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Comment on Someone Forked Systemd to Strip Out Its Age Verification Support

I find that move extremely funny, since it’s purely made for sensationalism and nothing else. I mean, if you hate how systems implemented age verification, then why don’t you remove its identity verification too, i.e. also optional fields for stuff like your address an e-mail that most users don’t even fill out.

There is no mechanism verifying what birth date you type in - you can type whatever date you want and systems doesn’t care.

I’d say no matter where you stand with age verification, this is the best solution to handle the situation. After all, any and all age checks we have nowadays are a black box anyways. There is no real knowing how other systems are checking ages, and there is AFAIK no real government mandated rules on how it is verified. They could make you scan your ID’s front, back, nuclear composition and dietary preferences and give you a result that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a proper age verification procedure.

If the government wants to introduce age verification, they have to do it themselves - build an API that handles the age verification, similar to how the digital ID in Germany works, as an example. If they want proper age verification, they also have to take the blame themselves if things go wrong.

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ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
My line in the sand is when a distro/app starts enforcing entry of birth date data. Having a database field to store it, or even an optional prompt for it isn’t the point where I bin it.

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- belazor@lemmy.zip ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  This is the most sane take I’ve read in this entire debacle. Between arguing the semantics of attestation vs verification and whether we need five hundred forks and PRs, I’m glad to read this.
  
  The biggest mistake the original PR did was not make it more clear it’s not directly because of the laws themselves, it’s to support higher level systems that may want to or need to comply. Systemd is no more complying with any present or future laws than a keyboard manufacturer is violating the law if the user uses it to type racially motivated hate speech.
  
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- Bloefz@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I would but I’ve always been opposed to systemd anyway.
  
  But for me it’s a slippery slope I don’t think we should even get on.
  
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  - ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    But for me it’s a slippery slope I don’t think we should even get on.
    
    I agree. But the start of the slope isn’t my exit point. My exit point is just before the slope gets too steep to get off.
    
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    RiceBowl@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    That’s the thing about slippery slopes. You don’t really know where the point you slip is.
    
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  - socsa@piefed.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Yeah I hated systemd since before it was cool to hate systemd again.
    
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- magic_smoke@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Distros will push a dob of 1970-1-1, marks my fucking words.
  
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  - ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    That’s still forcing a DOB, which is the line I won’t cross.
    
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    magic_smoke@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    When you make a new user using adduser and you leave your full name, number, and room number?
    
    Blank is blank, epoch is functionally the same as leaving it blank.
    
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- Blemgo@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  That is a valid point. Of course it still would be rather anonymised, but it could always be a ‘frog in the pot’ type situation, where most drastic changes are introduced very slowly. My main concern at the end of the day is how much info will be required to be given to services and how much data will be actually stored. If it’s anonymised, then I don’t see much of a threat. If a service requires me to fully identify for an age check, that’s an entirely different thing, especially considering the last of Discord’s data leaks.
  
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Skankhunt420@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
You know I remember when age verification was a thing on porn sites.

No big deal, I was like 12 and could easily say “yupp, I was born April 20th, 1969” and there was no problem.

Now, in several states that has escalated to you showing your ID.

Do you think this is the end game? Systemd made it clear with this move that any kind of US law passed will be able to be honored by their architecture. They didn’t take a stand that you would expect from pretty much the entire Linux community as a whole.

And see the funny part is where you talk about “if the government wants age verification they have to do it themselves” they pretty much do in USA its called your social security number. Banks, auto dealerships, landlords etc use it all the time and its very effective.

By not taking a strong stance against what is happening here you are paving the road brick by brick to having to provide full on SSN and very plausibly retina scans or something similar in the not so distant future before you can even login to your computer or phone.

I don’t understand, how people here are missing that. Fuck we are on Lemmy because we see how shit worked with things like reddit and others. Things always escalate when control and greed are the primary motivators.

This will escalate. And when it does I want you to remember that people were rightfully making a HUGE FUCKING DEAL about when systemd started doing this because by then you will be able to see clearly how it led to whatever surveillance wet dream they are absolutely going to force on us. It will be clear, and this will be step 1 .

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- Blemgo@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I don’t think that systemd is really bending the knee too hard on this one. Actually, I think this move is actually a great way to render any sort of age verification, when using systemd, inert. Because, let’s think about it: it’s an optional field, in a JSON file that NEEDS to be editable at all times. If a distro decides to implement any serious age verification, it will have to store the data, namely the date of birth, somewhere. The /home folder would be wrong, as the user could edit that at all times. The userdb on the other hand can be restricted, meaning that the user can only edit it with user privileges. So if a government questions the seriousness of this verification method, distros can just claim that it is the administrative duty of the parent to prevent their children accessing things they shouldn’t, and that the Linux kernel itself provides the proper tool to do it without constant supervision. Yet systemd cannot enforce any stricter rules because service users, especially root, are not real people and thus cannot have any age verification. The only solution would be to tie these accounts to a person. This would cause an outrage at companies, considering that this role would most likely be the CEO or CIO, and if that device is stolen their identity could be linked to a crime, and I doubt any police station would bother trying to retrieve that laptop.
  
  So this change will most likely be the maximum systemd can do without breaking distros for corporations, while at the same time allow classic Linux users, who most likely give themselves admin rights, a way to render any verification null and void by editing this optional field on their own.
  
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zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
This. And forking is easy. Maintaining a big piece of software is not. This is why every popular repo has hundreds of forks, but non of them are active or in sync with upstream.

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ieGod@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Yup. All this crying about the field is a big nothing burger.

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fluxx@mander.xyz ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I agree with all that you’ve said. But why add it now? Why haven’t they added it a long time ago? Or if now they remembered, why not other extra optional fields that some people might want, like gender, sex, any other field? Oh, it would be too political? I see…

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- Blemgo@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I mean, the introduction of the date of birth field is obviously done to make it easy for distros to comply with age verification by simply saving the birth date and nothing else.
  
  As for the other fields: what use would it have to have such info at OS level? What application would use these fields and how? I mean, some fields, like the ‘location’ one, already are pretty useless, as, for example, the ‘location’ field doesn’t seem to bhave any firm consensus on how it should be formatted. Even the documentation lists both “Berlin, Germany” as well as “Basement, Room 3a” as valid values.
  
  So I doubt not introducing such fields has any sort of political agenda to it, but just raises the question on why such fields would be useful to begin with.
  
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- wholookshere@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  you mean like adding it to a bunch of optional details already?
  
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