☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification Into Linux
sun_is_raI have read the git thread related to the merge request.
I don’t see what’s the big deal. You have a user model that already contain fields like user’s full name, location, … among others and all this developer did was adding yet another optional field called date of birth.
This does nothing to verify user’s age and enforce nothing. They’ve stressed that repeatedly in the comments.
What that does is making it easy for a Linux distro to store user’s birthday - should they wish to do so - and making that bit of info accessible to running apps so that each app can do what it wants with it.
User’s fullname and location are already there which are also optional so what’s the big deal?
For me the bigger problem is that was done without any community oversight.
Yeah it can be verified for now, but it’s a foot in the door for a braindead law that no one in their right mind would follow.
Yeah and against the massive outcry in the form of comments, the discussion was locked, and the general opinion was ignored in favor of 2 maintainers and a tool of a dev.
The person who has the most blame here is the lead dev of the project imo.
Why do you think this was locked? This fucking thread is a mugshot of a dev contributing to an open source project.
Exactly. There’s a massive thread on Mastodon where everybody is panicking about this, but it’s a nothing burger if ever there was one.
Sure, the timing and comments suggest it’s meant for legal compliance, but if that’s what it does, it does it by keeping full control in the hands of the user, where it should be.
If anyone is panicking, ask them how they feel about the ‘RealName’ field that has been in systemd for years (since the beginning?)
This is fake controversy and now it’s at the point where people are spreading articles, like the OP, brigading people into harassing a systemd developer.
orca“It’s just a harmless field; what’s the big deal?”
The big deal is that it’s on the heels of age verification bullshit that fascists are pushing through with the help of tech bros, so that they can eventually push all of us into a scenario where we have zero privacy.
It’s not the adding of the field itself or the fact that it can be filled with nonsense. It’s the reasoning backing it.
“But it’s the law!”
Yeah, fucking and…? It’s a stupid mass surveillance law disguised as a protection, and per usual, it’s written like vague dog shit. This is the smallest part of the wedge. More will come of this and if developers like this keep volunteering themselves to help the fascists, we will all be fucked. Here’s an alternative approach: just don’t add this. You can fight back by not fucking implementing this. Easy.
More will come of this and if developers like this keep volunteering themselves to help the fascists, we will all be fucked. Here’s an alternative approach: just don’t add this. You can fight back by not fucking implementing this. Easy.
Only thing you get out of this compared to the alternative of malicious compliance is opening yourself up to attack. You can still fight this without painting a big target on your back.
communism
PseudoSpockDefenders and writers of the evil code are the ones being targeted. You have this backwards and need a mirror.
Yep, then using linux will be illegal, great fucking idea boss
Nope, I am a muppet whose livelihood depends on them respecting the law. If you are from one of the godforsaken regions doing stupid laws you should vote against them, I need to comply with your laws because I need to work to feed my family.
You can call me a spineless muppet all you want but I am not the cause stupid laws exists, take it on the californianas for that crap, they elected the idiots doing this. I vote our own idiots and until now they made it clear this bullshit is not on their table, thank you wery much but I did my part.
Another collaborator, “just following orders.”
You don’t understand.
The alternative to device based private attestation which is what this is or could be part of is constant online verification by Palantir.
Is every time you want to view porn or adult content you have to verify your real identity so evil corporations and the government who pays them know exactly what your fetishes are and can blackmail you. So they know exactly what you’re posting online because you have to face-scan and ID-scan to set up an email account, a social media account, any account with anything that allows posting content online. Is training the population not to enter a date for their kids or themselves when setting up a computer or device account for the first time, once but upon demand scan their face, scan their ID, comply, sit meekly in fear because everything they do online is known.
What does this know? Your birthday. That’s nothing. As it stands it you can enter anything you want. Fight them when they come to add a verification system to this and point out parents would be in a position to set this up for their kids anyways and its just spying. Fight on stronger ground.
We’ve already lost the maximalist position. The internet scanning and ID verification has already been enacted in several states and countries and we risk a world where it becomes the norm and hosting companies drop anyone who doesn’t implement it because they’re made liable as well. This stuff won’t be repealed. People don’t live in democracies. They live in a dictatorship of the wealthy and the corporations. Your dissent doesn’t matter and it cannot reach most tech illiterate people who have far more pressing concerns than to riot over this.
This is a compromise solution and I wish more people would see it. If you can bend you don’t break. If you don’t bend and your enemy is the government they are stronger than you and they will snap you like a twig.
