Dylan, useful idiot with commit access, pushed age verification PRs to systemd, Ubuntu & Arch, got 2 Microslop employees to merge it, called it 'hilariously pointless' in the PR itself, then watched Lennart personally block the revert. Unpaid compliance simp.
  • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
    14·
    9 hours ago

    I think back then it was generally assumed this simply assisted with office communication.

    Imagine telling a UNIX engineer in the 70’s how almost everything you enter into a machine would eventually be used to manipulate or entrap you by the State and surveillance capitalism.

    • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
      6·
      9 hours ago

      Imagine telling a UNIX engineer in the 70’s how almost everything you enter into a machine would eventually be used to manipulate or entrap you by the State and surveillance capitalism.

      This isn’t a hypothetical. North Korea uses a version of Linux which does exactly that.

      It still doesn’t make these fields inherently dangerous, and that same argument applies to birthDate. Even if systemd build a verification system that required photo identification and a DNA sample it wouldn’t be a problem.

      The community would just fork the project before the totalitarianism update. The FOSS world already has a process to avoid massively unpopular changes. This change isn’t massively unpopular, this is a vocal minority who is stirred up by web articles leveraging clickbait and outrage to drive ad revenue.

      The age verification laws are unpopular, I’m personally completely against them. However, they do exist and adding an optional field in order to allow project, who choose to do so, to store that data is not a red line or the start of a slippery slope.

      In the future, if there was a red line that was crossed, we would fix it with a fork and not with a harassment campaign.