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.
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.
“How dare this person follow the law. ;(”
The law requires an operating system provider to provide the age.
Is systemd an OS provider? NO.
They didn’t do it for the law. Especially since the law doesn’t require to do it before next year.
“The law”, what law? Why should my computer in fucking Canada ask for age verification?
Because big tech and the us government want to complete the panopticon and the people queued up to approve his change worked at MSFT?
This shit needs to be stopped cold. Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t get to buy control of Linux just because he bought control of Gavin Newsom.
The holocaust was legal, hiding Jews to keep them alive was illegal.
Following the law does not guarantee you’re doing the right thing.
The word antisemitism has been thrown around so much that it’s lost all meaning, but what you just said, comparing the holocaust to age indication on the internet, is holocaust minimization which is near universally agreed to be antisemitic.
Equating this law with hiding jews during the holocaust is crazy.
At the rate things have been going, we are certainly headed that way and we get there by accepting this kind unnecessary privacy violations.
Let’s just ignore whether there’s any moral or ethical arguments about legal compliance: What law is this man complying with? This is not a law that governs him. He is volunteering, and not compelled. There is no sanctity of law at play here.
Are you implying that only people who are affected by something are allowed to contribute to open source projects? If this were some nobody developer in California would that really make you any more likely to accept that this merge request is okay?
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.
I love the level of disdain the linux community has for this kinda bootlicking.
Collaborator
Someone would have had to do this eventually anyways. Be angry at the geriatric fascists, not developers. If it comes to it that the project cannot survive without these changes, then it would be made so that these changes are made.
You gotta think and read more about the actual issue here. The PR was pointless. The idea that Linux could ever comply is absurd. It’s open source. It’s international. Nobody cares about Colorado law.
We’re all going to die one day anyway, might as well jump off a cliff now.
There is a special guillotine for this wannabe parasite.
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.
I don’t see what’s wrong with implementing it as an add-on to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecos_field as the PR in question does. It’s the most logical place as the location to store user information and is even easier to opt out of—you just edit a file—than choosing whether to compile Linux with/add to DKMS a kernel module.
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.
Artix is one, but I have no experience with it.
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/systemd-liberated-libs-git
systemd has already been forked
Don’t go around installing random AUR packages, this really shouldn’t need to be said.
+1 I spent years wondering if my decision to invest in learning systemd was worth it. The sunk cost fallacy blinded me for too long but I am now willing to ditch systemd if a fork is not made.
I believe this pissed of enough users and it’s likely we will see a fork
Linux Community: It’s Free Software. You can do what you want!
Also Linux community: BUT NOT THAT!
Its a free world wear any costume you want
BUT NOT THAT
Heh you said “any costume” bet you feel really silly nowhow do you use these emojis?
They’re from hexbear. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lemmy-emojis/
ah, i use a mobile app
ah if you have a hexbear account you can also draft a reply to some comment there and then copy-paste it here. Alternatively you can click on
of emojis you see and like and copy the markdown code.
I have the strong feeling, that some guys have crossed some red lines. Verbal abuse is also a form of violence. What will happen next? Will you beat, kill?
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.
I mean they kidnapped maduro and are trying him under new york law so…
So… if the law interferes with your goals, apparently it is now perfectly fine to just ignore it.
That seems to be the approach the US government is taking.
I mean yes, the dems have been breathlessly going on about how that thing that Trump’s doing is illegal but nothing seems to happen. There is no opposition at all
Germany has a similar law already active
§12 Jugendmedienschutzstaatsvertrag
(1) Anbieter von Betriebssystemen, die von Kindern und Jugendlichen üblicherweise genutzt werden im Sinne des § 16 Abs. 1 Satz 3 Nr. 6, stellen sicher, dass ihre Betriebssysteme über eine den nachfolgenden Absätzen entsprechende Jugendschutzvorrichtung verfügen. Passt ein Dritter die vom Anbieter des Betriebssystems bereitgestellte Jugendschutzvorrichtung an, besteht die Pflicht aus Satz 1 insoweit bei diesem Dritten. (3) In der Jugendschutzvorrichtung muss eine Altersangabe eingestellt werden können
But yes, neither such laws nor the implementation into systemd is in any way positive and should be fought
Jugendmedienschutzstaatsvertrag
Is that a single word? O_O
Kinda. In Germany, we put many words together, to form a new word.
Jugend = youth Medien = media Schutz = protection Staat = State Vertrag = contract
Yes!, and german words can even get bigger!
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.
No.
Uhm, wat. Had to implement, worldwide? Da fuck are you talking about?
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.
Have you checked your local laws? At least for Germany there is already one requiring this option.
Complying with this shit is nuts.
Provided compliance is nuts, this man is a nutcase for complying. Sounds all good, but I dont believe being a nutcase warrants doxxing, verbal harassment, verbal threatening, and everything else that we’re seeing here.
Hey, honestly, thanks for being mature and real about this. I 100% am going to be migrating away from systemd after seeing how quickly this happened at the project and yhat Microsoft can basically decide they want code added to it; but I’m not gonna drag this random junior dev… I’m gonna choose to direct my hate at Microsoft instead. If they orchestrated these changes, that is the story here. When did that corporation get its fingers into the cookie jar, and how do I now make sure my entire software stack is free from projects where Microsoft can have this level of influence? That’s the tactical picture that matters.
So what you are saying is is that you are a collaborator, too? What’s your real name, friend?
it’s the public info on the accounts GitHub page it’s not like anybody really had to dig at all
There’s a huge difference between someone’s information being available on github and someone taking their picture and photoshopping it to look like a mugshot and writing a hit piece article that’s whipping people up into a lynch mob.
Not really.
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
That’s the Minnesota bill. The PR does not comply with that. You can read on how to the California law and NY and Colorado bills basically say to give the user a drop-down to select their birth date.
- He didn’t draw any straw. Nobody asked him to do that (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.
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 “was only following orders”. But yes this is a class war.
Nah useful idiots like this deserve the shit they’ll get.
A mistake without regret must be punished. They are not kids acting silly. I don’t feel comfortable with a foot on my neck, even when that foot isn’t pressing very hard.
