheless consider you a true and valued friend. Spot of course is a sentient being. Merriam-Webster defines the word as “capable of sensing or feeling : conscious of or responsive to the sensations of seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, or smelling.” What she may not be is sapient: possessing or expressing great sagacity. That is, wise in the sense of homo sapiens. Capable of higher cognitive functions. In Dr. Maddox’s terms: intelligent, self-aware, and conscious. Spot, Data believes, is not any of those things. She’s a creature of instinct. She doesn’t think. She’s not aware of herself. That’s the traditional view of animals in Western culture. Man is unique among them all, raised up above them, ordained by heaven to rule over them by virtue of his superior intelligence. He is the only being with the ability to construct and use tools, and most of all, he is the only one who has developed language. The conception of animal cognition has changed considerably since Next Generation first aired. One of the main criteria of human intelligence, tool use, turns out not to be unique to humans. Primates, birds, insects, and sea creatures have been observed using tools. There’s even a cow in Austria, who may or may not be a genius of her species. Attempts to teach animals human language go back well before the original series. Increases in computing power and changes in how we perceive animals have given us the capacity to decode what may be language in sperm whales. It’s becoming clear that intelligence is not an on-off switch, or human-not human. Rather, it’s a spectrum, and many animals are a lot further along it than we used to think. That brings us to a social-media phenomenon that’s been growing exponentially: animals pushing buttons equipped with human words, to communicate with their humans. Author Mary Robinette Kowal is part of the movement with her calico cat Elsie. There is a huge study, thousands strong, of button-pushing dogs, coordinated by Federico Rossano of the Comparative Cognitive Lab at the University of California in San Diego. Rossano’s study and others like it are featured in a brand-new Nova documentary, “Can Dogs Talk?” It’s well worth watching if you’re interested in animal intelligence. It addresses the nature of language and asks whether dogs are actually using it to communicate, or if they’re applying more or less random associations to specific buttons, words, or sounds. Do they understand what Play or Outside or Beach actually means, as a word, or would any sound (or gesture or signal) do just as well to get them what they want? Are we training them to push a button to get a set response, or are they applying some form of reasoning to their choice of buttons? Animal-communication studies prior to Rossano’s have tended toward very small samples, as small as one researcher focused on a single animal removed from its natural habitat. Under those conditions, it’s questionable as to whether the animal has learned language or if the researcher has trained them to respond in specific ways to specific stimuli. The Rossano study encompasses ten thousand dogs in fifty countries. In its most basic form, each owner records button pushes on a simple spreadsheet. A more sophisticated version uses an app that records when the dog pushes a button, which button it pushes, and whether the button has been pushed by the dog or a human. It’s the largest animal-cognition study that’s ever been done, and it’s ongoing. It’s meant to continue for years. The scale of it is immense. Rossano observes that in three months, the study records over a million button pushes. Most of the communications between dogs and humans are transactional. Dog wants something, dog asks for it. Outside, Play, Food. This isn’t random, says Rossano. Dogs are stating their preferences. They’re letting their humans know what they want. But are they “talking” through the buttons? That takes us into definitions of language, and the difference between action words and words for objects. A dog who can identify toys by name is rare compared to one who can tell their owner they need to go potty or they want to go to the beach. Even rarer is the dog who is capable of what’s called language productivity. Given a limited number of words or buttons, if the dog wants or needs to convey a concept that isn’t in the existing vocabulary, they will combine two or three words into a new super-word. Some 800 dogs in Rosano’s study have been doing this. One for example lost her button for Beach—it broke. On her own, without prompting, she pressed Water and Outside instead. One of the animal-cognition experts in the documentary warns that one has to be skeptical. The substitute buttons are close by the broken one, so maybe she just pressed the nearest ones. They can’t test it because once she’s used those buttons, they mean Beach. A test would mean moving the buttons and seeing if she still used the same ones. But there are other dogs who have combined other buttons into new configurations, and