The discussion around "age verification" in systemd/XDG has been largely focused against the California law. But honestly, there's a much deeper problem there.

Firstly, the data collected. The question initially asked is "are you at least 18 years old?" However, that's not the data collected. In fact, the data collected is not even the age — it's the full birth date. It's a perfect example of collecting more data than you need, and a sensitive information too, and sharing it with any application that asks.

Secondly, the extended goal of "parental controls" used as a justification to collect more data. When you think about it, you realize how bad this is: it isn't the case of asking the user about their birth date (with the assumption that a kid will enter a fake date to workaround the limitations). It is effectively a tool for *parents* to impose restrictions on their children, which means that they are more likely to enter the real date to ensure that these restrictions work. And given how popular sharenting is today, do you really think they'd come up with a fake birth date that happens to roughly match their child's age?

This is simply irresponsible.

https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/1922

Now is the time for FOSS folk to remember what Free, Libre, and Open Source software is actually about, and to choose to resist.

If the existence of your project, and your not going to jail, depends on some form of compliance that you really cannot dodge, then make sure that compliance comes in a form that is bolted on and give me a spanner.

Specifically give users the power to remove age verification and to enable encryption, even if they have to fork your project to do so.

$ host -t AAAA www.tomshardware.com
www.tomshardware.com is an alias for g.sni.us-eu.fastly.net.

It would not be difficult for them to enable this: https://www.fastly.com/blog/ipv6-fastly (tl;dr: prepend "dualstack." to that alias)

Unfortunately, I cannot find a simple webmaster contact for them. If someone knows how to reach their IT people, please pass this along.

#ipv6

A small set of people are merging changes to various Linux components to make sure every application knows your birth date.

This is being done rapidly by people with questionable justifications and being merged with no youth and few marginalized people involved.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/accountsservice/accountsservice/-/merge_requests/176#0b07c0cc4d49be119f65cdb2037440f56eed647a

while considering whether i should be looking into replacing astral's ruff for projects i'm responsible for (tl;dr probably not) i realized that code formatting is an excellent place to use a language model. not for developing it, i mean; rather, make the entire formatter be a language model. verify that the AST is semantically equivalent in the end (which is a solved problem for the restricted case we're considering here) and we're golden

while there are people who are fine with the draconian approach taken by tools like black or (to a lesser extent) rustfmt, i find these tools intolerable. they promise consistency but this consistency butchers so much code that i'd rather quarrel with contributors over formatting (and presumably lose some) than read the absolute trash these tools emit in many common cases, with the resolution for this problem being WONTFIX

anyway, semantic style transfer is one of the things CNNs are pretty good at. if i could say "PRs should be formatted 'more or less like this'" and as a result they are formatted 'more or less like this' (with the quality being somewhere in between "manually reformatting all of it by hand" and "let everyone pick whatever they want at all" but closer to the first option), with near-zero per-PR action required from all participants, that would be nice

(you should be able to train a model like this by generating random snippets of code formatted in particular ways)