Ah the great betrayer. The snake in the garden. The enemy within the gates. That fucking cunt.
Dylan is a lowlife fucking looser
I disagree with age verification as well, but attacking a person like this is gross.
This article is all but brigading people into harassing this guy.
He got a huge amount of criticisms and negative comments from the community while he was working on this on GitHub; look at the comment thread of his implementation on GitHub. Essentially the community was telling him “we don’t want this”. And who are you working for in a FOSS project, if not for the community? Yet he disregarded the comments and went on.
On top of this, he appeared out of the blue with this implementation. He had not made any pull requests to this git before now. Nobody had assigned this task to him.
So the situation is not that this is some employee who was asked to implement something, and did it without knowing what the feedback would have been.
Spreading his face around doctored as if it were a mugshot in a community where people are calling him a traitor and other things is a recipe for someone to be hurt or killed.
This thread isn’t a community discussion about implementing a feature, it’s people trying to whip up a mob to attack a person. It doesn’t matter how much you dislike the field name he added to a JSON document, you don’t stir up a mob that can lead to people getting hurt.
In principle I agree with you, pacific discussion and democracy should be the way to go. But it seems that “discussion” doesn’t lead anywhere these times. Politicians do whatever they like (or what lobbies tell them to do), without checking if the majority of the population really agree with some decisions. A developer does whatever he likes, without bothering about the more or less pacific feedback he gets on github. Nobody really seems to want to have a discussion. Well guess then what the “mob” does at some point: they don’t care about discussions anymore either, and they do as they please too.
I fear that riots will start on a larger scale. Even if the context today is different, the situation reminds me somewhat of what happened with the 1981 riots in Toxteth, in Brixton, and other previous riots. Unjust and misused laws; deafness of authorities about discontent; innocent and not-so-innocent people getting hurt.
A developer does whatever he likes, without bothering about the more or less pacific feedback he gets on github. Nobody really seems to want to have a discussion. Well guess then what the “mob” does at some point: they don’t care about discussions anymore either, and they do as they please too.
It’s pretty cliche but: Two wrongs don’t make a right.
In the FOSS world, there are many ways to handle this kind of situation. A mob-led harassment campaign is not one of them.
If you disagree with how a project is going then you can fork it. LibreOffice disagreed with the direction of OpenOffice and forked it, NextCloud and OwnCloud forked from one another when there was major disagreement.
At no point should volunteer developers have their face plastered on a mugshot and their personal information blasted to a mob of angry people.
Be angry at the politicians and mega corporations who are voting and funding these initiatives, not the developers who are caught in the middle.
No
Keep up the good fight Don Quixote
A spade’s a spade. This is malicious compliance. The law might be the problem here but it’s on us to resist and try to make a change. Every last one of us. After all, the surveillance state workers in China and Russia are all just doing their jobs right?
Why the heck would we ever want a DoB field in systemd, optional or otherwise?
The systemd PR also referred to a flatpak PR who said they had wanted that to allow for parental controls even before the law came. That’s a somewhat reasonable use case, in my opinion.
Why the heck would we ever want a DoB field in systemd, optional or otherwise?
There is a field for your REAL NAME and LOCATION also. Who would ever want that?
Both of these fields contain way more identifying information about a user than birthDate. Do you feel the same way about them? Because they’ve been in systemd since the beginning.
and the GECOS field (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecos_field) containing fields for your real name, work address, which room in the building you work in, your home and office telephone numbers and external e-mail have been in UNIX/LINUX since 1962
This is manufactured outrage, the article is doxxing a person and painting a literal target on their head by photoshopping their picture to look like a mugshot in order to drive traffic for ad revenue.
It’s one thing to be against the laws, I’m against the laws. It’s another thing to personally attack a developer, that’s way beyond anything that is acceptable.
Words of a collaborator. Your words betray you, revealing what kind of person you are and what your goal is. The kind who would send ICE to your neighbour, the kind we don’t let baby sit, the office backstabber, the licker of boots to fascist regimes. Or a troll.
Timing’s a bit shit to add a DoB field don’t you think. I also don’t think you can compare computing in a professional setting in the 1960s to modern day surveillance states. I can also say as a parent there’s only one thing protecting your kid from the internet and its not whatever poorly standardized notion of Linux parental controls that exist today. Only actual parenting can.
As for the developer’s publicly observable commits and the following publicly available criticism of it, you can call it painting a target but I think even that’s a bit of a stretch. What’s most outrageous about the institution that is the United States of America in 2026 is how all of it was even allowed to get so far. So yeah, expect some activism.
