Dylan, useful idiot with commit access, pushed age verification PRs to systemd, Ubuntu & Arch, got 2 Microslop employees to merge it, called it 'hilariously pointless' in the PR itself, then watched Lennart personally block the revert. Unpaid compliance simp.
  • orca ( orca@orcas.enjoying.yachts ) 
    136·
    7 months ago

    “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.

    • Majestic ( Majestic@lemmy.ml ) 
      7·
      7 months ago

      You don’t understand.

      The alternative to device based private attestation which is what this is or could be part of is constant online verification by Palantir.

      Is every time you want to view porn or adult content you have to verify your real identity so evil corporations and the government who pays them know exactly what your fetishes are and can blackmail you. So they know exactly what you’re posting online because you have to face-scan and ID-scan to set up an email account, a social media account, any account with anything that allows posting content online. Is training the population not to enter a date for their kids or themselves when setting up a computer or device account for the first time, once but upon demand scan their face, scan their ID, comply, sit meekly in fear because everything they do online is known.

      What does this know? Your birthday. That’s nothing. As it stands it you can enter anything you want. Fight them when they come to add a verification system to this and point out parents would be in a position to set this up for their kids anyways and its just spying. Fight on stronger ground.

      We’ve already lost the maximalist position. The internet scanning and ID verification has already been enacted in several states and countries and we risk a world where it becomes the norm and hosting companies drop anyone who doesn’t implement it because they’re made liable as well. This stuff won’t be repealed. People don’t live in democracies. They live in a dictatorship of the wealthy and the corporations. Your dissent doesn’t matter and it cannot reach most tech illiterate people who have far more pressing concerns than to riot over this.

      This is a compromise solution and I wish more people would see it. If you can bend you don’t break. If you don’t bend and your enemy is the government they are stronger than you and they will snap you like a twig.

      Linux desktop market share is too small to matter. And if you make this push fail then the only alternative, the only viable solution these politicians who are being cajoled and urged to implement this will see is online live-scan face and ID verification and it’ll sweep everything. You’ll have destroyed the internet and having saved Linux won’t matter. After that it’ll be a quick move to ban encryption that the government cannot break and ISPs will block traffic they can’t inspect. Game over. A simple maneuver from the place you force them to by refusing to cooperate and enact this compromise, privacy-preserving solution. We need strong defensible positions to protect privacy and the internet and free software and to understand that the old ways have been lost, they’ve died, they’ve been strangled and a compromise position must be taken up to endure and avoid a total loss.

      • ScoffingLizard ( ScoffingLizard@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) 
        15·
        7 months ago

        They can already put it on the parents to verify if they want. Just buy age compliant devices. Stop shilling this nonsense and forcing fear and hopelessness down everyone’s throat. This is bullshit and you know it. We already have a defensible position.

        • G_M0N3Y_2503 ( G_M0N3Y_2503@lemmy.zip ) 
          2·
          7 months ago

          It is defensible in this kind of community, but I doubt it’s defensible in a board voter base. For instance people see billionaires and are saying the government should step in and do something, because as individuals we are somewhat helpless. In this instance we’re like we can fork/we can revert so the government ideally just needs to back off. But if you ask a non-tech savvy voter (and a parent in your example) they will just see big tech and say the government should step in and do something. Has this method of governance been compromised? Sure, is this law an example of that? Sure. But what can we do? The government… Well until people can agree on that, I think we are just trying to find a compromise so that most people can easily dismiss the perspective that parenting tech is too hard. And if people can believe that typing in an age for their child and see big penalties for big tech if they ignore that age, that seems to me the placebo this situation needs.

          • ScoffingLizard ( ScoffingLizard@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) 
            9·
            7 months ago

            Am I the only one that is sick and tired of explaining to clueless people why this type of legislation should be shot down. This has been going on since SOPA and PIPA in the US around 2010 or whatever. I feel like I’m blue in the face.

            Parents can get child compliant devices if they want. They need to leave our shit alone. How hard would it be to fork a child resistant Ubuntu or have Mac and Windows do it so these Karen’s can protect their own damn kids. But forget the guns and pedophiles running every country in the world. Let’s just fuck with the passions of the FOSS community and open the door for more surveillance.

      • FoundFootFootage78 ( Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml ) English
        1·
        7 months ago

        Finally a sane take.

        To take things further this whole outrage reads as a Karen screaming at a starbucks cashier and threatening to boycott the store because they asked for her name. It’s an overreaction to a minor issue, by someone who overestimate their power, directed at someone who has no real power, while the Palantir surveillance system runs on the cameras behind them.

