SystemD Contributor Harassed Over Optional Age Verification Field, Suggests Installer-Level Disabling (itsfoss.com) 102

It's FOSS interviewed a software engineer whose long-running open source contributions include Python code for the Arch Linux installer and maintaining packages for NixOS. But "a recent change he made to systemd has pushed him into the spotlight" after he'd added the optional birthDate field for systemd's user database:

Critics saw it not merely as a technical addition, but as a symbolic capitulation to government overreach. A crack in the philosophical foundation of freedom that Linux is built on. What followed went far beyond civil disagreement. Dylan revealed that he faced harassment, doxxing, death threats, and a flood of hate mail. He was forced to disable issues and pull request tabs across his GitHub repositories...

Q: Should FOSS projects adapt to laws they fundamentally disagree with? Because these kinds of laws are certainly in conflict with what a lot of Linux users believe in.

A. Unfortunately, in a lot of cases, the answer is yes — at least for any distribution with corporate backing. The small independent distributions are much more flexible to refuse as a protest.

If we ignore regulations entirely, we risk Linux being something that companies are not willing to contribute to, and Linux may be shipped on less hardware. I'm talking about things like Valve and System76 (despite them very vocally hating these laws). That does not help us; it just lowers the quality of software contributions due to less investment in the platform and makes Linux less accessible to the average person. We need Linux and other free operating systems to remain a viable alternative to closed systems.

Q. 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"?

A. Unfortunately, yes, to some degree this is likely. I imagine the split will be mostly along the lines of independent distributions and those with corporate backing.

We're already seeing it as far as which distributions plan on implementing some sort of age verification and which ones are not, and that sucks. I'd rather nobody have to deal with this mess at all, but this is the reality of things now. As I said in the previous response, the corporate-backed distributions really have no choice in the matter. Companies are notoriously risk-adverse, but something like Artix or Devuan? Those are small and independent enough where the individual maintainers may be willing to take on more risk.

I was actually thinking about what this would look like if we added it to [Linux system installer] Calamares and chatting about that with the maintainers before that thread got brigaded by bad actors posting personal information and throwing around insults. I completely support the freedom for the distro maintainers to choose their risk tolerance. If the distribution is based out of Ireland or something (like Linux Mint) without these silly laws in the jurisdiction the developer operates in, I think that we should leave it up to them to make a choice here.

They think the installer should have a date picker with a flag to disable it, and "We can even default it to off, and corporate distributions using Calamares or those not willing to take the risk could flip it on if they need to. That way if maintainers of the distributions do not wish to collect the birth date, they won't have to, and no forking is required to patch it out."

Q: Should FOSS projects adapt to laws they fundamentally disagree with? Because these kinds of laws are certainly in conflict with what a lot of Linux users believe in.

A. Unfortunately, in a lot of cases, the answer is yes — at least for any distribution with corporate backing. The small independent distributions are much more flexible to refuse as a protest.

If we ignore regulations entirely, we risk Linux being something that companies are not willing to contribute to, and Linux may be shipped on less hardware. I'm talking about things like Valve and System76 (despite them very vocally hating these laws). That does not help us; it just lowers the quality of software contributions due to less investment in the platform and makes Linux less accessible to the average person. We need Linux and other free operating systems to remain a viable alternative to closed systems.

Q. 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"?

A. Unfortunately, yes, to some degree this is likely. I imagine the split will be mostly along the lines of independent distributions and those with corporate backing.

We're already seeing it as far as which distributions plan on implementing some sort of age verification and which ones are not, and that sucks. I'd rather nobody have to deal with this mess at all, but this is the reality of things now. As I said in the previous response, the corporate-backed distributions really have no choice in the matter. Companies are notoriously risk-adverse, but something like Artix or Devuan? Those are small and independent enough where the individual maintainers may be willing to take on more risk.

I was actually thinking about what this would look like if we added it to [Linux system installer] Calamares and chatting about that with the maintainers before that thread got brigaded by bad actors posting personal information and throwing around insults. I completely support the freedom for the distro maintainers to choose their risk tolerance. If the distribution is based out of Ireland or something (like Linux Mint) without these silly laws in the jurisdiction the developer operates in, I think that we should leave it up to them to make a choice here.

