I’ve only absorbed bits and pieces of the story, but allegedly there’s an age verification push happening on Linux? What’s the full story here?
If I was cynical - which I absolutely am - I’d say maybe it’s a total nothingburger that’s being overplayed as a distraction from something else?
An optional field was added to the userdb to allow storing birthdate. That’s it.
The systemd project merged a pull request adding a new birthDate field to the JSON user records managed by userdb in response to the age verification laws of California, Colorado, and Brazil.
This is the same record that already holds basic user metadata like realName, emailAddress, and location. The field stores a full date in YYYY-MM-DD format and can only be set by administrators, not by users themselves.
An optional field in the userdb JSON object. It’s not a policy engine, not an API for apps. We just define the field, so that it’s standardized iff [sic] people want to store the date there, but it’s entirely optional.
–Lennart Poettering
Fix: a useless field was added by a random non-core contributor, and merged by a Microsoft employee.
iff [sic]
In case you are unaware, “iff” is short for “if and only if”, i.e. bidirectional implication. It’s not a typo.
It is a word, but I don’t think it’s really applicable here. The standard exists even if no one wants to use it or ever does.
That’s it so far.
Yeah who knows next PR could implement age verification via rectal print verified by aliens from the 7th dimension.
Also, it wasn’t a core maintainer who created the PR, which you want for something this sensitive.
Why would it matter who it was that contributed the code?
It’s just an extra field that was added to the UserDB. The methods used to access that information have not chaged AFAIK.
entirely optional
Until its not. Rome wasnt destroyed in a day
Yes, but the slippery slope is also a fallacy.
Caution is better than panic.
Redditor going full reddit over a law that they haven’t read and a pull request they barely understand.
They added a field and everyone is losing their minds because systemd has already a bad reputation for doing too much and being too powerful and also because everyone hate age verification so they don’t want it in their free OS so it crystalize the hate. There was something about AI too if I recall. I don’t want US law to impact international FOSS and I don’t want any kind of identity or age verification inside my OS so I understand and share the rage. But this change was very much not a big or impactful thing. Please correct me if I’m wrong, I’m 70% confident on the issue.
The AI was the slopfork written by one of the hyperventilating redditors.
You pretty right except the California law that the systemd change was in response to doesn’t do verification it just returns whatever age bracket is stored.
The issue is that some idiot suddenly appeared on the systemd repo to immediately push a change that adds the posibility of logging the user’s age into systemd. The community complained and explained that nobody wanted that change, and yet this idiot pushed through, ignored the feedback, and ended up getting the pull request merged. Not only that, but the discussion thread was locked to prevent criticism, and the merge was done by Microsoft employees. After the merge, someone tried to undo the change, and the effort was blocked by a Microsoft employee.
Despite the excuses, Systemd is not an OS, and it doesn’t even need to comply with any age verification laws. The fact that someone went and implemented a deeply unpopular change into a system that shouldn’t even deal with that info and that is used by most Linux distros, just to aid a surveillance government in implementing better surveillance on the entire world’s users is what lead to the pushback.
Additionally, Lennart Poettering used Claude to review the pull request, and has been using it for developing SystemD. I’m not gonna go too deep into that, but trust me, it’s really bad.
Double additionally, Lennart Poettering also defended not properly securing this sensitive data, because that would be too bothersome for him.
This was a good write-up of what’s going on: https://www.sambent.com/the-engineer-who-tried-to-put-age-verification-into-linux-5/
This is a hitpiece, imo completely the wrong tone to have this discussion in.