  • glitching ( glitching@lemmy.ml ) 
    59·
    7 months ago

    to all y’all with the “it’s just a text field”: what if the field is “race”? “sexual orientation”? “jerks_off_to”? what the fuck has a system managing daemon got to do with any of that? and why would you preemptively put it in there without even a pretense of a fight?

    fuck you make us! make linux illegal, in Cali of all places. guess how long that will last?

  • Alex ( stsquad@lemmy.ml ) 
    44·
    7 months ago

    What a pointless drama article this is. FLOSS software does stuff for legal compliance more often than you’d think. The whole point is people can contribute fly by patches and the maintainers make the decision to merge. It seems like being an optional field but potentially providing useful functionality is enough for systemd. If you don’t like it I’m sure there are forks you could join or even use a different init system. No one’s freedom is being oppressed here.

      • P03 Locke ( p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English
        12·
        7 months ago

        It’s literally an optional birthDate field in a place where there’s already realName, emailAddress, and location. If you’re concerned about privacy, maybe don’t expose your real name, email, and location.

        And it’s not even fucking installed everywhere:

        $ userdbctl
Command 'userdbctl' not found, but can be installed with:
sudo apt install systemd-userdbd

        Anybody who is calling this age verification is actively lying to you!

        This Sam Bent guy should fucking get bent.

  • trackball_fetish ( trackball_fetish@lemmy.wtf ) 
    37·
    7 months ago

    Lots of disingenuous comments in this thread regarding the change being “just json” considering they’re already on a warpath of implementing id verification. They are testing the water to see what they can get away with. Furthermore, the Linux community has always been against shit like this (see: systemd outrage, open bios, gnu etc).

    • luciferofastora ( luciferofastora@feddit.org ) 
      10·
      7 months ago

      I’ll believe that if and when they actually force me to upload identification to prove that my birthday really is 1970-01-01 and my name really is Nunya Bissnis. Otherwise, it’s really no different from Steam asking my birthday when opening store pages or porn sites asking “click here jf you’re 18” and take my word for it.

      So long as it’s being enforced just as well as the realName field, I maintain that it is indeed harmless. If the point is to have a hilariously ineffective solution as a fig leaf against a stupid law, I’ll prefer that to efforts to actually implement verification.

        • ImitationLimitation ( ImitationLimitation@lemmy.ml ) 
          16·
          7 months ago

          “Do not comply in advance.” There is simply no need for this. Resist because it’s our duty to do so in order to keep our freedoms. Start with, “why are they doing this?” Then go follow the money. Zuckerberg and Meta, that’s why. They have been under the gun for years to protect people, especially minors, from the harms of their attention based economy of apps. They hired lobbyists in multiple states to push this legislation. Why? Because if the OS does it, they don’t have to, and can blame all the problems on the OS. What’s the Meta business model? Gather data and sell it. The more accurate and targeted the data, the higher the price. What do these laws do? Add more data. Why doesn’t Apple, Google, and Microsoft resist? They already have the infrastructure and are data gathers themselves. Why does the government allow this (US and all 5 eyes)? They LOVE surveillance.

          https://tboteproject.com/

          • MonkeMischief ( MonkeMischief@lemmy.today ) 
            9·
            7 months ago

            Sincerely, thank you for spelling it out to the rest of the class.

            These things are always worded ‘agreeably’ enough that by the time we’re done going back and forth debating it all day, they’ve pushed even more invasive policies on us.

            • ImitationLimitation ( ImitationLimitation@lemmy.ml ) 
              2·
              7 months ago

              I try to explain to people a lot. If you like freedom, and you want to keep it, it’s a constant fight. The power structures are far more profitable without it, so they’ll undercut it every chance they get. “Give an inch they take a mile.” Don’t give them the inch.

        • Auli ( Auli@lemmy.ca ) English
          6·
          7 months ago

          We are well past the thin wedge. The thin wedge was American companies purchasing every tech company or stealing their ideas.

  • gasull ( gasull@lemmy.ml ) 
    26·
    7 months ago

    He didn’t just try. He succeeded in doing so. His pull request was merged into systemd and will land into your distro eventually (if it is systemd-based).

    There are distros free of systemd, like Devuan, based on Debian.

  • SavvyWolf ( savvywolf@pawb.social ) English
    26·
    7 months ago

    Jesus fucking Christ guys. Regardless of your thoughts on age verification, hunting down someone just for complying with the (currently) rather inoffensive law is nuts.

    Posting his face here is absolutely going to get him doxxed, and going to cause someone to actually hunt him down and hurt him.

