- cross-posted to:
- libre@hexbear.net
- cross-posted to:
- libre@hexbear.net
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Fuck this guy.
Next they will mandate a “race” field, and the same kind of imbecile will implement it.
I’m so confused he adds a JSON field and corporate linux (who fund 95% of Linux development) need some sort of age auth mechanism for enterprise deployments. What do you guys want instead?
Like its not even enforceable, when the hardware attestation comes sure but before that why does anyone care (thats not going to stop you from changing a json field in systemd lmao)
Be careful now! His coworkers will act most silently.
I love the level of disdain the linux community has for this kinda bootlicking.
Collaborator
You want the user to put their age somewhere?
Have a simple script that asks for a number and echos it into a file called “age”. Done.
And they can only run the script if they want to.
This whole article/blog post reads as “How dare this person follow the law. ;(”
I really don’t understand the pushback on this one person for submitting the change request. When it is the lawmaker that put this law into place that we should be criticizing. The post repeatedly uses how the contributer said that the change was “hilariously pointless and ineffective.” As some sort of gotcha as to why the merge should not have been accepted but does not explain why the maintainers should not follow the law other than “law bad”.
It also consistently calls out the various peoples’ places of work and experience as some sort of boogeyman for why they should not be allowed to contribute to open source. If these people were universally accepted to be bad actors in the community then they would not be accepted as reviewers for these projects. This just attacks their character to try to prove a point.
Then he said Arch Linux should implement it anyway because the law requires it. archinstall PR #4290
Well, it’s not “the law”, it’s your local law. To most people on the planet, it doesn’t apply any more than for example North Korea’s laws. As far as I can find, Arch Linux is not owned by a foundation or similar legal entity (i.e. which could have been located in California), but the lead developer appears to live in Germany.
to all y’all with the “it’s just a text field”: what if the field is “race”? “sexual orientation”? “jerks_off_to”? what the fuck has a system managing daemon got to do with any of that? and why would you preemptively put it in there without even a pretense of a fight?
fuck you make us! make linux illegal, in Cali of all places. guess how long that will last?
Yeah, scary.
What about some other scary fields like:
- Real Name
- Office Address
- Office number
- Office telephone number
- Home telephone number
- external e-mail address
I mean if those fields were stored, could you imagine the danger that Linux users would be in?
You don’t have to imagine, because those fields have been stored in UNIX/Linux since 1962. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecos_field
Your argument is an informal fallacy called Whataboutism.
I invite you to educate yourself by reading about it on Wikipedia
You should read the article and understand the difference between a comparison and Whataboutism.
Those are also entirely optional and not having them filled in doesn’t cause other software to stop doing what the user wants.
(same for the birthDate field)
Not true. Because the stated purpose of the laws at play is to enable that to be queried so that sites can decide what is appropriate for you to see.
Depends how these new laws are written.
The same with the birthDate field.
… unless someone merges a PR making it required, which is the discussion of this thread.
What if someone makes a PR making your real name and address being required? Damn…
You’re right.
“What if <insert dystopian scenario that hasn’t happened>?” is a silly argument.
And then you can input a random date from before 1940 and forget about it…
I think back then it was generally assumed this simply assisted with office communication.
Imagine telling a UNIX engineer in the 70’s how almost everything you enter into a machine would eventually be used to manipulate or entrap you by the State and surveillance capitalism.
Imagine telling a UNIX engineer in the 70’s how almost everything you enter into a machine would eventually be used to manipulate or entrap you by the State and surveillance capitalism.
This isn’t a hypothetical. North Korea uses a version of Linux which does exactly that.
It still doesn’t make these fields inherently dangerous, and that same argument applies to birthDate. Even if systemd build a verification system that required photo identification and a DNA sample it wouldn’t be a problem.
The community would just fork the project before the totalitarianism update. The FOSS world already has a process to avoid massively unpopular changes. This change isn’t massively unpopular, this is a vocal minority who is stirred up by web articles leveraging clickbait and outrage to drive ad revenue.
The age verification laws are unpopular, I’m personally completely against them. However, they do exist and adding an optional field in order to allow project, who choose to do so, to store that data is not a red line or the start of a slippery slope.
In the future, if there was a red line that was crossed, we would fix it with a fork and not with a harassment campaign.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
That’s you. You have no issues giving anyone an inch and then wondering why you’re being lined up on the street afterwards once they’ve taken the mile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
That’s you. You have no issue embarking on a creative writing exercise, painting the scariest possible scenario and pointing at that piece of fiction as if it were reality.
You think you can just make up lies about countries far away from you and no one will notice? Think again, whisu.
Sorry Chairman Kim, congratulations on your 99.8% victory
Stored “because law”, right?
Who cares why it is stored, these fields exist for every user in every Linux system and they have existed for decades.
Either birthDate the field is dangerous or it isn’t. If it is, how?
It is no different than data fields that ask for way more identifiable and personal information such as Real Name and Office number which have, again, existed for decades without issue.
Ah, but this time the government wants it to be able to be queried so that applications and web sites can decide what to do with you. That’s the difference.
