Mastodawn

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 thread

Martijn Vos 3d 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 thread

Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦

Say there's a law requiring collection of people's ethnicity. Or of their gender, allowing only two options. Or of their religion. Or legal, government issued names and id numbers. Oh, they're all optional in most jurisdictions and in fact defined in ways that are noncompliant with other laws. But what's the big deal? We'll just add an optional field name to standardize the schema. There's no mandatory mechanism or verification. Just making the data cleaner.
@mcv @Khrys