This is a gross article and doxxing this person is also gross and useless.
systemd will live rent-free in chuds heads and they will do nothing but use outdated and unmaintained software in protest.
oudated and unmaintained software… like openrc, with a commit 3 weeks ago? or dinit with a commit 3 days ago?
“doxxing” oh shut up
to all y’all with the “it’s just a text filed”: what if the field is “race”? “sexual orientation”? “jerks_off_to”? what the fuck has a system managing daemon got to do with any of that? and why would you preemptively put it in there without even a pretense of a fight?
fuck you make us! make linux illegal, in Cali of all places. guess how long that will last?
Yeah, scary.
What about some other scary fields like:
- Real Name
- Office Address
- Office number
- Office telephone number
- Home telephone number
- external e-mail address
I mean if those fields were stored, could you imagine the danger that Linux users would be in?
You don’t have to imagine, because those fields have been stored in UNIX/Linux since 1962. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecos_field
I think back then it was generally assumed this simply assisted with office communication.
Imagine telling a UNIX engineer in the 70’s how almost everything you enter into a machine would eventually be used to manipulate or entrap you by the State and surveillance capitalism.
Imagine telling a UNIX engineer in the 70’s how almost everything you enter into a machine would eventually be used to manipulate or entrap you by the State and surveillance capitalism.
This isn’t a hypothetical. North Korea uses a version of Linux which does exactly that.
It still doesn’t make these fields inherently dangerous, and that same argument applies to birthDate. Even if systemd build a verification system that required photo identification and a DNA sample it wouldn’t be a problem.
The community would just fork the project before the totalitarianism update. The FOSS world already has a process to avoid massively unpopular changes. This change isn’t massively unpopular, this is a vocal minority who is stirred up by web articles leveraging clickbait and outrage to drive ad revenue.
The age verification laws are unpopular, I’m personally completely against them. However, they do exist and adding an optional field in order to allow project, who choose to do so, to store that data is not a red line or the start of a slippery slope.
In the future, if there was a red line that was crossed, we would fix it with a fork and not with a harassment campaign.
You think you can just make up lies about countries far away from you and no one will notice? Think again, whisu.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
That’s you. You have no issues giving anyone an inch and then wondering why you’re being lined up on the street afterwards once they’ve taken the mile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
That’s you. You have no issue embarking on a creative writing exercise, painting the scariest possible scenario and pointing at that piece of fiction as if it were reality.
Those are also entirely optional and not having them filled in doesn’t cause other software to stop doing what the user wants.
The same with the birthDate field.
… unless someone merges a PR making it required, which is the discussion of this thread.
What if someone makes a PR making your real name and address being required? Damn…
And then you can input a random date from before 1940 and forget about it…
(same for the birthDate field)
Depends how these new laws are written.
Not true. Because the stated purpose of the laws at play is to enable that to be queried so that sites can decide what is appropriate for you to see.
That is the purpose, but the field is implemented as optional and modifiable with admin privileges.
That is not the point and you know it.
Your point is true, but I’m saying its impact is also optional.
Your argument is an informal fallacy called Whataboutism.
I invite you to educate yourself by reading about it on Wikipedia
You should read the article and understand the difference between a comparison and Whataboutism.
You should re-read what you wrote and see why it applies.
Stored “because law”, right?
Who cares why it is stored, these fields exist for every user in every Linux system and they have existed for decades.
Either birthDate the field is dangerous or it isn’t. If it is, how?
It is no different than data fields that ask for way more identifiable and personal information such as Real Name and Office number which have, again, existed for decades without issue.
I care. One thing is “you know, fields with this name have been around since before you were born”, another thing is “some idiots passed the law half the globe away, now we are preparing your system to comply. Someone has to ©”. The field is not the danger, the thinking, attitude and act is
Edit: some local law, for fuck’s sake
Half a world away where do you live since this is happening everywhere. To be half a world away from any place doing this would be hard.
That’s a fair argument.
Is it fair to say: The field is benign but there is contention about if it should be added or not and users of the software are concerned that their voices were not heard on the issue. That can be handled in the normal project framework, perhaps by suggesting a publicly stated policy about these issues around legal compliance so the community can determine if they want to support the project or not.
My argument is that I don’t think that the damage that was done justifies the hitpiece in the OP which is, almost literally, painting a target on the developer with the mugshot photograph and loaded language.
So, if you’re not one of the people then we’re having different conversations. In that conversation, I do agree with what you just said. I’d like to see the very large projects, which affect a lot of users, such as systemd, have a more formal way to accept public comment and respond on contentious changes and feature requests.
It is not a hit piece. No call to action was stated.
It paints him as an active danger, puts his picture on a wanted poster, includes his full name, workplace and the city and state where he lives and then writes up an article like an after action report of a cyberattack.
It then implies that he’s going to do it again and that he can’t be persuaded and so will be ‘harder to stop’.
