Mastodawn

but also "why does this have to be rushed?" you clearly never had to ship a product. Having less than a year is _not much time_. It's very little time. And I fully understand why people want at least bits and pieces in place, so they won't have to risk "yeah well.. can't ship shit for a year, because I waited until December"

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dylanmtaylor 6h ago

@rfc1036 Even with the other PRs as well, it's still not age verification. Nothing is verified. People have absolutely lost their minds over this.

dylanmtaylor 1d ago

kcxt 4d ago

people on reddit are doing a whole lot of yapping about age verification in Linux

I would generally agree that the whole approach of these laws is total dogshit and clearly a wedge issue to enable stricter surveillance laws in the future

at the same time though, the actual implementation and potentially having a portal which exposes the users age bracket seems totally reasonable as a way to implement parental controls... I'm also not totally against holding service providers to higher standards for data processing when it comes to minors, and hey if they're doing that why shouldn't adults get the same treatment?

what im totally miffed about though is why the fuck would you get mad at systemd for adding a birthDate field to userdb, what would you have them do? Would you rather every desktop environment had its own way to store this data??

An XDG portal for this also means you can *trivially* write a stub that always identifies you as an adult or even lets you pick per-app (heck maybe per website! that might be the new cursed way of avoiding trackers under late stage capitalism)

and yeah it sure would be shit if we get real-id laws in a few years, but systemd or XDG standing on "principle" and refusing to implement this API is absolutely not going to lead to better outcomes for anyone. The last thing we want is for users in certain regions to wind up relying on implementations maintained by distros or random individuals, if we need to have this crap the least we could ask is that it's maintained by established and trusted people in the open source community!

dylanmtaylor 1d ago

Sebastian Wick 2d ago

Instead of taking any part in the monthly wayland bashing bullshit, you could just read about how electron, one of the last X11 bastions, has adjusted to wayland. Super important work!

https://www.electronjs.org/blog/tech-talk-wayland

Tech Talk: How Electron went Wayland-native, and what it means for your apps | Electron

Electron recently switched to Wayland by default on Linux, bringing dozens of popular desktop apps along with it. Here's what changed and how it affects developers and users.

dylanmtaylor 1d ago

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Danielle Foré 5d ago

When you tell me to just not implement age declaration, do you understand you’re asking me to risk thousands of dollars in fines? Which means realistically the only way for me to not follow the law is to close my business and stop making elementary OS. Do you think it makes sense for me to decide to have no income right now in the middle of massive tech layoffs in a purely symbolic act of protest? Do you really fully understand this is what you’re asking of me?

dylanmtaylor 1d ago

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kcxt 4d ago

in the replies i expand a bit more on my point that systemd/xdg refusing to comply would more or less force distros to do the work themselves (potentially to a worse standard) or refuse, and in either case have to face the blowback themselves. While we can and should criticise industry backed distros if they blatantly disregard the interests of their users, particularly when they have the power to push back against legislation like this.

However it seems absurd to me to expect small community driven projects to navigate this legislation themselves or have to take the heat for taking steps to protect the livelihoods of their maintainers by complying with this legislation, something they would have to expend more effort in doing if the projects they are built on (systemd, flatpak, GNOME, KDE) took the high road and refused to comply.

I think there is a pretty huge lack of understanding by a lot of even highly technical Linux users when it comes to how the software supply chain of their distro actually works.

Very relevant example:

https://mastodon.online/@danirabbit/116250765623660340

Danielle Foré (@[email protected])

Mastodon

dylanmtaylor 1d ago

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Lennart Poettering 4d ago

@cas i am waiting for the moment when these folks who partake in this misguided shitstorm learn about the kind of PII the good old GECOS field on Linux/UNIX carries...

And once people are over that the next shock waits for them! There's a file in /etc/ that contains a hash (i.e. a unique identifier!) of your most personal, private, secret data: your password. And linux systems even kinda insist on you on providing that on first install! Can you believe that?

dylanmtaylor 1d ago

Adam Demasi 3d ago

I didn’t think this needed to be said, but don’t make up conspiracy theories about Linux projects complying with the age verification laws. You’re frustrated like we all are, but you’re directing it at the party that has little power other than to implement it as minimally as possible.

Instead, contact the lawmakers that passed this without listening to groups such as the EFF, who warned them about how it affects platforms other than Apple and Google’s. There’s still time before the laws come into effect.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/ab-1043s-internet-age-gates-hurt-everyone

#linux

A.B. 1043’s Internet Age Gates Hurt Everyone

EFF has long warned against age-gating the internet. Such mandates strike at the foundation of the free and open internet. They create unnecessary and unconstitutional barriers for adults and young people to access information and express themselves online. They hurt small and open-source...

Electronic Frontier Foundation

dylanmtaylor Apr 11, 2018

Sean R. Lynch ☑️Apr 11, 2018

Just got an email from Wells Fargo which begins:

"Dear Customer,

"As part of our commitment to make things right, we have entered into a $142 million class action settlement related to the opening of unauthorized accounts."

No, pond scum, you got your asses caught and sued and chose the settlement because you knew no jury in the world would side with you. In any sane world you would no longer exist as an entity and your execs would be in prison.

dylanmtaylor Apr 11, 2018

Mastodon is pretty cool, maybe it'll take over Twitter one day. I like how it is open source 🙂