Well, I’m not in a lynch mob. So there’s that.
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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Next they will mandate a "race" field, and the same kind of imbecile will implement it.
yes, race, sex, ... because in some countries men can't access women stuff online and women can't access men stuff, there is some good pushback and this looser was shown the door in a few places like the freedesktop gitlab and Ubuntu repos. Such a fucking looser.
I love the level of disdain the linux community has for this kinda bootlicking.
Then he said Arch Linux should implement it anyway because the law requires it. archinstall PR #4290
Well, it's not "the law", it's your local law. To most people on the planet, it doesn't apply any more than for example North Korea's laws. As far as I can find, Arch Linux is not owned by a foundation or similar legal entity (i.e. which could have been located in California), but the lead developer appears to live in Germany.
I mean they kidnapped maduro and are trying him under new york law so....
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to all y'all with the "it's just a text field": what if the field is "race"? "sexual orientation"? "jerks_off_to"? what the fuck has a system managing daemon got to do with any of that? and why would you preemptively put it in there without even a pretense of a fight?
fuck you make us! make linux illegal, in Cali of all places. guess how long that will last?
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I still don't understand why it needs to be implemented as part of systemd, and not - say - as a service. Or, if we want to "go with" the law - make it a kernel module, which sounds more impressive ("we are complying at the kernel level!") but in practice so much easier to opt out of.
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 .
“It’s just a harmless field; what’s the big deal?”
The big deal is that it’s on the heels of age verification bullshit that fascists are pushing through with the help of tech bros, so that they can eventually push all of us into a scenario where we have zero privacy.
It’s not the adding of the field itself or the fact that it can be filled with nonsense. It’s the reasoning backing it.
“But it’s the law!”
Yeah, fucking and…? It’s a stupid mass surveillance law disguised as a protection, and per usual, it’s written like vague dog shit. This is the smallest part of the wedge. More will come of this and if developers like this keep volunteering themselves to help the fascists, we will all be fucked. Here’s an alternative approach: just don’t add this. You can fight back by not fucking implementing this. Easy.
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I'm so confused he adds a JSON field and corporate linux (who fund 95% of Linux development) need some sort of age auth mechanism for enterprise deployments. What do you guys want instead?
Like its not even enforceable, when the hardware attestation comes sure but before that why does anyone care (thats not going to stop you from changing a json field in systemd lmao)
I think if you reframe the action, it'll make more sense why people are upset about this.
The way you see it: Some idiots created a new law, this guy was just compying with an unenforceable law, and its unenforceable, so why are people even bothering to get upset. They're not even using hardware assetation to force this yet. He was just doing his job to follow the law to get this software deployed.
If you reframe it to this, I think it'll make more sense:
Some idiots created a new unenforceable law. Did anyone from the government specifically reach out to this software team and demand they add this field? Did the software in any way get blocked from being deployed? Its unenforceable, why even bother voluntarily adding features no one wants, for an unenforceable law? They're not even using hardware assetation yet to force this. Why make the lives easier for people who want to ruin things, by voluntarily adding these features without even being demanded to?
Is there an Arch fork that is not implementing this shit or do I have to go non systemd now? Because this BS is not going on any of my machines.
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Lots of disingenuous comments in this thread regarding the change being "just json" considering they're already on a warpath of implementing id verification. They are testing the water to see what they can get away with. Furthermore, the Linux community has always been against shit like this (see: systemd outrage, open bios, gnu etc).
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You want the user to put their age somewhere?
Have a simple script that asks for a number and echos it into a file called "age". Done.
And they can only run the script if they want to.
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