ageless arch

[scarlet agate]

i will never comply.

Stay free, stay private, stay secure. Your system should not need your identity to function.

There is now agelessd and agelessd-flagrant which pull and run the become-ageless.sh script on arch so you can easily refuse age check/storage compliancy. They've both been packaged neatly in order to be reversible if you ever choose to uninstall.

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/agelessd
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/agelessd-flagrant

And I've update the website to include notes on these, as well as quick instructions on using them. There is also now "goals" present on the page, as well as progress in them. https://agelessarch.com/

[umbral nimbus]

i wish you did this like 2 weeks age before i installed agelesslinux on arch

cool project

[scarlet agate]

it'll probably merge or become more than agelesslinux depending on how things go. Currently in talks with the dev of that project on things :P

[umbral nimbus]

cool

keep it up

[quaint dirge]

If you make ageless arch iso you'll need to fork archinstall too
that is depending on if Arch is gonna lick the boots and merge the MR

[analog lintel]

yo deadass how fucking difficult is it to have a california-only fork that has the age verification shit like if it HAS to be forked why cant it be the smaller population that has to deal with it why should the rest of the fucking world have to deal with this bs
(this is ignoring the whole age verification on os shouldnt even be a thing in the first place)

[scarlet agate]

bc there's microslop and other company employees pushing for this kind of stuff in FOSS right now

[scarlet agate]

already aware lol

[umbral nimbus]

making a custom archiso is sooooo ez

but idk how to use custom repos on it

[quaint dirge]

in the agelessd package, maybe in updates.hook it should restore lsb-release and other unnecessary changes too?

otherwise /etc/lsb-release will get replaced every update
or maybe you should patch out these parts in become-ageless.sh

[umbral nimbus]

you need custom repos to get calamares working anyways

[warm dirge]

that is a really nice project

[ember wharf]

isnt arch already not forcing you to verify age

[umbral nimbus]

how are they even gonna implement that. with the bootloader interface? lol

[scarlet agate]

easy as well

[scarlet agate]

what does that release file even contain

[scarlet agate]

arch doesn't control systemd or Wayland and kde

[quaint dirge]

lsb-release
store the distro names and other information
shouldnt be touched afaik

[scarlet agate]

archiso is really convenient for making little tool live oses or even arch based distros I love it

[scarlet agate]

if the script touches it I'm gonna leave it at that and try to preserve what ever it does untill it's removed. I didn't make the script and that would be an upstream complaint to open and discuss there lol

[quaint dirge]

well that modification is bascially changing your os's name to Ageless Linux

[scarlet agate]

In my version it just never existed

[quaint dirge]

I dont think it's good to do that

[scarlet agate]

which breaks fetch I noticed 😭

[quaint dirge]

maybe we should avoid that change

[scarlet agate]

But it's an extra fuck you to any app checking that file to collect your data and identify you

[scarlet agate]

I'll ask them ig

[quaint dirge]

not really

tbh

[scarlet agate]

apps check your os name

[quaint dirge]

many people still want to show their distro

[quaint dirge]

it doesnt matter

that's some public info, lsb-release is world wide readable for a reason

[scarlet agate]

I prefer to do it quieter and just remove the bad feature which is what I'm doing

[quaint dirge]

it's like changing your distro's branding

[umbral nimbus]

there are different entries for thar

you change the name only, not the id (ID=arch)

[scarlet agate]

agelessd just uses the script from ageless Linux which isn't up to me like ageless arch is

[quaint dirge]

ik os-release
but lsb-release is also used

[umbral nimbus]

theres sure entries for that too

[scarlet agate]

The biggest problem we'll need to discuss is what to do when apps start crashing over not being able to query a non existent birthday field in your system

[quaint dirge]

understandable, but I mean a patch to the script(like other arch packages) would work

[scarlet agate]

Personally, I say fuck those apps and I will let them crash and stop using them. 😭

[quaint dirge]

well, isnt agelessd intended to respond with error for every request

[umbral nimbus]

you cant remove the field anyways. ageless-linux just enterred there UNKNOWN or smth iirc

[scarlet agate]

im having to maintain like 20 things mostly by myself for this but like I said, I'll ask them about it.

