Yep. Its honestly mild as hell.

Essentially legislation that says:

• app stores have to have age categories to silo children, teens, and adults.
• OSes have to have a field to collect this data from users when they set up their login, so it can be sent to app stores via API.

Its just a standardized system that should have been done ages ago, but was not a priority for standards orgs, so none stepped up - so legislation appeared.

I strongly argue that it should only apply to commercial OSes and app stores though - as they're the ones that primarily cause issues these laws intent to address.

Linux and FOSS have been caught in the crossfire in a privacy and personal data battle they were not involved in.

For me at least, it's less about the age field itself and more about the swift act of compliance with an absurd and overbearing demand

Good points. It's like websites with an age-gate: technically they're trying to keep out users under a certain age (usually minors), but there's no verification.

But we all need to remember that "protecting the children" and clutching our pearls is still not a good reason to let world governments and giant corporations create laws, demand our papers, keep massive databases of our data, and tie our real-world identities to our online ones. It will be the end of anonymity online, they'll use it for evil, and it will get hacked...

whereas I , out of pettiness, will switch an entire server to openRC to fuck over these assholes who only care about “line goes up”

the lemmy doomers must scratch their suicidal itch

They don't call the systemd change "age verification" in the article.

In fact, they specifically make the point that it isn't.

Sorry, minor correction. Not all the systemd developers. One single dickhead wrote it and two chuds who work at microslop merged the PR made this happen. The git structure got hijacked. People are arguing over the validity and necessity of the PR while ignoring the broader goals this serves.

To be frank, I am so sick of this invasive nonsense. I have a son and you know how I'm going to manage access for him? Not fucking letting him have the damn computer before he knows how to use it safely. I grew up on Web 1 and web 2.0. They were much scarier places back in the day and easier to find.

Moreover, this also follows with the trend of sensationalizing threats to make the pearl clutchers feel this is a good choice. Its no different that how the news screams the US is unsafe with tons of violent crime to justify this kind of bullshit when violent crime has been declining on the whole.

This ginned up controversy serves one interest. Control access to knowledge so you never question the State again.

4 US states; California, New York, Colorado, and Illinois.

A lot of people born January the first, 1970.

I like the idea of a system add-on that randomizes all user age responses with a different date that equals like 25-99years old (assuming 25 years meets the highest age for the applicable standards).

Not too dissimilar from a random MAC address generating feature.

And really, when was the last time some megacorp tried to access userdb on any machine?

SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKERS, it's Linux was my band in high school.

So why not just remove the field then?

eh?

og systemd hater (ish) here, personally I'm hoping to team up with the new systemd haters. This is just yet Another reason to hate on it, haha. We can work together!

(granted we came to Linux (from Mac) lonnggg after systemd already got entrenched, but the reasons we hated systemd (before now) were the same sorts of "it's trying to take over everything" reasons that the og haters hate it for)

-- Frost

Yes. I also hate feeling confused about where my hatred for SystemD firsts into the bigger picture

isn’t enough that we all hate the same thing? lets not overthink this. All I want is a socially-accepted smoldering crater

"normies" will not care at all

This isn't age verification. It's just adding the field into the user record so it can be used if your distro decides to collect that information.

the operating systems job is to negotiate between software and hardware. its there to make sure “my red triangle program draws the same red triangle on anything running this environment regardless of the parts used to build the machine”. its not there to rat you out to a surveillance state or advertisers or meta.

The idea that this protects children is insane and nobody believes this for a second. Hormones happened and little timmy has discovered the wonders of nudity and friction. age attestation doesn’t stop that. it doesn’t stop horrible people from preying on that. it doesn’t teach timmy the difference between fantasy and what a healthy relationship really looks like. it doesn’t address any of those things.

it tracks people. that is all it does. that is all it is for. and considering literal nazis are in power, nobody wants this. it does not solve a problem.

They're not even really covering their asses. They don't make an OS, they make a small but important art of many distros. They're providing a clean, standardized way for Linux distros from RedHat to Ageless to comply with the law if they choose to. Some distros will comply with the law to the letter, others will not comply out of spite. At least the ones that comply will do it in a standard way.

I am kinda giving them shit for when someone pointed out that they're essentially storing PII completely unsecured and their response was "you should use app isolation anyway". That is not a good security model.

I think the fact that they acted so quickly to comply is the problem

Asking for a friend?

optional sounds reasonable now. its gets its foot in the door. it sounds like compromise. but then, other things start depending on it. and if you dont comply, they just dont work. its a dependancy. break that dependency become incompatible.

this is not solving any problem. Sites already have the “are you 18” thing that says you aren’t allowed to know about naked people doing naked people things that we all ignored as teenagers and grew up just fine.

At least someone gets it.

It's kinda crazy how many people here claim to use linux or even actually use linux, but apparently don't know what the operating system does and what the system manager does.