systemd starting to store birthDate

unixuser · Yesterday 09:38:54

...to suits american (and brazilian) laws.

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954

No systemd distro soon illegals ? lol

tux_99 · Yesterday 12:53:46

I'm not surprised that they would do that since systemd is essentially a corporate IBM/Redhat project and corporations of course will comply (corporations seem to be the drivers behind this anyway, I guess the ultimate aim is that doing anything on the internet without a verified ID tied to some government issued digital ID will be impossible, basically cinese-style total surveillance and social scoring...).

The problems for us without systemd will start when applications such as Firefox will start depending on systemd for this and possibly refuse to work without it ...

That will mean either patching these apps or creating something equivalent outside systemd to comply.

I would rather stop using the internet (or at least anything I can't access without this crap) than comply.

Last edited by tux_99 (Yesterday 13:01:05)

Duke Nukem · Yesterday 13:49:54

This is related to my post in the Devuan sub-forum which asked what Devuan was doing about this issue, if anything.
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=62686

Verifying your entire ID may come later, but the immediate concern is just about age verification which became required at OS level in Brazil just a few days ago and will be required in some US states from some months ahead (from 2027 onwards?). I can imagine the rest of the world following - it would happen by default.

I don't think that Firefox will refuse to work without a verified age flag in your OS, instead it will only let you open a web page with the lowest age rating. There is talk of age bands like 0-13, 13-15, 15-18 and >18, and all web pages and software will need to be age rated for this system to work, like films are. You be unable to download software above your age rating, which is likely to apply to games. If your OS cannot return an age rating when interrogated for it, it will assume you are in the lowest age band.

Systemd may be one way of implementing age rating, but it cannot be the only way because Windows, MacOS also need to comply.

As for who is behind this, the consensus seems to be Meta. Currently in the UK, the effect (since July 2025) of the age verification required by the Online Safety Act is that individual websites are requiring verification on a user-by-user basis. You are supposed to send a shot of you passport, driving licence, or give your credit card details to any site you visit that wants to see it - even harmless hobby websites are doing this because they are scared, not just p0rn sites. These sites are employing contractors, typically in India, to look though your passport etc (no security risk there then), and it costs them money. Meta don't want that expense which is why they want the verification to be shifted to the OS level.

This is my understanding of where we are heading, but I hope I'm wrong. This will be the end of the free internet and of small and amateur hobby websites because of the cost and bureaucracy of getting an age rating. The web will shrink into walled controlled gardens like Facebook, and the former Compuserve and MSN.

EDX-0 · Yesterday 13:51:21

is not like a compliant daemon for the american laws is any hard to write, there's this one for example https://github.com/majestrate/aged

and i may write my own just in case that goes a step further and sets a default birthday if none exists, i just haven't decided yet if the default should be september 11 2001 or january 20 1953, Jeffrey Epstein's birthday, as it seems everyone pushing for age verification online is either a friend, client or investor of jeffrey epstein.

edit: i may go with the Jeffrey Epstein birthday, what i'm worriying more about is the name for the daemon, which sounds better "agestein-island" or "agestein-daemon" ?

edit: just thought another one "Virtual Jeffrey Epstein Age Daemon" whichs shortens to vjead

Last edited by EDX-0 (Yesterday 15:05:28)

trinidad · Yesterday 15:47:09

August 9 1945. MS, Google and Apple are never going to surrender their access to user data.

TC

Last edited by trinidad (Yesterday 15:49:11)

EDX-0 · Yesterday 16:48:33

nah, the age verification daemon must be themed after jeffrey epstein, there's no one whom governments and age verification pushers will trust more on werether someone is underage or not than jeffrey epstein, with only a "virtual" jeffrey epstein coming in second in that level of trust.

tux_99 · Yesterday 17:19:30

Any date you choose will be a persistent parameter that will allow fingerprinting and therefore together with other parameters tracking you.

