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Hell no, we didn’t fall for anything. This is a real problem with real and far-reaching consequences, associated to multiple legislative attacks against privacy etc, pushed by corporates and religious groups.
YOU fell for the “think of the children” lie and “It’s just a text field” BS. No, this is far worse than just a text field.
reads comments
Umm, I think they can read.
I foresee an astronomical amount of people born at unix epoch to appear if it becomes a required field lol
Since it’s about birth dates, shouldn’t it be an astrological amount of people?
October 15th, 1582 is another one you see often.
Don’t forget December 31st, 1969 which you’ll see when computers adjust UTC midnight at the Unix epoch to local time in the western hemisphere.
Lawmakers don’t care whether you’re 18 or 56
There’s a disconnect over this in that one side looks at the present data and other takes a possible result from that into account. (dividing people into groups…for the sake of argument ok?)
Now from strictly an IT perspective, this is indeed pretty meaningless. One line of code that stores one piece of data. Who cares right?
From the other side you take the very hot topics of politics and privacy into account (two things that are also very front and center with most of the Lemmy crowd afaik).
Because it can start by just one line of code but where will it end? Personally I’d rather be over cautious and assume the worst.
I mean look at the story of cookies. Back in the 90’s they were a small benign piece of data and look how that turned out. Our entire world is influenced by it today to great extend.
Personally I’d rather be overly cautious.
One line of code
Heh, look at the merge again.
It surprised me what a mess systemd code is.
Slippery slope again
People need to remember that slippery slope is a very specific fallacy where a hyperbolic chain of events is not backed up by supporting evidence.
If we allow gay marriage people will want to marry their dogs!
While none of us can possibly know where this ends, this is preemptive compliance with privacy invading measures that are practically indistinguishable from the kind of overreaching control desired by malicious parties. This is a much stronger case and even IF this is the last step, there’s no reason to take it in the first place.
It’s morally correct to loudly object at every step, that’s how you fight this.
The thing to also keep in mind is that this shit is pushed now by Facebook and politicians, none of whom care a single shit about kids, as they so loudly claim. That alone is a huge red flag as it’s always “but think about the poor children!!” that is used for the most nefarious shit being pushed.
This has been in the works for a long time (I’ve seen attempts for this at least a decade ago) and now it finally passed in some places,. meaning that it only got easier to soon implement it everywhere
Yes, it’s a slippery slope argument but that slope is right there in front of us
I found it extremely funny when people started asking for systemd replacements, of all things, after systemd added the ability to store a birth date.
“Replacements”?
We already had loads of those.
And then…
Boom! An explosion of systemd forks since the age “verification”(/attestation) merge and lennart’s blocking of the reversion pull request. https://github.com/systemd/systemd/forks?include=active&page=1&period=1mo&sort_by=last_updated
It didn’t even add that. You can put custom fields into userdb. It just standardized that, right next to other standard optional fields like full name.
Out of all the steps that happened, this one should be the least controversial, but some people see systemd and start the heavy breathing.
The author of the PR explicitly says IT IS TO COMPLY WITH THE NEW TRACKING LAW (LOBBIED BY FACEBOOK/META).
Yeah so Lennart Poettering is on the Executive team of Amutable (https://amutable.com/about), how do we feel about that? Remind me again how the open source community feels about trusted computing … https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.html
Mostly pretty positive actually, having some reasonable assurances that you’re actually running the software that you think you’re running seems like an obvious thing you would want.
Here’s an example of this in practice: https://grapheneos.org/features#auditor.
But I’m sure you know best. Time to cancel GrapheneOS.
“It is too late, for I have already straw-manned your argument in a meme”
Nobody gives a fuck about your weaseling technicalities. The salient fact is that this change was made in order to “comply in advance” with totalitarian fuckery. It SIGNALS POLITICAL SUPPORT for it, and that’s not okay!
The salient fact is that this change was made in order to “comply in advance” with totalitarian fuckery. It SIGNALS POLITICAL SUPPORT for it, and that’s not okay!
On an individual level, absolutely do not comply in advance with fucked up laws.
