- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
- linux@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
- linux@lemmy.world
Some of you need to watch this video, and hang your head in shame.
Dylan Taylor has been receiving constant harassment, including threats to his life and safety, for actions done collectively by SystemD. The article by Sam Bent was explictly mentioned as part of the harassment campaign, and rightfully so.
I don’t think enough people realize that this is catastrophically bad. It’ll discourage people from becoming open source developers, it’ll discourage people from using Linux, and it’ll discourage legislators from taking the Linux community seriously.
If you ever wished ill upon another human being for complying with a relatively inconsequential law, you are better off never touching a computer again. The Linux community has collectively gone so far beyond what is acceptable here.
You must log in or register to comment.
actions done collectively by SystemD
Nope. It only needs one maintainer to do the PR
It’ll discourage people from becoming open source developers
You know what will discourage Them more? Id verification
relatively inconsequential law
Give me your Id. Seriously, go and give me your ID with nothing blurred.
Give me your Id. Seriously, go and give me your ID with nothing blurred.
My age is 26.
That’s not what they asked
I also want to see your passport and your original birth certificate
That’s not what they asked
Yes, I know. I answered the question that reasonably follows from the context. Not their loaded question that assumes something which was not in the pull request.
I know a lot of people like to use the slippery slope fallacy here but even if that applies, you should limit your resistance to points where you actually have a leg to stand on. It’s not like the government would find it much harder to jump straight to age verification without this age indication step. Going all-in know just does all manner of a disservice to the cause of digital privacy.
Yeah I’m not going to give this guy his desired victim role. He put a lot of effort into make privacy invading pull requests. Death threats and doxxing is too far but he deserves some insults.
No he doesn’t. We need to focus our anger on the legislators/ lobbiers (Meta in this case).
Adding birthday fields is not privacy invading in itself.
Well, It depends on where.
Yes, of course. If you ignore current reality, then it’s not privacy invading…
No, it literally just can’t violate your privacy in any way. You have complete control over what, if anything, is placed in that field. No information about you can be gained or disclosed by virtue of the systemd change alone. You can think it’s a bad change because it signals intent to follow a trend of supporting privacy-invading age verification, but you can’t say this specific change in itself is privacy-invading.
You’d have complete control for now.
Don’t give them an inch.
Plenty of distros out there that don’t use systemd
Don’t collaborate with fascists.
I imagine it feels quite righteous to drop maxims like this. I too am reminded everyday how glad I am not to have to live in a fascist state.
That said I think this sort of superficial dismissal is really unhelpful.
I think the vast majority of Linux users will agree we don’t want to have to work with these laws but the reality is that we do. Far better we focus our efforts on minimising harm and promoting alternative mechanisms (e.g. zero-knowledge proofs).
Further I fear this righteousness actually serves to foster a toxic culture in the free software movement. And do you know what we call belligerent people who want to stifle dissent? Fascists!
We’re demanding that the government we pay for respect basic human needs. Privacy is not a luxury. It’s a need. They went to far with this shit so they can take the next mile. Fuck them all and fuck California’s lawmakers for doing it. We should be sending them letters of discontent too.
Lawmakers and politicians in the US ruin everything more and more everyday.
And people down voted me when I called out the Sam Bent blog post for what it is. A hit piece.
Lost me at “If you ever wished ill upon another human being for complying with a relatively inconsequential law”
How does that boot taste?
Agree death threats are crazy harassment, etc but I definitely wish I’ll will towards fascist collaborators.
I’m going to bullet my thoughts on this whole thing because I’m annoyed by the general response, and the implementation as well:
- I don’t wish harm on the dev and I don’t dislike them. I don’t even know them
- Death threats are ridiculous; that’s the working class attacking itself again
- That said, I want to know what compelled this dev to preemptively implement this field not in 1 but in 2 separate PRs
- Both the field and the law itself do not serve the user at all; it’s a bullshit vague law that is using children as cover—again (I’m old enough to know how this game works)
- I’ve always viewed Linux as the rebel among all of the corporate slop we have to constantly dodge, so it is super gross when I see changes in Linux that were made to appease laws built and pushed by fascist tech companies and governments
- Did the dev even open a line of discussion anywhere, or was the PR supposed to be used for that?