those don’t seem to be random. The one that convinced Rossano to do the study despite his reluctance to risk his career on it was a dog who went through a progression of buttons: Mad, Ouch, Stranger, Paw. The owner at first didn’t make sense of it, till she asked the dog for her paw—and found the “stranger,” a foxtail stuck in the tender web beween toes. That’s communication. It gets even more amazing in a smaller study based in Hungary, which looks at what canine cognition expert Claudia Fugazza calls gifted word-learner dogs. There are only about fifty in the world, that she has found so far. These dogs can learn multiple words for objects—as many as a thousand—and are also capable of sorting them into categories. Tug toy versus fetch toy, for example. Can these or any dogs compose complex sentences with correct grammar? As far as we know, no. But that they can learn and remember words, and acquire a considerable vocabulary, yes. And they can create new words by combining those they already know. Some appear not just to ask for things, or name things, but to narrate actions. One might press the button for Settle, without being asked or rewarded for it, then put herself to bed. She’s just talking to herself, apparently. Using her word. Is she intelligent? She seems to be. Is she self-aware? She may be. Is she conscious? It’s possible. The more we learn, the more data we gather, the more we’ll understand about how, and whether, and to what extent dogs think. Cats, too. Eventually. One hopes.[end-mark] The post Sentience, Sapience, and Animal Intelligence appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays Heated Rivalry Take the Fire Out From the Wire: Imagining a Future in Heated Rivalry How can we find a path forward after the cottage? By Rachel Kessler | Published on February 23, 2026 Credit: Sabrina Lantos / HBO Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Sabrina Lantos / HBO “I’m coming to the cottage”  Five words that broke the internet when spoken by Connor Storrie’s Ilya Rosanov at the end of Heated Rivalry’s immaculate fifth episode. Spoilers for the first season follow: After years of fighting the deeper feelings underneath his sexual relationship with hockey arch-rival Shane Hollander, Ilya’s decision to accept Shane’s invitation to his cottage is a definitive moment of hope for what might be possible between them in the future.   Suffice it to say that since Canadian showrunner Jacob Tierney brought the characters from Rachel Reid’s Game Changers romance series to screen, the concept of the “the cottage” has sustained its fan base through the tumultuous weeks at the start of 2026. I can definitely confirm my mental health is hanging by the thin thread of a group chat named “Stupid Canadian Wolf Birds.” I will also confess I’ve taken no shortage of delight from scandalizing students at the college where I am chaplain when they hear that the priest is obsessed with the “gay hockey show.” Far from being a guilty pleasure, however, I honestly believe Heated Rivalry is a piece of media we desperately need right now, and one which resonates deeply with my own faith.  As an avid romance reader, one of the things I have appreciated about Tierney’s approach to the source material of Heated Rivalry is the respect shown to romance as a genre. Tierney understands romance as, essentially, a kind of fantasy. It is a credit to Tierney’s writing that he does not dismiss the female fans of romance (including of M/M romance, which is a larger and nuanced conversation). At its core, the idea of “the cottage” serves as a metaphor for that escapist fantasy. Such escapism has a place, certainly, within genre fiction. We might ask though, if such fantastical escapism is all the cottage has to offer us? What if we view “the cottage” not just as representing idealized escape from the world, but as defiant hope for what the world might become?  It is worth noting that the promise of escape and a fantasy where he and Shane can be hidden from the world is not initially enough to get Ilya to accept the temptation of “the cottage.” Shane in his delightfully drug-induced state (as we have no doubt seen enacted by stuffed animals and household objects thanks to the wonders of TikTok) tries to lure Ilya not to return to Russia for the summer but come to his secluded cottage: “We’ll have so much fun. It’s so private. No one will know … We could have a week or even two. Completely alone. Together!” While Storrie portrays Ilya’s hesitation quite clearly, the book is able to go deeper into Ilya’s fear of accepting Shane’s invitation. Up until this point, Ilya and Shane have stolen only moments together. Ilya has at long last accepted the depth of his feelings (even confessing them to Shane, albeit in his native Russian). Despite this, Ilya does not believe any real future with Shane is possible. He hesitates to accept the prospect of this extended time together because he does not know how to return to the scarcity of what they can have moving forward. Ilya is actually prepared to end his relationship with Shane altogether because the pain of a clean break feels more endurable to him than the pain of longing for an impossible future.  