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.
Lots of disingenuous comments in this thread regarding the change being “just json” considering they’re already on a warpath of implementing id verification. They are testing the water to see what they can get away with. Furthermore, the Linux community has always been against shit like this (see: systemd outrage, open bios, gnu etc).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
Argue against what is happening, not fictitious and hypothetical scenarios that are not happening.
We’ve had fields for storing way more personal information (like real name, home telephone number, location, etc) since 1962. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecos_field
There is nothing that a birthdate will tell about a person that their real name and location will not.
The criticism here needs to be aimed at the laws and politicians. This article is whipping up a lynch mob against a volunteer developer using a clickbait article for the purposes of ad revenue.
I’ll believe that if and when they actually force me to upload identification to prove that my birthday really is 1970-01-01 and my name really is Nunya Bissnis. Otherwise, it’s really no different from Steam asking my birthday when opening store pages or porn sites asking “click here jf you’re 18” and take my word for it.
So long as it’s being enforced just as well as the realName field, I maintain that it is indeed harmless. If the point is to have a hilariously ineffective solution as a fig leaf against a stupid law, I’ll prefer that to efforts to actually implement verification.
It’ll be too late by that point. Way way way too late.
Your real name and location data have been stored in UNIX/Linux for over 60 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecos_field
realName and location have been fields in systemd since the beginning.
Were you panicking about this before social media told you to be afraid?
It’s not harmless, that’s the thing. Its just the thin end of the wedge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
“Do not comply in advance.” There is simply no need for this. Resist because it’s our duty to do so in order to keep our freedoms. Start with, “why are they doing this?” Then go follow the money. Zuckerberg and Meta, that’s why. They have been under the gun for years to protect people, especially minors, from the harms of their attention based economy of apps. They hired lobbyists in multiple states to push this legislation. Why? Because if the OS does it, they don’t have to, and can blame all the problems on the OS. What’s the Meta business model? Gather data and sell it. The more accurate and targeted the data, the higher the price. What do these laws do? Add more data. Why doesn’t Apple, Google, and Microsoft resist? They already have the infrastructure and are data gathers themselves. Why does the government allow this (US and all 5 eyes)? They LOVE surveillance.
https://tboteproject.com/