this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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I see it more as a boiling frog, look at California/Colorado/Brazil and I think NY is getting in on it as well, then there is the UK/Australia starting points. The Gov'ts and meta etc are looking for buy in. As the discussion dies down after attestation you will see them try to take another step to submitting actual ID (you have the infra in place, just add this API...) give it a year or so after we've moved on to another subject
Any time "they" cry Maude's line "Won't someone PLEASE think of the children!" the children's safety is the furthest thing from their mind. I hope I am wrong, but I have seen too much stuff like this to hold my breath. The more we fight every step the longer it will take to come into effect and we can hope for more buy in, from the less educated on this invasion of privacy of the population, to the resistance instead of acquiescing in advance. Linux distros are the last stand against it from major OSes, Microslop/Apple/iOS/Android are all on board, no fight. There is at least 1 distro that changed their EULA to say that their OS is not to be used in California or Colorado and lists the date that the laws come into effect.
Instead, to ACTUALLY think of the children, parents should be using the built in Parental Controls available on all OSes to keep their children from going places they shouldn't. Getting into fantasy land here but, these controls should have simple to follow instructions so parents can easily set them up with no tech knowledge, simple access to curated blocklists (a great job for LLMs) so they can easily add an approved block list by age range, and in the case of phones the parental controls should block resetting of the phone to factory settings unless from the parental control settings.
PR vs Merge is a moot point here, I am looking at the bigger picture to see where these choices are leading. By itself the attestation is pointless as anyone can put anything they want, but it is step one - buy in. We should never just look at what is going on around us in isolation or the bigger picture will crush us all.
I hope I didn't ramble too much here and lose my focus.
I’m still not convinced there is a direct casual link between the merged attestation and some future surveillance. Your speculation that this is some deliberate political strategy for some gradual escalation from attestation to surveillance is not logical evidence, but some belief you have, which holds no weight in an argument; it stands that you have no concrete evidence against your logic being a slippery slope fallacy.
You did concede to my argument by admitting “by itself the attestation is pointless.” Good to know we agree that there is outrage over nothing.
By saying “PR vs merge is a moot point”, you’re running away from a logical/technical debate by being dismissive; you are openly stating you don’t care how the mechanics of these foss projects actually work. Again, you can have a speculative opinion, but that is not a logical argument.
When you argue parents should be using OS parental controls, you do know that that’s exactly what the systemd age attestation PR is building, right? It seems you’re fighting against the very infrastructure needed for your preferred solution.
Finally, you conflate local infrastructure with cloud APIs (vindicating my claim that people opposing this are ignorant to the actual code being merged): Systemd is a local init system. Connecting the local userdb age integer to an external, network reliant govt API is a monumental leap in implementation and architecture, not a simple “add this API” patch that can be quietly slipped in without the entire foss community noticing and revolting. The attestation PR, for instance, had around 200 comments, of back and fourth refining of implementation and discussion, before merge.