- What’s his motivation? Money? Fame? I’ve been a programmer for 20 years and I’d never jump on a chance to add something that aligns with laws I think are unethical dog shit—especially in the Linux space where the whole goal is to not be Windows
- I’m a bit frustrated with the casual “what’s the big deal?” mindset that a lot of people I’ve encountered have about this. Are we not living through the same timeline where the US has fallen under the control of a fascist regime that is being eagerly assisted by Meta, Apple, Microsoft and a ton of other massive corporations? How do people not see that this is the beginning of the wedge? And let’s say it peters out and nothing else happens. I’m not going to be ashamed of the fact that I was a squeaky wheel over it because I’ve seen how these things go. You follow the money and suddenly the bigger picture comes into focus. Why on earth a meager single little dev would implement this, unprompted, is just beyond my reasoning.
This reminds me of when Guillermo Rauch from Vercel praised Trump multiple times. Bro, you’re not Tim Cook. You’re not Ellison, Zuck, or Musk. You’re not even on their level. You’re not going to get on their radar. I have PTSD from fellow tech folks being weirdly aligned with fascism and this whole dumb thing is giving me that vibe again. I don’t think this is that 1:1, but this is like the metal scene. You have to dodge the fascists that seem to weirdly permeate corners of the culture. People that refuse and get annoyed by right-wing labels, but still help right-wing grifters, are their own unique brand of pathetic.
I’ll be upset when a cloud-connected Linux component prevents the system from working unless the real name and birth date fields have been verified
until then, this is just as inert as the real name field which has been there for decades, and far less useful for surveillance than the real name field which has been there for decades
Don’t be logical. You’re supposed to cry fascist and hurl slippery-slope fallacies like this is the Reichstag Fire.
Except this field has been implemented explicitly for this age verification laws. If this was for some random birthday greeting when you open terminal, i think fewer people would be up in arms. context is everything.
if this moron implements compliance with laws that record a birthday today, what is stopping him adding 3rd party verification of id tomorrow? So far his track record is corporate bootlicker. You cannot trust projects where this guy is a contributer to
what is stopping him
The pull request approval process? It’s quite easy to recognize that one change is harmless and another is not. The slope is not THAT slippery.
I completely understand objecting to the systemd change, I also object, but acting like the fascists have already won is a bit crazy.
It is slippery, I have described the process UK is taken here https://piefed.social/comment/10693725
it would be very interesting to see that attempt
but Poettering has already said that functionality doesn’t belong in systemd so I’m not sure where anyone would raise such a PR
seems like an Ubuntu/RedHat level distribution design to pull in a brand new age-verification / mass-surveillance component, or maybe modify an existing telemetry component
the birth date field only made it into systemd because it’s user metadata that is consistent with what is already stored there, whereas surveillance does not
for now, at least
again, I’d be very interested to see what happens with follow-up PRs
Poettering closed the pr that was reverting this age field. What happens is adding more and more control in the future to conform to whatever idiotic laws someone might make. Should we then also implement a filter for what you type online to conform with Russian law about calling their war “SVO”? Its their law after all, so why not make the rest of the world conform? Its already years older then this age verification?
rejecting the revert is completely separate from accepting additional age-check / mass-surveillance PRs, you know this and you are being willfully ignorant
I would be very upset and very surprised if hypothetical follow-up PRs were merged into systemd, and I’m betting they will be rejected
How is it different? The ready acceptance of additional fields specifically for age verification is clearly proof enough that any further bullshit will be accepted just as quickly. PR description clearly outlines it is for the sole purpose of age verification…
Whats wrong with Age verification? its fine to verify age, the problem with the age verification laws is the issue of how age is being verified. In this case its fine because its local first and privacy respecting.
Age verification requires doxxing yourself in order to actually work, and if it doesn’t require doxxing yourself then it won’t work and it can be bypassed, so pointless capitulation granting ease into more authoritarian forms in the future. You don’t see why any actually functional age verification is a problem while fascists are trying to control all the digital architecture?
No it doesnt. If I ask are you 18 and you reply no/yes that is verifying your age without doxing you. This field is for when the user is NOT admin on the machine. This field would be filled out by the parent when they’re setting up their kids machine.
Its not suitable for proving your age. Its adding a field which is a stepping stone to future gating and more control over something that isn’t even applicable to most of the users of the system.
Why not then add a live filter to ensure that you don’t call Putler’s war in Ukraine and call it “SVO” as you are supposed to? Its the law over there and many years older than this one. People already have gone to prison for not complying with it. But hey lets make that a part of linux too. Its law after all… Do you see how stupid it is to blindly comply to something that doesn’t even apply to you?
