The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification Into Linux

[fishidwardrobe@mastodon.me.uk]

@lori @Khrys i've recently been thinking about — and this is beyond my skills, so i should really say "fantasising about" — some sort of common retrocomputing platform, maybe based on an esp32 or something, which is completely incompatible with commercial computers and so can't be used commercially.

but it would also be missing all the spy-firmware (minix in the cpu, tiny computers in usb plugs etc). maybe we could start our own replacement for the internet!

… yeah, right. sorry.

[draeath@infosec.exchange]

@mcv @Khrys let's take it a bit further too. Nobody uses a pre-built systemd straight from upstream, every distribution is building and packaging it.

This seems very trivial to patch right back out and/or put behind a define. (I would actually be surprised if it wasn't like that, to make compliance with different jurisdictions easier).

[khinsen@scholar.social]

@SReyCoyrehourcq On voit en effet de plus en plus de "corporate" dans l'univers Linux, et la Linux Foundation en est peut-être le symbol le plus visible. Je suppose que c'est pourquoi BSD (re-)trouve de plus en plus d'adhérents.

@biggrizzly @sebsauvage @Khrys

[mcv@friendica.opensocial.space]

@julesbl @Khrys

Nowhere do I call this a bug. It's an additional field in the user db. Just like userName, realName, emailAddress, location, timezone, preferredLanguage, and many others, some of which are at least as sensitive as age.

People are panicking about a complete non-issue. Read the actual discussion on the commit; there is actual discussion there, but nobody is panicking about it the way people here are.

The discussion on the Arch commit has a bit more pushback; there the contributor puts more emphasis on legal compliance, receives some pushback that it offers no reliable age verification, so how can it comply with the law? and the decision is made to put in on hold until they get some legal advice.

And with or without that law, I don't see any problem with storing yet another piece of personal information. It fits right in with everything else that's already stored. If you don't trust the privacy of your own PC, don't fill it in. It's optional.

But I can imagine that parents would want to set this for their kids, and may also want software to restrict their kids' access to certain kind of content based on that. But that's not what this does.

[mcv@friendica.opensocial.space]

@Legit_Spaghetti @Khrys

"Fuck you, make me."

Sorry, but nobody is making you fill this in. It's an optional field. And there's no verification on it.

[rootwyrm@weird.autos]

@filippo @Khrys @thedarktangent oh, and the company he works for?

Brags about not doing credit checks before issuing payday loans at usurious rates, and charging a monthly subscription fee on top of it.

[wonka@chaos.social]

Not *yet*.

@mcv @Khrys @Legit_Spaghetti

[legit_spaghetti@mastodo.neoliber.al]

@mcv @Khrys Imagine if instead of your DOB, the field asked "Are you a Jew?" and it was also optional and didn't have any sort of verification attached to it. Just an innocent question, right? No one's being forced to answer it. Not a problem, right?

Except anyone who'd spend their time adding such a field to an open-source project in anticipation of an imagined legal requirement should immediately become radioactive in the community, as should anyone defending such an action.

[zer0unplanned@friendica.rogueproject.org]

@revk @Khrys

[montef@mastodon.social]

@Khrys Further illustrating that systemd is evil and should be destroyed by fire.

[montef@mastodon.social]

@revk @Khrys Born January 1, 1970. Duh.

[thetooter@crapulator.duckdns.org]

@Khrys let's kill this guy with hammers. tbh tbh

[romabysen@mastodon.social]

@Khrys this is why Lennart isn't allowed to submit code to the kernel

[7666@comp.lain.la]

@Khrys for someone who uses the phrase "microslop" the whole thing reads like slop

[ultraverified@mastodon.sdf.org]

@Khrys

Too old for Linux

I think that's a rock opera, isn't it?

[ultraverified@mastodon.sdf.org]

@Khrys

Also, #fuckedCompany

" .... name is Dylan M. Taylor, a Senior DevOps Engineer at Credit Genie, a Khosla Ventures-backed fintech startup in Durham, North Carolina."

[_r@donotsta.re]

@Khrys@mamot.fr needlessly dramatic for what was an entirely unsurprising development. wake me up if they do anything beyond a glorified text field, something almost all other OSs have had for decades.

I mean I agree that the sentiment is bad. but do we need the entire linux community to explode over this? hardly

[andymoose@fedi.aiga.rocks]

@mcv @Khrys The problem is that they’ve acquiesced to a poorly thought out and bad faith trial balloon of a law. So now the lawmakers know that it’s game on. The next version of the law will be even more insidious and require actual verification and do who knows what else.

[jonathankoren@sfba.social]

@Khrys let’s be completely honest here. The choices are:

- Non compliance resulting in everyone complaining that your device is “broken”
- Non compliance (this option)
- Full compliance with outside verification (a horrible option)

If a mandated API is made called, then easiest option is just to return “adult” and move on, rather than the millions of people complaining that “it doesn’t work”

I really don’t get what the point of this hit piece is.

[salty@mastodon.nz]

@jonathankoren @Khrys The point is that you don’t just give away your freedom because it’s easier. You *at least* say ‘fuck you, make me’ first.

There are way more people for who this is NOT law than for who it IS. So much for the land of the free and the home of the brave.