Someone Forked Systemd to Strip Out Its Age Verification Support

Comments

• Dathknight@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  This is bs …

  Instead of fighting the laws and the people behind it, ‘we’ (as in ‘the community’) infight about some minor commit?

  If the reason is data privacy, why not also remove ‘realName’, ‘emailAdress’ and ‘location’? 🙄

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  • metakrakalaka@lemmychan.org ⁨23⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

    Instead of fighting the laws and the people behind it

    We can’t use the system to change the system.

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  • Skankhunt420@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    As far as I can tell the Name Email and location are all voluntarily provided by the user.

    This is something that will be used whether you want it to or not (that makes it invasive) because of the laws around it (of course depending on where you are).

    Having fields I can ignore as a user isn’t the same as this guided attempt by lawmakers to eventually get you to give ID and retina scans just to use a computer.

    This is step 1. That is why people are freaking out about it.

    And I know systemd isn’t doing this out of spite, but I do wish the scene would stand up for the user more… Just say no California or whatever other shit place decides to enact that and boom problem solved. Not their fault or problem anymore.

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    • themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

      I think these laws will be similar to prohibition. They will try for a while, but then realize they can’t succeed. Governments can’t even handle cyber security, how will they handle this?

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• Blemgo@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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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  • Skankhunt420@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨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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  • ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨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 ⁨9⁩ ⁨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 ⁨7⁩ ⁨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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    • magic_smoke@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Distros will push a dob of 1970-1-1, marks my fucking words.

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    • Blemgo@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨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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  • ieGod@lemmy.zip ⁨58⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

    Yup. All this crying about the field is a big nothing burger.

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  • fluxx@mander.xyz ⁨6⁩ ⁨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 ⁨2⁩ ⁨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 ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      you mean like adding it to a bunch of optional details already?

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• Quazatron@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  1. Fork a project that you have a problem with;
  2. Write a strong worded manifesto;
  3. Revel in those sweet sweet internet clicks;
  4. Try to gather a team of seasoned engineers to keep and evolve the project;
  5. Most likely fail, look for the next controversy, repeat.

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  • fluxx@mander.xyz ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Yes, but what’s wrong with this? If you gather engineers that are capable to maintain it - what is the downside? Systemd could always have used a bit of competition, I think most of us can agree. Most of the forks of systemd will fail, but most of all projects fail after some time. I don’t think this situation will harm systemd ultimately and it shouldn’t.

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  • ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Try to gather a team of seasoned engineers to keep and evolve the project;

    What is there to evolve? Just keep it up to date with the mainstream project while applying this one patch. This is as useful as the signatures that prohibit use of comments to train LLMs.

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• yardratianSoma@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  None of the id fields in the systemd db are required to be filled. This is useless. Simply don’t put any personal info in, and bam, you’re already liberated, from laws that aren’t even in effect yet!

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  • Skankhunt420@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Yupp 100% optional.

    for now

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  • GreatBlueHeron@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    This is perfectly logical and I agree. Except that this controversy has prompted me to go learn about Lennart Poettering. I’ve been using systemd forever and I like it - I like journald and remote journald, I like networkd, I even deleted cron off my systems and use systemd timers exclusively. I knew there was some controversy about Lennart, but I didn’t really care. Now that I’ve read a bit about his background and, maybe more importantly, his new company - I don’t have a good feeling for the future of systemd.

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    • silverneedle@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Finally someone who’s read into the issue

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  • silverneedle@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Will you still say that when they implement ID checking functionality?

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    • RIotingPacifist@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Will you still say that when aliens from the 19th Dimension verify your age rectally?

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    • bdonvr@thelemmy.club ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Obviously not, that would be something very very different than what they’ve done.

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    • yardratianSoma@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      when that happens, I’ll build my own ISO with that part stripped out, or just move away from systemd

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• MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Lots did. There are about a dotzend forks for this explicit purpose.

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• webkitten@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  They literally just added a field in the JSON schema to support a birth date field which is completely optional and has no relevance on the project. People are so dumb.

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  • Skankhunt420@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Well yeah, right now it is optional.

    What about when the law passes that says it’s required on a federal level (yes I’m talking about USA). They added this one in pretty quick, do you think they would fold and be like “nah we stand for the users!”

    Or do you think they will build on what is already being added here?

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    • webkitten@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      If a law passes and you’re running your IT infrastructure and not enforcing it then you have bigger problems.

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  • coolmojo@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Not to mention that removing that field won’t make you adult. Without it you can either not go to certain websites or download applications from stores like Flathub or the system assumes that you are a toddler and only let you visit baby tv.

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• 9tr6gyp3@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Good luck maintaining it

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  • bdonvr@thelemmy.club ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Honestly it’s such a minor change, I’m pretty sure they could just grab all the upstream patches in the future and not do anything and it’ll be fine.

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  • org@lemmy.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    They’ll just keep forkin’ and removing that field haha

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    • bruhduh@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Its forkin’ time

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• tabular@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I can see it’s just an optional text field but the ick isn’t optional. It’s leaning towards submission in comparison to resistance. I’m hoping such laws get repealed, rather than spread.

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• tabular@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I’d like to try an alternative to SystemD but I don’t know quite enough to filter the list of OS options for a gaming PC. I have Mint on desktop (modern GPU) with and OpenSUSE 14 on a server.

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  • ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    MX Linux. But it’s as pointless as only driving cars without onboard computer not to get tracked.

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