I am aware of the Orwellian privacy implication, but how do we deal with bots, now that AI is rampant?
Something like hashcash, or what?
this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
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Some type CAPTCHA type puzzle. Maybe ask users how many Rs are in ‘strawberry’ before they can proceed
to play a game of paper scissor rock. Most chatbot try to play (without any understanding of how pointless it is). Anything that tries to play straight away is automatically a bot.
Play a game of rock paper scissors with me
Not sure what is worse:
- The political fight re: should the OS store your age at all. (Linux will be illegal because they didn't bend).
- The political fight re: should OSes be required to verify your age / identity?
To me, fighting at step 1 has the advantage of keeping the infrastructure from getting built, and the disadvantage of people saying "well, actually, there's nothing concerning or new here."
Fighting at step 2 has the advantage of being a clearer threat, but a disadvantage since the prior infrastructure has been built, society has adapted it, and politicians say "think of the children."
I feel like it is more strategic to fight at every step.
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.
Nah. What is funny is a pull-request explicitly stating compliance with age verification laws getting merged and then revert refused with a "don't bring this discussion here" argument. This is where Lennart has lost me, with that bullshit of an excuse
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.
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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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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- Fork a project that you have a problem with;
- Write a strong worded manifesto;
- Revel in those sweet sweet internet clicks;
- Try to gather a team of seasoned engineers to keep and evolve the project;
- Most likely fail, look for the next controversy, repeat.
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.
There's nothing wrong with forking a project, IF you can and intend to maintain it -- hell, that's the whole basis of FOSS.
Forking it to make a point with no intention to maintaining it is just an easy way to gather clicks and stir drama.
IMHO the effort is better spent fighting the politicians that are shoving this down our throats, or should we fork all the tech that gets affected by bad political decisions?
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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!
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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Will you still say that when they implement ID checking functionality?
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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'? 🙄
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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They should also remove the phone number prompt that UNIX has had since before systemd even existed. Your phobe number is an optional part of the GECOS field and has been there for a very long time without anyone freaking out like this.
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There's no age verification in systemd. That field doesn't verify anything
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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.
Liberated systemd is a fork of mainline systemd started by Jeffrey Seathrún Sardina, a machine learning/AI researcher
I already have qualms about that.
Call me dreamy-eyed, but the reference to "machine learning" might mean this person has respect for what the technology is and has been for decades before the chatbot flood
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Reject the age verification.
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