Khrys5d ago

The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification Into Linux

https://www.sambent.com/the-engineer-who-tried-to-put-age-verification-into-linux-5/

The lasting damage was knowing it could happen at all: that a single contributor with no stated organizational backing could submit compliance infrastructure for surveillance law directly into the software that boots your computer, get it merged by two Microsoft employees, and have the creator of systemd personally block the removal.

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
Show threadMartijn Vos5d ago

@Khrys

I don't understand what the fuss is about. This is exactly the right way to comply with that law: an optional birth date field. You don't want to have to submit an idea to your OS or implement facial recognition, and you certainly don't want to tie account creation to external services for those things, but now parents can fill in the birth date for their kids, and everybody else can ignore it. This kind of thing needs to be in the hands of parents, not external companies.

So I don't really see the problem here.

Show threadJules 🍺5d ago
@mcv @Khrys
I do, it was done unilaterally without discussion.
Even if it was technically correct and maybe we need to look at this, a single person making the decision and forcing it into the code is not the way this should be done.
Show threadMartijn Vos5d ago

@julesbl @Khrys

But no single person can force this into the code, right? Someone submitted a PR, and two committers approved it, one of them the creator of the project, as far as I understand. If that's not good enough, then what is?

Of course discussion about this important, but can we do that without panic and fear mongering?

Show threadJules 🍺5d ago
@mcv @Khrys
If you think that is a way that things are discussed and implemented then I guess that is all fine and dandy, yes three people implementing a change which affects millions, perfectly fine
Show threadIrom

@julesbl @mcv
Another problem is that it starts implementing surveillance infrastructure without any pushback. Looking at many governments now I don't think that's advisable.

The law was lobbied into existence by Facebook/Meta and friends.

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rmhxk1/i_pulled_the_actual_bill_text_from_5_state_age/

https://tboteproject.com/

@Khrys

Mar 21 at 10:54amWeb