The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification Into Linux
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I don't understand what the fuss is about. This is exactly the right way to comply with that law: an optional birth date field. You don't want to have to submit an idea to your OS or implement facial recognition, and you certainly don't want to tie account creation to external services for those things, but now parents can fill in the birth date for their kids, and everybody else can ignore it. This kind of thing needs to be in the hands of parents, not external companies.
So I don't really see the problem here.
Say there's a law requiring collection of people's ethnicity. Or of their gender, allowing only two options. Or of their religion. Or legal, government issued names and id numbers. Oh, they're all optional in most jurisdictions and in fact defined in ways that are noncompliant with other laws. But what's the big deal? We'll just add an optional field name to standardize the schema. There's no mandatory mechanism or verification. Just making the data cleaner.
@mcv @Khrys -
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Di you understand that we're talking about an optional field on your own, local computer that you control, and which already has similar fields for your real name, your email and your location?
I understand people are wary to paranoid about privacy, and you should be, but it's misplaced here. This is the wrong battle to be fighting. There are many worthy battles out there that could use this energy.
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@Khrys @nblr @doingfedtime What kind of bullshit hit piece is this?
We’re now blaming developers for contributing to FOSS projects?
Great job everyone, you can be really proud of yourselves!
/s@joschi @nblr @doingfedtime @Khrys
That's my real worry. People are piling on long-standing open source contributors and pretending they're nazi collaborators. These are people who donate their time writing software that everybody can use for free.
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@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.
This is not giving away your freedom.
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We've long depended on software maintained by fewer people than that.
The point is: anyone can contribute, committers review and approve. If that has always been a reasonable process, why not now? There are lots of open source projects where the creator of the project has more power than that, and we've always accepted it because we trust the maintainers, and when they break that trust, the community forks, which has also happened plenty of times.
But at the end of the day, it seems to me most people here are irrationally panicking about this. Isn't the field optional? Isn't what goes in the field entirely under the user's control?
By all means discuss this honestly, but I don't see anything here that justifies the hype and panic.
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@Khrys we like to think of FOSS as some sort of anarchist collective°. it never has been.
it's run by a series of people with absolute power, for the most part. the benefit is that it's a lot of tiny dictators rather than a few big ones; that in theory anyone can become one, you don't need to be rich; and that these dictators tend to have technical knowledge.
but they can still be arseholes.
° i mean, we might not CALL it that.
@fishidwardrobe
I'm glad most tend to be BDFLs.
@Khrys -
@fishidwardrobe
I'm glad most tend to be BDFLs.
@Khrys -
@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.
Open hardware would be incompatible with modern day commercial aspirations.
Coupled with FOSS of course.#ESP32 is more for IoT than regular computing – but you can use it for #meshcore (and other #LoRa-based projects), wish is an interesting, albeight very basic, alternative to common (controlled) networks.
@lori @Khrys -
Open hardware would be incompatible with modern day commercial aspirations.
Coupled with FOSS of course.#ESP32 is more for IoT than regular computing – but you can use it for #meshcore (and other #LoRa-based projects), wish is an interesting, albeight very basic, alternative to common (controlled) networks.
@lori @Khrys@0x0 @lori @Khrys folks are, amazingly, building tiny computers that run python or basic around esp32. surprised me too!
you need another chip to handle vga, and some external static RAM, it appears.
here is a project emulating i386 that runs windows 98! on an esp32!! https://hackaday.com/2021/07/28/emulating-the-ibm-pc-on-an-esp32/
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This is not giving away your freedom.
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@0x0 @lori @Khrys folks are, amazingly, building tiny computers that run python or basic around esp32. surprised me too!
you need another chip to handle vga, and some external static RAM, it appears.
here is a project emulating i386 that runs windows 98! on an esp32!! https://hackaday.com/2021/07/28/emulating-the-ibm-pc-on-an-esp32/
It really says a lot when we can use low end hardware (for today's standards) to run simpler software that suffices for most tasks.
Maybe RAM prices will bring that ingenuity back.
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It really says a lot when we can use low end hardware (for today's standards) to run simpler software that suffices for most tasks.
Maybe RAM prices will bring that ingenuity back. -
@Khrys @fishidwardrobe @0x0 Everything I do other than surfing the web I could retrocompute. Both of the two (2) viable web layout engines are bloatware because the web standard is bloatware.
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@fishidwardrobe @0x0 @lori @Khrys The Motorola 68000 powered a generation of pretty awesome machines, I'd happily fall back to my STe as a daily driver for most tasks if I won the Lotto.
(Of course I would have to be paying the idiot tax for that scenario to have any possibility of happening
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@Khrys @fishidwardrobe @0x0 Everything I do other than surfing the web I could retrocompute. Both of the two (2) viable web layout engines are bloatware because the web standard is bloatware.
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@joschi
The article is as much about the multi-layer organisational failure as it is about the "contribution" - which indeed is not just one "I don't like". Please take your framing and go elsewhere. Thank you.The title focuses on ‘the engineer’, the top level sentence calls him out by name and calls him an ‘idiot’
There are later some thoughts on organisational failures. But to me it mostly reads as a personal attack.
You can read it anyway you want, frame it anyway you want. But please give others the same courtesy.
