Technology

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.

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 .

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

And in a month none will be active at all.

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

The biggest defense for this I see is:

• it's not bad now
• it's not mandatory
• it will remain unused like the other fields that were previously there
• you can put anything in it

Then, tell me, why bother adding this in the first place, exactly at the time governments are looking toward full control of everybody's computers? If it's that innocent and useless, either someone really likes throwing shit up, or it won't stop there.

And given the slate of other things that "didn't stop there" in the past few years, you know, it cost nothing to be cautious. Especially if it's "so useless you won't even notice it's there" after all.