But as a technical professional working in regulated industries, you have to try to predict future legislation to remain compliant and permit your place of work to continue operating. Anything computer or network related takes time to update, and if you do it wrong you can bring your entire organization down. It’s far better to be proactive and ensure that your organization is compliant with future legislation than it is to sit on your hands because you don’t like this new change and then have to scramble to implement it at the 11th hour before your organization becomes noncompliant and may be forced to pause operating business. That’s literally your job if you are, say, a SystemD developer working for RedHat/IBM
This ire needs to be directed towards your local politicians (whether or not such age verification laws are in the process of being passed!), not towards career developers who happen to work on projects you care about
Or we could direct the ire at both. There’s no shortage of ire here.
I’d agree with you, except that it’s clear that the political systems we live under are flawed/non-functional. Non-compliance may be our next best shot at stopping these laws from getting any more traction.
It’s clear to me with the stance that the dev that closed the revert pull request that they aren’t willing to form any resistance to these types of changes. Actually, the revert pull request stated that their request was due to a number of people discussing the matter and they ultimately decided that there could be harm inflicted, yet the dev ‘poettering’ decided to supercede this decision. Not only is this the first crack in a hold-the-line situation with other major FOSS projects refusing to make the change but also shows their hand at how they stance themselves politically.
…if you do it wrong you can bring your entire organization down.
In theory, but also we just don’t hear of this actually happening to organizations very much. Why? (I could be wrong, I don’t constantly dig through news to find instances of this happening.)
Everything from tax issues to personal data retention and protection policy gets overlooked all the time, with very real consequences, and we don’t hear of those organizations getting “taken down” for it. (Like when Equifax lost all our Pii and were just like ‘whoops.’ They’re still forcibly embedded in our lives anyway.)
Maybe this would get used to bring down a tiny small business if it caught legal attention, but anything larger could likely shrug it off.
Organizations don’t seem to bother with such inconveniences unless it’s actively enforced and audited. Is California really going to do that with this? Seems like it’d be prohibitively expensive.
So it’s just a little weird to me when legislation is proposed to infringe on end-users and suddenly there’s this huge rush to “get compliant” ahead of time. It seems like a lot less IT due diligence and more virtue-signaling agreeance with totalitarian politics.
fact is that this change was made
No, no change was made in fact. It was a pull request… that was rejected.
Guess if I propose to edit you comment to “I’m stupid” and you say “no” you have also made that change somehow…
This is actually incorrect. If you check the birthdate Pull Request changelog and compare with the actual files, all of those changes are still in place. The decision to revert was rejected by ‘poettering’ here.
It was not rejected, it was merged…
The REVERT was rejected by the systemd maintainer. The PR was accepted.
I studied at the PR in question and that’s not the conclusion I arrive at. Let me try to explain how this looks to me.
Also keep in mind, I do think we absolutely need to keep the political pressure on and push back on identity-gating policies with all our collective might. In that light the PR itself does the two things I’d absolutely require here: one, it allows the user to put whatever value they want in that field, including none at all, and two, it disallows all apps from reading that field without the user’s active permission.
Basically it’s a superficially valid implementation of a bullshit requirement that still leaves all the power in the user’s hands and therefore renders the requirement meaningless. Or in other words, a huge middle finger to the proponents of age-checking.
Mind you, I feel there’s also value in loud non-compliance and I’m glad some are taking that road – keep it up, folks. But I’m leery of demands that only one single approach be taken. This needs to be fought on every front we can. And to me the PR in question reads like an effective defensive move.
That’s something I wondered about the person who implemented this too, I wonder if it was an attempt to install a bare minimum to say “There. We did it. Leave us alone.” Instead of leaving it up to the government to force the issue, and he’s getting absolutely raked over the coals for it.
If that’s the case, I feel terribly bad about this backfiring so hard on him. I do think we should be putting up a lot more resistance before resorting to something like this though.
Some others have also suggested that this was done out of spite, however after reading the github I didn’t see anything said to support that. Are you sure you’re not reading something into this that’s not there?
I’ll be honest I haven’t dug into the GitHub transcripts.
