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Inside the Systemd Age Verification Debate: Developer Responds to Criticism (itsfoss.com)

submitted 2 months ago by cm0002@europe.pub to c/linux@programming.dev

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Dylan M. Taylor is not a household name in the Linux world. At least, he wasn’t until recently.

The software engineer and longtime open source contributor has quietly built a respectable track record over the years: writing Python code for the Arch Linux installer, maintaining packages for NixOS, and contributing CI/CD pipelines to various FOSS projects.

But a recent change he made to systemd has pushed him into the spotlight, along with a wave of intense debate.

At the center of the controversy is a seemingly simple addition Dylan made: an optional birthDate field in systemd’s user database.

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[-] fruitcantfly@programming.dev 1 points 2 months ago

It's not just server-side: A lot of fingerprinting happens client-side, for example using a canvas to check what features your graphics card supports. You can see this in action via services like https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ or https://amiunique.org/

[-] IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 months ago

That's not the fingerprinting happening client side, that's just information supply. Fingerprinting is about what the server does with that information.

[-] Zink@programming.dev 0 points 2 months ago

Yeah, but the countermeasures are client-side because that's what you can control. And some kind FOSS devs out there make it easy to start somewhere decent.

Sent from my LibreWolf

this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026

134 points (91.9% liked)

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