Is systemd going to embrace age checks?

I wouldn't really call it age verification, more like an optional field you can put in a date if you want

Already merged.

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954

OpenRC and sysvinit are probably the best options out there, and dinit looks promising. Personally, though, I like s6.

It's an optional field in the user record your distro can make use of if they want.

its age attestation, not verification, and linux is still going to have to comply with the law either way. being open source does not give us immunity from whatever laws are passed. if you have a problem with it, keep the law from being passed in the first place.

This has some serious cope to it

Systemd is here to stay. You don't have to use it but it isn't going anywhere.

Spooky stuff

/s

Adding a birth date field to isn’t super alarming to me. More PII is bad obviously, but it’s not required, editable by an admin, and hidden in system logs. Whatever this field will (or won’t) do, the effects are already achievable through user and group permissions.

If you read the discussion on that pull request, you’ll see there’s a ton of interest from the community in ways to privatize this, and I have a lot of faith in developers to reroute around stupidity.

The real danger comes from how it’s used in the front end, but there I have even more faith in the community to draw a hard line. Any distro trying to cut you off from your own computer until you drink a Mountain Dew verification can is gonna get forked so hard.

That's just the first step before they require you to upload your id. Don't let in the trojan horse.

The first step is adding the field, the next step is interfacing it with persona.

I'm really getting the vibe that this is a convenient use of the slippery slope fallacy by people that already hate on systemd for other reasons.

I don't really understand that hate either, but hey, everyone needs a hobby.

https://github.com/OpenRC/openrc

https://gentoo.org/

https://alpinelinux.org/

I'd argue the opposite. If we want to restrict access of kids under 14 to social media for example, then the parents should just be able to tell the device/browser, that they should inform the websites that the user is under 14. not the exact birthday, not even the year, just <14, <16, maybe <18, so that the website can adjust accordingly.
That would be way less invasive then having everyone show their ID on account creation.

Ah yeah openrc is great. Runs my Gentoo rig.

you can still reach out to the people who make those decisions and try to get people ti understand why age verification and attestation are bad. theres no point getting mad at companies for complying with the law. arguing how they're doing it is fine but complaining they're doing something they literally have to is just whining.

might just be forgetting smth but I have no idea what you mean by persona. so far though, all sys76 have done is work towards supporting something they are about to be legally required to do in the state they're based in (co), even if they did it in a kind of sucky way.

I am very anti-age-verification laws, because they tend to be pro-identification-laws. But adding a simple field signifying the age of the current user is probably as good as it gets, although i would have preferred a single-bit-solution (of age/not of age) or at max 2 bits (<14, <16, <18, of age). Using this to go after Systemd again is a) not gonna work, because it's here to stay and b) i am very interested in how others will implement the legal requirements.

I think you can see why people are nervous about this sort of affordance, though. Because of the kinds of pro-surveillance politics it is actually complying with.

That's what people say about Microsoft, so I guess we shouldn't complain about that either

git revert 7a858878a03966d2a65ef9e8f79b5caff352ac53

I very firmly disagree.

This is compliance in advance of laws that will do nothing to accomplish what they claim, will provide a means for corporations to absolve themselves of wrongdoing, provides an additional means of exposing PII unintentionally, and is an outright farce of an implementation.

The danger absolutely is how its used on the front end - and we can absolutely expect the most abusive approaches possible in that regard.

This is alarming to me because we've seen the same type of thing getting pushed over and over and over. Despite decades of experts showing how bad of an idea this is (tech, legal, and child development experts), seeing this still being pushed demonstrates the goal. "Protecting children" is the same bit of sprinkles on top that it always has been, and complying in advance with this is a mistake.

I'm not really interested in waiting for the abusive actions we are absolutely going to see. I'm shocked, however, at the number of people who think this is perfectly fine, where I would expect more people to know better.

I've already taken the necessary precautions by uploading my semen into the drive tray.

Your country's definition of "of age" and my country's definition of it is likely to differ. Easier to just implement a birthdate field than try to cover all the global legislations for these things. Especially when there are multiple conditions for "of age" in a single country. Old enough to vote? Old enough to drink? Those are often not the same.

Most of the laws aim for social media, so the 2 bit solution should be enough for most legislation. I would propose an "Birthday" field for legislations where an exact date is needed (which shouldn't be, because it's allowing every tracker to identify the DoB) and the "2 bits" for the rest. In my country the ages are 16 for drinking beer/voting and 18 for "mature"/hard liquors/tobacco.

the problem with introducing stuff like that at random is, that it may break A LOT in production environments

can we have SysV init back?