An init system does not need to know my personal details; it’s for starting programs in a specific order just fuck off with this shit. You don’t even have to capitulate to this stuff and these freaks are out here doing it preemptively like they expect a fucking pat on the head for being first in line to dive tongue first on to that boot.
Systemd isn’t an init system. Systemd-init is an init system and it is a part of the systemd suite.
Whatever the fuck it is it doesn’t need to know how old I am to do its job.
It already has fields for personal information, though, and they’re every bit as sensitive as your birthdate. realName, emailAddress, location, and timezone are already in there. The important part is that they’re all optional, and you don’t have to fill them in at all, or can fill them in with fake data. The system still serves you, not some outside party.
But the timing of it does have a lot of people freaking out about it.
I now fear it will one day be required for services on the internet (as it is by a recent law in California). I want to make that less likely, and more difficult to implement.
Having a principle the majority do not have and refusing to participate means being another step further out of society.
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It doesn’t need to know your age. It just provides a way to take a note of your birth date, only if you want to. The system already has a place to write your name and home address. All are optional and practically nobody uses them.
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And it still doesn’t, the blank space does not need to be filled
It already has fields for personal information, though, and they’re every bit as sensitive as your birthdate. realName, emailAddress, location, and timezone are already in there. The important part is that they’re all optional, and you don’t have to fill them in at all, or can fill them in with fake data. The system still serves you, not some outside party.
But the timing of it does have a lot of people freaking out about it.
It doesn’t know how old are you, it just remembers a date you tell it. You can give your birthday, but you can choose any other day
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It has been sold as just an init system to people who argued it’s a Katamari Damacy. We now know who was right.
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What service should handle it instead?
tell me you have only a passing understanding of how modern linux is architected without telling me you have only a passing understanding of how modern linux is architected
My date of birth is FU/CK/YOU
This is getting blown way out of proportion.
What’s being described right now is just an optional date-of-birth field. It doesn’t block installation, it doesn’t require verification, and it doesn’t change how the OS actually works. It just exists, and you can ignore it entirely.
The leap to “this is step one toward needing a passport to install an OS” is a classic slippery slope. It jumps from a harmless, non-enforced field straight to full identity verification with no actual mechanism connecting the two.
More importantly, this ignores how Linux works at a fundamental level.
Linux is open source, which means the code is public and can be modified by anyone. If any distribution ever tried to enforce something invasive like identity checks, that code would be stripped out almost immediately and redistributed as a fork. People already fork distributions over far smaller disagreements than this, and users would migrate just as quickly.
For this scenario people are worried about to actually happen, the entire ecosystem would have to move in lockstep and the community would have to abandon one of its core principles overnight. That’s not a realistic outcome.
Being skeptical of regulation is reasonable. Treating this like the beginning of mandatory identity verification at the OS level, especially in the Linux world, just isn’t grounded in how the technology or the community actually operates.
What is the use case for that field? I do not see it as being used as anything else than a stepping stone towards age verification.
this is the correct way to frame this issue. it serves no purpose other than to support things that are further down a slope
I wonder if a fork becomes successful, or if traditional init based systems make a comeback
enterprise users obviously won’t give a shit about any of this, and will keep using redhat or amazon linux or whatever
Seems like you don’t really need to fork the system until someone applies DOB field in a meaningful way.
Even in such a situation, I would suspect the short-term solution is simply a patch or crack to neuter the functionality that the DOB field is supposed to implement. A full fork seems unnecessary, even counterproductive, since it would define your OS as meaningfully distinct (and noticeably out of compliance) with a standard installation.
It’s giving an inch. We shouldn’t be doing that. We should be fighting tooth an nail against every single aggression against our privacy. They’ve already taken far too much.
with mass adoption of enshitification. and with the world in general. calling things a slippery slope fallacy is a long and losing gamble.
if the field was put in because of a law, then it’s for a reason, if the data isn’t important, or enforced, then it is useless and should not have been added.
Commentary like this is exactly what grinds my gears.
This isn’t analysis, it’s implication, conjecture, and conspiracy framed as insight.
The age verification laws are objectively bad. They do nothing meaningful to protect children, degrade the quality of the internet, and hand more authority to a government that already has too much.
But your line of argument is also flawed. I’ve already stated my position clearly. Repeating “it’s probably worse” adds nothing of substance.
More importantly, the fundamental architecture of Linux makes this entire premise irrelevant. It is open source and inherently resistant to centralized control. Governments can pass whatever laws they want; they cannot meaningfully enforce them at the system level in an ecosystem designed to be forked, modified, and redistributed at will.
the laws are bad, and you can push fighting for anonymity and freedom down the road because letting the camel stick its nose under the tent don’t bother anyone, and it’s too easy to just ignore…. but the laws are made for a purpose, and they will change. and uh oh, the camel has flipped the tent, you can’t fight to remove it because now systems are built around it being there. now it’s a much harder fight because we didn’t fight when it was easy.
again after seeing everything that has happened you call sounding the alarm for this as a slippery slope… i am sorry, but i question either your motives, or your foresight.
Yes, you are correct. Those of you who are concerned about this are not wrong to question it.
However, the point that keeps being ignored is that laws like this have very limited enforceability when it comes to platforms like Linux and other open-source software.
The reason is simple, anyone can modify the source code. There is no practical way to permanently embed restrictions like age verification into something that can be freely forked and redistributed. If a Linux distribution introduces age verification, a fork removing it will appear almost immediately. That is not hypothetical, that is how the open-source ecosystem functions.
Even if you personally install a version that includes such a feature, it is often trivial to bypass or remove it through system-level access.
Yes, the laws themselves are poorly conceived. They attempt to impose control in an environment that does not respond well to centralized regulation. But focusing on something like a birthday field in a Linux distribution misses the point. In that context, it is effectively meaningless and not something that warrants serious concern.
What’s being described right now is just an optional date-of-birth field.
The timing is dogshit.
Like getting handed a grenade pin and told “It’s a fucking pin! It’s harmless, what are you worried about?”
It is just a field. What it contains, if anything at all, is irrelevant.
Every step towards making people feel at ease giving personal information away, makes the next one easier.
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Slippery slope fallacy
Discord. Microsoft.
It’s not a fallacy if it’s an actual slippery slope.
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fallacy fallacy
My hate of SystemD is further justified! And you all just called me gray haired and not willing to update with the times!
Remember when they said “relax, it’s just an init system, no biggie”? Pepperidge farm remembers.
I’m a Debian guy so I’ll set mine to April 28, 1973.
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Ex microslop employee and self appointed systemd emperor Lennart poettering decided to roll that back and proceed
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