My line in the sand is when a distro/app starts enforcing entry of birth date data. Having a database field to store it, or even an optional prompt for it isn't the point where I bin it.

You know I remember when age verification was a thing on porn sites.

No big deal, I was like 12 and could easily say "yupp, I was born April 20th, 1969" and there was no problem.

Now, in several states that has escalated to you showing your ID.

Do you think this is the end game? Systemd made it clear with this move that any kind of US law passed will be able to be honored by their architecture. They didn't take a stand that you would expect from pretty much the entire Linux community as a whole.

And see the funny part is where you talk about "if the government wants age verification they have to do it themselves" they pretty much do in USA its called your social security number. Banks, auto dealerships, landlords etc use it all the time and its very effective.

By not taking a strong stance against what is happening here you are paving the road brick by brick to having to provide full on SSN and very plausibly retina scans or something similar in the not so distant future before you can even login to your computer or phone.

I don't understand, how people here are missing that. Fuck we are on Lemmy because we see how shit worked with things like reddit and others. Things always escalate when control and greed are the primary motivators.

This will escalate. And when it does I want you to remember that people were rightfully making a HUGE FUCKING DEAL about when systemd started doing this because by then you will be able to see clearly how it led to whatever surveillance wet dream they are absolutely going to force on us. It will be clear, and this will be step 1 .

I agree with all that you've said. But why add it now? Why haven't they added it a long time ago? Or if now they remembered, why not other extra optional fields that some people might want, like gender, sex, any other field? Oh, it would be too political? I see...

Yes, but what's wrong with this? If you gather engineers that are capable to maintain it - what is the downside? Systemd could always have used a bit of competition, I think most of us can agree. Most of the forks of systemd will fail, but most of all projects fail after some time. I don't think this situation will harm systemd ultimately and it shouldn't.

Try to gather a team of seasoned engineers to keep and evolve the project;

What is there to evolve? Just keep it up to date with the mainstream project while applying this one patch. This is as useful as the signatures that prohibit use of comments to train LLMs.

As far as I can tell the Name Email and location are all voluntarily provided by the user.

This is something that will be used whether you want it to or not (that makes it invasive) because of the laws around it (of course depending on where you are).

Having fields I can ignore as a user isn't the same as this guided attempt by lawmakers to eventually get you to give ID and retina scans just to use a computer.

This is step 1. That is why people are freaking out about it.

And I know systemd isn't doing this out of spite, but I do wish the scene would stand up for the user more... Just say no California or whatever other shit place decides to enact that and boom problem solved. Not their fault or problem anymore.

They should also remove the phone number prompt that UNIX has had since before systemd even existed. Your phobe number is an optional part of the GECOS field and has been there for a very long time without anyone freaking out like this.

This is perfectly logical and I agree. Except that this controversy has prompted me to go learn about Lennart Poettering. I've been using systemd forever and I like it - I like journald and remote journald, I like networkd, I even deleted cron off my systems and use systemd timers exclusively. I knew there was some controversy about Lennart, but I didn't really care. Now that I've read a bit about his background and, maybe more importantly, his new company - I don't have a good feeling for the future of systemd.

Will you still say that when they implement ID checking functionality?

They’ll just keep forkin’ and removing that field haha

Honestly it's such a minor change, I'm pretty sure they could just grab all the upstream commits in the future and not do anything and it'll be fine.

Hard disagree. This represents the pot getting turned up on the frog.

I acknowledge you are factually correct. However, once this field exists, it enables later reference and/or mandatory dependencies.

There is no positive use case , but lots of possibly negative use cases. For that reason, it shouldn't exist.

FUCK THERE IS A WHOLE LOT OF STUPID USING LINUX

we wanted the year of the linux desktop... well the first raft of windows refugees seem to be a bunch of these overzealous privacy types who think they're now a bunch of 1337 h4x0rs because they figured out how to get an nvidia driver working on mint.... they have more paranoia than actual tech knowledge, and their only contribution to the community is sowing dissent, and shouting about something as trivial as an optional data field.

The debian subreddit is downvoting an actual DEBIAN DEVELOPER when they tried to explain the situation

If i put on my tin foil hat, i'd say these people are being deliberately influenced to sow chaos in foss communities

And in a month none will be active at all.

In an ideal world, even that optional DOB field would have been blocked. Your first instinct on seeing techbros wanting to surveil us shouldn't be "how we can comply", but "how can I fight it".

Call me dreamy-eyed, but the reference to "machine learning" might mean this person has respect for what the technology is and has been for decades before the chatbot flood

Well yeah, right now it is optional.

What about when the law passes that says it's required on a federal level (yes I'm talking about USA). They added this one in pretty quick, do you think they would fold and be like "nah we stand for the users!"

Or do you think they will build on what is already being added here?

One inch, one centimeter, one millimeter of shit like this and eventually it keeps building until its inescapable. Until you need fingerprint or retina scans or fucking SSN or some other shit to login to your computer.

I'm sure then you would take issue with it, but by then its too late for you and everyone else.

Frog being boiled slowly and all that.

The biggest defense for this I see is:

• it's not bad now
• it's not mandatory
• it will remain unused like the other fields that were previously there
• you can put anything in it

Then, tell me, why bother adding this in the first place, exactly at the time governments are looking toward full control of everybody's computers? If it's that innocent and useless, either someone really likes throwing shit up, or it won't stop there.

And given the slate of other things that "didn't stop there" in the past few years, you know, it cost nothing to be cautious. Especially if it's "so useless you won't even notice it's there" after all.