So what gets Ilya to the cottage? The original “Game Changer,” Scott Hunter. Without a doubt one of the best scenes in the show happens after Scott wins the 2017 Stanley Cup for the New York Admirals. At this point, Scott has been in a secret relationship with his boyfriend Kip for years (in the show’s timeline). After hoisting the long-desired cup over his head, Scott watches—alone—as his teammates’ wives and children pour onto the ice in celebration from the stands. Meanwhile, the love of Scott’s life sits far removed among the crowds. Scott realizes that hiding his love from the world is no longer enough for him. He calls Kip down onto the ice, where they share a kiss that can only be described as triumphant defiance. As Scott and Kip embrace, the camera circles them, cutting away to show Ilya and Shane each watching from their homes in wonder and confusion. Caught up in this moment, Ilya calls Shane with his declaration of coming to the cottage.  The background musical sections throughout Heated Rivalry are worth a whole separate series of reflections. Setting Wolf Parade’s “I’ll Believe in Anything” to underscore this moment, however, was a particularly inspired move by Teirney. Choosing to believe the world can be different than what it is in itself is often a leap of faith. Acting on that hope—and indeed believing we deserve that better world—is where change happens. Ilya’s decision to accept Shane’s invitation to the cottage is not about realizing he loves Shane or he is willing to risk two weeks of privacy. Accepting that invitation—declaring “I’m coming to the cottage”—means that Ilya is willing to risk that the world might be different than he has let himself believe.  The defiant hope that ends Heated Rivalry’s episode 5 is inarguably inspiring. Hope is not an abstract ideal, though. Living into hope does much more than giving us as individuals the courage to seize opportunities for ourselves we had not thought possible. Living into hope is transformational in a way that we might call contagious. Scott declares his love for Kip and kisses him in front of thousands of people because he has decided for himself that he is tired of living in the shadows and that he does, in fact, deserve sunshine. That choice, however, catches on. Unknown to himself, Scott inspires Ilya to hope for more in his own relationship and seize the opportunity before him. Book readers of the Game Changers series will know that Ilya goes on to become something of a Nick Fury for other queer players in the NHL. He makes appearances throughout the other books, encouraging others to pursue relationships and, eventually, recruiting other players to coach at the charity hockey camp he and Shane run in the summers. While Unrivaled, the final book of Rachel Reid’s series, is not yet out, the synopsis certainly suggests we will see this community come together to withstand the bigotry and homophobia of the hockey world. The series is called “Game Changers” for a reason.  It is important to note that Jacob Tierney is a gay man who has adapted a work written about gay male characters originally written by a woman. Without doubt, his identity impacts the hopeful vision of what the world might look like in his TV adaptation. Speaking of triumphant and emotionally cathartic kiss between Scott and Kip, Tierney noted in a recent interview: “I mean, this was—you know—this was the point. This was to give people this moment that you don’t get when you’re a kid. You don’t get this.” Indeed, we might argue that far from simply being “smutty” the explicit content in Heated Rivalry serves as an unapologetic, defiant embrace of sexuality and intimacy on behalf of the queer community.   One of the most impactful added scenes in the series takes place between Shane and his mother after Shane’s parents discover his romantic relationship with Ilya. While Shane is racked with guilt over years of hiding and lies about his secret relationship, it is Shane’s mother who tearfully apologizes: “I’m sorry I didn’t make you feel like you could tell me.” Tierney’s vision of how a parent should react to discovering an adult child’s closeted sexuality may be idealized compared to how such a situation all too often plays out. At the same time, isn’t that idealized conversation what we want the world to be? Isn’t that how a parent should respond?  