How is it not suitable? If I setup my kids age and an app wants to use the portal to check if he is over 18 and it returns no. That suitable age verification and its privacy respecting. Which is what is being suggested.
There are already parental control packages exist in the Linux infrastructure which are not tied to low level modules such as systemd https://github.com/biglinux/big-parental-controls if you want, you can install it. Its fork is available in the Arch ecosystem for example that mentions it complies with the BR implementation (https://github.com/jersobh/arch-parental-controls)
- This is entirely optional package that claims to be privacy orientated (I haven’t tried it) that a system administrator can install if they wish.
- My router, an Asus one has parental controls settings already
- My ISP router, bog standard one has parental controls settings already
- My ISP account has parental controls settings already at account level, if Ia m not technical enough, I can call them and ask them to set it up
- My phone provider has parental controls
Why do I need MORE parental controls shoved down my throat when I do not desire it nor wish for it? But this time in a core component of alot of linux distributions.
Oh and before you tell me “but ExoticCherryPigeon, its an optional field”, sure, but here is the example of the slippery slope curtsey of UK:
Take a look at the history of this act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_age_verification_in_the_United_Kingdom
We are now at the point where I need to use a CC to tell some 3rd party that I want a wank.And what else is happening now? They are suing websites not based in UK! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023#Enforcement, but that’s not all, although not at the law stage, there are some talks about also now restricting VPN’s https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/uk-government-says-it-may-age-restrict-or-limit-childrens-vpn-use-following-new-consultation.
A lot of websites also not based in UK jurisdiction have simply self censored UK users before they get ISP level blocked.
If this is not an example of a slippery slope, I don’t know what is!
TL;DR tools already exist, we do not need more tools that will be a privacy nightmare
What’s his motivation? Money? Fame?
Why does anybody submit changes to any project? Probably a wide variety of reasons.
I’ve been a programmer for 20 years and I’d never jump on a chance to add something that aligns with laws I think are unethical dog shit—especially in the Linux space where the whole goal is to not be Windows
I hope that you can see that there are people who see this addition as being not a big deal: optional field, no verification, GECOS fields already storing ‘realName’, ‘location’, etc.
It doesn’t seem like a huge stretch to understand why a person would submit a simple update when they don’t think it’s of world changing significance.
I’m a bit frustrated with the casual “what’s the big deal?” mindset that a lot of people I’ve encountered have about this.
I’m one of those people so maybe I can help.
Are we not living through the same timeline where the US has fallen under the control of a fascist regime that is being eagerly assisted by Meta, Apple, Microsoft and a ton of other massive corporations?
Yes, we are. That’s why I don’t use their software or services. The major, and most important, reason why this isn’t a big deal to me is that Apple, Meta and Microsoft don’t choose the software that is part of my system. We’re not in commercial software land, this is the FOSS world. Here, I get to choose what happens on my system because I am the one in completely control.
If a project decides that I have to submit to age verification then I simply won’t use their project, it’s just that simple. But, that is not what is happening here. There is no verification of any sort, nor is the operation of systemd affected by this field in ANY way.
I don’t buy the slippery slope argument that’s being presented around this topic which makes the change seem like the beginning of fascisim or the end of privacy or whatever other hyperbolic situations that people are breathlessly inventing to justify their outrage.
We already have fields to store personal data and those fields are optional and rarely used. They exist because they are needed in some cases and in the cases where they are not needed they do not do anything. The birthDate field is exactly the same as the realName field in that sense. It only does something if you choose to install software that uses it.
This field will NEVER affect you unless you choose to install software on your system that requires it.
What’s happening here is that people are treating this single JSON field as a stand-in for age verification. It is not. If someone wants to meaningfully fight age verification laws then they need to involve themselves in politics instead of social media brigading and harassment campaigns against developers.
In my view, this ‘situation’ exists because it allows hoards of people to appear to be ‘doing something’ without actually doing anything. It’s low effort activisim. People find it much easier to write self-righteous and hyperbolic comments and to get into internet fights than to do the hard work required to affect the politicians and laws that are passed.
On top of this we have the signal boosting effect of trend following, clickbait-driven sites and content creators looking to boost ad revenue by playing up outrage and drama.
I disagree with these laws, but this is not the hill where the battle is being fought. It is a pointless distraction and one that is being used to actively target a person for harm.
Nothing is going to happen on your system unless you choose to let it happen. No software update by any project will ever change this.
