Fork time? Maybe all the anti-systemd zealots were right all along…
Edit: To address whether it is likely that this change will affect users: Gnome is planning a stronger dependence on userdb, the part of systemd where this change is being implemented. https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2025/06/10/gnome-systemd-dependencies/
Final Edit: The PR has been merged into main.
Give them an inch, and they will take a mile. Fuck this PR.
DRM writers love this too.
how do you think this can be most effectively fought?
🤷
In a few years, we may be smuggling in contraband Chinese RISC-V computers.
Huh, we really do live in a cyberpunk novel…
I’d done it, I’d smuggled in one of those RISC-whatever boxes. The hardware that doesn’t require a live-scan of your irises and your digital ID to interface. This baby can visit websites without even scanning your brainwaves. I don’t know what country it came from - You’re not allowed to know about foreign countries before you’re 40, the computer blocks them, it’s something about preventing “unauthorised gooning”.
Just as I sat down, I heard it - the info-chopper, they knew. I grabbed my illegal CPU just as the door was bust open, “INFORMATION PROTECTION OFFICER, CLOSE YOUR EYES AND TELL ME YOUR BIRTHDATE!” You see you’re only allowed to hear certain parts of our rights depending on your details, it’s to protect you from dangerous information. Even seeing his face might evoke corrupted thoughts, but I didn’t care anymore.
I quickly, but pointedly, looked over, and saw him, cool leather jacket, gun, one of those brain-interceptor helmet things, like a hockey helmet made of cushions and diodes. “NO” I cried, “I WANT TO PLAY SNAKE WITHOUT PROVIDING MY SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER!”.
With that war cry, I cheesed it, spurred on by the sky-high promise of reading a ‘potentially offensive’ Wikipedia article, in private.
Only to be backdoored by the Red instead of the Orange.
Someone call Dr. Strange, he fucked up this timeline real bad.
Unless first worlders get out of their comfort zone and fight back, nothing can be done.
I’ll never buy a computer that can’t be run without this shit. If that means I run what I have until it breaks and then never have a PC again then that’s what I’ll do
Email your legislators telling them that parents already have access to network block tools, these laws won’t stop the problem anyway (run through a vpn), they’re a free speech nightmare, they’re collecting more data on American citizens when America has data breaches losing data every few days, and Congress literally studied this twenty years ago and decided it wasn’t a good idea then, what makes it a good idea now?
uh…$? same reason the majority of US politicians vote anyway on anything put in front of them.
the only thing sacred in the USA is $
Largely true, though I think $ is a secondary consideration to some of the genocidal eugenicists, fundamentalists, supremacists, jingoist hegemons, etc.
The least effective way is whining on a Lemmy community about open source projects.
Go talk to your lawmakers, not the people complying with the law.
Why do the rest of us have to have this shit added in our systems just because some Yankees (and Brazil) passed some bills? My country has already said they won’t be doing any age verification shit. I’m starting to think there’s some big conspiracy here that FOSS isn’t as independent as we believe it is.
Don’t forget my shitty country in the process of trying to implement this too
Unfortunately, the internet at large has been embracing cuck behavior and capitulation for years.
They are genuinely excited to be a bunch of scared little bitches eager to please their masters.
FOSS isn’t as independent as we believe it is
Some parts are indeed sponsored by corporations, that’s not a bad thing per se because financial support is important.
Problems arise when corporations push changes solely for their own interest instead of the benefit of the community, this PR seems to be that case.
Germany has effectivly the same law, active since december 2025, and I am sure more countries will intruduce such laws soon. Linux Distributions have to be compliant with this laws, if we like it or not.
@DarkMetatron @Geki do you have inside knowledge of more countries you speak of? Stop spreading FUD and face the problem head on. You Germans have earned a reputation for intolerance of fascism and Nazi sympathizers in your own land. Get out there and protest such laws instead of musing online about the decline of freedom as if it’s a forgone conclusion. These laws are pushed by scum to chip away at freedom. They do not protect anyone.
I am not spreading fud, I only added something to a list. The fact that we have such a law is not known by many, even most germans are not aware of it, that is why I talk about it. It is only possible to Protest and fight against something if it is known, and I try to spread this knowledge. This is a way to fight against it, or at least the preparation.
