cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/62271427

For those interested, the Systemd release that’s planned to include the controversial ‘birthDate’ field to user records, complying with age-verification laws, is v261 (see ‘milestone’ in the pull request). This release seems to be planned for May.

The current release, from some hours ago, is v260.1. I see that Ubuntu Noble (24.04) just updated to v255.

  • spectrums_coherence@piefed.socialEnglish
    2·
    11 hours ago

    The good side: I feel it might enables me to better setup parental control in the future. If software read from the age field, then the blocking can be more robust than a simple DNS sink hole by pihole, which is really easy to get around, with mobile data or directly visiting IP address.

    I do find this field is fundamentally different from verification using government issued ID (yet). I will definitely fight the next one, but I am kind of okay with this one.

    Cons: it is additional fingerprint parameter, I hope the xdg-desktop protocol can be implemented to give out as little information as possible for the age field, instead of just handing the birthday field to every app that ask for it. And I hope all adult who don’t have any age-based content filtering needs will opt to leave the field empty.