At the moment of most intense debates about mandatory age checks and government surveillance you (Dylan) hoped people to be calm about this? Then you my friend are simply delusional. They are angry and for a good reason. Why the rush to comply with a surveillance practice that hasn't forced on you with some sanction or enforcement. You did not even wait for it to play out. You did not have a discourse about alternatives. You just went ahead and hastily applied a change as if as if doing some sort of coup.

HEY MY GUY you want a CIVIL discussion about CIVIL DISCUSSION?

/s

Q. You say this is "just attestation, not verification" but we know that infrastructure always gets repurposed later. This is where the legit fear lies. Today it's birthDate. Tomorrow could it be location, identity, or verification tokens? I understand that you are providing a workaround but where should we draw the line between compliance and resistance?

A. Funny you mention that, location is already a field in userdb. Like birthDate, this field is also trivially nullable, stored locally, and can be set to anything. As long as we are talking about a user self-attesting a date - especially with the ability to enter any value we want - we aren't in the realm of identity tracking. I draw the line at when a third party internet-connected service is doing validation of ID. Let’s be honest though, I strongly believe such a thing isn’t possible on a FOSS operating system environment unless they could control what was bootable on the device at a firmware level, enforce signatures to ensure that you couldn’t boot something unrestricted, remove the ability to be root, and block LD_PRELOAD so signals couldn’t be faked. There’s probably more ways to circumvent that. What I’m trying to say is real ID verification on Linux would be awfully hard to implement, and I guarantee you, nobody would put up with it. They’d fork to a version that doesn’t have it immediately as a protest. Right now, we’re considering implementing something akin to the date pickers that were ubiquitous when signing up for internet services in the early 2000s where it’s just an honor system. Things like actual ID checks and/or facial scanning + age estimation would be just too incompatible with Linux where we have the freedom to change whatever we want to.

the intellectually diverse lemmings represented in this post and many others cannot understand this

won't stop them expressing their feelings tho, bless their hearts

You definitely can't have your cake and eat it too. Linux for many has been about freedom and privacy. He made a direct contribution toward a system that would help take that away

That's a rather negative view. There's a big difference between people who actually contribute to FOSS (in any way, not just code) and random keyboard warriors in the contents. Sure, there's always some drama somewhere, but that's not exclusive to FOSS.

we're what happens when dumpster fighting punks need their laptops to work

Why not let someone else do it then? Why eagerly sign up to be the one to do it?

Blessings to you young bootlicker. May you pay escalating subscriptions and own nothing eternally, forevermore, amen.

Why not wait until it becomes absolutely necessary and all other alternatives are exhausted? The mandatory age check thing hasn't been even accepted whole US wide let alone world-wide. He did not even wait for ut to play out. What is with the enthusiasm to jump on board with this?

It's not necessary. But also, where's the hate against the ass that merged this PR. They're worse.

I really do not understand the hate :/

The itsfoss interviewer goes into this:

A lot of backlash isn't about the code change, but about what it represents.

You say this is "just attestation, not verification" but we know that infrastructure always gets repurposed later. This is where the legit fear lies.

Do you think regulations like these will reshape desktop Linux in the next 5-10 years where we might have "compliant Linux" and "Freedom-first Linux"?

Sam Bent's article also goes into this (although, fuck that clickbait title): https://www.sambent.com/the-engineer-who-tried-to-put-age-verification-into-linux-5/

He read the laws, decided compliance was the correct response, and went to work. Every objection the community raised went nowhere: that this enables surveillance infrastructure, that lying is trivially easy, that the laws themselves are unconstitutional overreach. He'd already accepted the law as legitimate and moved to implementation.

He read the law, took it at face value, and started writing code. The word for what that is sits somewhere past malice, something more insidious: an engineer who treats compliance as engineering, who sees a legal requirement the way he sees a technical specification, and will implement whatever the spec says regardless of who wrote the spec or why.

The reason to name him is the pattern. The surveillance state runs on volunteers: people who do the implementation work for free, out of genuine conviction, with no paper trail connecting them to the money that wrote the laws.

This is stupid. We block fingerprinting.

Just because some people are fingerprint able doesn't mean all of us should suffer and bend at the knee to unjust laws

What do you mean, he “admitted” that?

It’s quite literally the first thing he wrote in his pull request to systemd:

Stores the user's birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc.

And the second paragraph of his pull request to arch:

Recent age verification laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc. require platforms to verify user age. Collecting birth date at install time ensures Arch Linux is compliant with these regulations.

It's a fucking field. Why is everyone loosing his mind over it? It's not like it is required, nor will it prevent you to do anything if you put data in (except not being able to change it later).

If you have to complain, complain about the law, not poor guy that has to add it, by law.

Lol.

The free part is you are free to remove the commit and build it yourself. Doofus.

What fucking distro would make this change besides redhat?

Why would I want some stupid verification field needed only in one state in one country I don't even live in? It shouldn't be in my FOSS when it is not required in my home location. I would like to stay as far away from a dystopian police state as possible, tyvm. No lawyers needed; I'm not in their jurisdiction.