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Inside the Systemd Age Verification Debate: Developer Responds to Criticism (itsfoss.com)

submitted 3 days ago by cm0002@europe.pub to c/linux@programming.dev

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Dylan M. Taylor is not a household name in the Linux world. At least, he wasn’t until recently.

The software engineer and longtime open source contributor has quietly built a respectable track record over the years: writing Python code for the Arch Linux installer, maintaining packages for NixOS, and contributing CI/CD pipelines to various FOSS projects.

But a recent change he made to systemd has pushed him into the spotlight, along with a wave of intense debate.

At the center of the controversy is a seemingly simple addition Dylan made: an optional birthDate field in systemd’s user database.

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[–] fruitcantfly@programming.dev 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It's not just server-side: A lot of fingerprinting happens client-side, for example using a canvas to check what features your graphics card supports. You can see this in action via services like https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ or https://amiunique.org/

[–] IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That's not the fingerprinting happening client side, that's just information supply. Fingerprinting is about what the server does with that information.

[–] Zink@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago

Yeah, but the countermeasures are client-side because that's what you can control. And some kind FOSS devs out there make it easy to start somewhere decent.

Sent from my LibreWolf