    Focus your anger on the people who actually passed and push for this law. Not the person who drew the short straw and had to implement it.

    EDIT: Yeah, this whole discussion is toxic now. Suggesting that someone shouldn’t be lynched for making a change in a piece of software is equivalent to me agreeing with that change. I don’t like the push for age verification. It gives me a lot of stress. But I don’t think some random software developer should be hurt for it.

    Reading the room wrong when writing software is not worth a life.

    • Ulu-Mulu-no-die ( ulu_mulu@lemmy.zip ) 
      27·
      7 months ago

      Systemd is NOT an operating system provider, so they didn’t have to do absolutely anything.

      It was their choice to do what they did, not the law, especially since it won’t be active and enforceable before next year.

      Witch hunts are despicable indeed but lets not use that an an excuse to justify what they did.

    • AHemlocksLie ( AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip ) 
      21·
      7 months ago

      Not the person who drew the short straw and had to implement it.

      That’s the whole point, though, they don’t have to implement it. They’re under no obligation at all to do so. Try to rule Linux is illegal in California and watch Silicon Valley lobbyists damn near riot. They’re just giving in, but even just procrastination would be a ridiculously effective tactic.

    • stravanasu ( pglpm@lemmy.ca ) 
      18·
      7 months ago
      1. He didn’t draw any straw. Nobody asked him to work on such an implementation (or maybe Meta did?).
      2. In fact, he appeared out of the blue to do this implementation. This was his very first pull request on the Systemd git.
      3. From the very start he received a huge amount of critical comments from the community on GitHub, while he was working on this. He neglected their criticism and plowed on.

      So he already had a warning that the majority of the community didn’t agree on what he was doing. Nobody asked him to. He chose to continue – he could have imagined the consequences.

      And the whole context on why and why now he did this is fishy.

    • ThisIsABlandUsername ( ThisIsABlandUsername@lemmy.ml ) 
      15·
      7 months ago

      Why does the rest of the world have to comply with a handful of states laws? The US is not the center of the universe. If you people want to lick the boot and allow this, then by all means, create your own terrible versions and leave the rest of the world alone.

      • Aatube ( Aatube@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English
        7·
        7 months ago

        That’s the Minnesota bill. The PR does not comply with that. You can read on how to the California law and NY and Colorado bills basically say to give the user a drop-down to select their birth date.

      • FatherPeanut ( FatherPeanut@pawb.social ) 
        4·
        7 months ago

        Provided compliance is nuts, this man is a nutcase for complying. Sounds all good, but I dont believe being a nutcase warrants doxxing, verbal harassment, verbal threatening, and everything else that we’re seeing here.

        • hdnclr ( hdnclr@beehaw.org ) 
          3·
          7 months ago

          Hey, honestly, thanks for being mature and real about this. I 100% am going to be migrating away from systemd after seeing how quickly this happened at the project and yhat Microsoft can basically decide they want code added to it; but I’m not gonna drag this random junior dev… I’m gonna choose to direct my hate at Microsoft instead. If they orchestrated these changes, that is the story here. When did that corporation get its fingers into the cookie jar, and how do I now make sure my entire software stack is free from projects where Microsoft can have this level of influence? That’s the tactical picture that matters.

      • FoundFootFootage78 ( Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml ) English
        12·
        7 months ago

        Any criticism should be directed primarily at the laws, not the person who suggested adding a birthdate field to the user.json.

        Open source is dependent on volunteers contributing their time. The developers at SystemD have been receiving death threats over this. This article includes his name, face, workplace. I know that information is publicly available but the Geoguessr experts aren’t the people we need to worry about.

        • stravanasu ( pglpm@lemmy.ca ) 
          14·
          7 months ago

          He did not just suggest it. He went on and implemented it. All while the community was telling him “we don’t want this”, “stop with this” – look at the comments on GitHub. Yet he neglected all this feedback.

          As an open-source volunteer, you work for the community, right? If you go ahead while the community is telling you “we don’t want this”, then whom are you working for?

          • FoundFootFootage78 ( Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml ) English
            5·
            7 months ago

            As an open-source volunteer, you work for the community, right?

            1. They don’t work for anyone.
            2. Even if they did, it sure as hell wouldn’t be for you.
            3. Even if they did work for you, they are under no obligation to even think about breaking the law for you.
            • stravanasu ( pglpm@lemmy.ca ) 
              9·
              7 months ago

              Of course there are no obligations and he’s’free to do as he pleases. Likewise, the community or I are under no obligations of not criticizing him for what he chose to do.