A single pull request turned a quiet open source contributor into the unlikely target of one of the Linux community's most heated controversies. We interacted with Dylan Taylor to hear his side of the story.

Dylan M. Taylor is not a household name in the Linux world. At least, he wasn’t until recently.

The software engineer and longtime open source contributor has quietly built a respectable track record over the years: writing Python code for the Arch Linux installer, maintaining packages for NixOS, and contributing CI/CD pipelines to various FOSS projects.

But a recent change he made to systemd has pushed him into the spotlight, along with a wave of intense debate.

At the center of the controversy is a seemingly simple addition Dylan made: an optional birthDate field in systemd’s user database.

  • IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works
    11·
    1 day ago

    You can’t really “block” fingerprinting. You can obfuscate it a bit, but the fingerprinting process happens server side, not on your device. So whether or not your system sends whatever age verification signal becomes a part of its fingerprint.

      • IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works
        3·
        1 day ago

        That’s not the fingerprinting happening client side, that’s just information supply. Fingerprinting is about what the server does with that information.

        • Zink@programming.dev
          2·
          15 hours ago

          Yeah, but the countermeasures are client-side because that’s what you can control. And some kind FOSS devs out there make it easy to start somewhere decent.

          • Sent from my LibreWolf
    • quick_snail@feddit.nl
      1·
      1 day ago

      Of course you can block fingerprinting. See Tor Browser. Everyone looks the same.

      Or you can change your fingerprint every 30 seconds with a plugin like chameleon.

      You know it works when evil sites all ban you because they can’t fingerprint you and track you between sessions anymore

      • IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works
        5·
        1 day ago

        That’s not blocking the fingerprinting, that obfuscating the data. The fact that you are doing that itself becomes part of the fingerprint being built. Services like Tor or Chameleon don’t stop the fingerprinting process running, they just make it more difficult (but not impossible) to tie the fingerprint to your actual identity.