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Age checks creep into Linux as systemd gets a DOB field (www.theregister.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 25 points 5 months ago (2 children)

with mass adoption of enshitification. and with the world in general. calling things a slippery slope fallacy is a long and losing gamble.

if the field was put in because of a law, then it’s for a reason, if the data isn’t important, or enforced, then it is useless and should not have been added.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    I wonder if it was put in for the same reason CA passed a self-reporting law recently. I wonder if it's an attempt to repel through malicious compliance far worse age verification that's forced at a federal (US) level.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    Commentary like this is exactly what grinds my gears.

    This isn’t analysis, it’s implication, conjecture, and conspiracy framed as insight.

    The age verification laws are objectively bad. They do nothing meaningful to protect children, degrade the quality of the internet, and hand more authority to a government that already has too much.

    But your line of argument is also flawed. I’ve already stated my position clearly. Repeating “it’s probably worse” adds nothing of substance.

    More importantly, the fundamental architecture of Linux makes this entire premise irrelevant. It is open source and inherently resistant to centralized control. Governments can pass whatever laws they want; they cannot meaningfully enforce them at the system level in an ecosystem designed to be forked, modified, and redistributed at will.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    the laws are bad, and you can push fighting for anonymity and freedom down the road because letting the camel stick its nose under the tent don’t bother anyone, and it’s too easy to just ignore…. but the laws are made for a purpose, and they will change. and uh oh, the camel has flipped the tent, you can’t fight to remove it because now systems are built around it being there. now it’s a much harder fight because we didn’t fight when it was easy.

    again after seeing everything that has happened you call sounding the alarm for this as a slippery slope… i am sorry, but i question either your motives, or your foresight.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    Yes, you are correct. Those of you who are concerned about this are not wrong to question it.

    However, the point that keeps being ignored is that laws like this have very limited enforceability when it comes to platforms like Linux and other open-source software.

    The reason is simple, anyone can modify the source code. There is no practical way to permanently embed restrictions like age verification into something that can be freely forked and redistributed. If a Linux distribution introduces age verification, a fork removing it will appear almost immediately. That is not hypothetical, that is how the open-source ecosystem functions.

    Even if you personally install a version that includes such a feature, it is often trivial to bypass or remove it through system-level access.

    Yes, the laws themselves are poorly conceived. They attempt to impose control in an environment that does not respond well to centralized regulation. But focusing on something like a birthday field in a Linux distribution misses the point. In that context, it is effectively meaningless and not something that warrants serious concern.

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