The government’s wants are not in the PR. The PR is an optional JSON field.
The field isn’t dangerous, you’re conflating two different things.
The age verification laws are the threat, not an optional text field or the developer who added it.
I care. One thing is “you know, fields with this name have been around since before you were born”, another thing is “some idiots passed the law half the globe away, now we are preparing your system to comply. Someone has to ©”. The field is not the danger, the thinking, attitude and act is
Edit: some local law, for fuck’s sake
That’s a fair argument.
Is it fair to say: The field is benign but there is contention about if it should be added or not and users of the software are concerned that their voices were not heard on the issue. That can be handled in the normal project framework, perhaps by suggesting a publicly stated policy about these issues around legal compliance so the community can determine if they want to support the project or not.
My argument is that I don’t think that the damage that was done justifies the hitpiece in the OP which is, almost literally, painting a target on the developer with the mugshot photograph and loaded language.
So, if you’re not one of the people then we’re having different conversations. In that conversation, I do agree with what you just said. I’d like to see the very large projects, which affect a lot of users, such as systemd, have a more formal way to accept public comment and respond on contentious changes and feature requests.
It is not a hit piece. No call to action was stated.
It paints him as an active danger, puts his picture on a wanted poster, includes his full name, workplace and the city and state where he lives and then writes up an article like an after action report of a cyberattack.
It then implies that he’s going to do it again and that he can’t be persuaded and so will be ‘harder to stop’.
Taylor believes what he’s doing is right, which makes him harder to stop than someone acting for money. Taylor already has the resume line and knows the codebase well enough to try again. That’s the true believer pattern. The argument is ideological, so persuasion is off the table.
So if he’s done a bad thing, he’s going to do it again, and you can’t persuade him.
If you can’t read the implied call to action then you’re being deliberately dense.
To be fair, I am bit split on this. On one hand, name and shame is an effective strategy and should be used. On the other hand, “put age verification into Linux” is a hilarious stretch. And yes, it feels strange that I have yet to see any kind of response from other systemd maintainers and managers - after all, the man authored a pull-request, not merged into into upstream. I have not been looking for that kind of response myself though, which also serves your point: putting all the blame and anger on this one man (I purposefully omit name) is too much
Is it fair to say: The field is benign
It is benign if it is optional, remains 100% local and under the user’s control and doesn’t prevent other software from functioning as expected.
It is optional, 100% local, under the user’s control and does not prevent other software from functioning as expected.
If it ever is not, then you can simply fork the project at or before that change.
Half a world away where do you live since this is happening everywhere. To be half a world away from any place doing this would be hard.
Being half a world away from Americas is pretty easy, don’t ya think?
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You must be off by a decade. Your reference mentions no OS and Unic was developed around 1970.
Your reference mentions no OS
I still don’t understand why it needs to be implemented as part of systemd, and not - say - as a service. Or, if we want to “go with” the law - make it a kernel module, which sounds more impressive (“we are complying at the kernel level!”) but in practice so much easier to opt out of.
Is there an Arch fork that is not implementing this shit or do I have to go non systemd now? Because this BS is not going on any of my machines.
There is a special guillotine for this wannabe parasite.
Jesus fucking Christ guys. Regardless of your thoughts on age verification, hunting down someone just for complying with the (currently) rather inoffensive law is nuts.
Posting his face here is absolutely going to get him doxxed, and going to cause someone to actually hunt him down and hurt him.
Focus your anger on the people who actually passed and push for this law. Not the person who drew the short straw and had to implement it.
EDIT: Yeah, this whole discussion is toxic now. Suggesting that someone shouldn’t be lynched for making a change in a piece of software is equivalent to me agreeing with that change. I don’t like the push for age verification. It gives me a lot of stress. But I don’t think some random software developer should be hurt for it.
Reading the room wrong when writing software is not worth a life.
You’re part of the problem and I look forward to the day when you’re ashamed of it.
Regardless of your thoughts on age verification, hunting down someone just for complying with the (currently) rather inoffensive law is nuts.
No one has been hunted down. I’ve not read an article anywhere showing that’s happened, have you? Also, this wasn’t complying, this was being complicit. The law IS offensive, both to ones sensibilities and in that it literally attacks Linux by attempting to criminalize it. No one is taking a life, but maybe educating those in charge of open source projects and employers who work closely with the open source community, that this person should not be granted contributor access to such projects.
Why does the rest of the world have to comply with a handful of states laws? The US is not the center of the universe. If you people want to lick the boot and allow this, then by all means, create your own terrible versions and leave the rest of the world alone.
Systemd is NOT an operating system provider, so they didn’t have to do absolutely anything.
It was their choice to do what they did, not the law, especially since it won’t be active and enforceable before next year.
Witch hunts are despicable indeed but lets not use that an an excuse to justify what they did.
Not the person who drew the short straw and had to implement it.
That’s the whole point, though, they don’t have to implement it. They’re under no obligation at all to do so. Try to rule Linux is illegal in California and watch Silicon Valley lobbyists damn near riot. They’re just giving in, but even just procrastination would be a ridiculously effective tactic.
