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