Political entities do not have the authority to compel this kind of activity. If you go along with it, you are given them a reason to keep going. You have to look at this from a rights perspective.
I think we can agree this is overboard
Yeah it’s not like these people are IRC operators or something!
> Some of this has been fueled by a misinformation campaign that has targeted the systemd project and Taylor specifically, resulting in Taylor being doxxed and receiving death threats.
I see.
GECOS in 1962, and UNIX in '70s had them as well, and nobody threatened to kill their creators.
Having a field in a database is not equal to mandatory data collection. Let me remind of data that /etc/passwd allows to store on even an OS without systemd:
- User's full name (or application name, if the account is for a program)
- Building and room number or contact person
- Office telephone number
- Home telephone number
- Any other contact information (pager number, fax, external e-mail address, etc.)
maybe we should complain
1. To modify account creation so that in the scenarios where the law applies (account is being created for a child who is the primary user of the device) to ask for the age and/or birthdate of the child.
2. A way for applications to ask for the age range of the user ([0, 13), [13, 16), [16, 18), [18-infinity)).
Implicit is to store enough information from #1 to support #2.
The way I would store that information is by creating a directory, say /etc/age_group, and in that creating one file named after each age range. These files would be owned by root and not group or world readable.
On creating an account this applies to add an access control list (ACL) entry for that account to the appropriate file in /etc/age_group that allows that user to read it.
Then for #2 the way applications can check is by simply checking which files /etc/age_group it can open.
This should be more portable than the other ways I've seen proposed. POSIX access control lists are included I believe on every major Linux distribution (and also MacOS, FreeBSD, and maybe other BSDs).
This would give application writers on most Unix and Unix-like systems a common way to check if they are on a system that implements the California law (does it have /etc/age_group?) and a common way to check age group.
Systemd’s solution is simpler and doesn’t have these edge cases. A higher level of software, such as the desktop environment, can query the user’s birth date from systemd and use their locale settings or time zone or other information to compute the correct age group.
I think it's exactly how such a system should work: apps, sites, etc should declare an age limit, and the user's OS should decide if it's going to give the user access to them. This approach is opposite to having the user to prove their age (and worse, the legal identity) to the web site, app, etc.
How does this relate here, or to computing generally (barring electronic voting machines)?
If you don't like those things then use another distro or create your own, branch a browser, and create your own Internet. I welcome that. Until then, don't say the contradictory phrases of "parent your kids," and resist any of the infrastructure to actually accomplish that.
Not to give credit to the antisocial mob, but it would be a lot easier to take the maintainers' side here if the discourse was started before the change was merged into production.
It's incredibly ironic that the LWN article praises Jeremy Soller for having reasonable objections against the change but fails to mention that systemd maintainers locked the issue* when he tried to raise his objections (and implicitly called them spam). I really fail to see how anyone could expect civil discourse given these circumstances.
* In an incredibly pathetic way too - the systemd maintainer responded to his comment, then immediately locked the issue without even waiting to see what Soller would write in return.
I am shocked by what's going on with systemd and by how suddenly bootlicky LWN has gotten.
2. Why do the worst of the worst have to be on "my side" (like this harrassment, and other issues, where they are polar opposites of me when it comes to social issues). But. You have to go to war with the army/allies you have, and if that means I have to be in bed with ... a certain unduke, then I guess it shall be.
3. I remember when statements like the following would have been laughed at by the free software/"open source" community. Instead of acquiescing, and saying "well we have to plan for this big totalitarian overreach" (if you think it isn't, look at Palantir and all the big tech CEOs getting their mitts everywhere), it would have been calling to RESIST and do everything we can technically, organizationally and politically to push back against this, but here we are willingly just building our future prisons. At the behest of giant "open source" corporations who "have nothing to hide" after all.
Of course systemd is NOT a free/libre project in any sense of the word, which is all the more reason I distrust it, and this latest is going to push me off it (I'm on Cachy now). But like I am, we all just sit in the boiling water. I'm still on Firefox for example. I'm on Facebook. This is why it's important to resist BEFORE, so it doesn't become a systemic thing where everyone feels compelled to "go with the flow".
(the following, as referred to in point 3): "Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek replied that while it was possible California's law would be changed, ""similar ideas are popping up in other contexts and it's unlikely that they'll all go away"". Ultimately, Luca Boccassi merged Taylor's changes after a bit of back-and-forth about the implementation."
If I could trust that "it's just a field, maaaaan" fine, but I don't. I see how politics is played and plays out and it's the people who are building this that should reconsider, because they ARE enabling future abuse of these systems merely by putting them in. "Oh look - we now have an affordance there's no reason not to exploit it and put it in our central repository of "authentic" validated computer users).
How long before felons are disallowed from owning/using computers? No matter how necessary that is (and I don't mean "1337 hackers" just "we must punish 'the bad guys').
If I felt we were in a forward moving direction maybe I wouldn't be so resistant, but the past 15-20 years should have taught us well about this process of enshittification and corporate capture of tech in a way we never thought possible (just like the shock of the AT&T room wiretap back in the 00s, etc...)
That said, stop harrassing these people in this manner, it is not good and does a disservice for "our cause". Goddamnit, people.
WTF?
For the most part, I actually agree that Ubuntu is an appropriate operating system for toddlers.
It's only a problem when the OS insists on recording your private information to let you access your private account.
In my ideal world, instead of having Github accounts everyone in the thread would be posting under their own personal ID (in a way similar to ATProto, Nostr, etc.), using a discussion UX that would allow Soller to seamlessly continue the thread along with any other willing participants even after the systemd maintainers blocked it from their own end (which is their right to do). Perhaps if systemd entirely forked over this, this issue comment thread could seamlessly transition into a new issue on the fork, to serve as documentation for why the fork works the way it does.
In general, sometimes the best response to a moderator banning some kind of discussion is for everyone who is subject to that ban to fork the discussion thread itself; and online communication software should more readily facilitate this.
A moderator who claims to be maintaining a healthy discussion forum and terminating bad discussions that are causing problems, is likely to actually be stifling dissent - or discussion that an individual moderator finds personally embarrassing - or just exercising a personal vendetta against somebody. This is as true in open-source software project issue thread moderation on Github as it is anywhere else.