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.
@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.
I found this a good write-up https://www.sambent.com/the-engineer-who-tried-to-put-age-verification-into-linux-5/
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.
@DiogoConstantino @zl2tod @yrrsinn @wwahammy @k3ym0 Imho legalism is not a valid standpoint, precisely in free software. What if free software is made illegal in California (and “many other places”). Would you just shrug and stop making it? This is at best cowardice. Also, I find the fait accompli argumentation on the PR (“we already collect personal data 🤷”) so disgusting. As if this was nothing at all.
This is what happens when you hollow out ethics, you’re left with technicalities.
What the ... I, I don't. 😳
So the age verification stuff is beyond terrible. But the systemd PR specifically seems like a weird one to get worked up about?
It does 2 things:
1) The schema-docs for the the userdb JSON, which already allows you to add arbitrary user-defined fields in addition to the pre-defined fields, now define an optional "birthDate" field to be to be a "YYYY-MM-DD" string.
2) Added a flag to `userdbctl` (edit: `homectl`, actually) to be able to set the field from that command, instead of having to edit the JSON some other way.
Like, I already deal with multi-user systems where "hobbies" is a field in there. I don't see the harm in saying "If you wanna add a birthDate field, it should be 'YYYY-MM-DD' and not seconds-since-epoch or something".
The polkit stuff? Makes my gut churn.
So that's clearly (scumbag) Dylan M. Taylor's intent and belief. But I think it is valid to separate them for the purpose of evaluating folks-other-than-Dylan; I don't think bluca did anything wrong by merging it (nor poettering for lgtm'ing it). I don't think it's valid to say "welp, systemd added age verification, I have to switch to a non-systemd OS now to avoid age verification."[1] I think it's totally valid for bluca and poettering to look at the PR and think "the author's motivation is bad, but this specific change is fine."
"They build the tracks and plead innocence as to what is in the trains." I feel that way about a lot of stuff, but... this is even more removed than that? There's no policy engine. "They approved a standard for the width of train tracks."?
[1]: There are plenty of valid reasons to prefer other init systems, but I don't think "birthDate" showing up in a json schema is one of them.
@wwahammy @k3ym0 Aaaand this is the kind of shit that was brought up when SystemD came to being. That Pottering (RedHat) just did whatever they wanted and forced changes across the entire FOSS ecosystem.
And Lennart blocking the merge to revert the merge is just icing on the fucking cake.
And here we are yet again getting a feature pushed across the ecosystem without debate or consensus, driven by a small group of devs with commit access
Not only that, but the fact that it’s Microsoft developers themselves doing this (a company that, by the way, has effectively taken over the Linux Foundation...) really drives the point home....
Similarly, from the very beginning, it was always suspicious that Microsoft had suddenly become pro-FOSS years ago; we said so, and no one wanted to believe us... MS has only one goal, and with Pottering, it has found a way to achieve it...
Sure. I also don't like the unforced error of systemd taking the patch in. Really the proposed age verification laws need stopping in each country's legislature.
Distros (which package systemd) can choose to revert the patch that went in before building and packaging, which is quite manageable.
So now every single distro is supposed to maintain its own separate fork of a very fundamental component?
Or just never update it ever again?
Really they need to start moving away from systemd, but it's kind of really bad because A. the whole attitude of complying in advance is very dangerous and B. it's going to take some time for many to move away even IF they are willing to do so. (But there are a ton of benefits in doing it. Systemd is a hot, bloated mess and really needs to go in general anyway.)
I'm more concerned about A really. If it starts getting into everything we're screwed no matter what.
@nazokiyoubinbou @k3ym0 @wwahammy
> So now every single distro is supposed to maintain its own
No... distros already maintain a per-project "packagefiles", these are sometimes quite involved scripts that work at the level of how to build a package. This is how they get a .deb or a .rpm pop out. It's a lot of painstaking work, but, eg, the packaging scripts offer features like embedding patches to be applied or reverted in the source package itself.
So reverting this change is fairly easy.
@hopeless @k3ym0 @wwahammy I'm aware they have stuff like that, but reverting this is much more complex than you think. This isn't a one line change. They're adding whole new packages that collect and report user info, systems that check, etc etc. Getting it back out is a significant enough change that, for all intents and purposes, it really is a fork, not just simply a packaged version.
It's also something they'll have to keep at. At least one person involved in this is on quite a crusade here. The stuff to remove and how to compensate will change frequently. So it's not just an automated fork...
@nazokiyoubinbou @k3ym0 @wwahammy
I haven't looked at the patch, but typically all you need to revert is the thing getting called / built / installed at all. It can still be there but it's either not built if it's C, not installed in the distribution binary, or just NOPped out.
Often these kind of things have their own build options and can just not be built at package-time.
@hopeless @k3ym0 @wwahammy They've submitted a number of PRs.
I already see a whole separate package added (systemd-userdbd) for example.
It's a lot of stuff. Again, this is not a one line change. And the adjustments will have to change with each new such PR. By definition it will become a fork and it will require as much maintenance as a real fork even if you want to call it something else.
And hey, someone may actually do that and perhaps everyone will switch. Maybe.
Of course, a much better solution is just to fix the distro to stop relying on a bloated hot mess that keeps insisting over and over on stepping way outside of its scope anyway... There are lots of alternatives. The old sysvinit worked quite well, but OpenRC looks nice and modern with actual standards.
@nazokiyoubinbou @k3ym0 @wwahammy
OK but if you don't like systemd-userdbd, you can even build it if it forces you to and then just not include it in the package.
This is not the same as a fork, with lists of patches routinely applied at package time, you have a lot of power over the package, either just by build options or by disabling and snipping stuff.
Yes you need to know the code to do it, but the package owners do know the code for the package they are responsible for.
1/2
@nazokiyoubinbou @k3ym0 @wwahammy
... the other thing to bear in mind is if Debian do this, all downstreams of Debian (Ubuntu, Mint etc) inherit these changed Debian packages. Redhat is the other main packager and it also has a lot of downstreams.
But it's unclear if, eg, Ubuntu (or IBM), which want to make money, will follow what would be a principled decision by Debian (if that happened) and not just ship the upstream package with all the contentious stuff in.
RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@wwahammy/116264430375745593
@wwahammy the possibility of a free Internet is gone unless we start punishing these people.
No linux I use will.ever have that shyte
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