They think the installer should have a date picker with a flag to disable it, and "We can even default it to off, and corporate distributions using Calamares or those not willing to take the risk could flip it on if they need to. That way if maintainers of the distributions do not wish to collect the birth date, they won't have to, and no forking is required to patch it out."

advice to children (Score:5, Insightful)

Re:advice to children (Score:5, Informative)

In 2015 Harvard University professor Harvey Silverglate estimated that daily life in the United States is so over-criminalized the average American professional commits about three felonies a day.

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In 2015 Harvard University professor Harvey Silverglate estimated that daily life in the United States is so over-criminalized the average American professional commits about three felonies a day.

Of course the average probably includes people hitting the high seas for their streaming content, making those 3 felonies a day look like rookie numbers.

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It's so /. to think of technology first, but you probably commit a few technically jailable offenses driving to the grocery store

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Awhile back Florida passed a law making most license plate frames illegal, so that's at least semi-plausible. I'm thinking music from the high seas, now.

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Re:advice to children (Score:4, Insightful)

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Find a better source. The idea doesn't originate from that sick woman who is a high priest of the morons. I'm not being insulting, her work is juvenile; it's low maturity for her age and while it resonates with teenagers, a healthy person out grows that in a reasonable time... when they hit their 20s. If you are still stuck, then by definition, you are a moron. Just a fact. Without brain damage, it's theoretically possible you can still learn and grow out of what everybody else has. Not all morons are perm

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but the line must go up!!!

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Slavery and many other such things were once legal. Just because it's a law and legal doesn't much as things can change. A lot of these age gating laws violate other laws that supersede them. Having a plan is great but this fight is far from over.

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Slavery was once legal because there were not laws AGAINST it. Laws don't make things legal, they make them illegal.

"Having a plan is great but this fight is far from over."

Not sure what you mean by not over, but there are ways to fight unjust laws besides committing crimes.

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There were laws requiring that escaped slaves were returned to their owners. I presume you would have obeyed those laws, even though they were immoral.

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Why would you presume that from what was written?

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Because they literally said so.

These laws apply to you. Ignoring them will be bad for you. Don't do it.

Laws for slavery (Score:4, Insightful)

I’d argue that slavery wasn’t “legal because nobody banned it.” It was legal because there were explicit laws that created, defined, and enforced the institution.

There were statutes specifying who could be held as slaves, rules that the child of an enslaved woman was automatically a slave, procedures for manumission, regulations on how slaves could be bought, sold, punished, or inherited, and laws requiring that escaped slaves be returned. That’s not a legal vacuum, that’s a full legal framework.

It’s similar to how segregation laws later forced discrimination on people who might not have engaged in it otherwise. The state wasn’t passively allowing something; it was actively mandating and structuring it.

Slavery existed because the law built and maintained it, not because the law failed to forbid it.

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At the same time, "but I don't like this law" isn't going to protect you from punishment if you break it.

Fight unethical laws with every fiber but you're going to be far more effective if you Chesterton's Fence than if you just stomp your feet and whine.

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You know why encryption is legal despite Bush and Clinton's best attempts to prevent it?

Because Gen-X kids risked a decade in jail for breaking Federal law to ensure the code got out there and everyone had it. It simply became impossible to regulate because anyone anywhere in the world could download the code and run it.

Today programmers won't even say 'no' when governments demand they ID all their users.

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This guy gets it. Subservience gets you nowhere. Even more so these days.

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Now talk about ICE.

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Some of the things ICE is doing right now is not good and clearly violates some due process. At the same time, they're barely deporting anyone. Even with t

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Re: advice to children (Score:3)

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The child is you. Actual adults understand that things still need to work, regardless of laws. Hence laws may need to be worked around.

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Elaborate. Why does this law need to be "worked around"? And how does NOT adding age information in a database serve that purpose? In what world does a judge accept an argument that there isn't a way to determine age because there isn't an entry in a database? Or that an entry cannot be added on a judge's order? Just what argument gets won because of your "workaround"?

It appears you claim to be an "actual adult" here, too bad you lack the intellect of one.

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Thanks for the confirmation. How pathetic.

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You live in a country with laws.

A country with laws, yes. A country with law, no.