Are you sure you’re not reading something into this that’s not there?
Absolutely not sure! In fact my first inclination leans towards the cynical “This is totally a pro-authoritarian virtue signal move.” Because that’s seemingly everything nowadays.
But also I know things are seldom as they first seem. So I’m at least curious about this guy’s actual motives. Coming out of nowhere just for this contribution is hecka sus though.
I don’t like any of it. I looked to the Internet and open source to escape that petulant normie-verse of endless rage and braindead legislation. And they’re coming to assimilate us like they do everything else. :(
I agree that not everything is what it seems at first, I just fear it’s wishful thinking in this case.
I “love” how everyone now recommends alternative/non-systemd distros, not realizing that those will have to implement exactly the same sooner or later. Systemd is just moving fast.
No they wont, because this is open source and fuck corporate tracking and identification.
You only have to implement it if you care about a stupid law. Fuck.The.Law.
Best lawyer ever
Just don’t care about the stupid law!
us law doesnt existvputside the united states. systemd is not a corporation, its open source code.
But systemd exists inside the US. What do you want, an optional field to be optional for the US? Then good news, the fucking optional field is already optional.
If you are an international organized collective without monetary goals - who the fuck cares about local law? What is the worst that can happen - threaten to jail a person that is using $LINUX_DISTRIBUTION?
No, they threaten to jail the creator of $LINUX_DISTRIBUTION. I think the best stance is Arch’s current stance of doing nothing and saying nothing.
And WHO does they want to jail? If its an operation that is distributed all over the world…
You do realise there are many different jurisdictions om this planet, right? Some fight back more valiant against this shit than others.
Of course it’s still up in the air where which law will be introduced, but assuming every single distro or project has to follow the same laws is naive.
There’s a bunch of idiots looking to crucify someone over this. This fucking witchhunt bullshit is really shaking my faith in the basic goodness of the Linux community. Trying to make some dev that put a line of code in systemd into a pariah isn’t a good look for opensource.
Edit: 4 fuckwits and counting that don’t have the courage to show their usernames by telling me why I’m wrong to despise pitchfork mobs.
It’s a good reminder that a lot of Linux Enthusiasts are very quick to bandwagon.
SystemD already has (optional!) fields to store user data, proactively adding a birthdate field as multiple jurisdictions are working to pass age verification/restriction laws and the clear best (or more accurately, least worst) technical path to cleanly doing so is to store the user’s age in the OS to pass to the application, it’s a very sane move.
Developers and maintainers don’t exist in a vacuum. Corporate Linux maintainers need to ensure that their product is legally compliant. SystemD, is developed and maintained by RedHat, a subsidiary of IBM. They would be silly not to be proactive in the face of a clear legislative trend to ensure their product remains legally compliant.
It’s the same thing any professional has to do when they work in a regulated industry (which IBM operates in many regulated industries, from finance to banking to military contracting, they have a ton of industry regulations to try to meet), keep an ear to the ground for any likely upcoming new legal requirements and proactively meet those potential new requirements so instead of scrambling at the 11th hour you can focus on other things.
Folks blowing up on this should be focusing their efforts on their legislators, not on hardworking devs who are just trying to make a living
Folks blowing up on this should be focusing their efforts on their legislators, not on hardworking devs who are just trying to make a living
I’ve talked about why we all should be voting on Lemmy and its a bridge too far. Particularly the ml crew.
You won’t listen anyway. Just look at your language, calling us idiots and fuckwits while pretending you’re the level-headed one.
There’s enough comments under just this meme and every single discussion on this topic explaining why that change is a direct attack on privacy and privacy being the reason why many of us chose Linux.
Just because one idiot state in the US changes a law doesn’t mean the entire world needs to follow. Fuck em.
Isn’t it up to 5 now? Plus other countries. About a third of a billion people threatened to be living under such statutes. So far. Billionaire pedos have other plans for how to “protect” our children, than “doesn’t mean the entire world needs to follow”.
It’s enablement.
Of what?
