Technology

Reject the age verification.

Liberated systemd is a fork of mainline systemd started by Jeffrey Seathrún Sardina, a machine learning/AI researcher

I already have qualms about that.

There's no age verification in systemd. That field doesn't verify anything

Not sure what is worse:

1. The political fight re: should the OS store your age at all. (Linux will be illegal because they didn't bend).
2. 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 am aware of the Orwellian privacy implication, but how do we deal with bots, now that AI is rampant?

Something like hashcash, or what?

Far many more than someone.

Feels like something systemd can solve with a compile time flag. Either have it on or off depending on if you want to legally sell it in those areas or not and away you go.

if there is no malicious intent in adding this, they really should learn to read the room.

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.

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'? 🙄

1. Fork a project that you have a problem with;
2. Write a strong worded manifesto;
3. Revel in those sweet sweet internet clicks;
4. Try to gather a team of seasoned engineers to keep and evolve the project;
5. Most likely fail, look for the next controversy, repeat.

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!

After all, any and all age checks we have nowadays are a black box anyways

This is the only part I disagree with. Age verification is typically done via services like ID.me, Lexis Nexus, etc which do it via identity verification with documentation. The alternative method that most social sites have gone with is age prediction from a face scan, of which providers are more than happy to tout how they do it as differentiators. For the latter, there are even FOSS options.

I'm not into this, but is it the nerd version of releasing forks and torches?

Good luck maintaining it

Okay I've said this so many times but (open source) code is speech and thus protected by free speech laws. Also idk if anyone's noticed but it's pretty obvious ID verification is for mass surveillance and obbo purposes. Now why would this apply to software that we already know doesn't spy on you? Until now, proprietary software and big tech platforms already spied on you, but it could - to an extent be pseudonymised. This isn't about spying on people, they already do that, it's about removing pseudonymisation - instead of your data being stored under: User #2044820 it'll be your full govt name and address leaving no room for doubt or plausible deniability.

It is by every metric, useless to provide ID verification for software that collects no data, at best it would just give them a better idea of the demographic. Also it's literally open source, the GPL prohibits disallowing people from forking/editing it and it prohibits restrictions on the way in which it can be edited, which is legally binding.

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.

Lots did. There are about a dotzend forks for this explicit purpose.