The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification Into Linux

[bayo@me.dm]

@Khrys Open source's entire threat model assumed contributors act toward user freedom. The surveillance state runs on volunteers: people who do the implementation work for free, out of genuine conviction, with no paper trail connecting them to the money that wrote the laws.

[kbm0@mastodon.social]

@onepict @Khrys Although I agree this is very bad, I don't approve of the doxxing.

[jeffmcneill@hachyderm.io]

@Khrys @pluralistic best argument for removing systemd (and I actually like systemd).

[cyphersephiroth@piaille.fr]

@aaribaud J'interdis rien du tout. Je dis que je vois pas le rapport entre les deux prémisses.

[irom@social.tchncs.de]

@julesbl @mcv
Another problem is that it starts implementing surveillance infrastructure without any pushback. Looking at many governments now I don't think that's advisable.

The law was lobbied into existence by Facebook/Meta and friends.

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rmhxk1/i_pulled_the_actual_bill_text_from_5_state_age/

https://tboteproject.com/

@Khrys

[mcv@friendica.opensocial.space]

@julesbl @Khrys

We've long depended on software maintained by fewer people than that.

The point is: anyone can contribute, committers review and approve. If that has always been a reasonable process, why not now? There are lots of open source projects where the creator of the project has more power than that, and we've always accepted it because we trust the maintainers, and when they break that trust, the community forks, which has also happened plenty of times.

But at the end of the day, it seems to me most people here are irrationally panicking about this. Isn't the field optional? Isn't what goes in the field entirely under the user's control?

By all means discuss this honestly, but I don't see anything here that justifies the hype and panic.

[julesbl@mastodon.me.uk]

@mcv @Khrys
If you think this is just like a bug, you are mistaken

[wrybane@wizzards.club]

@Khrys I don't get it, there are alread fields for location and real name and I never put any real info their either, this is no different, an arbitrary field people don't need to use... And systemd isn't going to verify it either, is it?

[bloognoo@retro.pizza]

@Khrys
'He read the law, took it at face value, and started writing code. The word for what that is sits somewhere past malice, something more insidious: an engineer who treats compliance as engineering, who sees a legal requirement the way he sees a technical specification, and will implement whatever the spec says regardless of who wrote the spec or why.'

Zealot. The word is Zealot. His god spoke and he responded.

[peterkratz@chaos.social]

@Khrys Your linux bootloader in 2026: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3gFn5s6-iI ... and then you have to press ALT+X to continue.

[kerplunk@mastodon.scot]

@Khrys

The lasting damage was knowing it could happen at all: that a single contributor with no stated organizational backing could submit compliance infrastructure for surveillance law directly into the software that boots your computer, get it merged by two Microsoft employees, and have the creator of systemd personally block the removal.

NO, THE LASTING DAMAGE IS ACCEPTING INTRODUCTION AND USAGE OF OF SYSTEMD.

Paid for by IBM and later Microsoft to dominate (destroy) Linux

[foxes@bark.lgbt]

@fazalmajid @Khrys You mean the very same Poettering which was responsible for this commit https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/bb19b6104978b5ede792fa3f0cfc74272f20bf9c which was "Found with Claude Code Review" and it broke systemd-boot in one of the release candidates (260 RC3) https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/41098

"Anything LLM-generated will not be committed without a thorough human review" in practice. Yeah.

[mndflayr@metalhead.club]

@Khrys

So, tl;dr, someone added an age field, and the trolls went crazy?
And now everybody hates everybody, and each side is calling the other one "zealot" with religious fervor?

Just another day in toxicland, I guess. 🤷

[fazalmajid@social.vivaldi.net]

@foxes @Khrys Well, yes. We've known since the days of PulseAudio he is a moron with abysmal judgment and worse code quality, to the point he is regularly called out by Linus Torvalds for it.

[aaribaud@mastodon.art]

@CypherSephiroth Si par "les deux prémisses" tu entends l'angle de l'article et celui de mon commentaire, alors je renouvelle ma réponse : je ne vois pas la raison pour laquelle ils devraient avoir un rapport à part le fait de porter sur le même objet.

[kkarhan@infosec.space]

@Khrys cyberfascism at play..

https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/116267076899199952

[joschi@hachyderm.io]

@Khrys @nblr @doingfedtime What kind of bullshit hit piece is this?

We’re now blaming developers for contributing to FOSS projects?

Great job everyone, you can be really proud of yourselves! 👏 /s

[eobet@oldbytes.space]

@Khrys is it just me or is the article a bit weird? Weird repetitions, weird (fully animated) graphics and a weird quiz at the end. It smells vaguely like slop, but is it?

[filippo@abyssdomain.expert]

@Khrys @thedarktangent what the actual fuck, you’re reposting and spreading an article that targets an open source maintainer by insulting him and making his picture into a wanted poster? Seriously?