Comment on Someone Forked Systemd to Strip Out Its Age Verification Support
Skankhunt420@sh.itjust.works 1 week agoYou 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 .
Blemgo@lemmy.world 1 week 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.
Skankhunt420@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
You should read the thread in github.
A system76 developer said he’s in talk with state representatives, that this might even be overturned, and that it might not even affect open source software at all and one of the systemd maintainers said and I quote: “It is possible that California law will be changed. But similar ideas are popping up in other contexts and it’s unlikely that they’ll all go away. This implementation is fairly generic and useful for other things besides age verification, so we shouldn’t decide whether to merge it or not based on a single law in any jurisdiction.” -keszybz
That seems like bending the knee pretty fucking hard man.
What they have done is proven that they can bully and harass open source software into submission. They should have waited until FORCED to do something like this but it seems like they’re beyond eager to lick anyone’s boots USA or otherwise.
Linux distros are not US entities bound to US law the last I checked (of course you have your Redhats and etc. And I guess maybe their Fedora distro might fall under us jurdistiction since its developed by red hat but I’m not sure because of being open sourced licensed.
They’ve bent the knee before with banning Russian and I think Chinese Linux kernal maintainers before which was also fucking bullshit.
The USA shouldn’t be able to swing its dick around and force the whole world into submission but boy it sure seems to get to every single year more and more and more.
And a lot of people here support it its so sad.
Anyway I’m getting off track with this but seriously no, they should have taken a stand not only for all of us but for Linux as a whole because systemd is a part of Linux as a whole.
If forced, I understand. This was not forced. This was suggested, merged welcomed and the thread locked as soon as any pushback happened.
Doesn’t seem very open anymore to be honest.