It's ludicrous to tell people they should obey the law when none of Epstein's clients have been arrested and probably at least half of the business owners in the country would be in jail if the laws on employing illegal aliens were enforced.

If an escaped slave had turned up at your house in the 1800s asking for help, would you have followed the law and sent him back to his owner? From your post, I'm guessing you would have

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We are obligated to ignore stupid laws. To mock them, to flaunt them and ultimately get them removed.

We are not sheep.

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Look what happened to Rosa Parks [wikipedia.org].

Use an Age-verified flag (Score:2)

Re:Use an Age-verified flag (Score:4, Insightful)

Re:Use an Age-verified flag (Score:4, Insightful)

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He clearly meant morally, and laws do not make right.

Do you really need this explained for you? As an example, here in FL, a few months ago they painted over a LGBTQ+ pride crosswalk downtown. A few people decided to protest by coloring the sidewalk back in with chalk. Eventually, after a bunch of back and forth between the protestors and the city crew cleaning it back up over several weeks, some of the protestors were arrested.

Personally, I feel that temporarily vandalizing (it does wash away in our rather frequent rainstorms) a roadway with some bright c

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But understand that in this case, some people want other people to break the law. They aren't willing to be accountable themselves.

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Some people labor under the delusion that if enough people ignore a law, it will get repealed. If that were the case, speed limits would've been abolished a long time ago.

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If speed limits were enforced, they would be abolished tomorrow. They only continue to exist because most people can break the speed limit for years without getting a ticket.

If drivers received a fine every time they broke the speed limit, politicians houses would be burning down the next day and the law would be abolished the day after.

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No he didn't. What evidence do you have that says otherwise? Particularly when the remedy is to break the law.

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Why is it the business of my OS vendor how old I am?

Because if it's not done at the OS level, you're eventually going to have to prove you're an adult through some other method that might be even less privacy-respecting. And it's not just for porn, we're starting to see signs that all social media might end up age gated, because some courts have found that its use can reasonably be assumed to be harmful to children.

Let me be clear - I'm not defending the age checks and personally believe that parents should be the ones keeping their little spawn safe from t

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Requiriing a trusted source other than the OS (because the OS cannot do it) does not mean that age is not the OSes "business", it means that two components have it as their "business".

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Because if it's not done at the OS level, you're eventually going to have to prove you're an adult through some other method that might be even less privacy-respecting.

That's where this is all going anyway. If the age verification is nothing more than "state your age" when you make your user account then people will type in whatever they want. Then the politicians will say "Well, this age verification isn't working because there's nothing legally verifying the response. We need to add a check that identifies the person so we can know they are telling the truth." And then they will say "You surely will implement this into your OS, right? You already put the age check in we

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kids dont buy any of the hardware they use or pay the isp/phone bill. these age gates stop zero kids and they know it.

If you're implying that parents will just do the age verification step and set the device up with adult credentials for their kid, yeah, that will probably happen at least sometimes. But now you've at least established some form of willful negligence of the part of the parents, which is probably a very nice get-out-of-court-free card for the likes of Facebook the next time some teen becomes a victim of online bullying and "unalives" (as the kids say) himself.

Right now, the whole "parental controls are hard

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It is when the government says it is. Literally the easiest question there is.

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*nix supports fields for full name, location, phone numbers, email address, password, etc. Do you think your OS vendor knows what they are?

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No, I don't think they have cared (until now).

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And what if someone comes of age tomorrow or a year from now, you insensitive clod?

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Right, it is a non-functional solution that fails to solve ANY problem. Great virtue signaling though!

THIS is correct! You get an A- (Score:3)

THIS is the solution! Promote it!...

Actually a simple user group "adult" that you add users to who are adults or "underage."

It's not OS enforced; it's STANDARD for software to poll to find out permissions. Engineering wise, shouldn't you use the OS existing permissions system to do this?!!

The law simply applies to software using a simple standard mechanism to determine it. If you want intelligence and security or whatever, those are 3rd party software that handle the user group.