[quaint dirge]

(personally I'd recommand respond 9999 for every user but error/UNKNOWN also works)

[scarlet agate]

no mine removes the field

[umbral nimbus]

why do we need agelessd

[umbral nimbus]

then you need to fork systemd too

[scarlet agate]

to refuse complying with age laws

[scarlet agate]

already did

already removed it

[umbral nimbus]

oh lol

[scarlet agate]

already forked Wayland and kde shit to remove it there too

[quaint dirge]

did they add this???

[scarlet agate]

it can easily be automated, git revert is powerful

[umbral nimbus]

btw just relised, 100% apps now depend on systemd

[scarlet agate]

kde did lol

[quaint dirge]

I dont even know kde is adding this

[quaint dirge]

wtf

what's the MR

what they did?

[scarlet agate]

mostly yeah, a lot of closed sourced ones just crash

[scarlet agate]

there's a file with age hooks or some shit that was merged

[quaint dirge]

I'm using MATE so I wasnt monitoring it

[quaint dirge]

omfg it's Dylan again isnt it

do you have the MR link?

[scarlet agate]

also idk if I shared this but here :3

https://codeberg.org/Queer-Coded-LGBTQ/grep-age

easily check for age slop in your stuff

[quaint dirge]

It's so quick, there must be some entity pushing it

[scarlet agate]

Welcome to freedesktop 🥀

[scarlet agate]

Mostly bluca and lenart in systemd for some reason, then some same people are pushing it in kde

[quaint dirge]

Never used kde but never knew they were this bad

[scarlet agate]

lemme find a link

[scarlet agate]

Wayland is also stolen if you weren't aware lol

[umbral nimbus]

it would be more useful if it checked for the actual code and greping functions

[quaint dirge]

I dont care about wayland but still this is getting stupidly ridiculous

another reason to avoid wayland somehow

[umbral nimbus]

theyre not bad, they just ran out of ideas at this point. the full KDE is ~17GB

[quaint dirge]

lol

[umbral nimbus]

they have tea party planning apps and shit

[quaint dirge]

meanwhile MATE works well with only ~500MB consumed(without theme)

[umbral nimbus]

im on hyprland

[quaint dirge]

wait so what's merged in wayland?

what's even necessary to change in wayland to meet age requirement???

[umbral nimbus]

ai (on-screen) porn detection

idk

and active censor boxes (customisable form the config)

[quaint dirge]

huh????

what the actual hell

[umbral nimbus]

nah jk

theresnt rlly much they can do

[quaint dirge]

ok

[scarlet agate]

not merged in Wayland yet but they were discussing it on the forums then nuked the entire thing for some reason. Probably hid the discussion. they were arguing about adding a age hook on Wayland for some fucking reason

[scarlet agate]

can you not

[quaint dirge]

I just recall wayland doesnt even allow screenshot lmao

[scarlet agate]

Although there is a real issue with adding ai detection to 3d printers right now

[umbral nimbus]

bro if linux gets banned, after like a month, the whole internet will be hacked

[scarlet agate]

you're a bit behind then lmao

[umbral nimbus]

mb

[scarlet agate]

also Wayland is just the compositor that depends on the DE or WM

[quaint dirge]

well I'm not using wayland and not gonna move so

[quaint dirge]

I know

[quaint dirge]

so probably discussion is in their freedesktop discord

[scarlet agate]

kde login manager has some systemd integration file that uses the age field was the problem

can't find it on my phone rn

[scarlet agate]

please don't ignore the problem though lol we need everyone

[quaint dirge]

understandable

so these things just happened in like this week?

it's weirdly fast

[umbral nimbus]

the law is gonna chrash on itself anyways (i hope inshaallah)

[quaint dirge]

is there any possibility for the CA law getting cancelled?

They dont even know what they are talkinv about

[scarlet agate]

yep

and they usually happen to work at microsoft or openai

😭

[quaint dirge]

The brazil one, well, I dont even know much about it and I surely have no hope on their justice system

[scarlet agate]

the people pushing this shit in open source work for the companies that funded the age law bullshit

[quaint dirge]

ah I c

[quaint dirge]

And make it everyone else's problem

[scarlet agate]

yep

[umbral nimbus]

some eu countries have their own linux distro. no was eu is compying with some US law

[scarlet agate]

Well heres the repo with the script, you can open an issue there if you want to see a change in what it modifies. The reasonable thing would probably be asking for another mode that doesn't modify your os release.

https://github.com/agelesslinux/agelesslinux

[scarlet agate]

eu has chat scanning tho lol

[umbral nimbus]

and if we use that distro at CA, they will need to take action

[scarlet agate]

we now have like nowhere safe

[umbral nimbus]

except tor

[scarlet agate]

