this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
633 points (91.6% liked)
Technology
83094 readers
3140 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Well yeah, right now it is optional.
What about when the law passes that says it's required on a federal level (yes I'm talking about USA). They added this one in pretty quick, do you think they would fold and be like "nah we stand for the users!"
Or do you think they will build on what is already being added here?
One inch, one centimeter, one millimeter of shit like this and eventually it keeps building until its inescapable. Until you need fingerprint or retina scans or fucking SSN or some other shit to login to your computer.
I'm sure then you would take issue with it, but by then its too late for you and everyone else.
Frog being boiled slowly and all that.
In your hypothetical, this field not being present in systemd does not do much to protect you. Its not as if they'll stop when they hear that there isn't already a user age field in systemd and figure at that point that the whole endeavor is simply impractical and abandon it.
So let's imagine they pass a law in the US that says by 2030 all consumer devices must attest a user age group (or even specific ID) to connect to the Internet and that this must be enforced by the ISP (with the development of new protocols, what have you). If there's no mechanism with which to do this in systemd or anywhere else using Linux... they'll still pass the law. I don't think making desktop Linux defacto illegal for people to connect to the internet with would be a hindrance.
If they really do go to that extreme, things are pretty dire. We'd be lucky to be allowed to use Linux at all on internet connected PCs. Savvy people will find ways to do it anyway, sure... But man, like I said: dire.
All this is to say that I don't think code is the place to be focusing on to resist these potential changes to the law. I think it's just about irrelevant.
This is why it's so important to ensure that the USA continues its slide to irrevelance.
You are right because maybe then they would lose some money and that is the only thing the us government cares about.
So once you start disrupting that, maybe shit will get different. Idk though, I'm not very optimistic about most things tbh.
However its worth noting that, in the actual github commit one of the developers for system 76 said that they are in talks with legislators right now and that this may be overturned, not even apply to open source operating systems, etc.
And one of the maintainers said and I quote, "It is possible that California law will be changed. But similar ideas are popping up in other contexts and it's unlikely that they'll all go away. This implementation is fairly generic and useful for other things besides age verification, so we shouldn't decide whether to merge it or not based on a single law in any jurisdiction." -keszybz
So, it kind of seems like they have a rock hard erection to lick any pair of boots they can, not just the USA ones.
If a law passes and you're running your IT infrastructure and not enforcing it then you have bigger problems.
The bigger problem being the government with guns that makes you follow their surveillance laws?
Also most people don't run IT infrastructure. Most people will not be able to escape this when it turns in to full blown surveillance.