tx0
SunshineSay no to any age verification taking root
JimbabweAlready merged.
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...
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.
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.
git revert 7a858878a03966d2a65ef9e8f79b5caff352ac53
Luminous5481 "Lawless Heathen" [they/them]It’s an optional field in the user record your distro can make use of if they want.
Possibly linuxSpooky stuff
/s
grrgyleI wouldn’t really call it age verification, more like an optional field you can put in a date if you want
That’s just the first step before they require you to upload your id. Don’t let in the trojan horse.
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.
I’ve already taken the necessary precautions by uploading my semen into the drive tray.
Hellfire103OpenRC and sysvinit are probably the best options out there, and dinit looks promising. Personally, though, I like s6.
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.
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.
Ah yeah openrc is great. Runs my Gentoo rig.
WildmimicI 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.
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.