Give them an inch, and they will take a mile. Fuck this PR.

Why do the rest of us have to have this shit added in our systems just because some Yankees (and Brazil) passed some bills? My country has already said they won't be doing any age verification shit. I'm starting to think there's some big conspiracy here that FOSS isn't as independent as we believe it is.

Looks like this is just for storing the data (birth date). Distros can use it and do age restriction or ignore it. Not a big deal imo. Its not like systemd does anything more with the date.

I'll start off my comment with something everyone can agree on: the age verification laws absolutely sucks. It's a surveillance law masquerading as a means of "protecting" children. It also completely undermines free and open source projects, and therefore, protected speech. The fact systemd had to add a BirthDate field is unfortunate, however, I would blame the lawmakers for creating the law that the developers of systemd now have to comply with.

I'm okay with the implementation. It is an optional (meaning you have to add it yourself) field which only specifies the date of birth. It doesn't seem to be at all invasive, nor does it attempt to "verify" it at the moment. Granted, anything is possible, but I don't think there's a good enough reason why systemd would EVER feel the need to add age verification. Before you say anything regarding corporations, please answer this: why would a corporation add age verification to a system manager their servers depend on? How will that profit them?

I get why people are angry, but I think this anger should be funneled towards the lawmakers pulling off nonsense like this. Fight those who are actively trying to take your rights away. Bullying software developers for complying to international laws will lead to nothing but hate.

Wow that's an insane level of bootlicking, it was completely free for them to do absolutely nothing about this nonsense law and give the middle finger if asked by the US

I didn't care before but it turns out the systemd haters were on to something for a long time, fuck these owners for even considering this and even locking the PR to avoid valid criticism, I hope all the contributors create a fork, jump ship and never let the previous owners commit a single line of code to it

Final Edit: The PR has been merged into main.

Fucking hell. All he had to do was fucking nothing, the bastard.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/revoluciana-facing-fascism-sabotage

Sabotage sounds spicy. It sounds dangerous.

And yet, the underlying concept is simply this: inefficiency.

I told you last time, make every inch have its cost.

Resistance does not have to be violent, and that’s not something I’m advocating here. Resistance is the word no. Resistance is standing in place. Resistance is pushing.

Resistance is the albatross around the neck of your opposition. Resistance is the anchor that drags along the sea floor.

Here are some incredibly mundane but effective examples from the manual:

Make mistakes with purchasing travel tickets

Make engineering mistakes

Make long speeches and waste time

Act ignorant, or ask a lot of questions: if you’re not familiar with the concept of sea-lioning, you should really learn it

Take longer to do your work

Even if you’re terrified of doing more, this is simply a place to start.

You are someone and you have a responsibility to do something.

You cannot make it easier for the fascists to achieve their goals. You can’t do it today, and you can’t do it later if they claim authority. You must stand in the way of oppression.

This is fucking horseshit. I'm turning against fucking systemd , and I had no fucking opinion before, now it's completely clear they're a bunch of 1940s IBM wannabees.

EDIT : What a surprise, the fucker that wrote the PR works for IBM and "A Medical Malpractice company" and the one that merged it works for Microsoft.

i think it's really wholesome that a lot of 126 year old people use linux

Unless it is fought, this corporate-driven rot will burrow all the way down to the sub-processor TEE/TPM and all the way up to the web browser/app.

Something feels fishy... The user who made this pull request has more than doubled his contributions to various repositories since January (from 20–400 to more than 1100), and this is his first pull request in the systemd repo.

We graybeards tried to warn you about systemd but you acted as fools.

I was ambivalent about systemd up until now. If this gets merged I'm moving to a non-systemd distro. I do not live in California or even the USA. I do not want age verification garbage in my OS.

In my opinion, storing a date is pretty much irrelevant unless there's a process that validates the supplied date, otherwise every Linux user was born on 1/1/1, if not, an administrator can "fix" that

Furthermore, that systemd thinks that it's the place to store such information is in my opinion beyond absurd.

Who appointed that project the source of age truth in the Linux ecosystem? What discussion was there, who was consulted and where was the vote?

This is all to inch us towards an eventual Digital ID, similar to how we have a driver's license for a car.

You mean they're complying with Meta's age verification at OS level lobbying?

https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings

they also open accompanied PRs on this and I'm a little frightened
https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-desktop-provision/pull/1338
https://github.com/archlinux/archinstall/pull/4290

Has anyone even looked at the PR? Why is there such a big stink about adding an optional birthday field to a JSON schema? It's opt-in and can't be validated in any way.

That's like saying OpenSSL is the thin end of an anti-encryption wedge because they provide FIPS compliant modules. Or complaining that it puts your privacy at risk when you generate an SSH key and it asks for your address.

The problem is the laws getting passed, not with software that gives people a choice about whether to comply.

I never cared about the systemd debacle, now I do. I don't want that shit on my PC.

Just think of all those Azure and AWS VMs needing age verification as they're spooled up, destroyed and receated every few minutes...

They want to store the actual birthdays (not just a boolean stating it complies with an age bracket). And using claude to review PRs… fucking systemd

What is the alternative to systemd? I'm sort of a linux noob when it comes to this deeper level stuff.

Ofcourse the project run by a microslop employee wants to force this on almost every distro as soon as possible.