cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/65555474
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.
Wow, who knew all systemd users were born on 01/01/1970? What a coincidence!
Imagine if using a dataset containing the same birthdate for everyone results in AIs predicting an upcoming mass extinction due to the entire worlds population being above a certain age. We could call it the epochalypse.
Whipper snappers… my birthday on Steam is Jan 1st, 1900.
I was actually born in -1… er, I mean, December 31st, 1969. :)
April 1st. 1911 here.
Also,
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues
It is the duty of all to report bugs in the code.
Seems like a horrible eagerness to comply in advance with equally horrible US state laws when this legal scenario is not even close to resolved.
In Brazil that OS age verification law just became effective. (One day ago)
Because Meta’s lobbying to kill the free and open internet, and personal computing as a concept. Also, MS, Apple, and Google are probably lobbying to kill their competition before it gets too great.
I wonder if they have received directly some donations from that lobbying or signed some contract
I mean explicitly systemd and xdg-desktop-portal. Why are they so eager to implement a nonenforceable law? Did they get one of those grants?
Some money probably got passed under the table somewhere to get the competition knocked out.
And yet those laws are definitely going to go to court and haven’t been passed yet even, so why the eagerness to comply???
They have been passed and will be enforced in like 2 years. They may be challenged, but it’s not a guarantee that a court would oppose it.
The Colorado law is still under consideration and has only gone through the senate. https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/SB26-051
California is less than a year as it goes into effect this upcoming January 2027.
I always said systemd was trying to become the entire operating system
It doesn’t. The MR is just for an additional and optional field in userdb. The same as in any proper user directory service (LDAP mainly).
It’s systemd. A child pest of a Microsoftist pest. It was literally invented to contribute towards the MicrosoftizationMicroslopization of Linux.
I’m really disappointed that someone hasn’t just made a standalone userspace addon to implement the feature, shoved in down California’s throat, and told them to come back with complaints once they can find where BSD came from.
Adding this type of “support” is just giving legitimacy to crappy legislation. I would not bother even creating the underlying system so some underpaid google intern can make his age verification app 2% faster.
This entire fiasco could have been a bash script that uses a new file in /etc to store birthdays.
Another patch should be added to rename “Systemd” to “Surveillanced”.
Through this conversation I learned SixOS (systemd-less NixOS) exists
@skyline2@lemmy.dbzer0.com @linux@lemmy.world
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”.
OK. Fair point, but hear me out, his is this different than say user1 is admin who then verifies user2 by looking at id and says verified.
sudo moduser user2 birthDate 'yyyy/mm/dd'
And how is that different than I’m user1 and user2 and perform the operation myself.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that this is stupid. I’m also a bit offended about the flatpak comment.
@dis_honestfamiliar@lemmy.sdf.org @linux@lemmy.world
How is this different than say user1 is admin who then verifies user2 by looking at id and says verified.
As far as I understood (because the law is annoyingly and purposefully vague-worded), it wouldn’t be the user1 the one verifying user2 precisely because both are users (despite their different system privileges). The law requires the “fornecedor de produtos e serviços de tecnologia da informação” (IT products and services supplier) to check the users’s age, not the users themselves.
In the end, it feels like the lawmakers are wishing for something akin to Windows or MacOS: the user must link to an online account, which is bound to the corporation, which is then the one who will do the KYC (know your customer) shenanigans, often by relying on third-party services (such as Persona and au10tix) to achieve this.
To me, this is part of why MidnightBSD and Arch Linux 32-bits (and more to come) went nuclear and geoblocked Brazil: there’s no way this can be feasible for distros not Ubuntu, Red Hat, that Amazon distro whose name I forgot, or similar distros underneath the umbrella of a fairly large corp.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that this is stupid.
Yeah, I agree with you. This age check thing is stupid and, to be honest, extremely depressing as well.
Age verification is fucking scaremongering for this.
It literally adds a field to record user ages. It doesn’t verify anything.
Right. And when KDE (and whatever environments going back to time immemorial) added real name fields, that was a slippery fucking slope towards the Gestapo checking your papers every time you log in, was it?
Why can’t the conspiracy folks stick to funny stuff like flat earth?
If this shitstorm keeps up, I will just build my own OS at some point
It is optional field and can be unset and set to arbitrary value by the administrator. If you can build your own OS, isn’t it easier to just unset this value?
Easier it is, sure. And optional field it is - for now. But the moment anything (that should not be interested in it) asks my age on install, I am dropping that software
