this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
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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.