I also don’t think you can compare computing in a professional setting in the 1960s to modern day surveillance states.
My point was that the fields themselves are no more dangerous than we make them. The GECOS fields are not a thing that used to exist in the 1960s, they exist in your system in 2026.
My point was that the criticism here isn’t about the field, because there are way ‘worse’ fields that have existed for decades. The criticism is about the law and this is a kind of misplaced activisim. Where it goes wrong is deliberately targeting one person for harassment as if they are the scapegoat for all of these age verification laws.
I can also say as a parent there’s only one thing protecting your kid from the internet and its not whatever poorly standardized notion of Linux parental controls that exist today. Only actual parenting can.
I completely agree. These laws are worthless for their stated goals because, as you’ve said, it is a parenting problem.
As for the developer’s publicly observable commits and the following publicly available criticism of it, you can call it painting a target but I think even that’s a bit of a stretch.
They photoshopped his face on a mugshot like he’s a criminal and in the article they list his full name, job title, place of work and the state and city where he works. They also list his personal blog.
In addition to all of the personal details, the wording and framing of the article make it sound like an after action report on a cyberattack
Here’s some select quotes. This isn’t about activisim about a law, this is about painting a person as evil, bad, etc (and if you look at the comments in this post, that framing worked.
He hit three separate projects in one week.
Taylor believes what he’s doing is right, which makes him harder to stop than someone acting for money.
The argument is ideological, so persuasion is off the table.
“He’s going to be hard to stop and you can’t persuade him”
The word for what that is sits somewhere past malice, something more insidious:
Taylor already has the resume line and knows the codebase well enough to try again.
“He’s going to do it again!”
This kind of framing against a person is dangerous. If you stir up enough people on the Internet you’re going to stir up some people who are unstable and willing to act on this violent framing.
I agree that the laws are wrong, but this kind of personal attack is far, far more immediately dangerous.
Ask yourself, if it was your picture in the mugshot and your personal address being plastered all over Reddit would you feel safe?
Why the heck would we ever want a DoB field in systemd, optional or otherwise?
Who cares? What does having a Date of Birth field do that would harm you?
Sure, it sounds super scary that some evil corporation would be able to use the data in the birthdate field to locate you. It would be even more scary if they had your realName and location. If your realName and location was stored in your user account then the evil corporation, who has access to modern data brokers, would also be able to determine your birthdate and all kinds of other information about you.
We don’t have to wait to see how this hypothetical dangerous situation would play out, because realName and location have been user fields since the 1960s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecos_field
I wonder if he has tried not being a traitor dickfaced cunt?
Have you?
No, he chose to do this and deserves all the vitriol coming his way.
If you don’t want people to retaliate for fucking them over, then don’t fuck them over. Simple concept.
Looks like you’re trying to fuck someone over too.
Would you care to post your real name, place of work and the city and state where you live? I mean if you don’t want people to retaliate for fucking them over, then don’t fuck them over.
Or, do you understand the danger of having unhinged people on the Internet paint you as a target?
If I screwed someone over, I wouldn’t be surprised if they did something to screw me back. I don’t start it, but I damn well finish it. The moral of the story is to not screw people over. If he needs to learn that the hard way like so many others, so be it. They shouldn’t have to sit back while they get fucked.
You need to stop projecting your own lack of a spine onto everyone else.
fuck nazi collaborators, name and shame em, they don’t deserve peace
Yeah no how about fuck that. Politics is personal.
If you’re participating in a lynch mob then I believe you’re responsible for what happens.
If you don’t see a problem with this, please provide us a picture of your face, full name and place of work.
How about you do so first, you who would defend such vile actions.
Yeah, Its is sickening and goes against the spirit of open source. We work around restrictions in creative way to give people the freedom to control their software and have access to the source. We don’t deny people trapped in shitholes with bad laws access to open computing. Force them onto Windows and Apple. I don’t get what is wrong with people these days. They have lost all reason.
Yes, many people can work around the laws in various ways. And some of them can’t. Its not for us to judge. We offer possibilities. Everyone knows many distros will patch this field out. Many will just ignore it like we do the GECOS fields. And where its is unfortunately required its still going to be better than running Windows. Its completely orthogonal to political participation and fighting these laws.
Those writing boot licking compliance are NOT your friends.
Test your understanding of the Dylan Taylor age verification story and what it reveals about open source infrastructure
I’m very suspicious of whether one would create 10 questions for nearly every blog post of zirs by hand.
