A single pull request turned a quiet open source contributor into the unlikely target of one of the Linux community's most heated controversies. We interacted with Dylan Taylor to hear his side of the story.

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.

    • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1514·
      16 hours ago

      How does systemd having an optional birthDate field prevent children from having a computer?

      It also has fields for ‘Real Name’ and ‘Location’ (and has since the 1960s) without any problems. Most people don’t even know that they exist because they’re optional.

        • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldEnglish
          184·
          16 hours ago

          Gosh, it’s almost like it’s my opinion and these threads keep popping up for discussion in the communities that I’m a part of.

          I’m not going to pay you for replying to my comments and yet here you are.

    • Yttra@lemmy.worldEnglish
      611·
      14 hours ago

      Because the majority of parents can’t parent and risk frying their kid’s brain? Not the computer’s problem, sure, but still pretty common…

      • Calfpupa [she/her]@lemmy.mlEnglish
        18·
        13 hours ago

        Counterpoint: it also allows children to learn outside of what their abusive parents allow them to see. I only escaped christianity because I had access to computer and a library, and most kids don’t have access to a library today.

        • Yttra@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          7 hours ago

          I also grew up in a similar situation (abusive parent, evangelical), but it’s a real gamble what with the default leanings of the algorithms I see these days, and I’ve seen enough kids fall deep into alt-right pipelines because of it. It’s not all doom, but I think we were pretty fortunate…

          On top of my main authority figure being physically and verbally abusive, talking to normal people and asking my parents questions they couldn’t answer about religion were what got me out. I do understand that everyone will have different situations, freedoms, and experiences, though. It might be easier for me but harder for someone else, or vice versa.

        • Yttra@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          8 hours ago

          I grew up in that situation so believe me, the abusive parents are going to find a way to be abusive regardless.

          Ignoring how impractical it would be to accurately enforce, said parent would simply… not give them computer access to the outside world at all, or just change a password. In my case, they tried to limit access using router mac address rules 🤣