7 hours
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- 27 minutes
I disagree with age verification as well, but attacking a person like this is gross.
This article is all but brigading people into harassing this guy.
- 45 minutes
Ah the great betrayer. The snake in the garden. The enemy within the gates. That fucking cunt.
- corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish27 minutes
So lennart personally blocked the revert? Fucking on-brand for all he’s wrecked in Linux.
Is he still working at Microsoft, or was he just too special for them too?
2 hoursTest your understanding of the Dylan Taylor age verification story and what it reveals about open source infrastructure
I’m very suspicious of whether one would create 10 questions for nearly every blog post of zirs by hand.
- 42 minutes
It’s for sure AI generated, but also a weird ass thing to add to your blog.
- 3 hours
Genuine question, don’t we always say that we can change anything in the system on open source software like Linux and systemd etc? What’s stopping any of us from removing this age verification thing? Apps may break, true, but I’m sure there will be many one line scripts that replace that age verification with something that feeds it fake data?
- 51 minutes
Tbf simply following the development and criticizing bad design decisions is also one way to change opensource software no?
- 23 minutes
There’s a massive difference between criticizing bad decisions and articles like the one in the OP who’s painting the developer as a target.
There’s plenty of ways for the open source community to handle this. This isn’t one of them.
Brigading and harassing volunteer developer is way out of bounds.
- 41 minutes
Someone could fork systemd.
Also, some major distros might decide to use the fork
- 4 hours
Petition to name the inevitable fork of this “SystemFree”
- 5 hours
2000s: war on general purpose computing because of copyright
2020s: war on general purpose computing because of child protection
In the 2000s the forces of freedom mostly won, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital_Television_Promotion_Act didn’t become law. So far it seems that we are currently losing. :(
- 47 minutes
Fucking fascists arent ever going to stop. They want to control everything, they want the people to be their slaves.
- 4 hours
In Europe too, chatcontrol keeps being pushed no matter how often it’s being struck down.
- 3 hours
Yes; recent news have made me somewhat optimistic that the resistance to it is winning though.
Age verification laws currently look like a much greater danger to freedom.
- 3 hours
Personally I think that win (while really a win) is being overcelebrated.
It’s easily reverted. All they’ll have to do is find some csam or terrorism related scandal in the news and pump it as a big deal, and all the resistance will be gone at the next vote.
- 3 hours
With chat control we actually have to distinguish two different things that people sometimes confuse:
- voluntary chat control (“chat control 1.0”), which is currently already the law in the EU
- mandatory chat control (“chat control 2.0”), proposed in 2022
Voluntary chat control is about letting operators of communication services voluntarily scan messages for certain illegal activity (without this constituting a violation of data protection laws). This doesn’t break encryption and isn’t a part of a war on general purpose computing. While there are many good arguments against it, it’s not especially catastrophic. It’s a detail of business regulation.
Mandatory chat control is about forcing them to do so, which must necessarily break encryption and impose limits on software freedom. This is what is most important to oppose.
The most recent win ended up rejecting even (most) voluntary chat control, which is a good sign that mandatory chat control won’t get a majority either.
- 2 hours
It has very nearly got a majority several times. I’m sure that with some media manipulation (eg milking an incident) it will be easily pushed through.
Imagine if the Dutroux scandal would happen now. They’d jump on that to push all kinds of monitoring on everyone. Even though this would not be prevented by it in any way (and in fact that all happened long before WhatsApp even existed)
- 7 hours
“It’s just a harmless field; what’s the big deal?”
The big deal is that it’s on the heels of age verification bullshit that fascists are pushing through with the help of tech bros, so that they can eventually push all of us into a scenario where we have zero privacy.
It’s not the adding of the field itself or the fact that it can be filled with nonsense. It’s the reasoning backing it.
“But it’s the law!”
Yeah, fucking and…? It’s a stupid mass surveillance law disguised as a protection, and per usual, it’s written like vague dog shit. This is the smallest part of the wedge. More will come of this and if developers like this keep volunteering themselves to help the fascists, we will all be fucked. Here’s an alternative approach: just don’t add this. You can fight back by not fucking implementing this. Easy.