The admin has a JOB to do. T

It's inevitable (Score:4, Insightful)

The politicians aren't going to back down on this and the age gates have to be placed somewhere. I live in Florida where they ignorantly expect every adult site on the entire global internet to comply with Florida's age check laws, and the result has been an absolute mess that does very little to prevent children from accessing adult material online. Some sites just blocked IPs that are geographically considered to be in Florida (which can be easily bypassed via VPN), others implemented age checks in ways that leave wide ranging privacy concerns, and some sites took a page out of 4chan's book [slashdot.org] and figuratively said "We're not located in the USA, so kindly fuck off."

An age gate at the OS level isn't perfect. It isn't meant to be perfect though, it just limits the scope of compliance enforcement effort necessary down to a handful of vendors. Realistically, it's to have something that's good enough to cover the majority of consumer devices that parents are likely to give their rug rats (and then forget to configure any sort of parental controls, which is what landed us in this situation in the first place). That generally means hardware running Android, Windows, macOS, and iOS. As TFS mentioned, Linux being compliant with age gate laws mostly boils down to companies that sell consumer hardware with Linux preloaded (the Steam Deck comes to mind). If you're not going to sell something that is going to end up in the hands of someone's precious little Timmy, I doubt there's going to be much scrutiny over it (kind of like how Florida is basically ignoring the fact that you can still be underage and access a bunch of porn just by adding a VPN plugin to your browser).

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The politicians aren't going to back down on this and the age gates have to be placed somewhere.

I know of a perfect place they can place them: up their own ass.

|

And that is what all this will end up with.

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Age gates cannot be placed in any meaningful way in Linux. Not possible. Hence they may be placed somewhere, but they will be meaningless. Example: My Linux systems have no systemd. Second example: You can boot Linux from read-only medium and that possibility will not go away.

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Linux can be made compliant when it's incorporated into a consumer product. I gave the Steam Deck as an example. It has all sorts of parental controls implemented. [steamcommunity.com]

Yeah, this does mean that the burden of compliancy falls on individual hardware vendors since Linux itself is not subject to a single controlling entity, but this really isn't the massive hole in the dyke that people tend to make it out to be.

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A closed-source distro can be made compliant. A preinstallation can be made compliant. Linux cannot be made compliant and you can simply remove this check by a reinstallation or a respective script that runs from an external boot medium. Trivial. Easy enough that a smart 10 year old can do it.

The only way compliance could be forces in FOSS is to outlaw using and running most of that FOSS. Even these utterly dumb lawmakers will find that extremely destructive and far too expensive for them.

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Anything can go away. People need to realize who the enemy is and what the rules actually are. We now have a Constitution that does not apply to the President, we have major media that is corrupted by billionaires and controlled by political parties, we now have a corrupt Supreme Court with a supermajority of partisan, Catholic justices. Linux can go away tomorrow, just like citizens can be gunned down in the streets and military veterans can get deported. Go ahead, connect that contraband Linux box to

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Linux may go away in the US. And the damage done will be extreme. But, you know, from history there is a pattern that may apply here: Empires in decline trying to redefine reality with laws that make no sense but do accelerate that decline. This may be what we are seeing here: An increasing distance between reality and the laws that get made.

But Linux will be fine. Its massive benefits will just stop being available in some regions of the planet.

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Why keep saying "politicians" here? I know why, just look who posted it.

Age verification is an outgrowth of the christian nationalism, it is a core part of Republican identity politics. Stop voting Republican and stop supporting politically active chiurches. Bet you won't say that though. Instead, you need to pretend that Democrats are to blame...in Florida!

"...does very little to prevent children from accessing adult material online. "

It's not intended to. Its purpose is to own the libs. You should k

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I said "politicians" because age gate laws have bipartisan support. The law requiring it be implemented at the OS level is from California, the crap that requires app/site side verification is from my state of Florida, and I shouldn't need to point out that the former state is blue and the latter is red. This isn't even an entirely US-based phenomenon if you've been following it, with Apple preemptively adding age verification in the UK.

Thing is, as unpopular as it is to say here on Slashdot, kids being e

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But make no mistake, you are participating in the left-right illusions. It's fake. You are angry at the wrong people. The technocrats are everyone in power, and they want to surveil everything. Both

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I don't agree with age verification (Score:5, Informative)

I am strongly opposed to age verification.

However, given that the developer faced (according to the article) "harassment, doxxing, death threats, and a flood of hate mail", maybe we need some form of maturity verification? There's no call for that sort of crap. And I really hope that criminal charges are filed against anyone sending death threats.