It’s for sure AI generated, but also a weird ass thing to add to your blog.
Be careful now! His coworkers will act most silently.
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.
I have read the git thread related to the merge request.
I don’t see what’s the big deal. You have a user model that already contain fields like user’s full name, location, … among others and all this developer did was adding yet another optional field called date of birth.
This does nothing to verify user’s age and enforce nothing. They’ve stressed that repeatedly in the comments.
What that does is making it easy for a Linux distro to store user’s birthday - should they wish to do so - and making that bit of info accessible to running apps so that each app can do what it wants with it.
User’s fullname and location are already there which are also optional so what’s the big deal?
Then why did they lock the fucking thread as controversial if it was such an innocent change?
It’s paving the wave to implement a Californian law that can very easily end up meaning ID verification for everything.
They could just not have done this at zero cost but decide to go to multiple projects, at this specific time which obviously isn’t coincidental, and actively work to start implementing this on Linux. I guess “Contributed to systemd” on their CV was more valuable than resisting the USA taking control of the whole internet and ending all sense of privacy.
Fields like name and location do not have any expectation for the information being valid or accurate (see eg.:
adduser).DOB is different. It comes from a legal expectation that correctness of the information will be enforced somehow. If going by the Colorado and NY law proposals, IIRC, by using biometrics at the time of system install.
DOB is different. It comes from a legal expectation that correctness of the information will be enforced somehow.
[citation needed]
…Have you eve been following the news and the law proposals? I’m not sure you are engaging in good faith here.
not even said laws have an expectation that the date of birth provided would be accurate. the colorado bill just says “require[] an account holder to indicate” and never defines “indicate”, the ny bill says “request an age category signal” and never defines “signal”, so i assume they’re like the california law which has been verified to be just “enter your date of birth in this text field/dropdown and we’ll trust you girl”. i don’t think any of that involves biometrics
there’s no alien intelligence or protocol specification in systemd that ensures or says the dob field must be accurate either
Wow, picking choice words only in sections of the laws and proposals. At least try and engage in honest discussion, mate,
Honestly, just go check Ageless Linux’s site. They have a complete rundown on how and where does each law’s expectation come from.
Just one (1) example:
SB 142 — App Store Accountability Act
Requires “commercially reasonable” method. In other words, the powerful agents of the market (the Googles, the Facebooks, the NSAs) get to choose what you have to do to validate. Could even require biometrics.
there’s no alien intelligence or protocol specification in systemd that ensures or says the dob field must be accurate either
That’s because systemd, a well-known Microslop infection into the Linux ecosystem, is using the wayland playbook: specify nothing, leave to other projects the task and legal weight of implementation. All systemd has to do is to ship the field, then other projects are delegated the task of entering in a “legally compliant” way.
For me the bigger problem is that was done without any community oversight.
Yeah it can be verified for now, but it’s a foot in the door for a braindead law that no one in their right mind would follow.
What do you mean. It’s done in public
Yeah and against the massive outcry in the form of comments, the discussion was locked, and the general opinion was ignored in favor of 2 maintainers and a tool of a dev.
The person who has the most blame here is the lead dev of the project imo.
The problem is that Poettering is all in on attestation which is the underpinnings of age verification and remote attestation.
See amutable.com
Poettering has always been a piece of shit.
POS or not this is a reoccurring problem with open source. The benevolent dictator for life. Hopefully we can grow past it in the coming years.
Fork it and create a democratic project, nobody is stopping you. Wanna know projects that are very open and democratic? FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Wanna know why they aren’t as popular as linux?
Why do you think this was locked? This fucking thread is a mugshot of a dev contributing to an open source project.
The thread was discussing age verification from what I read, but I read it when it was already locked.I do not think harassment of the dev is appropriate and the article and this post is also needles drama imo. But the issue of age verification itself I think should be discussed by the community and not just accepted by one dictator.Edit: I misread that you were talking about the GH thread. Yeah this thread is kinda shit, but discussion on how and if age verification should be done is important imo.
discussion on how and if age verification should be done is important imo.
I completely agree.
I’m very against these age verification laws… but I focus my efforts on the politicians and companies like Meta who are actually trying to implement them.
This thread is a doxxing and harrasment campaign and should have been deleted in the first hour.
So they knew it was against the community and went right ahead?
There wouldn’t be “this” thread if they had taken the community into consideration.