I am very sorry that my posts gave the impression that I am not against such laws, because I for sure am!
And Yes, i should have said that I fear that more countries created such laws, my pessimistic world view got me when I wrote my first post.
@DarkMetatron sorry for the aggression, it’s just the relative helplessness us Americans feel in the shadow of so much stupidity and greed. It makes me jumpy when I perceive backsliding in more liberated places such as yours. I want to hold out hope the foolishness is mostly contained here in my nation.
Germany has effectivly the same law
I haven’t heard anything about that and a search doesn’t turn anything up either. Can you give any details on what you mean specifically?
§12 Jugendmedienschutzstaatsvertrag: https://www.landesrecht-bw.de/bsbw/document/jlr-JMedienSchStVtrGBWV10StVtr-P12
(1) Anbieter von Betriebssystemen, die von Kindern und Jugendlichen üblicherweise genutzt werden im Sinne des § 16 Abs. 1 Satz 3 Nr. 6, stellen sicher, dass ihre Betriebssysteme über eine den nachfolgenden Absätzen entsprechende Jugendschutzvorrichtung verfügen. Passt ein Dritter die vom Anbieter des Betriebssystems bereitgestellte Jugendschutzvorrichtung an, besteht die Pflicht aus Satz 1 insoweit bei diesem Dritten.
(3) In der Jugendschutzvorrichtung muss eine Altersangabe eingestellt werden können.
Ah scheiße, hier gehen wir wieder.
they also open accompanied PRs on this and I’m a little frightened
https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-desktop-provision/pull/1338
https://github.com/archlinux/archinstall/pull/4290Something feels fishy… The user who made this pull request has more than doubled his contributions to various repositories since January (from 20–400 to more than 1100), and this is his first pull request in the systemd repo.
Very fishy…
That guy is either a massive bootlicker or a fucking plant. Who goes around vulentarily adding birth date fields to EVERY project they can contribute to?
They bought a second computer so they can ask Claude for twice as much code.
Fishy how? As in a state-level backdooring like was the case with XZ and Jia Tan or are you weary of something else?
That memory surely also prompted this feeling. It’s just that Meta seems to be putting a lot of effort everywhere to push for this. Not so difficult to put, or corrupt, or push, people in dev communities and repos.
We graybeards tried to warn you about systemd but you acted as fools.
Guilty as charged xD
I know the debate around systemd is going on for quite some time, I understood the basic reasoning behind it but I don’t have the technical knowledge required to truly decide for myself, so I just didn’t pay too much attention to it and followed what my distro of choice does.
The good thing about this “new development” is that it’s not just a tech debate anymore, it has such wider implications that it’ll be much easier for people to decide where to be.
A large part of the disagreement was never a tech debate. Systemd on a purely technical level had advantages, but the arguments were always about a concentration of functionality into a single critical program. Great while things are going well. Hell when it falls apart. That fear wasn’t totally based in technical reasoning.
It does not help that non insignificant amounts of systemd criticism comes from Lunduke and gang, often ignoring the actual technical problems with systemd and turning into culture war.
I don’t mean you, just my thoughts.
i’m going to start dyeing mine so that people won’t just keep ignoring me like some old man yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off his lawn. lol
I was ambivalent about systemd up until now. If this gets merged I’m moving to a non-systemd distro. I do not live in California or even the USA. I do not want age verification garbage in my OS.
Iv not given a shit one way or another as well. But as a Californian I refuse to have this shit on my PC damn be what the law says.
Good news: this is not age verification. This is an optional DoB field on a user profile.
It’s being added as a response to the age verification laws with the intended purpose to provide the age signal.
It’s age verification/attestation.
No. It’s a date of birth. You’re right that age verification comes next, but this is not it. Had this field been present before, none of this would matter.
Contact your representative, not your local FOSS maintainer.
Contact your representative, not your local FOSS maintainer.
They’re not a US citizen.
They also didn’t say they would contact the maintainers. They said they’d just change distro to a non-systemd one.
