people on reddit are doing a whole lot of yapping about age verification in Linux
I would generally agree that the whole approach of these laws is total dogshit and clearly a wedge issue to enable stricter surveillance laws in the future
at the same time though, the actual implementation and potentially having a portal which exposes the users age bracket seems totally reasonable as a way to implement parental controls... I'm also not totally against holding service providers to higher standards for data processing when it comes to minors, and hey if they're doing that why shouldn't adults get the same treatment?
what im totally miffed about though is why the fuck would you get mad at systemd for adding a birthDate field to userdb, what would you have them do? Would you rather every desktop environment had its own way to store this data??
An XDG portal for this also means you can *trivially* write a stub that always identifies you as an adult or even lets you pick per-app (heck maybe per website! that might be the new cursed way of avoiding trackers under late stage capitalism)
and yeah it sure would be shit if we get real-id laws in a few years, but systemd or XDG standing on "principle" and refusing to implement this API is absolutely not going to lead to better outcomes for anyone. The last thing we want is for users in certain regions to wind up relying on implementations maintained by distros or random individuals, if we need to have this crap the least we could ask is that it's maintained by established and trusted people in the open source community!
@cas i am waiting for the moment when these folks who partake in this misguided shitstorm learn about the kind of PII the good old GECOS field on Linux/UNIX carries...
And once people are over that the next shock waits for them! There's a file in /etc/ that contains a hash (i.e. a unique identifier!) of your most personal, private, secret data: your password. And linux systems even kinda insist on you on providing that on first install! Can you believe that?
@cas It's as if UNIX carries AN ENTIRE DATABASE of PII in /etc/ without any consideration for user's privacy! Unbelievable!
I think we all need to *demand* from Kernighan and Ritchie to immediately drop /etc/passwd and related files from UNIX, and stop helping the government with collecting this kind of data. It's really appalling that no one has called them out on this yet! The shock! The horror!
@cas i never trusted these people in the first place and boy was I right. I'll now move one of my machines to CrazyOS because it stores no PII at all. That will hurt Kernighan and Ritchie, Ha! CrazyOS will not store *any* PII, it's so good! It doesnt have a password (MS-DOS back in the day already had that, and it should be common sense), you just are let in right away. It's kinda annoying though that it has no $HOME to store data in, but of course that's cool, because that would be PII...
@cas right after installing CrazyOS I'll make a video of it and put it on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram of course (I really dig their services, I have accounts everywhere, ha!). Hey, did you hear the web folks have cookies! 🍪 Yummy! So good!
@pid_eins @cas I think the way the code change is motivated has some importance here.
Normally, in a FOSS project when some change is made it's to make things better for users. The change was requested by users, and doing the change makes users happy.
If instead you start motivating code changes with "we change this because of this-and-that law", then that does not feel right to me.
Perhaps many users do want the change, but in that case better refer to user demand instead of laws.
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@pid_eins @cas I guess in some way it comes down to "who is the software for?"
A piece of libre software is for the users, it serves the user and does what the user wants (which may or may not be the same thing that lawmakers in some country want). It's not a tool for governments to enforce laws.
Of course, when there is a FOSS license users can always do what they want anyway. But saying that changes are because of laws risks giving the wrong impression.
Do you see what I mean?
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@eliasr @pid_eins superficially sure that makes sense, if FOSS existed in a vacuum I'd be totally on board. But despite the efforts of many to create and share software while taking zero responsibility for the consequences of their actions, software still exists in the real world.
To be clear (though I think i said so in my post) im not in favour of governments imposing restrictions or requirements on software, these laws are arbitrary and almost as hard to define concretely as they are to enforce.
With that being said, if I may attempt to challenge your underlying assumptions here: how are the requirements of law different to the requirements of (for example) a security minded individual, or an enterprise customer?
I want to daily drive a Linux phone but I care a whole lot about security and implementation details basically mean to only way to implement a truly secure OS stack is to use proprietary "trusted apps" from Qualcomm to protect my OS encryption keys (think software backed TPM), I have no doubt in my mind that people may object to the idea of Linux loading proprietary trusted apps into the "secure world" to implement this functionality, but would you object to the kernel adding support for this because it might not be "what the users want"?
I guess im making two points here so i'll try to separate them:
1. At what point is a topic so technical that the opinion of an average user with minimal context shouldn't be trusted?
2. How do you in practice enforce that "libre" software is always serving "the users" without alienation and othering?
Like I personally am always pretty confused and occasionally frustrated by the systemd unit constraints system, did i want Requires= or BindsTo= or WantedBy= or Requisite= etc.... Similarly the fact that every openrc service file is a shell script is infuriating, does these mean these aren't libre projects?
And again, yes I think the laws are fucking dumb, i just think criticising systemd and XDG in particular is just virtue signaling here, not advocating for real change. I hope i don't just come across as contrarian, you're making a philosophical argument so I hope it's ok to respond in kind.
> how are the requirements of law different to
> the requirements of (for example) a security minded individual,
> or an enterprise customer?
It sounds like you are assuming that the law is always good, that the state (making laws) is always good. I think taking a look around the world today makes it pretty clear that this is not the case. The state can be really bad, laws can be really bad.
1/?
@cas saying "as required by recent laws" indicates a mindset that "what we do here is to implement laws. States make laws, we implement them. That is what this software is about: compliance with laws."
And I think such a mindset goes against the idea of free software.
> I hope i don't just come across as contrarian
I appreciate your answer, and I'm sorry I only answered parts of it!
@cas
Anyway I think you kind of missed the point I was trying to make: I am not critical of the code change itself, what I am critical of is the way it was presented.
To clarify precisely what I mean, it's the first sentence in this PR: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954 which says:
"Stores the user's birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc."
I don't like that framing of the code change.
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@pid_eins