Fork time? Maybe all the anti-systemd zealots were right all along…
Edit: To address whether it is likely that this change will affect users: Gnome is planning a stronger dependence on userdb, the part of systemd where this change is being implemented. https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2025/06/10/gnome-systemd-dependencies/
Final Edit: The PR has been merged into main.
deleted by creator
🤷
In a few years, we may be smuggling in contraband Chinese RISC-V computers.
Huh, we really do live in a cyberpunk novel…
The fact that this shit sound like a dystopian future trope…
Email your legislators telling them that parents already have access to network block tools, these laws won’t stop the problem anyway (run through a vpn), they’re a free speech nightmare, they’re collecting more data on American citizens when America has data breaches losing data every few days, and Congress literally studied this twenty years ago and decided it wasn’t a good idea then, what makes it a good idea now?
What if users are redefined as context? Now the is does not have users anymore. That’s not a ‘root’ user, it’s a ‘root’ context. And that’s non root context with supercontext privileges
By implementing it all in the most brain dead, user space writable fashion
DRM writers love this too.
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
systemdthinks 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?
Exactly. This is a massive overreach, and it is crazy that Poettering is even considering merging this.
I would say the majority of objections to systemd pertain to perceived overreaches of the project (perceptions I generally share). So in that sense, it is kind of on brand.
it is crazy that Poettering is even considering merging this
You’ve, uh, seen systemd, right? Cmon; this is just one more section for the cancer to eat.
He thinks that systemd is desktop linux.
You’re right that asking a user for a date is next to useless. However, that isn’t a reason to not fight this stuff. Asking the user for the date is step one to getting people accept it. After that they’ll point out that people were lying, and they’ll need our government ID to verify (and link us to activity). It’s all a step towards a surveillance network tracking every move you make on your computer.
I understand your point and agree that this is the thin end of the wedge.
What we’re doing here is discussing the phenomenon and I’m highlighting some concerns.
I believe that this is how you get a dialogue happening which will effect change, which is what we’re both advocating.
I think that age verification is about surveillance rather than protecting children and I think it should be fought at every level.
This is me contributing to that fight.
1/1/1
every linux user is jesus confirmed
Everyone knows Jesus was born one 0001-12-25
Is he dumb? It’s been almost 12 months since A. D. started. What was he waiting for
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.
Fishy how? As in a state-level backdooring like was the case with XZ and Jia Tan or are you weary of something else?
That memory surely also prompted this feeling. It’s just that Meta seems to be putting a lot of effort everywhere to push for this. Not so difficult to put, or corrupt, or push, people in dev communities and repos.
Very fishy…
That guy is either a massive bootlicker or a fucking plant. Who goes around vulentarily adding birth date fields to EVERY project they can contribute to?
You mean they’re complying with Meta’s age verification at OS level lobbying?
https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings
i think it’s really wholesome that a lot of 126 year old people use linux
While I think it’s amazing that not only are 95% of Linux users 56 years of age, but they even share the same birth date!
Yes, the Unix epoch is the obvious choice of birth date here
deleted by creator
Rick Astley’s birthday is 6th Feb 1966, just saying
76 years old from day law is passed to honor System76 for having some nuts and being proactive.
We graybeards tried to warn you about systemd but you acted as fools.
It does not help that non insignificant amounts of systemd criticism comes from Lunduke and gang, often ignoring the actual technical problems with systemd and turning into culture war.
I don’t mean you, just my thoughts.
Guilty as charged xD
I know the debate around systemd is going on for quite some time, I understood the basic reasoning behind it but I don’t have the technical knowledge required to truly decide for myself, so I just didn’t pay too much attention to it and followed what my distro of choice does.
The good thing about this “new development” is that it’s not just a tech debate anymore, it has such wider implications that it’ll be much easier for people to decide where to be.
A large part of the disagreement was never a tech debate. Systemd on a purely technical level had advantages, but the arguments were always about a concentration of functionality into a single critical program. Great while things are going well. Hell when it falls apart. That fear wasn’t totally based in technical reasoning.
There is indeed a philosophical part to it around the “do one thing and do it well”, but what you call “fear” is not an totally unfounded concern, in that it’s true that the more complex a piece of software is, the more complex maintenance also is.
But you need serious technical knowledge to fully understand everything that systemd does compared to sysvinit, what are the advantages of this new system and how much its complexity can actually affect maintenance (or not).
I don’t have that kind of knowledge, you could explain to me all the technical advantages systemd has but I wouldn’t be able to understand them, so I just trust distro maintainers in doing what they believe it’s best for their distro and I never considered the init system as a parameter to choose what distro I want to use, I just use what’s in the distro.
Now it’s different, because adding a field to comply with a moronic law pushed by Meta to avoid fines has truly nothing to do with technical reasoning, you don’t need any tech knowledge to understand that, anyone can.
i’m going to start dyeing mine so that people won’t just keep ignoring me like some old man yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off his lawn. lol
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
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
It adds an optional birthdate field to userdb. The desktop does not have to populate it. I’m honestly surprised this wasn’t already a field in UserDB
I never cared about the systemd debacle, now I do. I don’t want that shit on my PC.