The only thing that will change it, and the thing that people should focus on, are the laws in the places where they live.
This field will NEVER affect you unless you choose to install software on your system that requires it.
If the field did not exist software could not be made to utilize it.
Do you think that would prevent or discourage age verification software from existing? It’s not as if a systemd user field is the only place a user’s birthday could be stored.
Realistically, age verification software that is seriously attempting age verification isn’t even going to touch the systemd field, because why would it? The field could only be trusted if it is managed by an age verification service anyway, in which case the service could just as easily store the data outside of systemd.
Who gets to decide what software should and should not be allowed to exist?
If someone wanted to store a birthDate (and, evidence exists to say that they do) then the most logical place to store that user detail is with all of the other user details… in systemd.
You can choose what you put on your system, that’s the Free in FOSS. But, you cannot choose what other people put on their systems.
Its not leaving a lot of choice if it’s part of systemd and I’d wager far more people do not want this than were asking for it. There’s no benefit to it except for the government and corporations that want your data.
The field doesn’t do anything by itself. There is zero harm inflicted on people using systemd. There are probably lots of features of systemd that you don’t want or use and the entire negative effect that you suffer is a few megabytes less free storage space.
The only way the field would be used is if a person decided to use a different piece of software that wants a birthdate. If they don’t choose to install such a program then the field is no more a danger than the realName or location fields. They have scary sounding labels but do absolutely nothing unless the user chooses to use them.
I ve got a feeling he wont change his mind. This kind of people are just too optimistic
Death threats are understamdable cause his move makes damage to huge amount of people. It is like a terrorism
Are we not living through the same timeline where the US has fallen under the control of a fascist regime that is being eagerly assisted by Meta, Apple, Microsoft and a ton of other massive corporations?
Because the real fight is not on the internet or computers.
People protesting (legally and peacefully) have been targeted based on social media accounts. This is closing the gap to allow similar fascist behavior on an even more personal level.
It’s one battlefront of many, and a fairly significant one. As we’ve become on online society, computer software has come to encode human rights to expression and privacy. Those rights are worth fighting for.
The real fight is on multiple fronts.
What I’ve learned is that it’s basically impossible to convince people that the only real way to solve this is violent revolution.
Given your lack of history of violent revolution (I’m assuming), I’d guess it’s because you look like a hypocrite for sitting behind a keyboard and telling others to do something you’re not willing to do yourself.
I’ve already spent years of my life in activism (the actual kind where you do work and try to build community, inevitably get added to watch lists, etc) trying to motivate others. I’ve helped with Food Not Bombs, etc. I’ve done a decent amount of “walk the walk” but I’ve also got a life to live. The US is deep into a propaganda hole that I’m afraid is gonna take a long time to climb out of and people have goldfish brains. I don’t really care how I come off to folks on the internet.
But it probably realistically has to be organized on it, since that is the global communication network…
When you discover the reason for his bootlicking you will be ashamed of your words and deeds.
I’m out of the loop; what’s his reason?
Something about complying with new laws in California and North Korea I think.
Something? You think? You were talking like you knew
Are you suggesting that Linux doesn’t attempt to comply to local laws?
That’s a serious question, by the way, not trying to ragebait you.
Parental controls on linux are a good thing. This is a fine privacy respecting implementation. People are overreacting.
Parental controls already exist in linux, they are entirely optional to those who want them, we do not need those controls to be rolled out to every user!
Not to mention
- My router, an Asus one has parental controls settings already
- My ISP router, bog standard one has parental controls settings already
- My ISP account has parental controls settings already at account level, if Ia m not technical enough, I can call them and ask them to set it up
- My phone provider has parental controls
Sir, this is a Lemmy.ml thread.
Reasonable, considered responses are not welcome here.
He didn’t comply, he collaborated. It won’t deter anyone but pro fascist programmers from developing for Linux. Your defence of the indefensible says a lot about you, too.
Threatening anyone with harm because you disagree with them is horrible. Things have gone too far on the internet. If we just ran after everyone who we disagree with then we wouldn’t have civilization left.
Damn people like you really think that you can negotiate with traitors
It’s not just a simple disagreement. They are allowing invasion of our privacy. If he didn’t want people pissed at him he shouldn’t have folded. We are dealing with government overreach on every front. Now is not the time to be giving up ground. I don’t think he deserves death threats but if he’s not with us he’s against us.
