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Inside the Systemd Age Verification Debate: Developer Responds to Criticism (itsfoss.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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I draw the line at when a third party internet-connected service is doing validation of ID. Let’s be honest though, I strongly believe such a thing isn’t possible on a FOSS operating system environment unless they could control what was bootable on the device at a firmware level, enforce signatures to ensure that you couldn’t boot something unrestricted, remove the ability to be root, and block LD_PRELOAD so signals couldn’t be faked. There’s probably more ways to circumvent that.

What I’m trying to say is real ID verification on Linux would be awfully hard to implement, and I guarantee you, nobody would put up with it. They’d fork to a version that doesn’t have it immediately as a protest. Right now, we’re considering implementing something akin to the date pickers that were ubiquitous when signing up for internet services in the early 2000s where it’s just an honor system.

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[–] -5 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Any systemd fork or distro that exists just to remove the birthDate field will be dead in a few weeks.

There ain't no way someone is going to maintain an entire fork and distro to remove one optional field in a user's profile.

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

    I mean, it's also one field. Wouldn't be hard to automate its removal and do a quick test.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago

    Sure, it's very easy to remove.

    It's also very easy to ignore and not use. A lot easier and less security comprimising than downloading and compiling a custom fork of systemd from an untrusted source.

    These 'forks' are performative activism and not a serious attempt at maintaining a systemd fork. Once the outrage mob moves on to the next target the forks will disappear.

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

    That would heavily depend on whether a fork splits systemd's developers off. Controversial changes have spilt FOSS development teams before. The entire point of forks is to allow taking projects in different philosophical or technical directions.

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  • [–] 0 points 7 months ago

    I understand the process, I simply have not seen a single fork that has any kind of traction or support outside of the individual running the repository.

    The people who are making a big deal out of this are not the same people who have both the technical capability and willingness to take on a project as big as systemd.

    At best someone will create a script that deletes the lines from userdb and a user can run that and then compile and install systemd themselves.

    This is not the kind of technical disagreement that leads to actual forks. This is a flash point of outrage that will disappear as these people move on to new topics.

    Any one serious about fighting Age verification laws are politically aware enough to understand that it is laws and politicians that need to be changed and not optional JSON fields.

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