They ask for it to store a date today, ask for IDs the next. Heck they already want 3d printers to somehow identify if they’re printing parts that can be used in guns, but 3d printers don’t have that kind of computing power nor should they need that so odds are most companies will require an internet connection and upload to a central server to be analyzed. And thus privacy goes away unintentionally.
ask for IDs the next.
Who? How?
It’s just a stupid “slippery slope” fear mongering. “Then Linux will require a child sacrifice to even boot and will not connect to the internet unless you recite the entire Pledge of Allegiance”.
It’s just a stupid “slippery slope” fear mongering
Do you want me to point to the last 25 years?
I could go back further.
The slippery slope fallacy has to do with ignoring the fact that restraint is possible.
I am gonna ask you to look at the last 25 years and show me where there’s been an ounce of restraint to privacy in the US. An ounce of restraint placed upon surveillance.
Do you want me to point to the last 25 years?
Yes, please point me to all the instances of open source projects implementing some mandatory ID checks. You know what? Just name one.
The slippery slope fallacy requires that the expected escalation be unlikely.
There already exists places where third party age verification is required, so it’s not an unreasonable expectation that a government already pushing for age verification “for the children” would also try a similar kind of legislation.
Yes, please point me to all the instances of open source projects implementing some mandatory ID checks. You know what? Just name one.
Given that open source wasn’t a hard criteria until you just added it to try and support your argument , why would proof of a position nobody has taken help anyone?
Perhaps you meant point you at the instances of legislative creep around privacy and age verification in the last 25 years, as was suggested.
In which case you can just search for it, it’s easily findable.
If you need help with search terms, try “Age verification UK”
Nobody is claiming all(or any) open source projects will comply, the argument is that this is a step towards laws/legislation that make not complying illegal.
You could argue against that, but i don’t think you’d have much of an argument, which you probably know, because you would have done that already if it was a valid point.
What they are pointing at is that systemd has potentially done something to pre-capitulate and voicing their concern.
Nobody is pushing this single field change in isolation is a full age verification system, to pretend they are is disingenuous and reeks of bad faith.
Given that open source wasn’t a hard criteria until you just added it
Dude, we’re talking about systemd. It being open source is the single most important factor here. If you don’t understand this you have no idea what is being discussed.
Bringing up age verification in UK is like saying iptables supports internet censorship because great firewall of China exists.
They aren’t “asking for a date”
The PR in question just adds a way to store a birth date. That’s it
In order to comply with the specific Californian law. It’s referenced in the PR. If you could read (to quote your meme) you’d be very upset.
In before there’s a fork that automatically sets the age to April 1st, 1984.
But why are they?
To comply
To not comply while superficially pretending to, I suspect, from studying that PR. See my other comment above, where I run my mouth a little longer about this.
This hasn’t been needed until just now, coincidentally when dipshit one-foot-in-the-grave out of touch sociopaths try to make it a law? It’s just a fluke that the timing is the same?
Couldn’t reply to me pointing out that this was merged, and was stated to be explicitly to support age verification laws, so you had to lie about it as a meme instead.
Because thats what youre doing right now, lying and spreading misinformation. You can admit it.
Age verification could be a usecase. The PR in question just adds a optional date field labeled birth date. If you are mad about age verification (as you should be) feel free to direct your rage elsewhere.
Can’t tell if you’re a bad faith pedant or just indescribably naive.
Age verification could be a usecase.
ITS THE EXPRESS PURPOSE AS WRITTEN IN THE PR.
I will absolutely direct my anger and frustration where it belongs, which includes systemd along with the dumbasses pushing these laws.
As well as you for spreading misinformation. Make no mistake, its deserved.
It enables another dead brained dev to push it further
Little by little
It is just a arbitrary field. They could have a field for all sorts of questionable things and it wouldn’t bother me.
It is up to the people outside of systemd on how it gets used. Systemd is non political and will implement whatever features have a use case. They don’t control the distro.
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954
They don’t control the distro.
And google doesn’t officially control web standards, but their monopoly on browser usage means they have “effective” control, for the most part at least.
See the manifest v3 changes for extensions.
Its step one of falling in line like a good little fascist puppet.
Technology is inherently political.
