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.
DRM writers love this too.
In my opinion, storing a date is pretty much irrelevant unless there’s a process that validates the supplied date, otherwise every Linux user was born on 1/1/1, if not, an administrator can “fix” that
Furthermore, that
systemdthinks that it’s the place to store such information is in my opinion beyond absurd.Who appointed that project the source of age truth in the Linux ecosystem? What discussion was there, who was consulted and where was the vote?
Exactly. This is a massive overreach, and it is crazy that Poettering is even considering merging this.
I would say the majority of objections to systemd pertain to perceived overreaches of the project (perceptions I generally share). So in that sense, it is kind of on brand.
He thinks that systemd is desktop linux.
You’re right that asking a user for a date is next to useless. However, that isn’t a reason to not fight this stuff. Asking the user for the date is step one to getting people accept it. After that they’ll point out that people were lying, and they’ll need our government ID to verify (and link us to activity). It’s all a step towards a surveillance network tracking every move you make on your computer.
I understand your point and agree that this is the thin end of the wedge.
What we’re doing here is discussing the phenomenon and I’m highlighting some concerns.
I believe that this is how you get a dialogue happening which will effect change, which is what we’re both advocating.
I think that age verification is about surveillance rather than protecting children and I think it should be fought at every level.
This is me contributing to that fight.
1/1/1
every linux user is jesus confirmed
Everyone knows Jesus was born one 0001-12-25
Is he dumb? It’s been almost 12 months since A. D. started. What was he waiting for
Come on, you know it’s going to be 1/1/1970 most of the time.
They haven’t fessed up yet that that’s part of their plan. I expect to hear from them after they’ve passed the first half.
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.
Something 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.
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.
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?
This is a big weakness in FOSS communities, hell, in capitalist existence. People with resources can afford to spend their own time or hire someone else to focus on their contributions like a full time job while most honest contributers will be doing it during their free time because they need to pay bills and such.
You mean they’re complying with Meta’s age verification at OS level lobbying?
https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings
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
you missed the joke I think: Thu Jan 01 1970 00:00:01 GMT+0000,
UNIX timestamp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time
All those leap seconds…
Rick Astley’s birthday is 6th Feb 1966, just saying
76 years old from day law is passed to honor System76 for having some nuts and being proactive.
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.
There is indeed a philosophical part to it around the “do one thing and do it well”, but what you call “fear” is not an totally unfounded concern, in that it’s true that the more complex a piece of software is, the more complex maintenance also is.
But you need serious technical knowledge to fully understand everything that systemd does compared to sysvinit, what are the advantages of this new system and how much its complexity can actually affect maintenance (or not).
I don’t have that kind of knowledge, you could explain to me all the technical advantages systemd has but I wouldn’t be able to understand them, so I just trust distro maintainers in doing what they believe it’s best for their distro and I never considered the init system as a parameter to choose what distro I want to use, I just use what’s in the distro.
Now it’s different, because adding a field to comply with a moronic law pushed by Meta to avoid fines has truly nothing to do with technical reasoning, you don’t need any tech knowledge to understand that, anyone can.
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.
They want to store the actual birthdays (not just a boolean stating it complies with an age bracket). And using claude to review PRs… fucking systemd
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
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.
What part of “now I do” you didn’t understand?
You must be the most dramatic person in the universe, calling that a “meltdown”.
I am !
echo "18+" > ~/.age_rcAm I compliant with California’s law now? Apps can use the POSIX API to access my age.
Yes, and you can do the same thing to your child’s non-root account. The point of the California law is to allow admins (parents) to do that.
As a teenager I was the only person in the house who understands computers. Naturally I was the admin. All this computer “jailing” is so insane to me.
Yes and that’s fine and everyone freaking out is being dumb.
There are fascist governments demanding genital inspection for playing highschool sports and they’re losing their shit over an accounts API returning an unverified age bracket!
There are fascist governments demanding genital inspection for playing highschool sports
- That is already going on in the very same country we’re discussing.
- “Things could be even worse, so until things are just as bad as that, don’t complain or try to stop it from getting worse.”
If you yell that the everything is on fire, over an API that doesn’t do verification, it’s less effective when you yell the same thing over real issues.
That’s a poor analogy, because nobody is lying, saying things are on fire that aren’t.
We weren’t born yesterday—or at least I wasn’t. We know where this is going, and it’s folly to wait until almost the end before pushing back.
Ah, but how will we know you weren’t born yesterday?
