Mastodawn

Systemd merged age verification to comply with California state law.

If you want to enter a birth date, I recommend "Friday, 13 December 1901 20:45:52".

I like this for a few reasons:

1. This is the earliest date possible for a 32 bit datetime integer in C.
2. It's malicious compliance.
3. It's obviously faked.

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

#linux

userdb: add birthDate field to JSON user records by dylanmtaylor · Pull Request #40954 · systemd/systemd

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 xdg-desktop-portal project is addi...

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aspragg Mar 19

@atoponce Why does systemd have to cater to this nonsense? I thought the Cali law applied to "operating systems". Last I checked, systemd isn't an operating system (yet!) so surely it doesn't need to bother with this.

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Aaron Toponce ⚛️

@aspragg I think it's part of the larger XDG specification, per that PR. Systemd is providing a centralized location that XDG can pull from. So while systemd isn't an operating system by itself, it's a core part the OS relies on for various things, including accounting.