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I Spoke To The Developer Of The Systemd Birth Date PR - YouTube (www.youtube.com)
submitted 5 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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[–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

Why do I need MORE parental controls shoved down my throat when I do not desire it nor wish for it? But this time in a core component of alot of linux distributions.

You don't and you don't have any parental controls being shoved down your throat, you have a JSON field that you can choose to enter data in or not. It does not control anything, it is not validated by anything (outside of compliance with ISO 8601) and it is not required to be set to anything.

Who controls what is installed on your system? If it is you, then you can save yourself from parental control software by not installing parental control software.

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

    So when application developer such as Discord (an example) builds on top of these age controls and decides to not allow access to channels which are marked 13+?

    What do you expect will happen?

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

    I expect that they will store your birthDate in their own way and not use systemd as they are not a Linux native application.

    You get to choose if you install Discord and you get to choose if you are going to submit to their age verification.

    This is true if the birthDate field exists in systemd or not.

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

    They DO have a linux native client though, and the whole idea of using systemd according to the PR author IS because application developers can then request this information from user profile

    https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954

    The xdg-desktop-portal project is adding an age verification portal
    (flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal#1922) that needs a data source for the user's age.
    userdb already stores personal metadata (emailAddress, realName, location)
    so birthDate is a natural fit.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    Discord does not use Linux user metadata to store information about your Discord account. Because the application is cross platform, they store information about you in their own systems, not in systemd. Their age verification is implemented completely independent of systemd and doesn't rely on the birthDate field.

    It's also software that you can choose to not install.

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