Nobody gives a fuck about your weaseling technicalities. The salient fact is that this change was made in order to "comply in advance" with totalitarian fuckery. It SIGNALS POLITICAL SUPPORT for it, and that's not okay!
I studied at the PR in question and that's not the conclusion I arrive at. Let me try to explain how this looks to me.
Also keep in mind, I do think we absolutely need to keep the political pressure on and push back on identity-gating policies with all our collective might. In that light the PR itself does the two things I'd absolutely require here: one, it allows the user to put whatever value they want in that field, including none at all, and two, it disallows all apps from reading that field without the user's active permission.
Basically it's a superficially valid implementation of a bullshit requirement that still leaves all the power in the user's hands and therefore renders the requirement meaningless. Or in other words, a huge middle finger to the proponents of age-checking.
Mind you, I feel there's also value in loud non-compliance and I'm glad some are taking that road -- keep it up, folks. But I'm leery of demands that only one single approach be taken. This needs to be fought on every front we can. And to me the PR in question reads like an effective defensive move.
Couldn't reply to me pointing out that this was merged, and was stated to be explicitly to support age verification laws, so you had to lie about it as a meme instead.
Because thats what youre doing right now, lying and spreading misinformation. You can admit it.
"It is too late, for I have already straw-manned your argument in a meme"
source? i mean you went through the effort to post a meme about it at least include the relevant information
Storing a users birthday is useful metadata anyway. I'm surprised it wasn't stored before.
The age isn't verified is any way. You can set it to the 1800s for all it cares
This is not very 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 of you.
How does one enter an older DOB without causing an underflow?
Implement it as a s64 instead of a u64. Ugh, honestly. Back when it was a 32 bit integer it made sense to make it unsigned because we'd have run out of numbers by now otherwise. But as of the advent of 64 bit unix time values there's really no reason not to implement it as a signed value smh
your argument is an oxymoron. if the data is useful meta data, but the user can just put what ever they want as the date then it’s not storeing useful data. and that means it should not exist.
unless the point is to use it in the future where the user can’t enter what ever they want and thus legitimizes all the commotion.
You can also store an email there, so it can be found by other programs, but you can also leave it blank, or enter a fake email if you don't want your email to be stored.
Given the open nature of Linux, I find it hard to believe they can lock it down like that.
Yeah like the email address and the full name of the user.
... What do you mean it's blank for 99% of users?
Email address and name are actually useful for network environments of a system admin needs to know who is the user behind a process or something. How old the user is is complete useless.
How is that useful information? To what purpose?
Auto-filling those "you must be at least X old to access this content" inputs could be one? Eg Steam could skip that page directly when accessing 18+ games.
I suppose you could ask the same for the realName and location fields that are already in systemd.
Well I still don't dang like it I'll tell you hwat.
There's a bunch of idiots looking to crucify someone over this. This fucking witchhunt bullshit is really shaking my faith in the basic goodness of the Linux community. Trying to make some dev that put a line of code in systemd into a pariah isn't a good look for opensource.
Edit: 4 fuckwits and counting that don't have the courage to show their usernames by telling me why I'm wrong to despise pitchfork mobs.
You won't listen anyway. Just look at your language, calling us idiots and fuckwits while pretending you're the level-headed one.
There's enough comments under just this meme and every single discussion on this topic explaining why that change is a direct attack on privacy and privacy being the reason why many of us chose Linux.
Just because one idiot state in the US changes a law doesn't mean the entire world needs to follow. Fuck em.
There’s a disconnect over this in that one side looks at the present data and other takes a possible result from that into account. (dividing people into groups…for the sake of argument ok?)
Now from strictly an IT perspective, this is indeed pretty meaningless. One line of code that stores one piece of data. Who cares right?
From the other side you take the very hot topics of politics and privacy into account (two things that are also very front and center with most of the Lemmy crowd afaik).
Because it can start by just one line of code but where will it end? Personally I’d rather be over cautious and assume the worst.
I mean look at the story of cookies. Back in the 90’s they were a small benign piece of data and look how that turned out. Our entire world is influenced by it today to great extend.
Personally I’d rather be overly cautious.
I found it extremely funny when people started asking for systemd replacements, of all things, after systemd added the ability to store a birth date.
Hell no, we didn't fall for anything. This is a real problem with real and far-reaching consequences, associated to multiple legislative attacks against privacy etc, pushed by corporates and religious groups.
YOU fell for the "think of the children" lie and "It's just a text field" BS. No, this is far worse than just a text field.
Hint: :q!
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