Similarly, we might look at how Tierney strengthens several of the side characters from the source material (notably the women). While Rose’s role in both the book and the series is largely responsible for Shane finally embracing and coming to terms with his sexuality, Tierney gives significantly more agency to Svetlana, who goes from being a semi-regular friend with benefits situationship with Ilya in Boston to a childhood friend from Russia. Svetlana perceptively notes Ilya’s long-term texting relationship with “Jane”, and she clearly indicates she is aware of “Jane’s” true gender. Svetlana pushes Ilya to take steps forward in emotional intimacy with “Jane”/Shane, first in the ill-fated tuna melt encounter, and later in nudging Ilya to acknowledge the depth of his feelings. In another critical moment, Scott Hunter finds himself challenged by Kip’s friend Elena who confronts him about hiding Kip away as a “dirty little secret.” There is a fair criticism to be made of Elena’s challenge to Scott on Kip’s behalf – no one should be pressured to come out before they are ready. No doubt, though, Teirney intended the words he wrote (which differ slightly from the book) to carry the very true, hopeful message that Kip “deserves sunshine … and so do you.”  Tierney is quite intentional in linking the sunshine we all deserve to the themes of hope and possibility of the cottage itself. Numerous commentators have rightly pointed out the contrast in lighting between the first episodes of the series and the finale at the cottage. Shane and Ilya share their first hook-up in a darkened hotel room. When they finally reunite in Shane’s cottage, Ilya makes a point of opening the blinds to Shane’s bedroom, allowing themselves to experience sexual intimacy in open daylight. The fact that Tierney so blocks both scenes almost identically allows the contrast in lighting to be even more apparent. While the cottage constitutes removal from the distractions and barriers to their relationship, the cottage is also where Shane and Ilya are able to embrace concrete possibilities for their future. Shane wakes Ilya up in the middle of the night with his ten-year plan for how they might one day be in a relationship. Ilya takes the risk of confessing his love for Shane—in English this time! Once Shane and Ilya have acknowledged their feelings, Tierney offers us the beautiful scene of the two of them by the lake as the sun rises in front of them. The light of the cottage is the light of one day no longer hiding but living in the sunshine.  Media like Heated Rivalry may be escapist fantasy at its core, but at its best it is a fantasy of the world that so many of us wish we were living in. Rather than lamenting the current state of the world, it’s worth asking: what is the world that we want to see? What is our role in bringing that world about—either by claiming defiant hope for ourselves or fighting for a better world for one another? We end season one of Heated Rivalry riding off into the future with Shane and Ilya, after they face the revelation of their relationship to Shane’s parents. The cottage has not magically solved their problems. They are still closeted publicly and their future will hold oncoming challenges. Nevertheless, the cottage has given them the courage of their love for one another—not to mention acceptance from Shane’s parents. The cottage has given them hope beyond the (perceived) security of secrecy.  As we move further into 2026 and away from the original air date of Heated Rivalry, a running joke among the fandom is how long we will stay in the collective Heated Rivalry psychosis. How long do we keep “re-heating” (a great term for just continuing to watch the series on repeat). When will it be time to leave the cottage and return to reality? Perhaps the answer is that we shouldn’t leave the cottage. Perhaps our job is actually to expand the cottage and work to make the world a place where the escape to the cottage is no longer necessary.[end-mark] The post Take the Fire Out From the Wire: Imagining a Future in <em>Heated Rivalry</em> appeared first on Reactor.

We just saw another tragic shooting in Rhode Island, this time at a high school hockey game. What people want to know in the immediate aftermath of such tragedies is who did it, where, and why – and how many people were injured or died. We instinctively want to know how close it was to us, if it could have happened to us, and if we could avoid a similar fate. Flying in the face of this human need for truth is the woke legacy media, which puts ideology ahead of facts. The Daily Mail, a British paper, reported early on that the Pawtucket perpetrator was a trans-identifying man in his 50s, the chief victims his wife and children, and the motive likely connected with his gender identification and family conflict about it. Their photos supported this. U.S. legacy media, meanwhile, tried to avoid the above facts. Their reason? The woke dogma the media adhere to is that “trans” people are an oppressed minority and always victims. Thus, the growing instances of mass shootings from people suffering from gender-related mental troubles must be given as little coverage and detail as possible. The Washington Post headline was “Shooting at Rhode Island youth hockey game leaves 3 dead, including shooter, and 3 more wounded.” They quoted the police chief as saying “it may be a family dispute” and that the shooter was “Robert Dorgan, who she [the police chief] said also went by the name Roberta Esposito.” The story from the Associated Press was almost