I find that move extremely funny, since it’s purely made for sensationalism and nothing else. I mean, if you hate how systems implemented age verification, then why don’t you remove its identity verification too, i.e. also optional fields for stuff like your address an e-mail that most users don’t even fill out.
There is no mechanism verifying what birth date you type in - you can type whatever date you want and systems doesn’t care.
I’d say no matter where you stand with age verification, this is the best solution to handle the situation. After all, any and all age checks we have nowadays are a black box anyways. There is no real knowing how other systems are checking ages, and there is AFAIK no real government mandated rules on how it is verified. They could make you scan your ID’s front, back, nuclear composition and dietary preferences and give you a result that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a proper age verification procedure.
If the government wants to introduce age verification, they have to do it themselves - build an API that handles the age verification, similar to how the digital ID in Germany works, as an example. If they want proper age verification, they also have to take the blame themselves if things go wrong.
I agree with all that you’ve said. But why add it now? Why haven’t they added it a long time ago? Or if now they remembered, why not other extra optional fields that some people might want, like gender, sex, any other field? Oh, it would be too political? I see…
I’m thinking the same. I understand the people saying it’s no big deal, it’s just an optional field. But the existing optional fields (GECOS) have been there since the beginning of time. The original Unix user database (/etc/passwd) was created in a different time. Things have changed in the last 50 years and we now know that a simple field in an OS level database is not really an appropriate place to store PII. I don’t know what the solution is, as these laws are coming and there will be some people that need to comply, but I don’t think the current change to systemd is the right approach.
On the plus side - this controversy has prompted me to look into other options for my home servers and I’m loving the minimalism and simplicity of Alpine. (This isn’t a knee jerk reaction - I’ve been frustrated by the bloated feel of mainstream distributions for a while - more the straw that may break the camel’s back)
Oh, definitely I’m not saying people should just jump the gun and replace their distro for one without systemd immediately. I certainly won’t, at least not without thinking about it for a while. But I also think that denying the controversy exists is not good. This is definitely controversial, for some people even a deal breaker and there are valid, real reasons why. For the rest, it’s good to look at what options there are, see that there really isn’t an appropriate alternative for systemd in some cases and realizing that a successful fork would be a good thing. Also, a long time criticism of the community has been that systemd does too much and it being against basic Unix philosophy. I always thought of it not being a big deal, given its modularity. But I now realize that it centralizes control and design decisions to a single org and that is certainly a weak point IMO. So a fork makes a lot of sense, but it is at this point a mammoth of the project, so it will be really hard to maintain.
I mean, the introduction of the date of birth field is obviously done to make it easy for distros to comply with age verification by simply saving the birth date and nothing else.
As for the other fields: what use would it have to have such info at OS level? What application would use these fields and how? I mean, some fields, like the ‘location’ one, already are pretty useless, as, for example, the ‘location’ field doesn’t seem to bhave any firm consensus on how it should be formatted. Even the documentation lists both “Berlin, Germany” as well as “Basement, Room 3a” as valid values.
So I doubt not introducing such fields has any sort of political agenda to it, but just raises the question on why such fields would be useful to begin with.
you mean like adding it to a bunch of optional details already?
Yup. All this crying about the field is a big nothing burger.
This. And forking is easy. Maintaining a big piece of software is not. This is why every popular repo has hundreds of forks, but non of them are active or in sync with upstream.
Nah. What is funny is a pull-request explicitly stating compliance with age verification laws getting merged and then revert refused with a “don’t bring this discussion here” argument. This is where Lennart has lost me, with that bullshit of an excuse
- Fork a project that you have a problem with;
- Write a strong worded manifesto;
- Revel in those sweet sweet internet clicks;
- Try to gather a team of seasoned engineers to keep and evolve the project;
- Most likely fail, look for the next controversy, repeat.
Yes, but what’s wrong with this? If you gather engineers that are capable to maintain it - what is the downside? Systemd could always have used a bit of competition, I think most of us can agree. Most of the forks of systemd will fail, but most of all projects fail after some time. I don’t think this situation will harm systemd ultimately and it shouldn’t.
