Isabel Ruffell1d ago

OK this is a stupid question, but why have Linux projects (apparently) fallen over themselves to comply with an age-recording statute in a single US state (albeit a large one), when those projects have been failing for decades to respect national and even international law regarding disability?

#accessibility #disability #linux #FreeSoftware #fascism #AgeVerification #infantilism

Show threadAntónio Manuel Dias1d ago

@iaruffell

Because it's not a single state, not even a single country. I think this video about systemd is elucidating:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5AcreFk40U

Watch until the end, because the last message is important.

#systemd #linux #ageverification

We Need To Talk About The Systemd Birth Date Situation

YouTube
Show threadAral Balkan1d ago
@ammdias @iaruffell Thanks to the white neckbeard in his parent’s basement telling us we’re blowing all this out of proportion I feel so much better now about this act of preemptive compliance with fascism.
Show threadKen Milmore
@aral @ammdias @iaruffell Is anyone actually using systemd's JSON user records? I must say I didn't even know they existed until this row erupted.
Edit: I might note with a hint of sarcasm that having a 128 bit UUID field in there will be useful; since systemd seems to have pre-reserved most of the the 32-bit Linux UID space for the purposes of using container UIDs, it is nice to have somewhere else to expand if you wanted to give out a large number of UIDs in an organisation.
Mar 22 at 1:56pmWeb
Show threadQuixoticgeek16h ago
@kbm0 @aral @ammdias @iaruffell you're expecting to have more than 4 bn users ?!?
Show threadKen Milmore16h ago
@quixoticgeek @aral @ammdias @iaruffell It's more like 260 million, if you fit into the gaps left between systemd's UID land grab.
There are various reasons, though, why it is desirable for an ID space like this to be sparse. So it isn't very much.
https://systemd.io/UIDS-GIDS/
Users, Groups, UIDs and GIDs on systemd Systems

Show threadQuixoticgeek15h ago
@kbm0 @aral @ammdias @iaruffell and you have 260m users on a single device ?
Show threadKen Milmore15h ago
@quixoticgeek @aral @ammdias @iaruffell No but you need to have a way of mapping your "enterprise" user ID space (from LDAP or AD or wherever) to a local user ID for every user that logs in. The smaller the local UID space is, the trickier this becomes. It's a bit like having to map every IPv6 address to an IPv4 address.
I expect Linux will one day try to support 128 bit UIDs natively.
Show threadQuixoticgeek15h ago
@kbm0 @aral @ammdias @iaruffell fair. Maybe in the future when systemd is enterprise ready, it'll allow you to configure how much uid space it hogs, so there's enough for those organisations with more than a quarter of a million employees...
Show threadKen Milmore15h ago
@quixoticgeek @aral @ammdias @iaruffell Ideally you never want to reuse a user ID when someone leaves, because it might be in use somewhere as a file ownership. And there are reasons you might want to generate temporary/transient users frequently. So you don't ever need anywhere near 260 million users to run into trouble. Unfortunately Windows seems to have the edge here, with its bulky SIDs.