Linux desktop market share is too small to matter. And if you make this push fail then the only alternative, the only viable solution these politicians who are being cajoled and urged to implement this will see is online live-scan face and ID verification and it’ll sweep everything. You’ll have destroyed the internet and having saved Linux won’t matter. After that it’ll be a quick move to ban encryption that the government cannot break and ISPs will block traffic they can’t inspect. Game over. A simple maneuver from the place you force them to by refusing to cooperate and enact this compromise, privacy-preserving solution. We need strong defensible positions to protect privacy and the internet and free software and to understand that the old ways have been lost, they’ve died, they’ve been strangled and a compromise position must be taken up to endure and avoid a total loss.
They can already put it on the parents to verify if they want. Just buy age compliant devices. Stop shilling this nonsense and forcing fear and hopelessness down everyone’s throat. This is bullshit and you know it. We already have a defensible position.
It is defensible in this kind of community, but I doubt it’s defensible in a board voter base. For instance people see billionaires and are saying the government should step in and do something, because as individuals we are somewhat helpless. In this instance we’re like we can fork/we can revert so the government ideally just needs to back off.
But if you ask a non-tech savvy voter (and a parent in your example) they will just see big tech and say the government should step in and do something.
Has this method of governance been compromised? Sure, is this law an example of that? Sure. But what can we do? The government… Well until people can agree on that, I think we are just trying to find a compromise so that most people can easily dismiss the perspective that parenting tech is too hard.
And if people can believe that typing in an age for their child and see big penalties for big tech if they ignore that age, that seems to me the placebo this situation needs.
Am I the only one that is sick and tired of explaining to clueless people why this type of legislation should be shot down. This has been going on since SOPA and PIPA in the US around 2010 or whatever. I feel like I’m blue in the face.
Parents can get child compliant devices if they want. They need to leave our shit alone. How hard would it be to fork a child resistant Ubuntu or have Mac and Windows do it so these Karen’s can protect their own damn kids. But forget the guns and pedophiles running every country in the world. Let’s just fuck with the passions of the FOSS community and open the door for more surveillance.
Twenty Lessons For Fighting Tyranny
THIS! Those that do obey in advance, especially trying to help impose it on the rest of us, are collaborators!!! Treat them as such!
Flax
schnurrito2000s: war on general purpose computing because of copyright
2020s: war on general purpose computing because of child protection
In the 2000s the forces of freedom mostly won, e.g. en.wikipedia.org/…/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital… didn’t become law. So far it seems that we are currently losing. :(
In Europe too, chatcontrol keeps being pushed no matter how often it’s being struck down.
Yes; recent news have made me somewhat optimistic that the resistance to it is winning though.
Age verification laws currently look like a much greater danger to freedom.
Personally I think that win (while really a win) is being overcelebrated.
It’s easily reverted. All they’ll have to do is find some csam or terrorism related scandal in the news and pump it as a big deal, and all the resistance will be gone at the next vote.
With chat control we actually have to distinguish two different things that people sometimes confuse:
- voluntary chat control (“chat control 1.0”), which is currently already the law in the EU
- mandatory chat control (“chat control 2.0”), proposed in 2022
Voluntary chat control is about letting operators of communication services voluntarily scan messages for certain illegal activity (without this constituting a violation of data protection laws). This doesn’t break encryption and isn’t a part of a war on general purpose computing. While there are many good arguments against it, it’s not especially catastrophic. It’s a detail of business regulation.
Mandatory chat control is about forcing them to do so, which must necessarily break encryption and impose limits on software freedom. This is what is most important to oppose.
The most recent win ended up rejecting even (most) voluntary chat control, which is a good sign that mandatory chat control won’t get a majority either.
Fucking fascists arent ever going to stop. They want to control everything, they want the people to be their slaves.
It gets worse every day.
DonutsRMehGenuine question, don’t we always say that we can change anything in the system on open source software like Linux and systemd etc? What’s stopping any of us from removing this age verification thing? Apps may break, true, but I’m sure there will be many one line scripts that replace that age verification with something that feeds it fake data?
Tbf simply following the development and criticizing bad design decisions is also one way to change opensource software no?
There’s a massive difference between criticizing bad decisions and articles like the one in the OP who’s painting the developer as a target.
There’s plenty of ways for the open source community to handle this. This isn’t one of them.
Brigading and harassing volunteer developer is way out of bounds.
Volunteering to do what? I would have paid him not to. Fuck that guy!
I disagree with age verification as well, but attacking a person like this is gross.
This article is all but brigading people into harassing this guy.
I wonder if he has tried not being a traitor dickfaced cunt?
A spade’s a spade. This is malicious compliance. The law might be the problem here but it’s on us to resist and try to make a change. Every last one of us. After all, the surveillance state workers in China and Russia are all just doing their jobs right?
Why the heck would we ever want a DoB field in systemd, optional or otherwise?
Why the heck would we ever want a DoB field in systemd, optional or otherwise?