This is something that has been known and taught for decades.
Learning towards bad faith pedant here.
you don’t know what inherent means, apparenty.
fuck me, the “everything is political” crowd in here needs to touch some grass.
That’s actually an interesting question…is grass political ?
By touching it, would we be signalling some sort of political stance ?
Something to ponder.
hi. slrpnk.net user here. yes. grass is political. when you mow your grass is determined by social contracts, the kind of grass you grow is reflective of the economic pressures you experience. when a city makes a green area, they must engage with politics on how to determine where and what the green area will be.
since the dawn of civilization, aka growing grass for food purposes, grass growing has been both political in its decision making, as well as a driving force in politics.
everything is political, and calling people who think that chronically online is goofy
The birth date field that was added can be used by age verification processes, but it’s not age verification itself.
It was added specifically for the purpose of two state laws and Brazil.
Trying to weasel it as “this doesnt implement it” is misinformation at best.
Okay.
How does it verify?sigh
How do these laws do anything to “protect children”? And since they dont actually do that, which you may already be aware of, what do you think their purpose is?
Then ask that question to yourself and think about whether the verification of an age is the issue with what’s going on here, and why people are angry with systemd maintainers merging something that houses PII, for no other stated reason or potential use case than a law that will have zero ability to “protect children”.
Edit: and to be clear, laws that currently exist in two states, CA & CO, as well as Brazil. Thats it.
Okay
Look at the pull request
Tell me how it verifies anything. It’s a field.
I’m not arguing about the politics. The law is laughably inept at best and horrifyingly insidious at worst (and the truth is likely both at the same time).
But again, read the change, read the comments, tell me what verification is happening.Then ask that question to yourself and think about whether the verification of an age is the issue with what’s going on here
Verification is the issue. Or, rather, it would be if there was any verification here at all.
I could put 1970-01-01 in that field no problem. Systemd has asked for precisely 0 additional information from any of its users, because it neither asks you to fill it in nor verifies that what you filled it with is correct. Just like the real name and location fields that were already present, which, might I remind you, are also PII.
Systemd isn’t the problem here. The laws are a problem and pissing in systemd’s direction won’t change that.
Storing a users birthday is useful metadata anyway. I’m surprised it wasn’t stored before.
The age isn’t verified is any way. You can set it to the 1800s for all it cares
Another datapoint for fingerprinting.
So don’t provide it or give it a fake value.
This is not very 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 of you.
How does one enter an older DOB without causing an underflow?
Implement it as a s64 instead of a u64. Ugh, honestly. Back when it was a 32 bit integer it made sense to make it unsigned because we’d have run out of numbers by now otherwise. But as of the advent of 64 bit unix time values there’s really no reason not to implement it as a signed value smh
It is stored as a json date string
That was a Unix Epoch joke
How is that useful information? To what purpose?
Auto-filling those “you must be at least X old to access this content” inputs could be one? Eg Steam could skip that page directly when accessing 18+ games.
I suppose you could ask the same for the realName and location fields that are already in systemd.
Name and email are useful for network admins to know what user is responsible for what process and location is used for timezone configuration. Autofill information can be get from the browser. What is next, systemd asking for credit card and full address?
There are jurisdictions where Steam has to explicitly ask every time you open an age-gated page, that’s why they do it and haven’t stored it before. That’ll presumably not change.
- Congratulate the user on their birthday.
- recommend age appropriate software for communication, learning and games.
- statistics on the demographics of the user base
Don’t forget the personalized ads! 🫠
compamys who want to de-microslop and still need feilds like that for whatever purpose
your argument is an oxymoron. if the data is useful meta data, but the user can just put what ever they want as the date then it’s not storeing useful data. and that means it should not exist.
unless the point is to use it in the future where the user can’t enter what ever they want and thus legitimizes all the commotion.
You can also store an email there, so it can be found by other programs, but you can also leave it blank, or enter a fake email if you don’t want your email to be stored.
Given the open nature of Linux, I find it hard to believe they can lock it down like that.
The point is to comply with the letter of a shitty law and avoid volunteer projects getting killed by lawsuits, while being useless for tracking purposes.
