Link: https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/24/foss_age_verification/

Just what I want in my distro.

After weeks of debate, code to record user age was finally merged into the Linux world's favorite system management daemon.

Pull request #40954 to the systemd project is titled "userdb: add birthDate field to JSON user records." It's a new function for the existing userdb service, which adds a field to hold the user's date of birth:

Stores the user's birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc.

The contents of the field will be protected from modification except by users with root privileges.

The change comes after the recent release of systemd 260 but unless it is reverted for some reason, it will be part of systemd 261. One of the justifications is to facilitate the new parental controls in Flatpak, which are still in the draft stage.

The annoying people telling us not to use systemd were right all along

Can’t wait for gender, race. Nothing could go wrong.

I'm gonna sound like Prof Snape here, but Goddamnit Poettering!

Literally fucking pointless

The contents of the field will be protected from modification except by users with root privileges.

Fucking nannystate bullshit.

And the same contributor (From Credit Genie) submitted a PR on Arch install to make that field mandatory ... Definitely not sus
https://github.com/archlinux/archinstall/pull/4290

Add religion and assigned sex at birth.

And religion is a dropdown, christian default, no option for atheist.

I always thought that having some kind of "kid-safe" mode for web browsers would be a good idea; there are some people who would use that. People whose age doesn't necessarily have much to do with it. Having a standard header sent to websites to indicate it and making some rules about what they're supposed to do when they see it would be feasible enough.

It seems so painfully obvious that having a "date of birth" field in systemd is the wrong way to do things and can only go nowhere or else lead to bad things.

When the time comes, I’ll make a script/systemd service that will periodically change the DoB field to a random value, so it’s effectively useless as it changes every few hours/minutes/(whatever I decide). If there’s enough interest, I’ll share it with everyone else on piefed/lemmy

This was my reply in another thread about this bullshit:

“It’s just a harmless field; what’s the big deal?”

The big deal is that it’s on the heels of age verification bullshit that fascists are pushing through with the help of tech bros, so that they can eventually push all of us into a scenario where we have zero privacy.

It’s not the adding of the field itself or the fact that it can be filled with nonsense. It’s the reasoning backing it.

“But it’s the law!”

Yeah, fucking and…? It’s a stupid mass surveillance law disguised as a protection, and per usual, it’s written like vague dog shit. This is the smallest part of the wedge. More will come of this and if developers like this keep volunteering themselves to help the fascists, we will all be fucked. Here’s an alternative approach: just don’t add this. You can fight back by not fucking implementing this. Easy.

ACAB

Assigned Christian At Birth

Don't worry. This will all get reverted real quick once it makes its way into a user prompt for headless installations. Imagine needing to pass a DOB in through stdin somehow every time you docker run ubuntu lol.

They will force you to verify it using your government info somehow after they "notice" it isn't working "as expected".

No

I'm relatively certain that the junta would prefer all of us headless.

Ubuntu not required.

The big deal is that it’s on the heels of age verification bullshit that fascists are pushing through with the help of tech bros, so that they can eventually push all of us into a scenario where we have zero privacy.

That's a bit difficult to argue in a world where the most prominent of such laws was passed in California, where Democrats control the entire legislative process.

I have not looked up the voting record for it, but would suspect that, like most of the worst laws in the US, it was enthusiastically supported by both parties? Am I wrong about that?

Garuda Linux will not implement any age verification measures, since Garuda Linux's legal jurisdictions have no laws mandating age verification.

Yes. That's how it should be, that on the Internet you only have to comply with laws where you or the servers you are hosting things on are based, and all other places can piss off when it comes to enforcing their laws.

And it's how it mostly used to work, but we now live in this world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel_Durov

One of my childhood dreams was to run my own successful web forum. Now that we live in this world where that means countries might prosecute me because my users have been doing things that are illegal somewhere in the world, that dream is officially dead. >:(

That’s… not what this is. Who is “they” in this scenario? There’s no government that’s looking at these values. It’s simply a way for any app you’re running to get your DoB without a prompt to track you better.

passed in California, where Democrats control the entire legislative process.

I think that's the "with the help of tech bros" part. Rather high population of those in California, and boy do they have lobbying money.

It should be something like date of birth and at what age are they no longer considered a minor, then its hashed and the system will only say if they are to be considered a minor or not but not give any information on the actual dates set or anything. Or like a specific number of years to countdown from instead of a date

Yet 4chan is still running

1/1/1955

I ain't giving no bum my dob.

