Technology

Not sure what is worse:

1. The political fight re: should the OS store your age at all. (Linux will be illegal because they didn't bend).
2. The political fight re: should OSes be required to verify your age / identity?

To me, fighting at step 1 has the advantage of keeping the infrastructure from getting built, and the disadvantage of people saying "well, actually, there's nothing concerning or new here."

Fighting at step 2 has the advantage of being a clearer threat, but a disadvantage since the prior infrastructure has been built, society has adapted it, and politicians say "think of the children."

I feel like it is more strategic to fight at every step.

Reject the age verification.

I am aware of the Orwellian privacy implication, but how do we deal with bots, now that AI is rampant?

Something like hashcash, or what?

Liberated systemd is a fork of mainline systemd started by Jeffrey Seathrún Sardina, a machine learning/AI researcher

I already have qualms about that.

Feels like something systemd can solve with a compile time flag. Either have it on or off depending on if you want to legally sell it in those areas or not and away you go.

if there is no malicious intent in adding this, they really should learn to read the room.

Far many more than someone.

There's no age verification in systemd. That field doesn't verify anything

After all, any and all age checks we have nowadays are a black box anyways

This is the only part I disagree with. Age verification is typically done via services like ID.me, Lexis Nexus, etc which do it via identity verification with documentation. The alternative method that most social sites have gone with is age prediction from a face scan, of which providers are more than happy to tout how they do it as differentiators. For the latter, there are even FOSS options.

I find that move extremely funny, since it's purely made for sensationalism and nothing else. I mean, if you hate how systems implemented age verification, then why don't you remove its identity verification too, i.e. also optional fields for stuff like your address an e-mail that most users don't even fill out.

There is no mechanism verifying what birth date you type in - you can type whatever date you want and systems doesn't care.

I'd say no matter where you stand with age verification, this is the best solution to handle the situation. After all, any and all age checks we have nowadays are a black box anyways. There is no real knowing how other systems are checking ages, and there is AFAIK no real government mandated rules on how it is verified. They could make you scan your ID's front, back, nuclear composition and dietary preferences and give you a result that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a proper age verification procedure.

If the government wants to introduce age verification, they have to do it themselves - build an API that handles the age verification, similar to how the digital ID in Germany works, as an example. If they want proper age verification, they also have to take the blame themselves if things go wrong.

I'm not into this, but is it the nerd version of releasing forks and torches?

This is bs ...

Instead of fighting the laws and the people behind it, 'we' (as in 'the community') infight about some minor commit?

If the reason is data privacy, why not also remove 'realName', 'emailAdress' and 'location'? 🙄

The DOB field is different from name and address because it is a fixed attribute that never changes. Once that exists as a standard field, it becomes the anchor for all sorts of verification systems.

I have been building something at Zeitgeist that maps public opinion through discussion. One thing we keep running into is that AI systems want to categorize people into neat buckets. They will say "users under 18" vs "over 18" and move on. But real human disagreement does not work that way. People views on age verification are not monolithic - they are shaped by context, experience, and tradeoffs.

We are seeing this play out everywhere now. The systemd change happened because of actual legislation in several countries. It is not theoretical anymore. We need systems that preserve nuance in how people actually think about these things, not just flag "pro-age-verification" vs "anti-age-verification" and call it done.

1. Fork a project that you have a problem with;
2. Write a strong worded manifesto;
3. Revel in those sweet sweet internet clicks;
4. Try to gather a team of seasoned engineers to keep and evolve the project;
5. Most likely fail, look for the next controversy, repeat.