This law was written by Microsoft lobbyists so they can sue desktop Linux out of existence, and this PR prevents that.How would they be able to sue systemd? Genuine question. As i understand it, it is a local law. How could they force open source projects to comply? If I am located in Europe, for example, how would they even try to sue me by “breaking” the law of an american state? And how would they stop people frlm still using the “illegal” software?
They’d sue the SPI.
then if it could be left blank or not a verifiable date… it would not comply with the law making its existence…. worthless. unless it is to make it mandatory in the future
The law said the OS must have a method to enter an age at account creation and an API for applications to query it. The systemd PR satisfies that, so the SPI and anyone representing a distro that uses systemd is off the hook legally.
so the second step in enshitification then. seems to me nipping it in the bud seems the better play. best to just slap a “not in california” sticker on it and provide it the same as always.
at this point i dont treat peoples invocation of the slippery slope fallacy as coherent or honest based on historical evidence
Yeah like the email address and the full name of the user.
… What do you mean it’s blank for 99% of users?
Email address and name are actually useful for network environments of a system admin needs to know who is the user behind a process or something. How old the user is is complete useless.
Unless your system is for you and your kid, for example
Do you not know how old your child is?
Are you serious? I mean there’s a lot of dumb shit in this thread but come on
And how is it useful then? Parental controls have existed for decades and you never had to give your age to Facebook, who is the main proponent of these laws in the US and has poured millions of dollars into their creation.
This isn’t about protecting kids. It’s about adding an additional fingerprint companies and governments can use to track and identify you and what you do with your system.
Providing a place to store and read data for minimal, nominal, non-invasive compliance with legislation so that people can protect themselves without harming anyone else
Things I have never said anything about:
- Giving your age to anyone
- Laws in the US
- Protecting kids
- Fingerprinting
I have mine set ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Found the 1%!
Wrong. The earliest date you can set it to is 1900!!! 😠
You could also just not set it instead of using a nonsensical date
source? i mean you went through the effort to post a meme about it at least include the relevant information
The source is the source: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/acb6624fa19ddd68f9433fb0838db119fe18c3ed
Takes a birth date for the user in ISO 8601 calendar date format. The earliest representable year is 1900. If an empty string is passed the birth date is reset to unset.
That’s it. That’s all it does.
Whatever was discussed in the PR, the code does precisely nothing to implement any kind of verification. It’s just an optional birth date field, like tons of electronics have had forever.
So they’re introducing a system where a users age can be verified?
Hmm, if only there was a name for that.
Stores the user’s birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws\ in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc.
So they’re introducing a system where a users age can be verified?
No. They are not.
It is an optional field that does no semblance of checking its veracity. Again, like basically every bit of electronics has had forever.
It is literally for the act of verifying a users age.
Being the verifier instead of the requester doesn’t make it not age verification. It’s part and parcel.
I just don’t see how it’s any different than my Sony PSP having an optional birthday field. Or oldschool forums having one. It can’t possibly affect me, or anyone who’s concerned about it.
If systemd starts talking about bundling face scanners or whatever they actually need to verify someone’s age, and then tons of linux systems start requiring it, then I will be gravely concerned.
it’s optional now but can be mandatory later? It literally takes a baby monkey’s brain to understand that.
Also this is literally in the PR:
Stores the user’s birth date for AGE VERIFICATION, as required by recent laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc.
ah yeah because all of our digital clocks, smartphones, smart watches, microwaves, washing machines, TVs, and… what else stores user age in a standardized manner? oh, you say none of these and no other things either?
I don’t think anyone who read even the first paragraph of the article (at least the one i read) would say they are doing verification. They are simply adding a field for data to be housed if anyone wants to opt in. Instead of putting it in 20 different spots/apps it’s in one place that any third party can reference.
it’s in one place that any third party can reference.
But why would I want that?
