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The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification Into Linux
(www.sambent.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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Linux
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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.
What do you mean. It’s done in public
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.
Why do you think this was locked? This fucking thread is a mugshot of a dev contributing to an open source project.
So they knew it was against the community and went right ahead?
There wouldn't be "this" thread if they had taken the community into consideration.
This isn't the gotcha you think it is. That "engineer" is ~~contributing~~ bullhorning this bullshit on multiple Linux based repositories.
The community is not against compliance, a loud minority is. The implementation is not where discussion needs to happen, as any software dev that had to implement shit they did not agree on, it rarely has a positive effect at this level
Blaming the victim, beautiful.
~~The thread was discussing age verification from what I read, but I read it when it was already locked.~~ I do not think harassment of the dev is appropriate and the article and this post is also needles drama imo. But the issue of age verification itself I think should be discussed by the community and not just accepted by one dictator.
Edit: I misread that you were talking about the GH thread. Yeah this thread is kinda shit, but discussion on how and if age verification should be done is important imo.
I completely agree.
I'm very against these age verification laws... but I focus my efforts on the politicians and companies like Meta who are actually trying to implement them.
This thread is a doxxing and harrasment campaign and should have been deleted in the first hour.
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.
The problem is that Poettering is all in on attestation which is the underpinnings of age verification and remote attestation.
See amutable.com
Poettering has always been a piece of shit.
POS or not this is a reoccurring problem with open source. The benevolent dictator for life. Hopefully we can grow past it in the coming years.
Fork it and create a democratic project, nobody is stopping you. Wanna know projects that are very open and democratic? FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Wanna know why they aren't as popular as linux?
Python also dealt with this problem and seem to be doing fine.