A small set of people are merging changes to various Linux components to make sure every application knows your birth date.

This is being done rapidly by people with questionable justifications and being merged with no youth and few marginalized people involved.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/accountsservice/accountsservice/-/merge_requests/176#0b07c0cc4d49be119f65cdb2037440f56eed647a

user: Add BirthDate with polkit-gated GetBirthDate and SetBirthDate methods (!176) · Merge requests · accountsservice / accountsservice · GitLab

Summary Add a BirthDate field to the user account interface. For non-homed users, the value is stored...

GitLab
@wwahammy wtf… these are current maintainers???
@k3ym0 some are. systemd already merged a corresponding change from the same contributor.
@wwahammy can’t we fork it prior to that commit and maintain a separate fork?

@k3ym0 could it be done theoretically? Sure. But on systemd, that'd be a huge task to maintain. And the systemd folks say "oh, this PR is just an optional part of the user account system, we're just making a common API for anyone who wants to add it for any reason".

They build the tracks and plead innocence as to what is in the trains.

The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification Into Linux

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.

Sam Bent
The community pushed back hard on this one. The Arch maintainers are holding, Canonical backed away, and Artix Linux, the systemd-free Arch derivative, issued the clearest statement: they will never require any verification or ID. It's FOSS When someone opened a revert PR, Lennart closed it himself on March 19th. The birthDate field is in systemd and it's staying.
It's funny because only Artix isn't actively enforcing this change. Arch are lying that they're holding (they're not). Canonical are lying that they're backing away (they're not). How can I tell? Both of them use systemd. Both of them require systemd. So anything that gets merged into systemd, they require, whether they want to or not.

It's a fuggin disgrace to see people downstream of an important change saying "Oh no, no we aren't gonna comply with this nosirree," while forcing upstream compliance of it down our throats just by being useless tools.

CC: @[email protected] @[email protected]
@cy @wwahammy @yrrsinn Canonical never had a position, stop pushing fake news.