Dylan, useful idiot with commit access, pushed age verification PRs to systemd, Ubuntu & Arch, got 2 Microslop employees to merge it, called it 'hilariously pointless' in the PR itself, then watched Lennart personally block the revert. Unpaid compliance simp.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.