Oh wait, I have an idea…
Push back to your lawmakers not the fucking open source projects that comply with the law.
You are really the dumb one for not learning from the past and for not seeing where is this headed once it’s kicked into motion.
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
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.
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.
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.
@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.
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.
The answer to the PII issues is hence not restrictions in userdb, the answer is proper app sandboxing. And that even already exists in flatpak! It restricts access to $HOME already, and to userdb too! And that’s the way to do it!
I don’t use flatpak. I don’t like it. Linux is about choice and I choose not to use that.
Hence, just embrace app sandboxing! And if you come to me and say “hey, I run all my apps without sandboxing, but i want the birthday hidden anyway” then I can only say, your model is really really broken. Fix your security model first, then come back.
In the words of the great Linus Torvalds, go fuck yourself.
@skyline2@lemmy.dbzer0.com @linux@lemmy.ml
Brazilian here. I’m neither a lawyer nor a specialist, just someone who has read the Portuguese text from the Brazilian flavor of the ongoing worldwide age check set of laws.
I must note that the Brazilian age check law (Lei 15.211/2025) specifies “vedada a autodeclaração” (English: “self-declaring is forbidden”). This means that this kind of implementation, where age or birthday is an user input, wouldn’t be compliant to Lei 15.211/2025, because it requires the age information to be assessed independently from the user whose age is being assessed. This means face biometrics, government-issued ID (in our case, CPF, CNH, Passaporte and similar) or “behaviorial analysis”… Anything but a “yes I’m 18” or “I was born in day month year”, for those are self-declared and the Law says it’s “not enough”.
Someone should warn the systemd maintainers of this “Brazilian jabuticaba”.
(Cross posting this reply of mine because the post was cross posted to two different Lemmy instances)
I believe this only stores that information. It’s not a system of declaring an age
@ominouslemon@sh.itjust.works @linux@lemmy.ml
The git PR specifically mentions a
birthDate, a data struct that feels like it could easily be tampered with (therefore, far from “confiável” (trustworthy) as explicitly required by “deverão ser adotados mecanismos confiáveis de verificação de idade” (“trustworthy age checking mechanisms must be adopted”)).Thinking of age checking as some kind of OAuth flow, one would ideally store the authz token from whatever age checking provider validated the user’s age, instead of some plain data which, depending on the provider, wouldn’t even be handed to the application.
I can sort of imagine the following, hypothetical flow:
- Human tries to access the system for the first time
- System asks for human consent to proceed with age checking
- Human (is compelled to) accept going through age checking shenanigans
- System redirects human to 3rd-party age checking provider interface (e.g. Persona).
- Provider proceeds with whatever means necessary for the human to upload ID and/or selfie, who does whatever is required from them by the provider interface.
- In case of IDs, the provider talks with gov databases (e.g. Receita Federal do Brasil for CPF “Cadastro de Pessoa Física”) in order to attest the validity of the ID. In case of selfie, provider communicates with a facial recognition model/algorithm/platform.
- Provider gets the information necessary for age-bracketing, appends it to their own DB with a signing hash, then returns the digest of said hash as a token to the system.
- System receives the authorization payload and confirms with the provider whether it’s a valid token.
- Provider replies positively, perhaps with some kind of checksum, regarding validity of the token.
- System stores the token to hand it to whatever subsystem (for OSes, a software; for online platforms such as social media, a module/route) requesting age info.
- Subsystem allows or denies human access.
Some age checking models (such as EU) seems to be doing a similar thing to what I hypothesized above: the EU Digital Wallet returns a token, instead of PII. A token that can be checked against the Digital Wallet API for validity (theoretically) without disclosing who the user is (in practice, it’d be another, pretty reliable piece of traceable data despite any “anonymity”)
I’m not sure whether a similar thing will be implemented here in Brazil (we got an official gov app, gov.br, which can already be used for “social log-in” by 3rd-party platforms, but I don’t know whether it’s ready for age check provisioning).
As far as I know Brazil and Brazilians, it’s highly likely we’d end up with dependencies on Microsoft or Google services because Brazilian gov can’t help but handing its own sovereignty to US tech corps, which adds to the dystopia.
I must make something very clear: I’m far from agreeing with this dystopia, I deeply despise this whole “age check” thing going on worldwide; I’m just thinking as a DevOps would.
Wait until Iran nukes the US and the financial systems collapses. Having bajillions of dollars will not help when dollars are worth nothing.