Even if you ignore the whole “this doesn’t verify anything” discussion, why would I want to give third parties easy access to personal and potentially sensitive information? I personally am not interested in simplifying data collection for corporate entities who definitely do not give a shit about the safety of my personal data, let alone hypothetical children. I do not know why this data collection needs or would be desired to be implemented within systemd, besides being a direct response to age verification laws saying its an OS providers responsibility to collect it. Arbitrary data collection by private entities is not “useful”. My personal data has no business being referenced by random asshats that ask for it. There are so few things in the world that “justify” needing my age that I would suggest it would be easier to make my birth date a permanent data point on my PC. Same goes for the other personal details that systemd already supports. Crazy to imagine anyone actually using those on a personal machine.
“While our lawyers are fighting it in court, we decided to whip up the barest minimum viable proof of concept so that if it does come to pass, at least it’ll be on our terms, and not a rushed piece of easily-exploitable garbage pushed out at the last second” the systemd team, probably
Edit: source, two weeks ago, the pull request conversation: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954#issuecomment-4032221990
That’s the question: would they fight it? From all I’ve seen so far, they wouldn’t.
I’m Jeremy from System76. We are in talks with legislators and there are likely to be amendments to the age verification bills, as well as conflicting requirements in different jurisdictions. It may even be the case that open source operating systems are exempted entirely. I detailed this on the xdg mailing list here:
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2026-March/014797.html
I have other concerns about this specific implementation. By relying on systemd, which is decidedly unportable to non-Linux operating systems, and not used across all Linux operating systems either, it will force at least one alternative implementation to exist. If these implementations end up having to collect jurisdiction specific requirements, that makes it much harder for compliance.
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954#issuecomment-4032221990Yeah, I’ve read that discussion a few days ago. That specific post seemed reasonable, but that was a comment from outside the core systemd team, wasn’t it? As far as I understood all of this, different people took the decision to merge, without coordinating their efforts with those of the corporate linux distros (Pop!, Ubuntu, Red Hat/Fedora, (Open)SUSE).
Its a nullable field, chill. It’s exactly the same as a Linux distro installer asking for your first name for account setup and the moral outrage is genuinely embarrassing
Edit: not to mention that good system design reduces redundant data. If programs want your birthdate, they’ll either repeatedly ask you or go to a central source. If you don’t want to give out that information, you enter a null value or you put something random. The only difference is now you don’t have to repeatedly do that
Good system design doesn’t do things without me asking it to. I’ll gladly manually re enter my birth date for an external service if its required, which to be clear, should be as close to 0 times as possible. What, should I keep all my job application info in the initialization system too? Because a website I’m on might ask for it at some point? Don’t want to be too redundant.
Literally this field serves no purpose other than to build compliance with the surveillance state. No end user asked for this. Like I said, can’t imagine any end user making use of the existing systemd fields either. But those also didn’t get any attention because they weren’t made as a reaction to threats by a malicious regime.
It is just a optional field
Be mad at lawmakers not developers who are trying to make the best of a shitty situation
It was also an option to not make a useless field. Not like this self reported dob is going to cut it for the existing age verification laws as is exists now. But I can be mad at people in a position of community production for not having a spine, too.
How is this supposed to be making the best of the situation anyway? It accomplished nothing but piss off the community and signify to authoritarians that open source developers are ready to bend over for them. Simply threaten unenforceable fines across the world and suddenly everything is hopeless. Better get ready to comply, its inevitable! Its pathetic. Ageless Linux might be performative bs, but at least its critical of this over reach instead of intentionally signalling compliance in advance.
I speak only for myself, but I’m not mad at any developers for following with this. I wish they wouldn’t, but I can’t blame them for following the law to protect themselves.
I still think this is bullshit and just going down the slippery slope. The next thing is “this value doesn’t do anything. Now we need a law that actually checks an ID!” And it just keeps getting worse and worse.
Don’t give them an inch on any of this bullshit. And by them, I do mean the governments trying these stupid laws that, at best, waste taxpayer money and valuable time spent on other worthwhile things.
earliest representable year is 1900
(Time to set it to) literally 1984!
You can if you want
You also could just ignoro it entirely as it is optional
Well I still don’t dang like it I’ll tell you hwat.
And then they scream RTFM at linux noobs
