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I Spoke To The Developer Of The Systemd Birth Date PR - YouTube (www.youtube.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Some of you need to watch this video, and hang your head in shame.

Dylan Taylor has been receiving constant harassment, including threats to his life and safety, for actions done collectively by SystemD. The article by Sam Bent was explictly mentioned as part of the harassment campaign, and rightfully so.

I don't think enough people realize that this is catastrophically bad. It'll discourage people from becoming open source developers, it'll discourage people from using Linux, and it'll discourage legislators from taking the Linux community seriously.

If you ever wished ill upon another human being for complying with a relatively inconsequential law, you are better off never touching a computer again. The Linux community has collectively gone so far beyond what is acceptable here.

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[+] [S] -20 points 6 months ago (10 children)

Are we not living through the same timeline where the US has fallen under the control of a fascist regime that is being eagerly assisted by Meta, Apple, Microsoft and a ton of other massive corporations?

Because the real fight is not on the internet or computers.

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  • [–] 22 points 6 months ago

    It's one battlefront of many, and a fairly significant one. As we've become on online society, computer software has come to encode human rights to expression and privacy. Those rights are worth fighting for.

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  • [–] 13 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    What I’ve learned is that it’s basically impossible to convince people that the only real way to solve this is violent revolution.

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  • [–] -2 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    Given your lack of history of violent revolution (I'm assuming), I'd guess it's because you look like a hypocrite for sitting behind a keyboard and telling others to do something you're not willing to do yourself.

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  • [–] 8 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    I’ve already spent years of my life in activism (the actual kind where you do work and try to build community, inevitably get added to watch lists, etc) trying to motivate others. I’ve helped with Food Not Bombs, etc. I’ve done a decent amount of “walk the walk” but I’ve also got a life to live. The US is deep into a propaganda hole that I’m afraid is gonna take a long time to climb out of and people have goldfish brains. I don’t really care how I come off to folks on the internet.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    People protesting (legally and peacefully) have been targeted based on social media accounts. This is closing the gap to allow similar fascist behavior on an even more personal level.

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago

    People protesting (legally and peacefully) have been targeted based on social media accounts.

    Yes, this is bad. People should not be targeted because of what they wrote.

    This is closing the gap to allow similar fascist behavior on an even more personal level.

    On a personal level.

    Yeah, that would be bad. Kind of like a targeted harassment campaign of a person because of what they wrote.

    It's one thing to be against age verification or software that does age verification or platforms that require age verification. That isn't what is happening here.

    That fight is political, this is an engineering problem.

    You could argue that this enables age verification, it doesn't. Age verification software can exist without this field, it could store your birthdate in .config/EvilAgeVerificationApp/userinfo.txt.

    The field is an optional entry, systemd doesn't require it or verify it. It is simply the most logical place, from an engineering perspective, to store the data.

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