This isn’t the gotcha you think it is. That “engineer” is
contributingbullhorning this bullshit on multiple Linux based repositories.So they knew it was against the community and went right ahead?
Blaming the victim, beautiful.
The community is not against compliance, a loud minority is. The implementation is not where discussion needs to happen, as any software dev that had to implement shit they did not agree on, it rarely has a positive effect at this level
1000x this.
It doesn’t matter how much you disagree with the change, brigading harassment is gross and should be called out every time someone tries.
This post should be nuked.
Exactly. There’s a massive thread on Mastodon where everybody is panicking about this, but it’s a nothing burger if ever there was one.
Sure, the timing and comments suggest it’s meant for legal compliance, but if that’s what it does, it does it by keeping full control in the hands of the user, where it should be.
If anyone is panicking, ask them how they feel about the ‘RealName’ field that has been in systemd for years (since the beginning?)
This is fake controversy and now it’s at the point where people are spreading articles, like the OP, brigading people into harassing a systemd developer.
Exactly. And that’s the part that worries me most: I’m seeing people investigating the guy, shaming him (he wrote a blog about using Claude to write a game in 90 minutes, so clearly he must be evil /s), and the article above is written in such a way to insinuate all sorts of nefarious goings on, but everything I see suggests this is just normal procedure.
I really feat this is going to hurt the community and chase good developers away.
Ask yourself if “RealName” field was added in response of a requirement that’s supposed to assist with a bullshit law backed by a mega evil corp?
No?
Then how’s it comparable?
Then how’s it comparable?
Because they’re both optional fields that have absolutely no checks on them where you’re free to enter any information or none at all.
In this hypothetical threat that you’re worrying about, there is no world where birthDate gives an ‘evil corporation’ more data about you than your REAL NAME and LOCATION.
Those fields have been in systemd since the beginning, have you noticed any problems related to using your Real Name and Location in your user profile… or do you simply not enter that data?
It’s definitely wrong to degrade or harass this guy for doing it.
Buuut this is being made to support a bad law that should be opposed. The law is a bellwether for compulsory age and identity verification, which should strike fear into the hearts of everyone. And especially everyone who cares about their privacy (which really should be everyone, but …).
Furthermore, it’s questionable whether a law like this can apply to open source software. IMO it really can’t - who exactly is liable? Is the world really better with ageless Linux outlawed?
This is one of the most sensible comments in the thread. The law is the problem. This is something which should have been self regulated by websites themselves, but Meta lobbied for laws like this so they wouldn’t have to police it. The law making this mandatory for everyone when this should be a parental control is the issue.
This is a law that companies are required to implement or stop making business in the states enforcing that law.
You probably feel that companies should just stop doing business in those states “to show them”. Sadly a lot of profitable Linux companies that fund Linux development disagree with your high morals. They want to continue doing business there.
Adding that field help those company comply with the law and doesn’t hurt you in anyway except maybe taking few bytes in your disk drive.
Even if the field is not added, those companies would come up with another place to store date of birth or even use systemd fork.
Its not like they will say since we can’t store date of birth in systemd’s user model then we’ll have to abandon this project and close our branches in those states instead.
Yes it’s technically trivial. I have read the patch. That’s beside the point, which is social and political.
I get to decide and report what does and does not hurt me thankyouverymuch. And I do think this is a step that erodes my right to privacy, taken with shockingly little discussion. (Which got it reverted)
There’s a lot of degrees of freedom between “just comply bro” and “good luck enforcing that”. For example https://blog.system76.com/post/system76-on-age-verification
I love the level of disdain the linux community has for this kinda bootlicking.
Collaborator
Fucking bootlicker
What a pointless drama article this is. FLOSS software does stuff for legal compliance more often than you’d think. The whole point is people can contribute fly by patches and the maintainers make the decision to merge. It seems like being an optional field but potentially providing useful functionality is enough for systemd. If you don’t like it I’m sure there are forks you could join or even use a different init system. No one’s freedom is being oppressed here.
That isn’t really the point. All this nonsense happened without community discussion beforehand.
Discussions happen after the PRs in most projects, because there is no point discussing code that ain’t there.
And they usually don’t get pushed through when discussion is just starting.
Who are the community employing? Why do they need consulting before code changes are made?
Your comment is nonsense.
I think what ze’s saying is https://mikemcquaid.com/open-source-maintainers-owe-you-nothing/ . the nature of open source—atl in accord with the hacker ethic—is that everything is just a passion project, there is no responsibility to not make bad decisions, and bad decisions result in decreased adoption and lost trust. after all, open source has always been about making a new alternative because existing solutions are bad.