The only date of birth that would avoid this is one that gets randomly generated each time it's requested (or at least at each reboot), so it's never the same date.

But it should be obvious to anyone that the current legislation is only an initial stepping stone since the date can be faked easily, within a year or two the laws will be changed to allow only verified dates that are cryptographically signed by some authority so that you can no longer fake it.

This is only to get people used to the idea, so they can expand upon it in the coming years. Classic boiling the frog slowly strategy.

Last edited by tux_99 (Yesterday 17:20:32)

blackhole · Yesterday 18:27:27

This is clearly the result of corporate lobbying by "Big Tech" to push much of the world onto Microsoft, google, Apple, etc, accounts.

As you can see, the systemd sellouts are more than willing to implement this, but ultimately, just as they sold out when it came to secureboot, the likes of IBM/Red Hat and Canonical will sell out again. The Linux Foundation sold their souls many years ago - so I can honestly see "Sign into Ubuntu with your Microsoft account" eventually becoming a reality.

The aim here is "prove you're an adult" and to do that they will get your data and track all of your activity - that's the sad reality of where this is going. "The children" is, as ever, the pretext, coming from billionaires who have only ever cared about profit and never about children, nor anyone else for that matter.

Last edited by blackhole (Yesterday 18:28:40)

EDX-0 · Yesterday 18:41:03

oh government officials and billionares care for children, but only for the children they can use to satisfy their depravity, after all government and tech are ruled by the epstein class.

greenjeans · Yesterday 20:24:35

oh government officials and billionares care for children, but only for the children they can use to satisfy their depravity, after all government and tech are ruled by the epstein class.

Too true. The idea that Cali politicians and the wealthy that own them actually care about children would be laughable if it weren't so horrible and evil.

Zero chance i'll comply with their absurd demands, and any crap that comes from upstream with unwanted big brother garbage in it will get chopped on and re-written before it gets installed on one of my machines.

ruenoak · Yesterday 22:34:48

The greater concern that I see with the current age attestation/verification laws that are popping up all over the place, is they are spreading like a virus. with out a lot of push back. As these laws become more common and enforced, I think we will see FOSS projects either comply by force or shutdown. This is a great way to finally extinguish that pesky GNU/Linux thing. I add GNU here because it is the GNU bit that these big tech companies don't like, and I am including some big Linux companies in this group too. The rise of the likes of 'Microsoft loves Opensource' is just free-washing in my mind. FOSS is great when you can use a permissive license to pull the rug out from you at any point in time.

Anyway I'm going off track a bit here but, this is my theory from observation of course, I don't have the evidence to back it up, so it will remain a theory floating across the either of space and time with all the other theories out there.

What I do know is, none of us are immune to these nefarious laws. So how do we fight them? Education, We need to educate the people that It's is not about saving the children, It's about slow but assured surveillance at a thousand paper-cuts!
A politician's number one goal is to stay in power, and to do that it's a popularity contest, so if they are seen to be backing a very unpopular bill by the masses, they will probably back down.

Education! It works.

laurie_dev1 · Yesterday 23:26:27

Is the long term goal a case of locking kids out of a computer or giving them a watered down (youtube for kids) versions of operating systems and surveilling everyone who uses operating systems? I think the latter is true and they couldn't care less what kids get up to on computers. Big tech must not like the fact that people are anonymous online and want to keep it that way, they cant sell your data when they dont know who you are, what you buy and what you do.

rations · Today 00:57:28

You will own nothing and be depressed.

golinux · Today 01:06:03

Or . . . perhaps "less" is more" and "depression" is a choice . . .

blackhole · Today 09:29:02

rurnoak wrote:

The rise of the likes of 'Microsoft loves Opensource' is just free-washing in my mind. FOSS is great when you can use a permissive license to pull the rug out from you at any point in time.

Microsoft are the same. They changed their tactics in response to the internet revolution and the fact that most people "online" are using a smartphone. There is no longer any sense in MS solely persuing Linux or other FOSS via patent trolling tactics (though it still goes on by proxy) - it has reverted to EEE tactics and is playing the long game.

