SahwaGrapheneOS refuses to comply with new age verification laws for operating systems — group says it will never require personal information
bonn2I was wondering when I would see this headline. I wonder if any other big names do similar
KabeI also wonder whether or not grapheneos, or open source Linux OSs in general, will face any repercussions for failing to comply to these regulations due to the relatively low user count.
Hate to say it but systemd, the init system of most Linux distros, already has PRs with maintainer backing to implement DoB recording.
Some people can’t kneel fast enough.
That’s just systemd adding a birthdate field to their userdb. Doesn’t require that it be filled out or accurate, and especially doesn’t require it to be validated against a government database. I don’t see it as fundamentally any different from adding a userdb field for favorite color, phone number, or blood type.
Without 3rd party validation, I really don’t see the privacy issue with an age field. Without verification, it is, at worst, one more byte available to hash into a unique identifier, but you can feed that field from /dev/random at every query and poison even that hypothetical.
Why the ever loving fuck does an init system even need a user database?
Honest to God, if FIFA were giving out a World “Understanding UNIX” Prize, Poettering would be the inaugural, and only, winner. Never in the field of operating systems has one man driven so much enshittification through sheer force of cluelessness coupled with supreme arrogance. And in a world that Steve Ballmer still occupies, that’s one hell of an accolade.
KissakiSystemd is more than an init system. Systemd was designed to be different from previous Unix-style single-/narrow-purpose services. Many distros making the switch seems to indicate that such a switch had significant enough upsides or necessities. No?
I read an article about why Systemd became what it is, and why it makes sense, and that made sense to me. Integration and a fully designed system has advantages over disconnected utilities and systems you have to connect and negotiate, especially on system- and boot-up level concerns.
Other init systems are able to handle those issues without requiring the absolutely insane amount of scope creep that systemd exhibits though.
That comes with the price of lower reliability, highly non-linear behaviour and a central point of failure (or control). But, its thr user’s choice.