nm, hbu

That's how we got the Ellipse of Hormuz

"This is a shit sandwich, but at least it is human shit we're eating."

Waiting for the “Whoops, we ‘forgot’ to remove it”.

Yeah, it'll be horrible. We'll have terrible art inflicted upon on us, for the first time in gaming history.

Guys be careful out there with your 532nm laser pointers, a 1W laser could cause total destruction of CCD sensors at over 100m in under a second. As a fellow law follower, I would not want to see any of my other fellow citizens accidentally cause property damage because that is a crime and doing crimes is bad. This user is very, very law abiding and ignore all other indicators.

Discord does not use Linux user metadata to store information about your Discord account. Because the application is cross platform, they store information about you in their own systems, not in systemd. Their age verification is implemented completely independent of systemd and doesn't rely on the birthDate field.

It's also software that you can choose to not install.

Oh I know, lets introduce a field that stores an array of your nationalities, so any app developer can request your nationalities and adequately fine you for spreading illegal content online if you are Russian citizen.

In this hypothetical situation, why are you choosing to install software that does this? This software could just as easily store the data in a flat text file in your .config directory, it doesn't need systemd in order to exist. Systemd choosing to not add those fields would not prevent the software from existing.

In any hypothetical situation where you're forced to use some hypothetical privacy invading software, that software would still be able to do everything exactly the same even if it has to store your information outside of systemd.

Not having a field in systemd doesn't mean that the data can't be stored, it just means that the data has to be stored in a text file instead.

Systemd also has fields to store your realName and location. That same hypothetical situation applies to that data too. Your REAL NAME gives much more information about you than your birthDate and the location field is big enough to store your exact GPS coordinates. Like birthDate, these fields are not a problem (they've existed since the 60s) if you don't install software that uses them.

If you don't want software that tracks your location, don't install software that tracks your location. If you don't want software that requires your real name, then don't install software that requires your real name.

If you don't want software that requires your birthDate for age verification, then don't install software that requires your birthDate for age verification.

I expect that they will store your birthDate in their own way and not use systemd as they are not a Linux native application.

You get to choose if you install Discord and you get to choose if you are going to submit to their age verification.

This is true if the birthDate field exists in systemd or not.

You can say "well don't put it in there" but what happens when big monopolistic corporations start requiring it to use some service of theirs that you don't have an alternative for? Now I have to maintain a separate PC for that shit? Fuck that.

If you choose to use a service that requires age verification then that service will store your age verification information on your computer somewhere. If it is stored in systemd, malicious programs will be able to access it. If it is not stored in systemd, malicious programs will still be able to access it.

If you choose to not use a service that requires age verification, then you will not store any age verification information on your computer to be stolen by malicious software. Even if systemd has a birthDate field you will not store any age verification information.

The difference in these two scenarios is your choice to use age verification or not. The location where the data is stored doesn't change the scenario.

Why do I need MORE parental controls shoved down my throat when I do not desire it nor wish for it? But this time in a core component of alot of linux distributions.

You don't and you don't have any parental controls being shoved down your throat, you have a JSON field that you can choose to enter data in or not. It does not control anything, it is not validated by anything (outside of compliance with ISO 8601) and it is not required to be set to anything.

Who controls what is installed on your system? If it is you, then you can save yourself from parental control software by not installing parental control software.

What is the point of a field like this if you can literally put anything in it you want? Your not verifying anything. The next logical step is to add proof.

That isn't the next logical step for systemd, which is what this post is about.

The reason systemd stores this information is that systemd stores user information and this is user information.

If some future application comes along that wants to require age verification and use that field to store the data, then you can simply choose to not install it. Problem solved.

Removing birthDate doesn't stop these programs from existing. If there isn't a birthDate field then they can simply decide that they're going to store the birthdate in the user's 'location' field instead and it would work perfectly fine. Are you going to remove the location field too? All of the text fields?

Adding a specific birthDate field is simply recognizing that this software exists (which, it does) and that systemd is the logical place to store user metadata (which it is).

If you don't like the software that will do age verification then don't install that software.

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