So we aren’t supposed to talk about or react to said bad decisions? Come on.
So we aren’t supposed to talk about or react to said bad decisions? Come on.
Do you want to post your real name and place of work online for everyone to see or do you understand why that kind of action is dangerous and wrong?
What in the fascist fuck are you talking about
nah as an anarchist i am against silence. i’m just saying that in our capitalist society open source maintainers do not in fact have responsibility to the community, only to their market share, and this works slightly less dysfunctionally than proprietary because come what may the opposition may fork it. but that and the transparency and the ability to volunteer your labor for them are the only things that open source does guarantee.
My OS should have no details on me besides the account name which didn’t necessarily correspond to my real name.
It does have some old fields for location etc but those stem from the times of massive multi user systems.
Linux has similar fields for realName, emailAddress, location, timezone and more. But like birthdate, I think they’re all optional.
Was Linux ever used for massive multiuser systems? I thought it had always been primarily home use and internet servers. I think big multiuser systems went out of fashion with Solaris. Well, I suppose corporate workstations need user accounts where some of these are set.
No Linux as such was not, by the time Linux got popular the big multiuser systems were on their way out. I still worked on those in college. But they were SGI, HP-UX and Sequent. Especially the latter were huge systems.
But these fields were just a clone of what was in the original Unix systems.
What a pointless drama article this is.
Yep. The crypto ticker at the bottom of the page is the cherry on top!
It’s literally an optional birthDate field in a place where there’s already realName, emailAddress, and location. If you’re concerned about privacy, maybe don’t expose your real name, email, and location.
And it’s not even fucking installed everywhere:
$ userdbctl Command 'userdbctl' not found, but can be installed with: sudo apt install systemd-userdbdAnybody who is calling this age verification is actively lying to you!
This Sam Bent guy should fucking get bent.
It’s brigading harassment on a volunteer dev, the post should be nuked this is just doxxing for ad revenue… disgusting
It was posted by Yσɠƚԋσʂ themselves, who moderates several lemmy.ml communities. I agree it should be nuked, but it’s not going to be nuked.
That’s good to know, I don’t want to be supporting communities which allow this kind of toxic garbage
what do you want him to do? to break the law?
And how exactly would that be breaking the law?
Systemd isn’t an operating system provider and has no legal obligation to make any change.
There’s no need to follow an unjust law, nor a law that makes you an unethical person.
“Software not for distribution or use in California” (aka: “offer void in Nebraska”) is a perfectly valid compliance, btw.
You can’t put license conditions on LGPL code. Surprised you got 49 upvotes with nobody explaining that.
There’s also going the Ageless route and making protestware.
And if you comply with unjust laws, then it’s way harder to challenge them in the courts.
Who is going to arrest/fine FOSS developers for not doing anything about that? Would Brazil and US states go after uuuh, the systemd developers? What about distros not using systemd, like Slackware. Who is ultimately responsible for a collaborative project? Are they gonna send the police after Torvalds?
Plus, other countries don’t have this obligation.
All that dev had to do is nothing. Instead he chose to comply with something that was never asked.
The beauty of FOSS is that if people want, they can just fork it and keep what they don’t like out
lol, what? You mean the law in a handful of states and Brazil? Why should the entire world be affected by this?
I want him to do nothing.
He doesn’t work for a distribution or a system integrator. He isn’t the maintainer for systemd either. He’s a random contributor, and he works for a cloud company that doesn’t make or sell the sort of devices these laws apply to.
These age verification laws did not require Dylan Taylor to take any actions. He did that all on his own.
So, does the law require this doxxing and brigading harassment or is this something that you’re doing for fun?
He did it under his real name. His Github username is his real name, with middle initial. He also links from said Github to his .com, which is also his real name. There is no doxxing here, nor is saying I wish someone hadn’t done the thing they did harassment.
I won’t defend the tone of the article though. I find the photoshopped mugshot and name-calling distasteful.
There’s a difference between your information being publicly available and people taking your information and spreading it around amongst people that hate the person calling them a traitor and other shit.
It’s stochastic terrorism, if they make 10,000 people hate the guy then the chances of somebody doing something to him goes up.
it’s stochastic terrorism
Get fucking real
You are dangerously naive if you don’t understand how mobs work.
Nah I don’t buy it. Ain’t no way this mf is 6’4".
Well, I’m not in a lynch mob. So there’s that.