Enabling fascists hardly makes him a victim
Nor does it prevent him from being one
Unfortunately appeasement upwards has been taken advantage of over and over.
It’s logical to take a stance of ok what can we do to head off the bigger problem. But the truth is, over authoritative governments and tech businesses will overstep that rational offering. So appeasement needs to stop, and recognising this as the line is already occurring.
I am not gonna wish harm on the guy, but I really don’t have a lot of sympathy for a techbro simp.
Yeah preemptive bootlicking before even getting sued is not a characteristic i love to see in a dev that works on one of the most important pieces of linux software.
When the Ai companys acted after this maxime, ignore laws until getting sued, there was a huge outrage but here everyone wants the same from open source companies and developers.
It seems that double Standards are fine after all.
I dunno the exact law, but I’d differentiate based on whether the law in place is bad, or good (in my opinion). Maybe the guys doing the “double standard” also think like this.
So you say that opinion and subjective classification of good or bad is the only valid measurement?
That is the issue with double standard, everyone has their own subjective viewpoint of good or bad, of morality, of which laws to ignore and which to follow. And a lot of really bad things are done all the time in the name of good and moral reasons!
Why make any law at all if only personal, subjectiv morallity matters?
This one is a very old debate, and you are taking my opinion to an extreme. Not that I think it’s particularly offensive or anything.
This question is rhetorical: would you uphold racial segregation laws because they are the law?
There are many takes one what one should do.
I don’t think the changes in question are “upholding” any law, but rather giving system admins and software devs a convenient/predefined way to attempt to comply with the law if they choose. “Upholding” the law would be requiring the field to be filled or checked.
That said, to your point, if someone proposed a race field “so that devs can implement segregation if they choose,” I’d find that reprehensible even though it doesn’t do anything on its own. Similarly, I object to the systemd change.
I would fight the law itself, not single persons.
I’m not US and my country doesn’t have such a law, can’t fight foreign laws.
I’m not fighting the dev either and I don’t approve harassment, I’m just switching to non-systemd distro, that’s the best message anyone can send against this.
I agree in principle. Thankfully, the law is not “in place” in the US yet, there’s still time to amend, repeal, etc., so we are not in trouble for now.
Ofc, John Brown would disagree with you, but he is extreme by today’s standards.
A better example would be the many people who try to block policemen from evicting people from rented apartments (mostly old/sick people who cannot pay). Ofc, one could pay for one being evicted, but that would just strengthen the landlord.
I don’t think enough people realize that this is catastrophically bad. It’ll discourage people from becoming open source developers, it’ll discourage people from using Linux, and it’ll discourage legislators from taking the Linux community seriously.
Sure, but personally, I don’t want a linux community that’s driven by corporate needs and governments that have been paid off by them. I don’t view it as a catastrophe, if that’s the version of “the linux community” that we lose.
None of that is to say that harassing devs is correct. It’s not, and never is. Harassing anyone with death threats and dogpiling is not on. But if we take that out of the picture, negative pushback that drives away devs that would otherwise have helped implement universal age gating isn’t something I’m terribly upset over, because I don’t want the version of community they’re taking us towards
this version IS the community and they’re not taking us anywhere where we weren’t already going.
linux is a much a product of our society as are other things like pop culture and capitalism. corporations of all sizes and reaches (ie red hat, ibm, google, facebook, etc.) have always steered the path and decided upon the development trends that linux has always taken and the only people who could have prevented or mitigated further centralized enshitification (aka the linux kernel developers group) bent over backwards to comply with the american government’s overreach when they kicked out russian developers.
age verification is just the next step into this overreach and it too is being driving from the same corporate/government source that forced us all to accepting things like systemd or libvirt/kvm (facebook for the former and red hat for the latter) to service their profit motives.
like american politics, it’s still possible to reverse the trend; but also like american politics; it requires a greater deal of collectivist action that westerners are unwilling to risk out of fear of losing their own tiny piece of the pie.
[the linux kernel developers group] bent over backwards to comply with the american government’s overreach when they kicked out russian developers.
I though that was mostly due to Linus being a typical Russia-hating Finn, but I never investigated.
i also wouldn’t put this past him given the reactionary tendencies he’s demonstrated in the past; but i suspect that a threat of non-compliance == treason from the federal government probably had a bigger impact.
and if you’ve ever had the displeasure of working for the federal government; you’ll hear horror stories of how capricious and draconian the selective enforcement of treason can be.
