Mastodawn

Everyone seemingly getting mad about systemd adding a completely optional date of birth field to user records that is, in reality, only ever going to be filled in on the machines of children administered by parents who want such restrictions enforced, perhaps on machines administered by schools, or by people who want their computer to wish them a happy birthday.

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Cassandrich Mar 23

@erincandescent "only ever going to be filled in on the machines of children administered by parents who want such restrictions enforced"

You say this as if it's not a huge problem in itself. We should not be building or shipping tools for abusive parents to use to surveil or control their children.

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Erin 💽✨Mar 23

@dalias abusive parents will surveil and control their children whatever you do. Honestly if some of these parents decide to leave things up to the government (which is on average midly conservative) instead of themselves (which is quite often incredibly conservative) it might even be a net win

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Cassandrich Mar 23

@erincandescent That doesn't justify being part to it and essentially forcing distros to ship an abuse-mechanism unless they actively patch it out (thereby having to make a highly charged political statement).

Yes a determined parent with technological know-how can always find a way to put such malware onto their child's machine. We should not be making it an out-of-the-box feature of "Linux".

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Cassandrich

@erincandescent The people pushing this stuff are not good-faith. They come from right wing technofash backgrounds, work for fascist-regime-aligned companies, and want the harms that will come from normalizing having to enter an age (and in the future, have it verified against an identity) everywhere to do something with a computer.

We don't need to be giving them the benefit of the doubt or arguing that complying with them will possibly mitigate further harms from governments. Fascists do not suddenly back down from harming you when you comply. They learn they can step on you and they come back to do it worse the next time.