themachinestopsSomeone Forked Systemd to Strip Out Its Age Verification Support
I find that move extremely funny, since it’s purely made for sensationalism and nothing else. I mean, if you hate how systems implemented age verification, then why don’t you remove its identity verification too, i.e. also optional fields for stuff like your address an e-mail that most users don’t even fill out.
There is no mechanism verifying what birth date you type in - you can type whatever date you want and systems doesn’t care.
I’d say no matter where you stand with age verification, this is the best solution to handle the situation. After all, any and all age checks we have nowadays are a black box anyways. There is no real knowing how other systems are checking ages, and there is AFAIK no real government mandated rules on how it is verified. They could make you scan your ID’s front, back, nuclear composition and dietary preferences and give you a result that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a proper age verification procedure.
If the government wants to introduce age verification, they have to do it themselves - build an API that handles the age verification, similar to how the digital ID in Germany works, as an example. If they want proper age verification, they also have to take the blame themselves if things go wrong.
AdaI would but I’ve always been opposed to systemd anyway.
But for me it’s a slippery slope I don’t think we should even get on.
But for me it’s a slippery slope I don’t think we should even get on.
I agree. But the start of the slope isn’t my exit point. My exit point is just before the slope gets too steep to get off.
That’s the thing about slippery slopes. You don’t really know where the point you slip is.
I do. We’re on it already. The whole system is slipping towards an age gated internet, and there is nothing we can do to stop it. That’s the slope. There’s nothing I can do to stop it, whether I’m I stay on or get off.
I don’t believe that dropping my whole OS over a database field will change anything. It won’t stop the devs who are concerned about their legal liability from being doing what they need to do to protect themselves. Some devs will comply, some will walk away from OSS, and some won’t comply. But the bigger the project, the more corporate sponorship it relies on, the more certain it is going to be in the “comply” category, and the truth of that won’t change because users push back.
Which is to say, I don’t believe standing up and rejecting a DB field as a matter of principle will change anything, except to make my life harder.
My line in in the sand isn’t about changing the course of the path we’re on, it’s about my own personal interactions with the system. And being forced to provide my age to interact with the internet is the bit I won’t do. So I will stay with the inevitable creep towards that state until the last possible moment, in the hopes that somehow, I’m wrong, and we avoid this privacy nightmare we’re heading towards. If and when it becomes impossible to interact without providing that data, then that’s where I step off, even if it costs me half the internet.
socsa