Geez this beat-up is getting tiring. I wrote up a complaint in another thread but I think the OP realised how terrible it was because it was deleted by the time I hit submit. That particular post was utter trash, not even attempting to maintain a reasonable tone or look at the situation dispassionately, despite being a full article (and not a short toot, where throwaway poorly-thought-out thoughts might be more justified). Its lede literally read:

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.

And frankly, the author of that sort of hit piece should be ashamed of himself. Far, far more than Dylan should.

It’s such a dumb thing to whinge about. Age verification is not a bad thing! What’s bad is age verification that is implemented in a way that either requires, or significantly increases the chances of people’s privacy being violated. Requiring people to upload photo ID directly to sites, or to third-party “trusted age verification partners”. Or trusting bullshit AI face-detection age verification.

Age verification that’s implemented by asking parents to…y’know, actually *parent*, and helping them to do that by giving them tools like OS-level parental controls, enforced through operating system and browser APIs that we mandate apps and websites use, *is the way to go*. The OS should expose to apps, and browsers expose to websites, only the simple answer to the question: “is the current user of a legal age to access this content?” as a boolean value, based on information stored in the OS by parents setting it. No fancy technology. No privacy invasion. Just simply giving parents the tools to help them do their job.

There are more complicated technical solutions that could be used. Things involving repeated hashes or blind digital signatures. But these are only appropriate if we pre-suppose that the government needs to strictly enforce it by requiring IDs or other sensitive information be used to age verify. And these solutions help minimise the risk by eliminating the connection between the age verification and which sites are being accessed (so the verifier can’t see what sites the verifyee is viewing, and the sites can’t see who the person being verified was, only that they were verified). And you don’t need to go even that far. Because the best solution is right down on the user’s device, with a simple setting that parents can set.

This age verification push is utterly bullshit and I’m shocked to find people carrying water for this on lemmy. It has absolutely nothing to do with age or saftey and everything to do with advertisers no longer having any way to know whose human on the llm-shit-bot infested internet they’ve created.

Oh come off of it. That’s some serious bullshit conspiracy nonsense you’re peddling there.

A flag set on your local machine that blocks children from accessing porn, if their parents choose to set the flag correctly on their child’s account, is not some big-tech privacy invasion. It’s just basic good sense. I’m shocked that people would actually be opposed to it.

Opposing it has no practical effect other than helping strengthen big tech’s argument that the onus shouldn’t be on them to ensure their platforms are safe to use. That people should have to upload their ID to sketchy third-parties to verify their age before making an account on every website, because that’s the only way we could possible know that children aren’t accessing dangerous content!

If you’re going to disagree with me, fine. But at least actually live in the real world rather than throwing out nonsense conspiracies. And respond to the proposal that’s actually on the table. To the single user-configurable field that this guy was trying to put into Linux. Or to the ideas I raised in my comment. Not to some fantasy straw-man you’ve concocted, or to the big-tech nightmare that I’ve already explained I disagree with.