- He didn’t draw any straw. Nobody asked him to work on such an implementation (or maybe Meta did?).
- In fact, he appeared out of the blue to do this implementation. This was his very first pull request on the Systemd git.
- From the very start he received a huge amount of critical comments from the community on GitHub, while he was working on this. He neglected their criticism and plowed on.
So he already had a warning that the majority of the community didn’t agree on what he was doing. Nobody asked him to. He chose to continue – he could have imagined the consequences.
And the whole context on why and why now he did this is fishy.
It’s not inoffensive at all, it’s being pushed by religious whackjobs https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/rep-finke-was-right-age-gating-isnt-about-kids-its-about-control
Uhm, wat. Had to implement, worldwide? Da fuck are you talking about?
He “was only following orders”. But yes this is a class war.
Lots of disingenuous comments in this thread regarding the change being “just json” considering they’re already on a warpath of implementing id verification. They are testing the water to see what they can get away with. Furthermore, the Linux community has always been against shit like this (see: systemd outrage, open bios, gnu etc).
Who are “they”?
Loaded question. Governments, country and state level, technocrats, fascists.
I’ll believe that if and when they actually force me to upload identification to prove that my birthday really is 1970-01-01 and my name really is Nunya Bissnis. Otherwise, it’s really no different from Steam asking my birthday when opening store pages or porn sites asking “click here jf you’re 18” and take my word for it.
So long as it’s being enforced just as well as the realName field, I maintain that it is indeed harmless. If the point is to have a hilariously ineffective solution as a fig leaf against a stupid law, I’ll prefer that to efforts to actually implement verification.
It’s not harmless, that’s the thing. Its just the thin end of the wedge.
We are well past the thin wedge. The thin wedge was American companies purchasing every tech company or stealing their ideas.
“Do not comply in advance.” There is simply no need for this. Resist because it’s our duty to do so in order to keep our freedoms. Start with, “why are they doing this?” Then go follow the money. Zuckerberg and Meta, that’s why. They have been under the gun for years to protect people, especially minors, from the harms of their attention based economy of apps. They hired lobbyists in multiple states to push this legislation. Why? Because if the OS does it, they don’t have to, and can blame all the problems on the OS. What’s the Meta business model? Gather data and sell it. The more accurate and targeted the data, the higher the price. What do these laws do? Add more data. Why doesn’t Apple, Google, and Microsoft resist? They already have the infrastructure and are data gathers themselves. Why does the government allow this (US and all 5 eyes)? They LOVE surveillance.
Sincerely, thank you for spelling it out to the rest of the class.
These things are always worded ‘agreeably’ enough that by the time we’re done going back and forth debating it all day, they’ve pushed even more invasive policies on us.
I’ll believe that if and when they actually force me to upload identification to prove that my birthday really is 1970-01-01 and my name really is Nunya Bissnis
It’ll be too late by that point. Way way way too late.
Then its already to late. We are well past the point of fighting for freedom and privacy on the net. Hell we let the net be bought up and controlled by 5 companies. And people happily use them and complain about big tech on reddit. Lime WTF.
Your real name and location data have been stored in UNIX/Linux for over 60 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecos_field
realName and location have been fields in systemd since the beginning.
Were you panicking about this before social media told you to be afraid?
Your real name and location data have been stored in UNIX/Linux for over 60 years.
IF you entered that info. And it wasn’t being used by applications to enable surveillance laws. It’s a false equivalency.
The birthDate field is optional. As userdb as a whole.
It’s like talking to a wall with these people.
What do you mean with “these people”?
All I say is that no one forces you to enter a value in an optional part oft the systemd project (not to be confused with systemd, the init process).
Age verification isn’t optional (at least in the jurisdictions in question, and for now).
I doubt those changes would be PRed, merged, updated in my distro and somehow automatically pushed to my system in the blink of an eye. This isn’t Microslop we’re talking about who can force-push intransparent “fuck your settings” at the drop of a hat, and I’m certainly going to be much more wary of upcoming updates now. This isn’t my point of objection (yet - mandatory entry would be), but definitely a point of caution.
If they stick to malicious “here, you can ask for a date, but we can’t guarantee which date, if any, you’ll get” compliance, that isn’t perfect, but it’ll be good enough to make a joke out of tracking the date at all.
Besides, just this change being minor would be no reason not to keep pushing back against the law and airing our discontent about the direction they’re heading in, because the direction is definitely concerning.
Lots of disingenuous comments in this thread regarding the change being “just json” considering they’re already on a warpath of implementing id verification. They are testing the water to see what they can get away with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
Argue against what is happening, not fictitious and hypothetical scenarios that are not happening.
Furthermore, the Linux community has always been against shit like this (see: systemd outrage, open bios, gnu etc).
We’ve had fields for storing way more personal information (like real name, home telephone number, location, etc) since 1962. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecos_field
There is nothing that a birthdate will tell about a person that their real name and location will not.
The criticism here needs to be aimed at the laws and politicians. This article is whipping up a lynch mob against a volunteer developer using a clickbait article for the purposes of ad revenue.
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