In March of 2026,
systemd, the init system that boots most modern Linux distributions, merged a pull request adding abirthDatefield to its user database.The stated purpose was compliance with California's AB-1043, Colorado's SB26-051, and Brazil's Lei 15.211/2025, a wave of age verification laws requiring operating systems to collect birth dates from users at account setup, then feed that data to app stores via a real-time API...
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...
Nobody paid him to do this. He's a cloud engineer who read the law and decided someone needed to implement it...
The pattern HN picked up immediately... That's the true believer pattern... Every objection the community raised went nowhere: that this enables surveillance infrastructure, that lying is trivially easy, that the laws themselves are unconstitutional overreach...
The open source community has always relied on the assumption that contributors act in good faith toward user freedom...
The community needs to recognize the pattern before the PR opens, not after.
Source: The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification Into Linux
This is bullshit doxxing of an opensource contributor to demonize him for an innocuous contribution. It’s not right and Lobste.rs removed it for good reason.
How is it doxxing if his profile is fucking public?
Do you even know what that word means?
If they did, I do get the rationale behind a Community as Lobsters, who try to express their tolerance and some kind of understanding. Who do not want to associate themselves with stance against Microsoft and certain Linux maintainers. It's understood.
Meanwhile, I do not agree this being "bulls*it", sorry. The person who tries to affect a substantial number of people, or likely the third of Earth's environments, a person who does indeed implement a feature that decreases the privacy of numerous people, where their very operating system tells everyone their birth date (as if "doxxing" indeed)... should have asked the very world prior changes, and considered the magnitude of impact, or a backfire from people who believe in fair and personal life where you control your machines in your environment, and not vice-versa.
Those who don't use Systemd, probably won't bother, but even Valve's Steam Deck has it.
If you did consider only people names, which were already public, please do consider the information and effort of the article author once more.
The article doesn't include just a few already public personal details, but also important historical events, comparisons of accountability of people involved, great presentation of issues accumulated within a scoped time event, and not to mention warnings for the future or "good reason".
Drop this line here, no point in speculating what people might want to use it for, just define what it is
Source: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954#discussion_r2955885459
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- "Privacy is not an option, and it shouldn't be the price we pay for just getting out on the internet." ~ Gary Kovacs
- "I don't know why people are so keen to put the details of their private life in public; they forget that invisibility is a superpower." ~ Banksy
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