Taylor believes what he’s doing is right, which makes him harder to stop than someone acting for money. Taylor already has the resume line and knows the codebase well enough to try again. That’s the true believer pattern. The argument is ideological, so persuasion is off the table.
So if he’s done a bad thing, he’s going to do it again, and you can’t persuade him.
If you can’t read the implied call to action then you’re being deliberately dense.
Is it fair to say: The field is benign
It is benign if it is optional, remains 100% local and under the user’s control and doesn’t prevent other software from functioning as expected.
It is optional, 100% local, under the user’s control and does not prevent other software from functioning as expected.
If it ever is not, then you can simply fork the project at or before that change.
Ah, but this time the government wants it to be able to be queried so that applications and web sites can decide what to do with you. That’s the difference.
The government’s wants are not in the PR. The PR is an optional JSON field.
The field isn’t dangerous, you’re conflating two different things.
The age verification laws are the threat, not an optional text field or the developer who added it.
You must be off by a decade. Your reference mentions no OS and Unic was developed around 1970.
Your reference mentions no OS
Fuck Dylan Taylor
Someone add the default to 1/1/1970
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
Genuine question, don’t we always say that we can change anything in the system on open source software like Linux and systemd etc? What’s stopping any of us from removing this age verification thing? Apps may break, true, but I’m sure there will be many one line scripts that replace that age verification with something that feeds it fake data?
There are a few forks already like https://github.com/Jeffrey-Sardina/systemd and more will pop up for sure. I will try to build it maybe at least I can help with some infra to build it + an AUR package.
I never doubted the forks for a freaking second. That’s why however I think about it, I feel like it won’t work with free open source. Unless the government burdens the app developers to make their apps require age verification to an external source then distribution will have to implement it. Not sure how this shit is going to pan out. Fuck Zuckerberg
IMO the benefit and curse is you could fork it, maintain it, patch it yourself, etc if you wanted, but then its a full time job keeping it up to date with changes. As others have pointed out, this is a decisive change, so a fork probably wouldn’t be a solo project, but the bifurcation in development would be a large impact, slowing development in other fixes and features.
Then what’s stopping you from rallying the contributors to treat the fork as the primary target for development instead?
Ooo, I know the answer.
Because they’re only interested in the low effort performative activism and have no interest in actually putting in anything resembling real effort because the next social media driven frenzy is just around the corner and they need to be outraged about that instead.
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Tbf simply following the development and criticizing bad design decisions is also one way to change opensource software no?
There’s a massive difference between criticizing bad decisions and articles like the one in the OP who’s painting the developer as a target.
There’s plenty of ways for the open source community to handle this. This isn’t one of them.
Brigading and harassing volunteer developer is way out of bounds.
Volunteering to do what? I would have paid him not to. Fuck that guy!
Feel free to fork the project if you don’t like the direction it is going.
Engaging in a harassment campaign is far worse than adding a JSON field, you troglodyte.
No, the community should hold people accountable that fuck them over.
The people that you’re looking for are politicians and companies like Meta who spend tens of millions of dollars to push these laws.
Not the random developer who created a PR to add an optional JSON field.
The ironic thing here is that this isn’t even the guy that accepted the merge request… that’s the person who actually added the code to the project. Anybody can submit a PR.
He didn’t need to do this and you need to stop defending him.
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You could just put a fake date in at user setup from what I understand. It adds the field to the user database but there isn’t any verification that that date is true
I’ve heard somewhere that they’ll require a constant api calls from each system to an external verification system that is even paid. I don’t remember where I read this but if that’s the case then we are fucking doomed.
“I’ve heard somewhere that they’ll require a constant api calls from each system to an external verification system that is even paid”
or what? you can’t use the software store? most of the stuff on there is open source and you can compile it yourself
if it comes down to it you can just compile your own kernel that doesn’t do that.
what about airgapped systems?
It just doesn’t work
We were all born on 01/01/1970
I think it’s blatantly obvious we weren’t born on January 1970, year 1. January only has 30 days, not 1970.
You could just put a fake date in at user setup from what I understand.
Yes, it’s exactly like the realName and location fields that have been in UNIX/Linux for over 60 years.
It’s incredibly clear who is being whipped up into a frenzy by social media clickbait. Your birthDate is not nearly as privacy-destroying as your real name, location, office number, home phone number, e-mail address, etc. These fields have been in Linux since the beginning and, like birthDate will be, are typically left blank and ignored.
If you wanted to throw on your tinfoil hat you could ask ‘Well what if, in the future, some bad guy forced you to actually put your REAL NAME in the realName field?’ That’s basically what is happening in this thread, in addition to brigading a lynch mob on a systemd developer.
Can I just do an
apt remove —purge systemd-ageverificationdand call it a day, or do I need to edit/etc/systemd/ageverificationd/birthday.confand call it a day?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.
Collaborator
Linux Community: It’s Free Software. You can do what you want!
Also Linux community: BUT NOT THAT!
Nobody paid him to do this. He’s a cloud engineer who read the law and decided someone needed to implement it.
Well, how do you know that?