There’s nothing wrong with forking a project, IF you can and intend to maintain it – hell, that’s the whole basis of FOSS.
Forking it to make a point with no intention to maintaining it is just an easy way to gather clicks and stir drama.
IMHO the effort is better spent fighting the politicians that are shoving this down our throats, or should we fork all the tech that gets affected by bad political decisions?
Try to gather a team of seasoned engineers to keep and evolve the project;
What is there to evolve? Just keep it up to date with the mainstream project while applying this one patch. This is as useful as the signatures that prohibit use of comments to train LLMs.
What is there to evolve? Just keep it up to date with the mainstream project while applying this one patch. This is as useful as the signatures that prohibit use of comments to train LLMs.
That sounds super easy on paper. In practice nobody is going to do this long-term.
The kind of people who get massively upset about this are not the kind of people that are going to make a long term commitment to actually doing anything. Forking systemd is performative activism, that’s it.
I know, 100% agree. It’s not a lot of work but people will quickly find another thing to get angry about and move on. Trying to fork systemd over this feature is completely pointless.
Forking projects to put a different coat of paint on them is just silly. It’s still the same project, it’s just got your sticker on it now. You still dependent on upstream decisions. If things change too much for your liking, you have a growing patch management issue on your hands, and that’s not fun. But hey, you’re free to do it, that’s the beauty of FOSS.
Reminds me of the Linux distros that just fork Debian, stick a new theme and logo, create a website and voilá. Nah, mate, it’s still Debian.
Good luck maintaining it
They’ll just keep forkin’ and removing that field haha
This is bs …
Instead of fighting the laws and the people behind it, ‘we’ (as in ‘the community’) infight about some minor commit?
If the reason is data privacy, why not also remove ‘realName’, ‘emailAdress’ and ‘location’? 🙄
They should also remove the phone number prompt that UNIX has had since before systemd even existed. Your phobe number is an optional part of the GECOS field and has been there for a very long time without anyone freaking out like this.
It’s a slippery slope, I can’t imagine organizations won’t want more and more control over the public.
Instead of fighting the laws and the people behind it
We can’t use the system to change the system.
None of the id fields in the systemd db are required to be filled. This is useless. Simply don’t put any personal info in, and bam, you’re already liberated, from laws that aren’t even in effect yet!
This is perfectly logical and I agree. Except that this controversy has prompted me to go learn about Lennart Poettering. I’ve been using systemd forever and I like it - I like journald and remote journald, I like networkd, I even deleted cron off my systems and use systemd timers exclusively. I knew there was some controversy about Lennart, but I didn’t really care. Now that I’ve read a bit about his background and, maybe more importantly, his new company - I don’t have a good feeling for the future of systemd.
Finally someone who’s read into the issue
Will you still say that when they implement ID checking functionality?
Will you still say that when aliens from the 19th Dimension verify your age rectally?
I don’t know what this derailment is ultimately trying to say honestly.
It’s saying that you can invent an infinite number of hypothetical futures but they are not useful for making decisions in the here and now
The prospect of being prompted to submit an ID is not useful for making decisions in the here and now? As far as I understand it, this is the concrete danger. California lawmakers and lawmakers from elsewhere have indicated that this is only the beginning.
But this is just speculation. The fact is, systemd introduced a new optional field in the local database. They don’t publish an OS so they have no obligation to do anything more, actual implementation would have to happen in other projects.
What this is, is a spite-fork by some random AI researcher and anybody installing that on their system has way larger problems here and now than hypothetical ID verification in the maybe future.
They don’t publish an OS so they have no obligation to do anything more, actual implementation would have to happen in other projects
Why are the people who decide on changes to systemd implementing stuff that the vast majority of Linux users vehemently reject? +Things that they have no legal obligation of adding I might add.
