I was expecting civil discourse and a level-headed response.
He may have been hoping for that, but surely he didn't truely expect it. The FOSS community can barely have a civil discussion about filesystems.
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
129 points (91.6% liked)
Linux
12995 readers
500 users here now
A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system (except the memes!)
Also, check out:
Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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
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
That's a sound argument, mostly (in the quote, i mean)
If the technical implementation of how they would try and force age verification was the problem people were concerned about, this take would be very useful.
Physical locks on glass doors are easy to bypass, doesn't mean you won't get shafted if someone just so happens to catch you in the act.
If third party age verification is legally mandated the implementation being technically difficult (or easy to bypass) doesn't stop it from being illegal.
Being a condescending prick works better if the position you take is unassailable, you do you though.
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.
load more comments
(5 replies)
HEY MY GUY you want a CIVIL discussion about CIVIL DISCUSSION?
/s
Ugh, I’m forking this thread. If you guys can’t agree with me I’ll make my own.
How nation states were formed
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
we're what happens when dumpster fighting punks need their laptops to work
Not surprising, this guy is also onboard with Google locking down Android: https://dylanmtaylor.com/posts/2026-03-19-googles-new-android-sideloading-flow-is-a-fair-trade
He barely went into developing systemd for two weeks before shoehorning in his bootlicking, he can fuck off. You're supposed to stick it to the man, not stick up for him
One interesting thought I’ve had is actually that if we strip this signal to websites/apps and do not report an age range at all, but the vast majority of users DO, that actually gives us a more unique and trackable browser fingerprint.
As someone who is not a fan of adding the age field I'm curious what people think of this.
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
You can't really "block" fingerprinting. You can obfuscate it a bit, but the fingerprinting process happens server side, not on your device. So whether or not your system sends whatever age verification signal becomes a part of its fingerprint.
load more comments
(7 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
He has nothing to defend
The damage is done
He's a collaborator; we don't want parasites like him
In free software, there is FREEDOM
I didn't switch to Linux to end up under the thumb of Microsoft's henchmen and some random government
Lol.
The free part is you are free to remove the commit and build it yourself. Doofus.
view more: next ›