other_catSystemd’s New Feature Brings Age Verification Option to Linux
The optional birthDate field gives other projects a standardized data source for age verification compliance.
SupercrunchyOf all terrible proposals coming up in this period, I’m still more-or-less ok with this system because the administrator is still in full control to set whatever date they want, and the field is entirely optional.
They call it “age verification” in the aricle, but there’s no 3rd party “verification” whatsoever. It’s just a field for the user birth date saved in the user metadata. This is IMHO acceptable because it doesn’t force anybody to provide IDs or personal information to some random shady company.
I think calling it “age verification” is a bit confusing and will make people unhappy by default, but might be a smart move to make it compliant with the new laws coming out in this period (the user age was “verified” by the system administrator, after all).
Yep. Its honestly mild as hell.
Essentially legislation that says:
- app stores have to have age categories to silo children, teens, and adults.
- OSes have to have a field to collect this data from users when they set up their login, so it can be sent to app stores via API.
Its just a standardized system that should have been done ages ago, but was not a priority for standards orgs, so none stepped up - so legislation appeared.
I strongly argue that it should only apply to commercial OSes and app stores though - as they’re the ones that primarily cause issues these laws intent to address.
Linux and FOSS have been caught in the crossfire in a privacy and personal data battle they were not involved in.
The boiling pot goes up 1C, then another 1C
Slippery slope argument | Fallacy, Causality & Argumentation | Britannica
Slippery slope argument, in logic, the fallacy of arguing that a certain course of action is undesirable or that a certain proposition is implausible because it leads to an undesirable or implausible conclusion via a series of tenuously connected premises, each of which is understood to lead,
muusemuusenope. slippery slope is basically “bad thing can happen, so it will happen” without evidence to support that outcome. here, we have a trajectory. there’s a pattern. it has momentum at this point. it hasn’t changed corse. it’s followed a predictable and proven pattern. It’s done so because the the pressures exerted on this particular system guide the outcome in predictable ways.
that is entirely different than the slippery slope dismissal
No, entirely incorrect. “bad thing can happen, so it will happen” is essentially a mangling of Murphy’s Law.
In a slippery slope argument, a course of action is rejected [eg: this minor law] because the slippery slope advocate believes it will lead to a chain reaction resulting in an undesirable end or ends [eg: loose claims of a pot getting hotter implying further details will be demanded next].