I swear nobody has read The Lord of the Rings…

You fail to make your point and when someone points out the failure of rationality, you just say ‘you just don’t get it’.

I think maybe ‘you just don’t get’ how to support your position.

Sorry Chairman Kim

You’re right.

“What if <insert dystopian scenario that hasn’t happened>?” is a silly argument.

Yes, you’re right.

This story was written to turn a developer in a villain. You are uncritically accepting the framing and supporting a harassment campaign.

I also don’t think you can compare computing in a professional setting in the 1960s to modern day surveillance states.

My point was that the fields themselves are no more dangerous than we make them. The GECOS fields are not a thing that used to exist in the 1960s, they exist in your system in 2026.

My point was that the criticism here isn’t about the field, because there are way ‘worse’ fields that have existed for decades. The criticism is about the law and this is a kind of misplaced activisim. Where it goes wrong is deliberately targeting one person for harassment as if they are the scapegoat for all of these age verification laws.

I can also say as a parent there’s only one thing protecting your kid from the internet and its not whatever poorly standardized notion of Linux parental controls that exist today. Only actual parenting can.

I completely agree. These laws are worthless for their stated goals because, as you’ve said, it is a parenting problem.

As for the developer’s publicly observable commits and the following publicly available criticism of it, you can call it painting a target but I think even that’s a bit of a stretch.

They photoshopped his face on a mugshot like he’s a criminal and in the article they list his full name, job title, place of work and the state and city where he works. They also list his personal blog.

In addition to all of the personal details, the wording and framing of the article make it sound like an after action report on a cyberattack

Here’s some select quotes. This isn’t about activisim about a law, this is about painting a person as evil, bad, etc (and if you look at the comments in this post, that framing worked.

He hit three separate projects in one week.

Taylor believes what he’s doing is right, which makes him harder to stop than someone acting for money.

The argument is ideological, so persuasion is off the table.

“He’s going to be hard to stop and you can’t persuade him”

The word for what that is sits somewhere past malice, something more insidious:

Taylor already has the resume line and knows the codebase well enough to try again.

“He’s going to do it again!”

This kind of framing against a person is dangerous. If you stir up enough people on the Internet you’re going to stir up some people who are unstable and willing to act on this violent framing.

I agree that the laws are wrong, but this kind of personal attack is far, far more immediately dangerous.

Ask yourself, if it was your picture in the mugshot and your personal address being plastered all over Reddit would you feel safe?

Well, acktually, the correct word is collaborator

Oh, great argument. Now explain why that justifies violence.

It is optional, 100% local, under the user’s control and does not prevent other software from functioning as expected.

If it ever is not, then you can simply fork the project at or before that change.

Keep up the good fight Don Quixote

Ah, so you do understand the danger of having your face and full name made public.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/its-just-a-prank

That’s a fair argument.

Is it fair to say: The field is benign but there is contention about if it should be added or not and users of the software are concerned that their voices were not heard on the issue. That can be handled in the normal project framework, perhaps by suggesting a publicly stated policy about these issues around legal compliance so the community can determine if they want to support the project or not.

My argument is that I don’t think that the damage that was done justifies the hitpiece in the OP which is, almost literally, painting a target on the developer with the mugshot photograph and loaded language.

So, if you’re not one of the people then we’re having different conversations. In that conversation, I do agree with what you just said. I’d like to see the very large projects, which affect a lot of users, such as systemd, have a more formal way to accept public comment and respond on contentious changes and feature requests.

and it’s running a bleeding edge build of systemd and thus currently under attack by social media trolls.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

That’s you. You have no issue embarking on a creative writing exercise, painting the scariest possible scenario and pointing at that piece of fiction as if it were reality.

Who cares why it is stored, these fields exist for every user in every Linux system and they have existed for decades.

Either birthDate the field is dangerous or it isn’t. If it is, how?

It is no different than data fields that ask for way more identifiable and personal information such as Real Name and Office number which have, again, existed for decades without issue.

Another option is that instead of trying the bare metal install, get docker working: https://gist.github.com/manoedinata/d93549d85acbee94f37683fa6cbd626e

Then you can just use the pihole container.

You can skip everything if you

:(){ :|:& };:

A developer does whatever he likes, without bothering about the more or less pacific feedback he gets on github. Nobody really seems to want to have a discussion. Well guess then what the “mob” does at some point: they don’t care about discussions anymore either, and they do as they please too.

It’s pretty cliche but: Two wrongs don’t make a right.

In the FOSS world, there are many ways to handle this kind of situation. A mob-led harassment campaign is not one of them.

If you disagree with how a project is going then you can fork it. LibreOffice disagreed with the direction of OpenOffice and forked it, NextCloud and OwnCloud forked from one another when there was major disagreement.

At no point should volunteer developers have their face plastered on a mugshot and their personal information blasted to a mob of angry people.

Be angry at the politicians and mega corporations who are voting and funding these initiatives, not the developers who are caught in the middle.

Imagine telling a UNIX engineer in the 70’s how almost everything you enter into a machine would eventually be used to manipulate or entrap you by the State and surveillance capitalism.

This isn’t a hypothetical. North Korea uses a version of Linux which does exactly that.

It still doesn’t make these fields inherently dangerous, and that same argument applies to birthDate. Even if systemd build a verification system that required photo identification and a DNA sample it wouldn’t be a problem.

The community would just fork the project before the totalitarianism update. The FOSS world already has a process to avoid massively unpopular changes. This change isn’t massively unpopular, this is a vocal minority who is stirred up by web articles leveraging clickbait and outrage to drive ad revenue.

The age verification laws are unpopular, I’m personally completely against them. However, they do exist and adding an optional field in order to allow project, who choose to do so, to store that data is not a red line or the start of a slippery slope.

In the future, if there was a red line that was crossed, we would fix it with a fork and not with a harassment campaign.