Just what I want in my distro.
After weeks of debate, code to record user age was finally merged into the Linux world’s favorite system management daemon.
Pull request #40954 to the systemd project is titled “userdb: add birthDate field to JSON user records.” It’s a new function for the existing userdb service, which adds a field to hold the user’s date of birth:
Stores the user’s birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc.
The contents of the field will be protected from modification except by users with root privileges.
The change comes after the recent release of systemd 260 but unless it is reverted for some reason, it will be part of systemd 261. One of the justifications is to facilitate the new parental controls in Flatpak, which are still in the draft stage.
This was my reply in another thread about this bullshit:
“It’s just a harmless field; what’s the big deal?”
The big deal is that it’s on the heels of age verification bullshit that fascists are pushing through with the help of tech bros, so that they can eventually push all of us into a scenario where we have zero privacy.
It’s not the adding of the field itself or the fact that it can be filled with nonsense. It’s the reasoning backing it.
“But it’s the law!”
Yeah, fucking and…? It’s a stupid mass surveillance law disguised as a protection, and per usual, it’s written like vague dog shit. This is the smallest part of the wedge. More will come of this and if developers like this keep volunteering themselves to help the fascists, we will all be fucked. Here’s an alternative approach: just don’t add this. You can fight back by not fucking implementing this. Easy.
The big deal is that it’s on the heels of age verification bullshit that fascists are pushing through with the help of tech bros, so that they can eventually push all of us into a scenario where we have zero privacy.
That’s a bit difficult to argue in a world where the most prominent of such laws was passed in California, where Democrats control the entire legislative process.
I have not looked up the voting record for it, but would suspect that, like most of the worst laws in the US, it was enthusiastically supported by both parties? Am I wrong about that?
From your instance, I’m guessing you have limited knowledge of the American political system. I don’t mean this as an insult; I couldn’t tell you a damn thing about CDU/CSU policies (AfD, of course, is easy to parse). The Democratic Party is just as captured as the Nazi one. It’s all corporate money, so the real difference between red states and blue states is politicians in blue states at least pretend to care for the working class.
And the same contributor (From Credit Genie) submitted a PR on Arch install to make that field mandatory … Definitely not sus https://github.com/archlinux/archinstall/pull/4290
It’s weird that this guy is pushing it with “it’s the law” justifications while claiming it’s so ineffective as to be harmless. If your justification is that it’s ineffective, why not just do nothing? That would be even more ineffective at collecting users’ dates of birth. Why be the guy who does something? He seems oddly eager and strangely confident that all the steps he’s taking to comply preemptively won’t be misused in future, by governments, corporations or hackers.
Down voting this title. For now.
What’s wrong with the title? It’s the article title.
Also, Beehaw has no downvotes, so you can downvote all you want on your instance if it makes you feel better, but it won’t federate the downvote.
“I disagree with all the drama being associated with an optional field. I reserve the right to ‘drama’ later should optional turn into mandatory”.
I always thought that having some kind of “kid-safe” mode for web browsers would be a good idea; there are some people who would use that. People whose age doesn’t necessarily have much to do with it. Having a standard header sent to websites to indicate it and making some rules about what they’re supposed to do when they see it would be feasible enough.
It seems so painfully obvious that having a “date of birth” field in systemd is the wrong way to do things and can only go nowhere or else lead to bad things.
It should be something like date of birth and at what age are they no longer considered a minor, then its hashed and the system will only say if they are to be considered a minor or not but not give any information on the actual dates set or anything. Or like a specific number of years to countdown from instead of a date
The annoying people telling us not to use systemd were right all along
I’ve never heard of a REASON to not use systemd, other than OMG! Change!
That’s a cringe and spineless move to see from systemd.