From your instance, I'm guessing you have limited knowledge of the American political system. I don't mean this as an insult; I couldn't tell you a damn thing about CDU/CSU policies (AfD, of course, is easy to parse). The Democratic Party is just as captured as the Nazi one. It's all corporate money, so the real difference between red states and blue states is politicians in blue states at least pretend to care for the working class.

Yeah, across the board participation. Because of heavy lobbying.

Down voting this title. For now.

Even if you give a false DOB, it could be one more weapon in the armory of trackers and fingerprinters.

It's weird that this guy is pushing it with "it's the law" justifications while claiming it's so ineffective as to be harmless. If your justification is that it's ineffective, why not just do nothing? That would be even more ineffective at collecting users' dates of birth. Why be the guy who does something? He seems oddly eager and strangely confident that all the steps he's taking to comply preemptively won't be misused in future, by governments, corporations or hackers.

DOB shouldn't be collected at all. Operating systems don't need to know personal information about their users.

It shouldn't need to reveal DOB to any other party. At most there should be an API that returns a boolean indicating whether the user is a child.* DOB is too much information.

*Edit: Even that's a bad idea, as others here have pointed out. Let content filtering be done locally based on content metadata and user settings, so no information about the user needs to be broadcast.

Yeah I guess if someone wanted to set a sort of parental control you'd just make them a user with limited control which we have already ways to do

Every initial setup is granted admin and therefore sudo/su group permissions which is root privilege.

So, yeah, pointless..

Write a cronjob to change the dob on each logrotate or every hour?

And none of this will prevent a single incidence of child abuse.

I'm not in the country that force this in.

Can't speak for this person as I wouldn't have volunteered to make these changes myself, but it's possible that he thinks implementing "harmless" versions sooner can provide a legal basis to decline to provide "harmful" versions later.

I'd personally wait for the legal challenges against non-compliant systems before moving into malicious compliance if necessary.

So you're agreeing with me that this was supported by both parties…?

(I'm actually Austrian, not German; I have however read enough about US politics that I'm fairly confident in my statement above.)

What's wrong with the title? It's the article title.

Also, Beehaw has no downvotes, so you can downvote all you want on your instance if it makes you feel better, but it won't federate the downvote.

If entire distros default to 1/1/1970 then it might not be super helpful.

Might be interesting to see if some anti-tracking distros outside of these jurisdictions are interested in doing something like that.

That's a cringe and spineless move to see from systemd.

Finally, we're not just the Crazy Weirdos anymore!

It'd be awesome to get alternate init systems on, say, Debian hammered out into a more user-friendly shape. It's already fairly decent but feels a tad precarious and the initial setup is way too involved. (We're running OpenRC personally.)

-- Frost

If we accept the premise that certain distros will need to comply with age verification laws (school specific ones, distros running on govt machines), then it would be better if that information was securely stored in the system database rather than relying on each school/government agency reinventing the wheel.

I will save my ire and save my effort protesting until age verification, not attestation, makes its way into my distro of choice.

"I disagree with all the drama being associated with an optional field. I reserve the right to 'drama' later should optional turn into mandatory".

I've never heard of a REASON to not use systemd, other than OMG! Change!

If we accept the premise

Let's not. They're doing this backwards. If this were actually for the children, identification happens by the content, with the filters set locally.

Not BROADCASTING TO THE ENTIRE INTERNET that a child is browsing.

Or just let the parents turn it on or off instead of needing it to securely hold PII... Which we know never ends well. Doubtful they'll be using the same device for their entire childhood anyway.

I'm not afraid to let everyone know I was born on 1/1/1900

So is this enough for you then?

Dylan's words in the PR:

After reading the bill text, this is the conclusion I came to - arch install is an OS installer, the law asks for users to provide birth date when installing an OS. Is that going to be hilariously pointless and ineffective? Yes.

I feel like he's getting ahead of the work as a matter-of-fact. In other words, the law passed, Arch is used by Californians, they need measures to make sure they're not breaking the law.

I don't think protest even falls into it with these kind of people, even though a majority of us would jump on the chance to actively protest this law and these changes. I personally cannot wait to have this shit throw at me at the next Linux upgrade, just to pull something like what Ageless Linux does against it.

That's why I was vehemently opposed to the hit piece that was attacking this guy personally, by a shit blogger who I will forever blacklist. Also, fuck the mod who submitted that hit piece to Lemmy.

Well, it's not so much about parties but rather "donors" ... which is to say, lobbyists who give not one whit whether there's an R or D after the name if they can get what they want.

Arch? Rrquired? Fucking bullshit.

And yes.

The Democratic Party as an apparatus is made up in large part by a bunch of neoliberal fascist-appeasers. Progressive are still a (growing) minority in the party. Leftists are nearly non-existent in it.