While I see your point on permissive licences, that's the common fallacy to adopt a mindset that those licences are corporate friendly. It's not so black and white. OpenBSD for example is permissive licenced and has far less corporate influence and control when compared to e.g. the Linux kernel, gnome or systemd, which are all funded, managed/influenced and/or developed by "Big Tech".

I don't think it's as simple as the licencing indicating where the intentions lie or of any affilations.

Licences can be abused strategically. While the MIT licence may be used for one project for a valid reason, the "viral" nature of GPL v3 may be exploited, as a means to an end (e.g. forcing potential competitors to keep their changes open). If code, developed by a corporate entity, is released under a permissive licence, a competitor can equally utilise that, turn it proprietary and close it off. They would not be able to under GPL. So GPL is "pro business" in that respect. So in reality, business favours closed proprietary code first and foremost - but that costs money. They cab throw what amounts to peanuts at the LF and get something which is a "good enough" replacement for something like AIX, HP-UX, etc.

Last edited by blackhole (Today 09:30:32)

Duke Nukem · Today 13:42:11

What is amazing is the short notice that Brazil gave to requiring an age indicator in operating systems. In fact I don't think they did give any "notice", they just passed a law that required it to be done within a few weeks. Perhaps they did give notice to Microsoft, Apple and even Canonical, but even if they did I can't imagine they did to the likes of Knoppix, Slackware, SystemRescue, DamnSmall, the other 400 minor distros - or Devuan.

I heard that Brazil acted as fast as it did in a knee jerk reaction to a particular video that has gone viral on the web and was displeasing to the Brazillian government. Does anyone know if this is true, and if so what it was about? It must have been a heck of a video.

I would have thought that any age indicator in the OS would need to be in an agreed format for websites to read. Is anyone aware of any industry group working on this? Or will it just be left to Microsoft to set a de-facto standard that everyone else must follow (if MS even allow that to be possible), or be locked out. I can just imagine MS devising a system that involves age verification via the MS mothership, so you need an MS account even if you are on Linux and MS can record every website you visit.

blackhole · Today 14:25:16

Meta seems to be heavily involved in, if not directly instigating this:

https://www.gadgetreview.com/reddit-use … ation-tech

Considering Meta are footing the bill for age verification on their own platform, this does make sense... pusing it into the core OS will relieve them of all but the application developers obligation: to read the age verification data from the OS. This massively lets them off the hook by shifting that to the OS level.

So any who thought this kind of corporate skullduggery was "conspiracy nonsense"', may want to have a rethink.

However, I suspect that the "way forward" will be MS, google, Apple, etc accounts. So though the linked article portrays Apple and google as the targets, I'm not sure that either will complain at being forced to capture this data. Oddly the article refers to phones, but not PCs, nor are Microsoft mentioned.

Last edited by blackhole (Today 14:28:31)

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#1 Yesterday 09:38:54

systemd starting to store birthDate

#2 Yesterday 12:53:46

Re: systemd starting to store birthDate

#3 Yesterday 13:49:54

Re: systemd starting to store birthDate

#4 Yesterday 13:51:21

Re: systemd starting to store birthDate

#5 Yesterday 15:47:09

Re: systemd starting to store birthDate

#6 Yesterday 16:48:33

Re: systemd starting to store birthDate

#7 Yesterday 17:19:30

Re: systemd starting to store birthDate

#8 Yesterday 18:27:27

Re: systemd starting to store birthDate

#9 Yesterday 18:41:03

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#10 Yesterday 20:24:35

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#11 Yesterday 22:34:48

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#12 Yesterday 23:26:27

Re: systemd starting to store birthDate

#13 Today 00:57:28

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#14 Today 01:06:03

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#15 Today 09:29:02

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#16 Today 13:42:11

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#17 Today 14:25:16

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