What this is, is a spite-fork
No one deeply cares about the spite fork. It’s weird that commentators have suddenly become very acclimatised to the systemd changes. A few days ago people were asking themselves why a rando got through with an intensely disliked pull request and now we are here.
forget cookies, reload, begin; forget cookies, reload, begin
… auto clicker
when that happens, I’ll build my own ISO with that part stripped out, or just move away from systemd
Yes, because I won’t be using their distribution.
deleted by creator
There’s no age verification in systemd. That field doesn’t verify anything
But my clickbait!
Not yet, it doesn’t. We’ll see how far we go down this hole.
I can see it’s just an optional text field but the ick isn’t optional. It’s leaning towards submission in comparison to resistance. I’m hoping such laws get repealed, rather than spread.
Liberated systemd is a fork of mainline systemd started by Jeffrey Seathrún Sardina, a machine learning/AI researcher
I already have qualms about that.
Call me dreamy-eyed, but the reference to “machine learning” might mean this person has respect for what the technology is and has been for decades before the chatbot flood
yea but as to how this tech seems to me rn, leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.
Lots did. There are about a dotzend forks for this explicit purpose.
Okay I’ve said this so many times but (open source) code is speech and thus protected by free speech laws. Also idk if anyone’s noticed but it’s pretty obvious ID verification is for mass surveillance and obbo purposes. Now why would this apply to software that we already know doesn’t spy on you? Until now, proprietary software and big tech platforms already spied on you, but it could - to an extent be pseudonymised. This isn’t about spying on people, they already do that, it’s about removing pseudonymisation - instead of your data being stored under: User #2044820 it’ll be your full govt name and address leaving no room for doubt or plausible deniability.
It is by every metric, useless to provide ID verification for software that collects no data, at best it would just give them a better idea of the demographic. Also it’s literally open source, the GPL prohibits disallowing people from forking/editing it and it prohibits restrictions on the way in which it can be edited, which is legally binding.
After all, any and all age checks we have nowadays are a black box anyways
This is the only part I disagree with. Age verification is typically done via services like ID.me, Lexis Nexus, etc which do it via identity verification with documentation. The alternative method that most social sites have gone with is age prediction from a face scan, of which providers are more than happy to tout how they do it as differentiators. For the latter, there are even FOSS options.
I think what they mean is, with a black box we know the input, documents, and output, yes you can buy beer, but we don’t know the internals. How and for how long is the data stored, who is it shared with, who has access to it, how much meta data can they pull together to build a profile on you and so on.
I am aware of the Orwellian privacy implication, but how do we deal with bots, now that AI is rampant?
Something like hashcash, or what?
Some type CAPTCHA type puzzle. Maybe ask users how many Rs are in ‘strawberry’ before they can proceed
to play a game of paper scissor rock. Most chatbot try to play (without any understanding of how pointless it is). Anything that tries to play straight away is automatically a bot.
Play a game of rock paper scissors with me
Feels like something systemd can solve with a compile time flag. Either have it on or off depending on if you want to legally sell it in those areas or not and away you go.
Give an inch they’ll take a mile.I see your instance is UK, so I assume you don’t understand how utterly insane US lawmakers are right now.
I’m not into this, but is it the nerd version of releasing forks and torches?
More like forks and patches
I didn’t realize age verification had been put in yet? holy shit tat was fast
Well not really, they added a field so that they could store date of birth in the way they have a field to store “real name”.
So you can be sure my birthday is 4/20/1969 as sure as you can be that my name is Bimbo Baggins.
Note that for the California law at least, this is “good enough” and the OS never actually has to validate anything. In practice a person without admin access could have their birthdate out of control, well, until they run a patched browser that skips asking systemd and just always sends a desired bracket…
It kind of works to keep kids under 13 sending the signal with parental administration, but doesn’t do anything for more resourceful people you tend to find over 13.
I call BS! I have it on good authority that Bilbo Baggins is at least eleventy-one.
Bilbo Baggins
Ah I see the confusion. That said their name was Bimbo Baggins. Different Baggins completely.