the same. The New York Times also danced around the motive, quickly pivoting to “the painful regularity of gun violence in America.” The Federalist demonstrated in one graphic how the legacy media approached this story. They produced headlines from CBS, CNN, NBC, ESPN, AP, and The New York Times. Not one has the word “transgender.” They all reference a “shooting,” which one said was by a “shooter.” Legacy outlets are so predictable on this that one can infer truth from what they leave out. Initial reports on a (barely) previous mass shooting on Feb. 10 in Canada spoke of a “female in a dress,” or a “gunperson,” leading astute readers correctly to guess the shooter was male. The legacy media do this because they don’t want to violate the Fifth Woke Commandment: You Shall Not Know “What Is a Woman.” In The Ten Woke Commandments (You Must Not Obey), I explain how the progressive Left, which dominates American media, demands we ignore obvious truth to defend their ideology. Anything that does not fit the woke model must be refuted or, better still, ignored. That is the agenda the legacy media serves. Gender ideology claims that identity is subjective. You are what you say you are. Hence the mantra “trans women are women,” repeated by everyone from actor Rupert Grint of the Harry Potter movies to British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer (in 2022–he later changed his mind). Why does it matter if news outlets report the truth about crimes committed by trans-identifying individuals, or any other identity group? It matters because the gender ideology agenda is to give men who identify as women full, unchallengeable access to women’s spaces, and to label anyone fighting for women’s rights a bigot, transphobe, or worse. Ideologues are also still pushing–against mounting evidence that it does not improve outcomes—what they call “gender affirming care.” That means accepting at their word any individual–even a child–who self-identifies as the opposite sex, and using social acceptance, hormones, and surgery to make the person look more like how they feel. It matters because parents have been bullied and shamed into letting their children go so far down this path they can’t go back. Fox Varian is the first successful “detransitioner” to sue her providers for negligence, winning $2 million. Many others, like Prisha Mosley and Chloe Cole, are bravely countering the narrative that everything works out fine once you “affirm” a child’s fleeting sense of gender. And it matters because we see more and more cases of men who are frustrated at their inability to change reality and force the world to accept it that they hurt themselves or others. Clinical psychologist Dr. Ray Blanchard coined the term autogynephilia–“the love of oneself as a woman”–to describe adult men, often in middle age, who enjoy dressing and acting as women and are sexually aroused by the idea of themselves as women. Men fitting this description are often the most aggressive in insisting on their “right” to women’s sports and spaces from spas to prisons. Their families, co-workers, and friends must decide how to help them, and they are best served by the truth, not obfuscation for the sake of ideology. Accurately describing the perpetrators of violence and their motives is a journalistic duty. Hiding the role of gender-confusion in individuals who commit crimes serves only to propagate myths that sustain gender ideology’s crumbling house of cards and will result in more violence. The post The Media Lies About Trans Shooters appeared first on The Daily Signal.

A federal judge on Monday permanently blocked the Justice Department from releasing former special counsel Jack Smith’s report on President Donald Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents.  Smith’s report was set to become public on Tuesday without the court order. Judge Aileen Cannon of the Southern District of Florida had dismissed the classified documents case against Trump and two other defendants, prosecuted by Smith, in July 2024, on grounds that Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional. However, in her Monday ruling she wrote that despite her 2024 order that Smith cease his activity in the case, he continued to compile his report and submitted it to the Justice Department. “Special Counsel Smith and his team went ahead for months, undeterred, preparing Volume II using discovery collected in connection with this proceeding and expending government funds in the process,” Cannon wrote. “To say this chronology represents, at a minimum, a concerning breach of the spirit of the Dismissal Order is an understatement, if not an outright violation of it,” Cannon, a Trump appointee, continued.  “The Court need not countenance this brazen stratagem or effectively perpetuate the Special Counsel’s breach of this Court’s own order,” she wrote. Smith’s first volume of his report alleged Trump participated in a conspiracy as he challenged the 2020 election outcome.  