“But it’s the law!”

I was just following orders!

this same person would be chuckling to themself about how pointless this all is as he locks the door on the gas chambers.

Twenty Lessons For Fighting Tyranny

1. Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/twenty-lessons-fighting-tyranny/

Also, they will use it as a means to lock content they don't want. Like in some jurisdictions it's already forbidden to share any kind of LGBTQ information even medical with minors.. Even in EU, like Hungary. Clearly this age verification will be used for this too. And people not willing to age verify will be locked out too.

It's part of their campaign of forcing conservative 'values' onto everyone.

Agreed. To elaborate:

Sure, the developer is a bit of a Judas for complying in advance, but our anger should be aimed at the people with power and reach promoting these laws in the political sphere (the metaphorical Pharisees).

To those saying "it's just a field", please consider that the timing is a more significant statement than the addition of the field itself. Why now? If you don't support fascism, don't build the frameworks that support it and don't let fascists use YOUR platforms or software to make THEIR point, make them fork it and let them fail. I don't think many members of the senate or house would be capable of adding this themselves. I'd be surprised if they could code hello world in TI-83 BASIC. If they ask you to do it, stub your toe and call in sick. Make it really shitty. Leave in a bunch of bugs that crash the program then blame the age attestation feature to turn users against it. Use copywrited code that they'll have to remove later due to license incompatibilities. Report your boss to HR for every indiscretion that you might have normally overlooked. Or do nothing; that's still better than complying in advance.

We have to break the narrative that this is inevitable. There's enough of us, with concentrated enough knowledge and influence (aka, you folks are a bunch if nerds and I love it!), that if we collectively stop, the whole train stops or derails.

wasting 32 or 64 bits for absolutely no reason is also pretty offensive in itself

I mean they kidnapped maduro and are trying him under new york law so....

For me the bigger problem is that was done without any community oversight.

Yeah it can be verified for now, but it's a foot in the door for a braindead law that no one in their right mind would follow.

Fields like name and location do not have any expectation for the information being valid or accurate (see eg.: adduser).

DOB is different. It comes from a legal expectation that correctness of the information will be enforced somehow. If going by the Colorado and NY law proposals, IIRC, by using biometrics at the time of system install.

Then why did they lock the fucking thread as controversial if it was such an innocent change?

It's paving the wave to implement a Californian law that can very easily end up meaning ID verification for everything.

They could just not have done this at zero cost but decide to go to multiple projects, at this specific time which obviously isn't coincidental, and actively work to start implementing this on Linux. I guess "Contributed to systemd" on their CV was more valuable than resisting the USA taking control of the whole internet and ending all sense of privacy.

I don't see what's wrong with implementing it as an add-on to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecos_field as the PR in question does. It's the most logical place as the location to store user information and is even easier to opt out of—you just edit a file—than choosing whether to compile Linux with/add to DKMS a kernel module.

Edit: One can see https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/8878df45c1a58afdfb500fdc53ec50e057a240ce/docs/USER_RECORD_BLOB_DIRS.md?plain=1#L103 for an example of a user record file and its path. Further documentation you can read at https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/8878df45c1a58afdfb500fdc53ec50e057a240ce/man/systemd-userdbd.service.xml#L36 and https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/8878df45c1a58afdfb500fdc53ec50e057a240ce/docs/USER_RECORD.md .

Systemd is NOT an operating system provider, so they didn't have to do absolutely anything.

It was their choice to do what they did, not the law, especially since it won't be active and enforceable before next year.

Witch hunts are despicable indeed but lets not use that an an excuse to justify what they did.

Not the person who drew the short straw and had to implement it.

That's the whole point, though, they don't have to implement it. They're under no obligation at all to do so. Try to rule Linux is illegal in California and watch Silicon Valley lobbyists damn near riot. They're just giving in, but even just procrastination would be a ridiculously effective tactic.

1. He didn't draw any straw. Nobody asked him to work on such an implementation (or maybe Meta did?).
2. In fact, he appeared out of the blue to do this implementation. This was his very first pull request on the Systemd git.
3. From the very start he received a huge amount of critical comments from the community on GitHub, while he was working on this. He neglected their criticism and plowed on.

So he already had a warning that the majority of the community didn't agree on what he was doing. Nobody asked him to. He chose to continue – he could have imagined the consequences.

And the whole context on why and why now he did this is fishy.

It's not inoffensive at all, it's being pushed by religious whackjobs https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/rep-finke-was-right-age-gating-isnt-about-kids-its-about-control

He "was only following orders". But yes this is a class war.

Why does the rest of the world have to comply with a handful of states laws? The US is not the center of the universe. If you people want to lick the boot and allow this, then by all means, create your own terrible versions and leave the rest of the world alone.

Developers are not a protected class. They do not get special social protections when they do ignorant things.

Tbf simply following the development and criticizing bad design decisions is also one way to change opensource software no?