people on reddit are doing a whole lot of yapping about age verification in Linux
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"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!"
I trust most random individuals more than I trust Poettering's slopcoded garbage. systemd is not a community project and it never has been.
That aside, the first rule of data security is: _never_ collect, store, relay or distribute any data you don't need to, especially when it's personal information.
Have a fun headache with GDPR if you don't fall back to dummy data. -
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 As far as I understood it, the administrator will still be able to claim whatever they want as birth dates of their users. And it is “only” required that websites et al. react appropriately to what the system says is the age of the current user.
If that is the case, I'd consider that the definitely better idea of how parental controls could look like. Unfortunately, on this side of the pond, they seem to rather go in the direction of actually checking government IDs which _is_ a surveillance nightmare.
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@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?
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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!
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@Tijgertje1987 @cas @jane @freya it is not like it is not all that hard to figure how to boot into single-user mode (on anything non-systemdboot anyway)
Kids, if you are reading this, no need to thank this internet bunny for the tip
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@cas @jane @freya
I mentioned here here:
https://social.vlhl.dev/notice/B4PU0aMRZdCXV8QAJk
but tl:dr I believe that a child young enough to need parental controls should not be left alone unsupervised w/ an internet device, and that teenagers should have already learnt discretion and have built a trust relationship with their parents
in a good world then, parental controls would just be guardrails for the former, but in the world we live in, i fear how much abuse, well, abusive parents might cause on the latter by forcing parental controls on their devices -
@Tijgertje1987 @cas @jane @freya it is not like it is not all that hard to figure how to boot into single-user mode (on anything non-systemdboot anyway)
Kids, if you are reading this, no need to thank this internet bunny for the tip
@ZanaGB what's a boot? what do shoes have to do with it?
2501: Average Familiarity - explain xkcd
explain xkcd is a wiki dedicated to explaining the webcomic xkcd. Go figure.
(www.explainxkcd.com)
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@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!
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@ZanaGB congratulations for delving into conspiracy theory! nobody is interested in the linux desktop, all of those players are into linux server.
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@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!
@pid_eins @cas UNIX wasn't installed on end-user computers, the same way end-user computers would be surprised that
--delete-tmpfilesremoves their homedir. i am impressed that systemd now realizes it's also used on people's laptops and not just containers but UNIX never had to deal with this because it was expensive and proprietary. least trustworthy thing i've ever read and i have no idea why cas feels the need to defend it at length. postmarketos marketing for a pos -
@pid_eins @cas UNIX wasn't installed on end-user computers, the same way end-user computers would be surprised that
--delete-tmpfilesremoves their homedir. i am impressed that systemd now realizes it's also used on people's laptops and not just containers but UNIX never had to deal with this because it was expensive and proprietary. least trustworthy thing i've ever read and i have no idea why cas feels the need to defend it at length. postmarketos marketing for a pos@pid_eins @cas if you read IBM and the Holocaust you learn people who provided false data to the nazi census were actually considered heroes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Carmille
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@cas implementing birth date in systemd now is showing everyone how this kind of control is technically practical and can be extended and enforced. It'an entirely new torment nexus being implemented right now.
Seeing no problem here is VERY short sighted.
This cant be good.
@f4grx i'm sorry but this is just FUD. GNOME lets you set a profile photo for your user account but we aren't getting up in arms about how any unsandboxed software could upload it and run facial recognition.
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@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! -
@cas I usually agree with a lot of your takes, and the ones I don't are usually very minor, but I cannot in good conscience agree with this. Complying in advance is never the proper reaction to any change that could be used to oppress people. Life is not a vacuum. The rise of fascism in the United States and its increasing influence in the rest of the world makes it obvious that these age restriction laws are only for controlling information. Compliance means giving in to fascism.
@justsoup on the one hand, i think id generally fully agree with you here, but in this case i struggle to see how things would be better if systemd/xdg refused to comply. I think it would be contrarian and shallow from an implementation perspective to refuse to store the users DoB in systemd's case, or for XDG to refuse to define a flatpak portal API to get the user's age bracket, both of these are fairly reasonable features were they not motivated by legislation.
i'm glad folks like Jeremy from system76 are pushing back harder against this, and from an individual level I'd agree that we should not comply, but from an OS/distribution perspective it feels like a pretty milquetoast response to just throw up your hands and say "Sorry, if you live in Cali we can't give you our software"...
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"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!"
I trust most random individuals more than I trust Poettering's slopcoded garbage. systemd is not a community project and it never has been.
@ki damn i thought i had escaped the systemd haters this time
you quoted me lol, did i say "community project"?
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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
The history of social progress has shown us that progress never happens by complying with authoritarian laws in advance, quite the contrary. It has always been by resisting as a unified group against authoritarianism. Systemd isn't going for social progress, it's a tool for developing capitalist commercial solutions. They get criticisms primarily because of that, and complying to these laws is inline. They're not a friend in this situation so them doing shit is absolutely unsurprising
You don't need age verification to do parental control. You need guardians acting as actual guardians, educate themselves on what taking care of human beings is. Once again the children are not an excuse for adults' laziness -
@pid_eins @cas UNIX wasn't installed on end-user computers, the same way end-user computers would be surprised that
--delete-tmpfilesremoves their homedir. i am impressed that systemd now realizes it's also used on people's laptops and not just containers but UNIX never had to deal with this because it was expensive and proprietary. least trustworthy thing i've ever read and i have no idea why cas feels the need to defend it at length. postmarketos marketing for a pos@hipsterelectron i think i'm missing several layers of context to understand your point here tbh?? /gen