Re:I don't agree with age verification (Score:4, Funny)

The hate really should be directed at the politicians who pushed for these age gate laws, but threatening a politician usually results in big angry guys with guns showing up at your front door.

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"There's no call for that sort of crap."

Depends on who you threaten. Celebrating Charlie Kirk's death should be treason punishable by death, celebrating Robert Mueller's death? Just another day. Death threats against doctors at health clinics A-OK, it just depends on who does the threatenin'

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Celebrating someone's death is low-class.

Making a death threat is a crime. There is a difference.

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there is no evidence whatsoever of doxxing, death-threats or swatting, only his claims. the evidence of "hateful comments" otoh is quite underwhelming, i pulled out the popcorn for nothing. just saying.

after this unfortunate pull-request some backlash was indeed to be expected. i'm surprised poettering didn't get some flak too after accepting and closing the pr and preventing further comments or criticism with a totally incongruent argument: if it is "just an optional field with zero policy" then it has abs

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nah, he got what he deserved. you wanna lick boots don't be surprised when you find a few up your ass.

Mod parent funny (Score:2)

It's funny to suggest that we need age verification to counter immature people who go around making empty death threats like a 12 year old... but is not age tagged so we treat it was serious. Making an argument using them as a reason precisely against their position!

But really, those can be ignored for just about everybody. Now a real person on a phone call can sound really bad and real if done by the right unhinged person; heard it. Now with AI a child can get a really good real sounding threat. While a

Nothing optional about it (Score:2)

Specifically Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook wanted because AI slop is starting to infest his data sources that he sells for money.

All this age verification bullshit is just Zuckerberg and other billionaire types getting out ahead of the AI slop apocalypse so that they can continue to

Sorry no (Score:2)

This is a desperation attempt to solve a problem; or more like placate voters -- if it works or not is not as important as acting like you are solving a voter issue.

A common (fundamental?) theme in minor to pro-level politics is BLAME management:

The fact corps impose the whole trash problem on everybody else to save them money, is masked by making it OUR problem to solve; we are responsible for cleaning it up.

Protection of children (especially if you want to do harmful stuff) is then the responsibility of

Serves him right (Score:2)

What were you thinking making changes like that without firstly checking with the entire community? What sort of self-righteous prick are you?

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Evil bit (Score:2)

Maybe the evil bit wasn't such a bad idea. How about instead of unreliable and privacy invading age checks, put an extra field in TCP so that websites can signal that they have adult content and the user can then decide to block them at the router or OS level. That would still leak some information that SSL normally wouldn't, but not much.

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Because it's not about age. It's about eliminating anonymity online.

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One should make an effort to protest bad laws (Score:1)

Explain please? (Score:2)

why now (Score:2)

genuine question - why was this code pushed now? I don't know who this idiot dev is but I'm struggling to imagine how this is issue is anywhere near the top 10 things they should be working on.

So then, who is setting the roadmap for systemd and the issues that are prioritised? There's no way this just came from the community - it smells very much like MS or even Valve have been advocating for it.

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Yes.

Free and open source is dead. When major components that have no requirement to comply with the laws decide to implement a thing; it forces the hand of developers and users.

Where's the freedom. Did they ask anyone how this should be implemented...maybe take some responsibility given their usage levels and see how this would go over? No. They just did it. Fuck your opinion, get the fuck out if you don't like it.

The bullshit we sought to avoid with FOSS has in fact, infected FOSS.

Why do this? To enshittif

the issue is putting it in systemd (Score:2)

Inside a #pragma, off by default. that's OK (Score:2)

It is going to happen so propose a useful solution (Score:2)

The laws in several countries are going to require it. My preferred way is for the OS to offer a flag of "This user is of legal age in this region based on information provided to the administrator of this computer." I'll leave it up to the people with compilers to comply or not with their local laws.

My proposal is stuff the flags in a sysctl user.$UID.age var. and then let the browser send info off to other sites just like it does with language selection. That way a pam module (or systemd) can set an ov

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Governments are starting to require people verify their ages with an actual picture ID either primarily or via a trusted third party verifier. How does does a flag sent by the OS that the user sets to whatever they want satisfy that requirement?