Trump and two other previously indicted individuals, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, filed a motion to block the release of the second volume.  “Special Counsel Smith, acting without lawful authority, obtained an indictment in this action and initiated proceedings that resulted in a final order of dismissal of all charges,” Cannon wrote in her decision. “As a result, the former defendants in this case, like any other defendant in this situation, still enjoy the presumption of innocence held sacrosanct in our constitutional order.” Cannon went on to say that the release of the second report after charges were dismissed would set an unusual precedent.  “Moreover, while it is true that former special counsels have released final reports at the conclusion of their work, it appears they have done so either after electing not to bring charges at all or after adjudications of guilt by plea or trial,” Cannon continued. “The Court strains to find a situation in which a former special counsel has released a report after initiating criminal charges that did not result in a finding of guilt, at least not in a situation like this one, where the defendants contested the charges from the outset and still proclaim their innocence.” The post ‘BRAZEN’: Judge Slams Jack Smith in Blocking His Second Volume of Report on Trump appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Colorado’s latest attempt to regulate minors’ online access differs from its predecessors. Senate Bill 26-051 doesn’t target adult websites directly. Instead, it targets the operating system sitting on your phone. The bill, currently before the Senate Committee on Business, Labor, and Technology with a hearing scheduled for February 24, would require operating system providers to collect your date of birth when you create an account. We obtained a copy of the bill for you here. That data gets converted into an age bracket signal, which then flows to app developers through an API whenever you download or open an app. Developers must request and use that signal. The age check becomes embedded in the infrastructure before you ever reach the app itself. This is a structural change from what Colorado has tried before. SB 25-201, passed out of committee in 2025 but ultimately lost, required websites hosting material deemed harmful to children to run their own age verification. It also mandated at least one verification method that didn’t expose a user’s identity, and required compliance with Colorado’s Privacy Act data handling standards. Those provisions didn’t save it. Civil liberties groups argued that requiring government ID to access lawful speech burdens adults. Technical experts pointed out that a state mandate can’t easily reach websites hosted outside Colorado. The bill went nowhere. Senate Bill 25-086 tried platform-level requirements instead, making social media companies determine user age categories and redesign accordingly. Governor Jared Polis vetoed it in April 2025, citing feasibility problems, constitutional exposure, and the difficulty of imposing broad mandates on platforms at the state level. SB 26-051 exists because of those failures. By moving enforcement to the operating system layer, lawmakers are targeting a genuine chokepoint. Apple and Google control the operating systems, app stores, account infrastructure, and software distribution pipelines for virtually every smartphone. Requiring age signals at that layer means a defined compliance target with a limited number of companies to regulate. The desktop web doesn’t offer that. Browser-based access spans millions of independently operated sites across multiple jurisdictions. There’s no single point of control. Any law that tried to impose universal age verification across the open web would require something far more radical, either mandatory identity verification for internet access, which would end anonymous browsing entirely, or rely on parental controls, which already exist and remain optional. That reality shapes the bill’s most honest framing: it imposes heavy compliance burdens on operating system providers and app developers while leaving the broader ecosystem largely unchanged. Apple and Google would be required to collect age data, generate signals, and build API infrastructure, cementing Big Tech dominance. App developers would be required to integrate those signals into their applications. Users would be required to provide their date of birth information when establishing accounts. The constitutional terrain here is unstable, thankfully. Federal courts reviewing age verification laws in other states have scrutinized whether such laws are narrowly tailored and whether less restrictive alternatives exist. Parental controls are exactly that alternative. Major platforms already offer device-level and account-level filtering tools that parents can configure voluntarily. Courts have noticed. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Colorado Senate Bill Would Require Apple and Google to Embed ID Checks in Operating Systems appeared first on Reclaim The Net.