And you’re nothing but silly trying to act like this isn’t about age “verification”. We know it is, because it comes in response to the new california law
If you’re (or they) not a US citizen (or Brazilian) why would you care if they comply with local laws?
They stated that reason very clearly in their original comment. I suggest you read it if you want to know why.
Yes I can read.
Contact your representative
Right, so that they can ask if I’m stoned or stupid for asking them to affect laws in another country?
Then this doesn’t impact you in any form. (Especially since it’s just a DoB).
You can continue to whine but frankly I don’t see the point then.Of course it does. This particular change may seem innocuous in itself, but the idea of compliance with ridiculous laws like this one, in one jurisdiction, being implemented in a project used globally will result in compromising everyone’s privacy/security, regardless of whether they are even subject to that law or not.
If anything, it’s more troubling for those outside the relevant jurisdiction, since we get 0 say on the laws, and have no actual reason to comply.
i think it’s really wholesome that a lot of 126 year old people use linux
While I think it’s amazing that not only are 95% of Linux users 56 years of age, but they even share the same birth date!
Yes, the Unix epoch is the obvious choice of birth date here
We should all agree on a common birthday, until operating systems enforce ID upload
I never cared about the systemd debacle, now I do. I don’t want that shit on my PC.
So, declare your system users’ birthdate as Thu Jan 01 1970 00:00:01 GMT+0000 and get on with life.
Luckily for me, that’s not the only option, especially since I’m not US.
You did care, or else you wouldn’t be having this meltdown.
You must be the most dramatic person in the universe, calling that a “meltdown”.
I am !
What part of “now I do” you didn’t understand?
You mean they’re complying with Meta’s age verification at OS level lobbying?
https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings
Wow that’s an insane level of bootlicking, it was completely free for them to do absolutely nothing about this nonsense law and give the middle finger if asked by the US
I didn’t care before but it turns out the systemd haters were on to something for a long time, fuck these owners for even considering this and even locking the PR to avoid valid criticism, I hope all the contributors create a fork, jump ship and never let the previous owners commit a single line of code to it
It adds an optional birthdate field to userdb. The desktop does not have to populate it. I’m honestly surprised this wasn’t already a field in UserDB
Final Edit: The PR has been merged into main.
Fucking hell. All he had to do was fucking nothing, the bastard.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/revoluciana-facing-fascism-sabotage
Sabotage sounds spicy. It sounds dangerous.
And yet, the underlying concept is simply this: inefficiency.
I told you last time, make every inch have its cost.
Resistance does not have to be violent, and that’s not something I’m advocating here. Resistance is the word no. Resistance is standing in place. Resistance is pushing.
Resistance is the albatross around the neck of your opposition. Resistance is the anchor that drags along the sea floor.
Here are some incredibly mundane but effective examples from the manual:
Make mistakes with purchasing travel tickets
Make engineering mistakes
Make long speeches and waste time
Act ignorant, or ask a lot of questions: if you’re not familiar with the concept of sea-lioning, you should really learn it
Take longer to do your work
Even if you’re terrified of doing more, this is simply a place to start.
You are someone and you have a responsibility to do something.
You cannot make it easier for the fascists to achieve their goals. You can’t do it today, and you can’t do it later if they claim authority. You must stand in the way of oppression.
This is fucking horseshit. I’m turning against fucking systemd , and I had no fucking opinion before, now it’s completely clear they’re a bunch of 1940s IBM wannabees.
EDIT : What a surprise, the fucker that wrote the PR works for IBM and “A Medical Malpractice company” and the one that merged it works for Microsoft.
Ofcourse the project run by a microslop employee wants to force this on almost every distro as soon as possible.
same thing with manifest v3, just some mega corp goon doing the work no one’s asked for
Poettering is not with Microsoft anymore, though
- get top recent commiters with https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pulse
- click on 1st link https://github.com/bluca and see https://github.com/microsoft in profile
Just 2 steps.
Yes Poettering isn’t at Microsoft but seems the person driving the project at the moment is.
Ah, nice catch
This is all to inch us towards an eventual Digital ID, similar to how we have a driver’s license for a car.
I didn’t need one more reason to hate systemd