There is a field for your REAL NAME and LOCATION also. Who would ever want that?
Both of these fields contain way more identifying information about a user than birthDate. Do you feel the same way about them? Because they’ve been in systemd since the beginning.
and the GECOS field (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecos_field) containing fields for your real name, work address, which room in the building you work in, your home and office telephone numbers and external e-mail have been in UNIX/LINUX since 1962
This is manufactured outrage, the article is doxxing a person and painting a literal target on their head by photoshopping their picture to look like a mugshot in order to drive traffic for ad revenue.
It’s one thing to be against the laws, I’m against the laws. It’s another thing to personally attack a developer, that’s way beyond anything that is acceptable.
Words of a collaborator. Your words betray you, revealing what kind of person you are and what your goal is. The kind who would send ICE to your neighbour, the kind we don’t let baby sit, the office backstabber, the licker of boots to fascist regimes. Or a troll.
Yeah, Its is sickening and goes against the spirit of open source. We work around restrictions in creative way to give people the freedom to control their software and have access to the source. We don’t deny people trapped in shitholes with bad laws access to open computing. Force them onto Windows and Apple. I don’t get what is wrong with people these days. They have lost all reason.
Yes, many people can work around the laws in various ways. And some of them can’t. Its not for us to judge. We offer possibilities. Everyone knows many distros will patch this field out. Many will just ignore it like we do the GECOS fields. And where it is unfortunately required it is still going to be better than running Windows. Its completely orthogonal to political participation and fighting these laws.
Those writing boot licking compliance are NOT your friends.
If you’re participating in a lynch mob then I believe you’re responsible for what happens.
If you don’t see a problem with this, please provide us a picture of your face, full name and place of work.
How about you do so first, you who would defend such vile actions.
stravanasuHe got a huge amount of criticisms and negative comments from the community while he was working on this on GitHub; look at the comment thread of his implementation on GitHub. Essentially the community was telling him “we don’t want this”. And who are you working for in a FOSS project, if not for the community? Yet he disregarded the comments and went on.
On top of this, he appeared out of the blue with this implementation. He had not made any pull requests to this git before now. Nobody had assigned this task to him.
So the situation is not that this is some employee who was asked to implement something, and did it without knowing what the feedback would have been.
Spreading his face around doctored as if it were a mugshot in a community where people are calling him a traitor and other things is a recipe for someone to be hurt or killed.
This thread isn’t a community discussion about implementing a feature, it’s people trying to whip up a mob to attack a person. It doesn’t matter how much you dislike the field name he added to a JSON document, you don’t stir up a mob that can lead to people getting hurt.
In principle I agree with you, pacific discussion and democracy should be the way to go. But it seems that “discussion” doesn’t lead anywhere these times. Politicians do whatever they like (or what lobbies tell them to do), without checking if the majority of the population really agree with some decisions. A developer does whatever he likes, without bothering about the more or less pacific feedback he gets on github. Nobody really seems to want to have a discussion. Well guess then what the “mob” does at some point: they don’t care about discussions anymore either, and they do as they please too.
I fear that riots will start on a larger scale. Even if the context today is different, the situation reminds me somewhat of what happened with the 1981 riots in Toxteth, in Brixton, and other previous riots. Unjust or misused laws; deafness of authorities about discontent; innocent and not-so-innocent people getting hurt.
A developer does whatever he likes, without bothering about the more or less pacific feedback he gets on github. Nobody really seems to want to have a discussion. Well guess then what the “mob” does at some point: they don’t care about discussions anymore either, and they do as they please too.
It’s pretty cliche but: Two wrongs don’t make a right.
In the FOSS world, there are many ways to handle this kind of situation. A mob-led harassment campaign is not one of them.
If you disagree with how a project is going then you can fork it. LibreOffice disagreed with the direction of OpenOffice and forked it, NextCloud and OwnCloud forked from one another when there was major disagreement.
At no point should volunteer developers have their face plastered on a mugshot and their personal information blasted to a mob of angry people.
Be angry at the politicians and mega corporations who are voting and funding these initiatives, not the developers who are caught in the middle.
hello_hello [undecided, comrade/them]This is a gross article and doxxing this person is also gross and useless.
systemd will live rent-free in chuds heads and they will do nothing but use outdated and unmaintained software in protest.
The funny thing is that by January 7, all the bros screaming “I’ll never use an OS that asks my age” will have switched to an OS that asks their age because they can’t go a week without their porn.
Well, very possibly.
That’s actually a funny consequence I hadn’t thought of. A media company could go to a pirating site and then file a police report claiming neglect of child protections. That could really start to spiral quick…
Yeah, currently it is perfectly legal to host piracy sites.
(do I really need an /s?)