HEY MY GUY you want a CIVIL discussion about CIVIL DISCUSSION?

/s

Q. You say this is “just attestation, not verification” but we know that infrastructure always gets repurposed later. This is where the legit fear lies. Today it’s birthDate. Tomorrow could it be location, identity, or verification tokens? I understand that you are providing a workaround but where should we draw the line between compliance and resistance?

A. Funny you mention that, location is already a field in userdb. Like birthDate, this field is also trivially nullable, stored locally, and can be set to anything. As long as we are talking about a user self-attesting a date - especially with the ability to enter any value we want - we aren’t in the realm of identity tracking. I draw the line at when a third party internet-connected service is doing validation of ID. Let’s be honest though, I strongly believe such a thing isn’t possible on a FOSS operating system environment unless they could control what was bootable on the device at a firmware level, enforce signatures to ensure that you couldn’t boot something unrestricted, remove the ability to be root, and block LD_PRELOAD so signals couldn’t be faked. There’s probably more ways to circumvent that. What I’m trying to say is real ID verification on Linux would be awfully hard to implement, and I guarantee you, nobody would put up with it. They’d fork to a version that doesn’t have it immediately as a protest. Right now, we’re considering implementing something akin to the date pickers that were ubiquitous when signing up for internet services in the early 2000s where it’s just an honor system. Things like actual ID checks and/or facial scanning + age estimation would be just too incompatible with Linux where we have the freedom to change whatever we want to.

the intellectually diverse lemmings represented in this post and many others cannot understand this

won’t stop them expressing their feelings tho, bless their hearts

I really do not understand the hate :/

The itsfoss interviewer goes into this:

A lot of backlash isn’t about the code change, but about what it represents.

You say this is “just attestation, not verification” but we know that infrastructure always gets repurposed later. This is where the legit fear lies.

Do you think regulations like these will reshape desktop Linux in the next 5-10 years where we might have “compliant Linux” and “Freedom-first Linux”?

Sam Bent’s article also goes into this (although, fuck that clickbait title): https://www.sambent.com/the-engineer-who-tried-to-put-age-verification-into-linux-5/

He read the laws, decided compliance was the correct response, and went to work. Every objection the community raised went nowhere: that this enables surveillance infrastructure, that lying is trivially easy, that the laws themselves are unconstitutional overreach. He’d already accepted the law as legitimate and moved to implementation.

He read the law, took it at face value, and started writing code. The word for what that is sits somewhere past malice, something more insidious: an engineer who treats compliance as engineering, who sees a legal requirement the way he sees a technical specification, and will implement whatever the spec says regardless of who wrote the spec or why.

The reason to name him is the pattern. The surveillance state runs on volunteers: people who do the implementation work for free, out of genuine conviction, with no paper trail connecting them to the money that wrote the laws.

This is stupid. We block fingerprinting.

Just because some people are fingerprint able doesn’t mean all of us should suffer and bend at the knee to unjust laws