Post by @cas@social.treehouse.systems

@cas@social.treehouse.systems

2026-03-20 03:25 UTC

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&#39;m also not totally against holding service providers to higher standards for data processing when it comes to minors, and hey if they&#39;re doing that why shouldn&#39;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 &quot;principle&quot; 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&#39;s maintained by established and trusted people in the open source community!

Replies (5)

@joncruz@mstdn.social 2026-03-20 04:14

@cas@social.treehouse.systems well, I just have to think back to US authorities arresting a Russian programmer for things they did while in Russia, that were legal in Russia, and were a technically trivial end-around a simplistic DRM. Once the law is on the books, it is a tool against any "circumvention", especially at the behest of large companies.

Open ##2351230
@pid_eins@mastodon.social 2026-03-20 05:01

@cas@social.treehouse.systems 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?

Open ##2351234
@gourd@indiepocalypse.social 2026-03-20 05:21

@cas@social.treehouse.systems I mean, they did recently open themselves to "AI" coding, so trusted is a bit of a stretch.

Open ##2351262
@migratory@jorts.horse 2026-03-20 06:42

@cas@social.treehouse.systems this is a canonical example of "complying in advance"

Open ##2351264
@VileLasagna@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-03-20 07:34

@cas@social.treehouse.systems honestly, having this be trivially by passable sounds like a wholly desirable outcome

Open ##2351269