So, declare your system users’ birthdate as Thu Jan 01 1970 00:00:01 GMT+0000 and get on with life.
Luckily for me, that’s not the only option, especially since I’m not US.
This is the first time I’ve cared about the whole systemd debate, so that’s something I guess. Not interested in anything that kowtows to this age verification nonsense
@skyline2@lemmy.dbzer0.com @linux@lemmy.ml
Brazilian here. I’m neither a lawyer nor a specialist, just someone who has read the Portuguese text from the Brazilian flavor of the ongoing worldwide age check set of laws.
I must note that the Brazilian age check law (Lei 15.211/2025) specifies “vedada a autodeclaração” (English: “self-declaring is forbidden”). This means that this kind of implementation, where age or birthday is an user input, wouldn’t be compliant to Lei 15.211/2025, because it requires the age information to be assessed independently from the user whose age is being assessed. This means face biometrics, government-issued ID (in our case, CPF, CNH, Passaporte and similar) or “behaviorial analysis”… Anything but a “yes I’m 18” or “I was born in day month year”, for those are self-declared and the Law says it’s “not enough”.
Someone should warn the systemd maintainers of this “Brazilian jabuticaba”.
(Cross posting this reply of mine because the post was cross posted to two different Lemmy instances)
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.
FOSS isn’t as independent as we believe it is
Some parts are indeed sponsored by corporations, that’s not a bad thing per se because financial support is important.
Problems arise when corporations push changes solely for their own interest instead of the benefit of the community, this PR seems to be that case.
Unfortunately, the internet at large has been embracing cuck behavior and capitulation for years.
They are genuinely excited to be a bunch of scared little bitches eager to please their masters.
Germany has effectivly the same law, active since december 2025, and I am sure more countries will intruduce such laws soon. Linux Distributions have to be compliant with this laws, if we like it or not.
Germany has effectivly the same law
I haven’t heard anything about that and a search doesn’t turn anything up either. Can you give any details on what you mean specifically?
§12 Jugendmedienschutzstaatsvertrag: https://www.landesrecht-bw.de/bsbw/document/jlr-JMedienSchStVtrGBWV10StVtr-P12
(1) Anbieter von Betriebssystemen, die von Kindern und Jugendlichen üblicherweise genutzt werden im Sinne des § 16 Abs. 1 Satz 3 Nr. 6, stellen sicher, dass ihre Betriebssysteme über eine den nachfolgenden Absätzen entsprechende Jugendschutzvorrichtung verfügen. Passt ein Dritter die vom Anbieter des Betriebssystems bereitgestellte Jugendschutzvorrichtung an, besteht die Pflicht aus Satz 1 insoweit bei diesem Dritten.
(3) In der Jugendschutzvorrichtung muss eine Altersangabe eingestellt werden können.
Ah scheiße, hier gehen wir wieder.
@DarkMetatron @Geki do you have inside knowledge of more countries you speak of? Stop spreading FUD and face the problem head on. You Germans have earned a reputation for intolerance of fascism and Nazi sympathizers in your own land. Get out there and protest such laws instead of musing online about the decline of freedom as if it’s a forgone conclusion. These laws are pushed by scum to chip away at freedom. They do not protect anyone.
I am not spreading fud, I only added something to a list. The fact that we have such a law is not known by many, even most germans are not aware of it, that is why I talk about it. It is only possible to Protest and fight against something if it is known, and I try to spread this knowledge. This is a way to fight against it, or at least the preparation.
I am very sorry that my posts gave the impression that I am not against such laws, because I for sure am!
And Yes, i should have said that I fear that more countries created such laws, my pessimistic world view got me when I wrote my first post.
@DarkMetatron sorry for the aggression, it’s just the relative helplessness us Americans feel in the shadow of so much stupidity and greed. It makes me jumpy when I perceive backsliding in more liberated places such as yours. I want to hold out hope the foolishness is mostly contained here in my nation.
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.
Yes, the PR specifically calls out the laws as the reason for this change. The problem is BOTH the laws getting passed, and corporate interests complying in advance.
… can’t be validated in any way.
I feel like this will be a problem for the future.
Edit: another user already pointed out the “problem for the future” here.
It definitely will be a problem, but it will be a legal problem, not a software problem. Even if the systemd devs decided to revert this commit and never collect age data, the law would still be just a shitty as it is now.
If this law said that everyone needed to provide a phone number instead of a birthday, would everyone here be just as angry at the Bell Labs developers who wrote the GECOS standard?
Everyone should be 76 years old, to honor System76 for helping.
The problem is the laws getting passed, not with software that gives people a choice about whether to comply.
Is it going to give a choice, though? As more and more of these laws are passed, soon people will have no choice. Open-source software was supposed to be about freedom, and I see this as anything but that.
Just think of all those Azure and AWS VMs needing age verification as they’re spooled up, destroyed and receated every few minutes…
Meta’s lobbies reach really everywhere these days.
