Linux

I’m going to bullet my thoughts on this whole thing because I’m annoyed by the general response, and the implementation as well:

• I don’t wish harm on the dev and I don’t dislike them. I don’t even know them
• Death threats are ridiculous; that’s the working class attacking itself again
• That said, I want to know what compelled this dev to preemptively implement this field not in 1 but in 2 separate PRs
• Both the field and the law itself do not serve the user at all; it’s a bullshit vague law that is using children as cover—again (I’m old enough to know how this game works)
• I’ve always viewed Linux as the rebel among all of the corporate slop we have to constantly dodge, so it is super gross when I see changes in Linux that were made to appease laws built and pushed by fascist tech companies and governments
• Did the dev even open a line of discussion anywhere, or was the PR supposed to be used for that?
• What’s his motivation? Money? Fame? I’ve been a programmer for 20 years and I’d never jump on a chance to add something that aligns with laws I think are unethical dog shit—especially in the Linux space where the whole goal is to not be Windows
• I’m a bit frustrated with the casual “what’s the big deal?” mindset that a lot of people I’ve encountered have about this. Are we not living through the same timeline where the US has fallen under the control of a fascist regime that is being eagerly assisted by Meta, Apple, Microsoft and a ton of other massive corporations? How do people not see that this is the beginning of the wedge? And let’s say it peters out and nothing else happens. I’m not going to be ashamed of the fact that I was a squeaky wheel over it because I’ve seen how these things go. You follow the money and suddenly the bigger picture comes into focus. Why on earth a meager single little dev would implement this, unprompted, is just beyond my reasoning.

This reminds me of when Guillermo Rauch from Vercel praised Trump multiple times. Bro, you’re not Tim Cook. You’re not Ellison, Zuck, or Musk. You’re not even on their level. You’re not going to get on their radar. I have PTSD from fellow tech folks being weirdly aligned with fascism and this whole dumb thing is giving me that vibe again. I don’t think this is that 1:1, but this is like the metal scene. You have to dodge the fascists that seem to weirdly permeate corners of the culture. People that refuse and get annoyed by right-wing labels, but still help right-wing grifters, are their own unique brand of pathetic.

On a completely unrelated, off-topic note. Here is the same person talking about Google's new "advanced workflow" for "sideloading apps" on Android.

The title of his blog post is "Google's New Android Sideloading Flow Is a Fair Trade"...Figures.

I don't think enough people realize that this is catastrophically bad. It'll discourage people from becoming open source developers, it'll discourage people from using Linux, and it'll discourage legislators from taking the Linux community seriously.

Sure, but personally, I don't want a linux community that's driven by corporate needs and governments that have been paid off by them. I don't view it as a catastrophe, if that's the version of "the linux community" that we lose.

None of that is to say that harassing devs is correct. It's not, and never is. Harassing anyone with death threats and dogpiling is not on. But if we take that out of the picture, negative pushback that drives away devs that would otherwise have helped implement universal age gating isn't something I'm terribly upset over, because I don't want the version of community they're taking us towards

Yeah I'm not going to give this guy his desired victim role. He put a lot of effort into make privacy invading pull requests. Death threats and doxxing is too far but he deserves some insults.

Unfortunately appeasement upwards has been taken advantage of over and over.

It’s logical to take a stance of ok what can we do to head off the bigger problem. But the truth is, over authoritative governments and tech businesses will overstep that rational offering. So appeasement needs to stop, and recognising this as the line is already occurring.

I am not gonna wish harm on the guy, but I really don't have a lot of sympathy for a techbro simp.

actions done collectively by SystemD

Nope. It only needs one maintainer to do the PR

It'll discourage people from becoming open source developers

You know what will discourage Them more? Id verification

relatively inconsequential law

Give me your Id. Seriously, go and give me your ID with nothing blurred.

Don't collaborate with fascists.

He didn’t comply, he collaborated. It won’t deter anyone but pro fascist programmers from developing for Linux. Your defence of the indefensible says a lot about you, too.

We're demanding that the government we pay for respect basic human needs. Privacy is not a luxury. It's a need. They went to far with this shit so they can take the next mile. Fuck them all and fuck California's lawmakers for doing it. We should be sending them letters of discontent too.

Lawmakers and politicians in the US ruin everything more and more everyday.

Relatively inconsequential law? Relative to what?

first off, please announce that the video is from that brody clown so people can not click on that slop; needless to say, I ain't watched it so I don't know or care what points was made in it.

second, what OP is doing in OP and his bonehead comments is purposefully pushing a strawman argument, false dichotomy, red herring, and all the other logical fallacies in order to posture as a hero or whatever they got going on between their ears - if you're anti this bullshit "law" then you are also pro physically harming poor FOSS "contributors".

this fucking "contribution" shoulda been shot down like any other troll/bullshit plaguing every other FOSS project beset with ai bots and carma-farming typo-fixers and the like, and if by some mistake their "contribution" was accepted, here's a chance to reverse it.

cali ain't the world, which by and large ain't got no such idiocy on the books. and if it did, I wouldn't bootlick my way to submitting a patch to incorporate it; I would, in fact, oppose it any way I could.

that clown of a "contributor" has a history of simping for the backwardest ideas, antithetical to FOSS and I don't care one bit what he has to say on any one topic.

complying with a relatively inconsequential law

This downplays the impact to privacy these laws can have but sure, personal harassment is bad.

