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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Erin 💽✨1d ago

There’s a lot that can be said about the ineffectiveness of age gates or the problems of rating systems but those are better directed at legislators rather than open source maintainers working to ensure that distros are in legal compliance with flawed legislation by the deadline, especially with regards to laws like New York’s with serious privacy issues and that are pretty much unworkable by any open source projects

And also a lot to think about in terms of why educating parents is ineffective and the nature of the societal problems motivating these laws and how to address them in the real world with actual parents

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infinite love ⴳ 22h ago

@erincandescent "working to ensure legal compliance" is the problem though. no one should be complying at all.

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Erin 💽✨22h ago

@trwnh if i were a person shipping a distro to users in California from the 1st Jan next year, I'd be asking who's going to pay my legal fees...

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LisPi 20h ago

@erincandescent @trwnh What legal fees?

Just slap a disclaimer you're not responsible for nor approving of users choosing to use it in non-Free locations and that they take the risk on their own.

"This distribution is not approved for use in police states. Do so at your own risk."

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LisPi

@erincandescent @trwnh Besides, Guix provides a hint of the solution for this.

The binary bootstrap seed.

Distribute everything as text, speech, that is to say, and provide the bootstrap as an image or shirt or something.

Then provide a very minimal boot image the user can use to enter the seed manually and overwrite the start of a disk (a very old school kind of editor isn't it?), with the next partition over (or a USB disk) containing the source for everything else, and now the blocking of such a distribution is a Free Speech issue.

UEFI provides most of the tooling necessary to make this require an absolute minimum object code (little enough to be auditable reasonably without source if need be).