- 2 hours
“But it’s the law!”
I was just following orders!
this same person would be chuckling to themself about how pointless this all is as he locks the door on the gas chambers.
- 4 hours
Also, they will use it as a means to lock content they don’t want. Like in some jurisdictions it’s already forbidden to share any kind of LGBTQ information even medical with minors… Even in EU, like Hungary. Clearly this age verification will be used for this too. And people not willing to age verify will be locked out too.
It’s part of their campaign of forcing conservative ‘values’ onto everyone.
- 6 hours
More will come of this and if developers like this keep volunteering themselves to help the fascists, we will all be fucked. Here’s an alternative approach: just don’t add this. You can fight back by not fucking implementing this. Easy.
Only thing you get out of this compared to the alternative of malicious compliance is opening yourself up to attack. You can still fight this without painting a big target on your back.
- 5 hours
Is there any evidence that they would go after random FOSS projects that aren’t hosted or developed in the relevant jurisdictions? Don’t comply in advance.
- 3 hours
You’re welcome to be a spineless muppet trying to obey unethical laws, but I won’t be.
- 39 minutes
Nope, I am a muppet whose livelihood depends on them respecting the law. If you are from one of the godforsaken regions doing stupid laws you should vote against them, I need to comply with your laws because I need to work to feed my family.
You can call me a spineless muppet all you want but I am not the cause stupid laws exists, take it on the californianas for that crap, they elected the idiots doing this. I vote our own idiots and until now they made it clear this bullshit is not on their table, thank you wery much but I did my part.
- 3 hours
Only in California and Brazil. And I suspect neither has a shortage of people able to add this field.
- underscores@lemmy.zipEnglish3 hours
Exactly, make your own fascist distro with a fork of systems and leave the original landscape alone
- 7 hours
What a pointless drama article this is. FLOSS software does stuff for legal compliance more often than you’d think. The whole point is people can contribute fly by patches and the maintainers make the decision to merge. It seems like being an optional field but potentially providing useful functionality is enough for systemd. If you don’t like it I’m sure there are forks you could join or even use a different init system. No one’s freedom is being oppressed here.
- 3 hours
My OS should have no details on me besides the account name which didn’t necessarily correspond to my real name.
It does have some old fields for location etc but those stem from the times of massive multi user systems.
- 3 hours
Linux has similar fields for realName, emailAddress, location, timezone and more. But like birthdate, I think they’re all optional.
Was Linux ever used for massive multiuser systems? I thought it had always been primarily home use and internet servers. I think big multiuser systems went out of fashion with Solaris. Well, I suppose corporate workstations need user accounts where some of these are set.
- 2 hours
No Linux as such was not, by the time Linux got popular the big multiuser systems were on their way out. I still worked on those in college. But they were SGI, HP-UX and Sequent. Especially the latter were huge systems.
But these fields were just a clone of what was in the original Unix systems.
What a pointless drama article this is.
Yep. The crypto ticker at the bottom of the page is the cherry on top!
- 18 minutes
It’s brigading harassment on a volunteer dev, the post should be nuked this is just doxxing for ad revenue… disgusting
- 7 hours
That isn’t really the point. All this nonsense happened without community discussion beforehand.
- 3 hours
Discussions happen after the PRs in most projects, because there is no point discussing code that ain’t there.
- 5 hours
Who are the community employing? Why do they need consulting before code changes are made?
I think what ze’s saying is https://mikemcquaid.com/open-source-maintainers-owe-you-nothing/ . the nature of open source—atl in accord with the hacker ethic—is that everything is just a passion project, there is no responsibility to not make bad decisions, and bad decisions result in decreased adoption and lost trust. after all, open source has always been about making a new alternative because existing solutions are bad.
- 19 minutes
So we aren’t supposed to talk about or react to said bad decisions? Come on.
Do you want to post your real name and place of work online for everyone to see or do you understand why that kind of action is dangerous and wrong?
nah as an anarchist i am against silence. i’m just saying that in our capitalist society open source maintainers do not in fact have responsibility to the community, only to their market share, and this works slightly less dysfunctionally than proprietary because come what may the opposition may fork it. but that and the transparency and the ability to volunteer your labor for them are the only things that open source does guarantee.
- sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.worksEnglish7 hours
I have read the git thread related to the merge request.
I don’t see what’s the big deal. You have a user model that already contain fields like user’s full name, location, … among others and all this developer did was adding yet another optional field called date of birth.
This does nothing to verify user’s age and enforce nothing. They’ve stressed that repeatedly in the comments.
What that does is making it easy for a Linux distro to store user’s birthday - should they wish to do so - and making that bit of info accessible to running apps so that each app can do what it wants with it.
User’s fullname and location are already there which are also optional so what’s the big deal?
- 6 hours
For me the bigger problem is that was done without any community oversight.
Yeah it can be verified for now, but it’s a foot in the door for a braindead law that no one in their right mind would follow.
- 5 hours
Yeah and against the massive outcry in the form of comments, the discussion was locked, and the general opinion was ignored in favor of 2 maintainers and a tool of a dev.
The person who has the most blame here is the lead dev of the project imo.
- 3 hours
Why do you think this was locked? This fucking thread is a mugshot of a dev contributing to an open source project.
- 22 minutes
1000x this.
It doesn’t matter how much you disagree with the change, brigading harassment is gross and should be called out every time someone tries.
This post should be nuked.
- 3 hours
The problem is that Poettering is all in on attestation which is the underpinnings of age verification and remote attestation.
See amutable.com
- 7 hours
Fields like name and location do not have any expectation for the information being valid or accurate (see eg.:
adduser).DOB is different. It comes from a legal expectation that correctness of the information will be enforced somehow. If going by the Colorado and NY law proposals, IIRC, by using biometrics at the time of system install.
not even said laws have an expectation that the date of birth provided would be accurate. the colorado bill just says “require[] an account holder to indicate” and never defines “indicate”, the ny bill says “request an age category signal” and never defines “signal”, so i assume they’re like the california law which has been verified to be just “enter your date of birth in this text field/dropdown and we’ll trust you girl”. i don’t think any of that involves biometrics
there’s no alien intelligence or protocol specification in systemd that ensures or says the dob field must be accurate either
- 3 hours
Exactly. There’s a massive thread on Mastodon where everybody is panicking about this, but it’s a nothing burger if ever there was one.
Sure, the timing and comments suggest it’s meant for legal compliance, but if that’s what it does, it does it by keeping full control in the hands of the user, where it should be.
- 20 minutes
If anyone is panicking, ask them how they feel about the ‘RealName’ field that has been in systemd for years (since the beginning?)
This is fake controversy and now it’s at the point where people are spreading articles, like the OP, brigading people into harassing a systemd developer.
- 6 hours
I don’t see how engaging in malicious compliance is being a useful idiot. Implementing the entire surveillance mechanism free of charge, that I would call being a useful idiot.
Purposefully implementing a broken feature to satisfy the letter of the law, while preserving the user’s ability to avoid the surveillance mechanism is certainly not that.
- 5 hours
I want him to do nothing.
He doesn’t work for a distribution or a system integrator. He isn’t the maintainer for systemd either. He’s a random contributor, and he works for a cloud company that doesn’t make or sell the sort of devices these laws apply to.
These age verification laws did not require Dylan Taylor to take any actions. He did that all on his own.
- 17 minutes
So, does the law require this doxxing and brigading harassment or is this something that you’re doing for fun?
- 4 hours
And how exactly would that be breaking the law?
Systemd isn’t an operating system provider and has no legal obligation to make any change.
- 6 hours
Who is going to arrest/fine FOSS developers for not doing anything about that? Would Brazil and US states go after uuuh, the systemd developers? What about distros not using systemd, like Slackware. Who is ultimately responsible for a collaborative project? Are they gonna send the police after Torvalds?
Plus, other countries don’t have this obligation.
All that dev had to do is nothing. Instead he chose to comply with something that was never asked.
- 7 hours
There’s no need to follow an unjust law, nor a law that makes you an unethical person.
“Software not for distribution or use in California” (aka: “offer void in Nebraska”) is a perfectly valid compliance, btw.
- 6 hours
The beauty of FOSS is that if people want, they can just fork it and keep what they don’t like out
