Please stop with the (indirect) personal attacks on open source maintainers.
He didn’t have to do this. If he wants to do his part to make everyone else’s life worse, then he will have to face the consequences for it.
Seriously. Lemmy is kinda gross with this stuff.
This change is shit but I’m not a fan of personal attacks on the guy.
Developers are not a protected class. They do not get special social protections when they do ignorant things.
The key phrase is Personal Attack.
If the law was the only thing stopping you doing that, it reflects on you.
Any criticism should be directed primarily at the laws, not the person who suggested adding a birthdate field to the user.json.
Open source is dependent on volunteers contributing their time. The developers at SystemD have been receiving death threats over this. This article includes his name, face, workplace. I know that information is publicly available but the Geoguessr experts aren’t the people we need to worry about.
So maybe next time when someone sees a pull-request like this, they think before merging it?
*provided no one gets hurt. I sympathise with the uproar, but physically hurting the guy is definitely too much
He did not just suggest it. He went on and implemented it. All while the community was telling him “we don’t want this”, “stop with this” – look at the comments on GitHub. Yet he neglected all this feedback.
As an open-source volunteer, you work for the community, right? If you go ahead while the community is telling you “we don’t want this”, then whom are you working for?
As an open-source volunteer, you work for the community, right?
- They don’t work for anyone.
- Even if they did, it sure as hell wouldn’t be for you.
- Even if they did work for you, they are under no obligation to even think about breaking the law for you.
Of course there are no obligations and he’s’free to do as he pleases. Likewise, the community or I are under no obligations of not criticizing him for what he chose to do.
This isn’t criticism.
Taking a person, photoshopping their picture to look like a dossier on a criminal and writing a hit piece which includes all of their publicly available information is doxxing for the purpose of harassment.
Lemmy is a small community, read some of the comments in this post and you’ll see people using violent language, calling him a traitor, etc.
I didn’t even have to go far to find an example, literally the comment under my reply:
https://lemmy.world/post/44550728/22802099
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.
Expand that to the tens or hundreds of thousands of people on Reddit (where this exact article is also posted) and the chances of some crazy person going out and doing harm to this man increases.
This is why public doxxing is wrong and anyone participating in this is morally corrupt.
The correct word is collaborator, btw. Sticking up for him doesn’t look good, either.
Stop trying to make what he did ok. It is not ok.
Another collaborator.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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
fuck nazi collaborators, name and shame em, they don’t deserve peace
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.
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
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.
I wonder if he has tried not being a traitor dickfaced cunt?
Have you?
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.
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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.
Nah useful idiots like this deserve the shit they’ll get.
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.
He “was only following orders”. But yes this is a class war.
- 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.
Uhm, wat. Had to implement, worldwide? Da fuck are you talking about?
No.
Complying with this shit is nuts.
it’s the public info on the accounts GitHub page it’s not like anybody really had to dig at all
Excellent. Just having his face out there will discourage him for good, once he gets the backlash.
He should just fuck off, we don’t need free and open source anything that is in league with Palantir.
Personally, I do think it’s a useful exercise to decide what your red-lines are when it comes to OS level age verification.
For me: Having a field in a database that could contain my DoB is acceptable. Having a prompt to populate it during first time set up is very concerning. Requiring that data to be validate by a third party is the red line.
If you don’t want to be boiled like a frog, bring a thermometer.
NO!
I have two red lines.
- Retaining my personal information.
- Giving it to Peter Thiel.
If I had to give my photo ID to Mullvad to access a VPN, I would do it. I trust they wouldn’t retain it nor give it to Peter Thiel.
Well, I’m not in a lynch mob. So there’s that.
The funny thing is that by January 7, all the bros screaming “I’ll never use an OS that asks my age” will have switched to an OS that asks their age because they can’t go a week without their porn.
Yeah not a chance bud
Some of them might know how to use a torrent client though.
You’ll get age-gated in a heart beat.
They’re going to put age verification on pirating too!?
Well, very possibly.
That’s actually a funny consequence I hadn’t thought of. A media company could go to a pirating site and then file a police report claiming neglect of child protections. That could really start to spiral quick…
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What’s next, my drug dealer will start checking IDs? /s
I wouldn’t mind if your drug dealer didn’t sell drugs to kids.
No, this would be absurd.
Clearly.
Can someone explain why there is a separate merge for systemd and Arch? If Arch just uses the systemd init which was already modified, then what was the separate request for?
I’m using vanilla Arch and will be pissed if I have to switch, but I will based on this. I’m not willing to give an inch.
The systemd change ‘just’ adds a birthday field to the user data, where you could store (or don’t) the users birthday, that then could be used by other applications to request an age bracket.
The Arch-change doesn’t effect real arch Linux. It modifies the archinstall script (so, irrelevant, if you install according to Wiki) to ask the user for their birthday during installation and stores it for systemd.
Collaborator!
I will revolt, once this tries to attack my privacy.
I’m fine, as long it complies technical requirements that applications will implement sooner or later, while preserving my privacy by simply defaulting to 1900-01-01 or something.
Oh cool. So I don’t have to deal with anything after updating. Sweet!
disclaimer: linux noob here.
the separate pull request appears to be for archinstall, “a helper library which automates the installation of Arch Linux.” it would collect user age during installation… somehow?
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)
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.
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.
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.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
So they knew it was against the community and went right ahead?
Blaming the victim, beautiful.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
Fucking bootlicker
