Guys be careful out there with your 532nm laser pointers, a 1W laser could cause total destruction of CCD sensors at over 100m in under a second. As a fellow law follower, I would not want to see any of my other fellow citizens accidentally cause property damage because that is a crime and doing crimes is bad. This user is very, very law abiding and ignore all other indicators.

Its not a hypothetical situation, it is happening, although right now to mobile phones and tablets if we stick with Russia example. Il let you envision what direction this is going to. But hey its a law. There are linux tablets out there, should maybe they add this pre-installed app?

You haven’t shown how this would be prevented if systemd didn’t store birthDate.

You, and I, are no more affected by this field than we have been affected by the realName or location fields which have existed for decades. The field doesn’t do anything unless you choose to run software that uses it.

If you’re going to swap init systems because of this change then you understand my point about choice. If you think this field is bad, you can choose to not install systemd. If you use systemd and think the field is bad you can choose to not install software that uses the field.

I think the age verification laws are pointless and damaging, but systemd isn’t the battleground to fight that battle and, most importantly, people who are engaged in a harassment campaign against this developer are completely in the wrong.

Discord does not use Linux user metadata to store information about your Discord account. Because the application is cross platform, they store information about you in their own systems, not in systemd. Their age verification is implemented completely independent of systemd and doesn’t rely on the birthDate field.

It’s also software that you can choose to not install.

Oh I know, lets introduce a field that stores an array of your nationalities, so any app developer can request your nationalities and adequately fine you for spreading illegal content online if you are Russian citizen.

In this hypothetical situation, why are you choosing to install software that does this? This software could just as easily store the data in a flat text file in your .config directory, it doesn’t need systemd in order to exist. Systemd choosing to not add those fields would not prevent the software from existing.

In any hypothetical situation where you’re forced to use some hypothetical privacy invading software, that software would still be able to do everything exactly the same even if it has to store your information outside of systemd.

Not having a field in systemd doesn’t mean that the data can’t be stored, it just means that the data has to be stored in a text file instead.

Systemd also has fields to store your realName and location. That same hypothetical situation applies to that data too. Your REAL NAME gives much more information about you than your birthDate and the location field is big enough to store your exact GPS coordinates. Like birthDate, these fields are not a problem (they’ve existed since the 60s) if you don’t install software that uses them.

If you don’t want software that tracks your location, don’t install software that tracks your location. If you don’t want software that requires your real name, then don’t install software that requires your real name.

If you don’t want software that requires your birthDate for age verification, then don’t install software that requires your birthDate for age verification.

I expect that they will store your birthDate in their own way and not use systemd as they are not a Linux native application.

You get to choose if you install Discord and you get to choose if you are going to submit to their age verification.

This is true if the birthDate field exists in systemd or not.

You can say “well don’t put it in there” but what happens when big monopolistic corporations start requiring it to use some service of theirs that you don’t have an alternative for? Now I have to maintain a separate PC for that shit? Fuck that.

If you choose to use a service that requires age verification then that service will store your age verification information on your computer somewhere. If it is stored in systemd, malicious programs will be able to access it. If it is not stored in systemd, malicious programs will still be able to access it.

If you choose to not use a service that requires age verification, then you will not store any age verification information on your computer to be stolen by malicious software. Even if systemd has a birthDate field you will not store any age verification information.

The difference in these two scenarios is your choice to use age verification or not. The location where the data is stored doesn’t change the scenario.

Well, you come off like you’re promoting violence.

People protesting (legally and peacefully) have been targeted based on social media accounts.

Yes, this is bad. People should not be targeted because of what they wrote.

This is closing the gap to allow similar fascist behavior on an even more personal level.

On a personal level.

Yeah, that would be bad. Kind of like a targeted harassment campaign of a person because of what they wrote.

It’s one thing to be against age verification or software that does age verification or platforms that require age verification. That isn’t what is happening here.

That fight is political, this is an engineering problem.

You could argue that this enables age verification, it doesn’t. Age verification software can exist without this field, it could store your birthdate in .config/EvilAgeVerificationApp/userinfo.txt.

The field is an optional entry, systemd doesn’t require it or verify it. It is simply the most logical place, from an engineering perspective, to store the data.

Why do I need MORE parental controls shoved down my throat when I do not desire it nor wish for it? But this time in a core component of alot of linux distributions.

You don’t and you don’t have any parental controls being shoved down your throat, you have a JSON field that you can choose to enter data in or not. It does not control anything, it is not validated by anything (outside of compliance with ISO 8601) and it is not required to be set to anything.

Who controls what is installed on your system? If it is you, then you can save yourself from parental control software by not installing parental control software.

What is the point of a field like this if you can literally put anything in it you want? Your not verifying anything. The next logical step is to add proof.

That isn’t the next logical step for systemd, which is what this post is about.

The reason systemd stores this information is that systemd stores user information and this is user information.

If some future application comes along that wants to require age verification and use that field to store the data, then you can simply choose to not install it. Problem solved.

Removing birthDate doesn’t stop these programs from existing. If there isn’t a birthDate field then they can simply decide that they’re going to store the birthdate in the user’s ‘location’ field instead and it would work perfectly fine. Are you going to remove the location field too? All of the text fields?

Adding a specific birthDate field is simply recognizing that this software exists (which, it does) and that systemd is the logical place to store user metadata (which it is).

If you don’t like the software that will do age verification then don’t install that software.

What happens is adding more and more control in the future to conform to whatever idiotic laws someone might make.

Slippery slope

Should we then also implement a filter

Also?

There is no filter here so the comparison isn’t valid.

If we’re just playing hypotheticals, turn the situation around. What if some Russian state program was required to run on every machine and if it detected people not in compliance with the law it updated their location field to say ‘jail’. Should we then remove the location field?

This guy social medias

If you have to fill them in, it is.

If you don’t have to fill them in, it isn’t.

You don’t have to fill them in, therefore it isn’t. QED

They don’t want to be correct, they want to be outraged.

This is the same Reddit-brained nonsense that ruined those communities.

Obviously death threats are over the line but making his life uncomfortable is the least the Judas Iscariot of Linux deserves.

Harassment is over the line.

Do you really think that people on the Internet will show restraint and ‘only’ harass the person without taking it too far?

No, because there are crazy people online. Supporting any kind of mob harassment is supporting death threats and violence because they inevitably follow once the mob is large enough.

You can choose to not install applications that use birthDate. It’s your system.

But, you cannot choose what other people want to install. It’s their system.

There are applications which exist, that other people can choose to install, that require this field and systemd is the logical place to store that information.

If you don’t like the applications that would use this field, and you don’t want your system to store information in birthDate then there is absolutely nothing stopping you from doing that. You don’t get to make that choice for other people, however.

The field doesn’t do anything by itself. There is zero harm inflicted on people using systemd. There are probably lots of features of systemd that you don’t want or use and the entire negative effect that you suffer is a few megabytes less free storage space.

The only way the field would be used is if a person decided to use a different piece of software that wants a birthdate. If they don’t choose to install such a program then the field is no more a danger than the realName or location fields. They have scary sounding labels but do absolutely nothing unless the user chooses to use them.

…and r/conspiracy was 80% stuff like birds ain’t real and the rest I always assumed was people posting ironically… now I’m not so sure that that was an accurate assessment.

and r/F7U12. It wasn’t just a meme it was an entire meme language, kids these days with their gifs and their template sites… smhing my head

I know! I paid an artist, from the forums, to draw my avatar and paid them to update it for holidays and stuff so it was consistent.

Also, you gotta have a good signature. Why not a live updating image of what is playing in your media player, that could not possibly end badly.