Counterpoint: fuck this guy for complying with the technofascists in advance like the bootlicker he is.

Common right wing pattern:

1. I do a fascist thing
2. people call me a piece of shit
3. I feel threatened

When you discover the reason for his bootlicking you will be ashamed of your words and deeds.

So they added a date of birth field. Not technically doing anything wrong but a concerning direction morally. If it wasn't for the fash / authoritarian bullshit in the world that field wouldn't be a problem.

However, the question is how should the Linux community respond. Rather than grabbing pitch forks we should do what the Linux community does best. Support the alternatives, be it a fork or a replacement stack.

I'm watching for what lands and becomes popular. It seems inevitable that Devs in countries that aren't forcing ID checks will build what we need. I hope to see either a fork of systemd free from redhat influence (always suspicious of large corps), or a true set of alternatives that can realistically replace the systemd stack.

The community will drive the change. Put down your pitch forks, pick up your keyboard yourself, or just support the good Devs instead.

I expect someone will just make a systemd patcher package that removes the field and provides clean error handling for anything that tries to use it.

I think the discussion we should be having instead is engineering ethics.

I think Dylan's letter clearly showed he isn't really involved in "FOSS radical" circles and has the usual engineering mindset (that was described in the Sam Bent blogpost). Not that I personally blame him, engineering schools raise students for this, and the corporate structure further enforces it with the strict hierarchies where you do whatever management orders you to do. What's important is that there are many devs who clearly aren't tied into the ethics discussion part of engineering. There's even research on engineers' attitudes afaik, and its conclusion was that freshly graduated engineers' first response was to implement changes without thinking about the ethics part, and after further prompting and discussion, they could be convinced that this change was bad and they need to push back.

I'll leave a two links here so when people iwsh to read, they know where to find good stuff.

• Constructive Technology Criticism Annotated Syllabus - I know Medium sucks but the scribe.rip copy I saved suffers link rot
• Awesome critical tech reading list - you can just git clone it and read it without browser

Enabling fascists hardly makes him a victim

lmfao this entire situation is just the average rational person vs big tech lapdogs

I don't wish Dylan harm, and I'm not doing anything to him. I also believe nobody here is sending threats. If you saw the video, you probably noticed that it contained a screenshot from 4chan. 4chan users have been known for terrible behaviour and they are conspiracy-minded fascists, who also oppose this change (others fascists would like this as long as it's not them being spied on). I'm almost completely sure that they are the ones doing the bullying, not users from here.

I'd prefer if the age verification landscape would be fragmented an unusable, compared to systemd offering it in a consistent manner. Websites will use the offered APIs and will use it for extending fingerprinting. No, fake birth dates won't save you. Even the disabled canvas API is used for fingerprinting. It just shouldn't be exposed at all. Not that it matters because every other OS will comply and desktop linux is negligible.

The arguments presented in the video won't convince anyone who bully people on the internet. They are most often fash and they believe that only power matters. Bullying is exerting power over people, and if they succeed in bullying them into reverting the change, they will be satisfied. Not that I think it will achieve anything, but they do. They follow Carl Schmitt's teachings.

On "better ways to make a change": If somebody doesn't live in the US, and lives in sort of a dictatorship, they can neither affect murican lawmaking nor do their govt listen to anyone other than a few. If this age attestation/verification shit comes into place, their only choice here would be to go and not install systemd-userdb (or use linux without systemd). The disabled API would probably break even more websites than disabling 3rd party javascript. Their govt could also use the fingerprinting to spy more on citizens (they prolly already do).

As a thought experiment: please recommend them a better way than bullying. No, not living in a shithole country is not an option. No, they don't have the spare money to found/donate to an existing org that fights against this. Also, companies pushing this would just outspend them.

There's also the aspect of corporate influence over linux. It directs changes in order to further business interest over normal users' interests. Personally, I prefer companies be out of linux and would accept lower-quality things. But also, I think the ones most hurt by these laws are the system integrators (mentioned in the video), who actually need to do things that align with normal users' interests.

On the parental control thing: yes, age things could be used for it, but the parents know better than the computer, and user settings would be preferable (for example, kid should be able to this and that program, open this site, but not others). I think it shouldn't be the websites who decide. Yes, parenting takes a lot of time, but we can't substitute it with automatated fence-building.

Edit: elaborate on "fascists.