They're trying to ban vpns too

[umbral nimbus]

what does even count as vpn, can i ssh and download the thing from there

[scarlet agate]

usa made https://freedom.gov/ for other countries to bypass censorships, and we have states trying to force ISPs to block vpns entirely at the same time

like what

[scarlet agate]

IPs that are known as vpns or proxies

[quaint dirge]

well just tell them to ban us
we dont even ban CA ips for them
after all most distros arent even legal entities in CA

[umbral nimbus]

does my homelab count

[quaint dirge]

That's really, really stupid
censorship is really roaming now

[scarlet agate]

arch32 has to block ips in cali, im tempted to mirror their iso and repos just for california people out of spite

[scarlet agate]

like if you use it as a vpn?

[umbral nimbus]

wait fr, distros arent rlly official things

[umbral nimbus]

yea

i have wireshark set up there

[scarlet agate]

no since its your home IP and not a commercial one. But the vpn is used to circumvent the things your home lab will be blocked from seeing

its about censorship not security

i use tailscale :3

[umbral nimbus]

i also gave profiles to my friends

[quaint dirge]

well I have some good news
I dealt with many different firewalls
I have the way to bypass most censoring efforg

[scarlet agate]

if something blocks me i spin up a droplet server in some other country and use it as a tailscale exit node :3

[quaint dirge]

I guess maybe Xray is gonna become widely used after this

[scarlet agate]

Also remember the problem isn't that its censored so much as that trying to bypass it becomes illegal

even if its horribly implemented and barely blocks anything, it becomes punishable

:c

[scarlet agate]

I2P >:3

[quaint dirge]

so how do they find out lol
it's illegal in many areas and you can see what they could do

[scarlet agate]

I2P gaming servers and stuff will be neat

[quaint dirge]

true

[scarlet agate]

cops will literally seize every electronic in your house where I live if they get a warrant

[quaint dirge]

I'm really sick of governments trying to controll the internet

[scarlet agate]

also we're heading towards requiring ID to access the internet period thats another huge problem

[scarlet agate]

Although most lack the skills to bypass even basic encrption, so use LUKS and you're probably good

[quaint dirge]

that's true
however if you have experience dealing with this kind of censorship
you'll know it's not hard to hide

[scarlet agate]

then we head to having a surveilance state 🥀

[quaint dirge]

yeah

really hope these kind of laws dont get passed but

I dont really know man

[scarlet agate]

we already have some of them lol

Ring cameras are now an AI scanning network for shit

and we have flock cameras in the usa already

[molten egret]

[quaint dirge]

oh that's replaceable isnt it?
And I think there're alternatives which doesnt upload things

[scarlet agate]

rossman funds bypassing that shit though thankfully :3

[quaint dirge]

well it's not gonna change anytime soon tbh

[scarlet agate]

replaceable but not everyones aware lol

[quaint dirge]

yeah that really sucks

really privacy should be teached in school and people should understand without privacy, under a monitoring society there's no freedom and rights

[scarlet agate]

keep fighting it however we can tho pls

[quaint dirge]

yeah

[scarlet agate]

people have made outfits that IR cameras can't handle x3

[scarlet agate]

welp thats the constitutions fault

founding fathers didn't plan for an LLM to scan through an entire neighborhood to predict what toilerpaper brand to recommend to somebody

privacy is implied in the constitution

worst case we'll end up in a revolution over this kind of shit, then hopefully it'll get better

But until then ill continue to surgically remove any stupid code relatign to the age laws and make sure everyone in california can use the code 🔥

[scarlet agate]

I just had an idea to make apps that require systemd run outside of it if users are okay with switching away from it entirely. I can create a little wrapper that spoofs the information, and make sure it's only tied to that app. Then, I can package apps that way so that's it's ready to go. 🔥

that's already been done before but not in a drop in way afaik

[cedar carbon]

could have a pacman repository which provides patched versions of systemd and other complicit packages 🤔

[umbral nimbus]

then youll need to basically recompile the whole arch repo

id make a custom pacman with pacman as a backend (like yay) and add the patches on compile automatically

idk how thats possible tho

[cedar carbon]

no, just systemd (and maybe a few other packages that implement similar things in their code directly), all it needs to do is provide a version that overrides those, it doesn't break any dependencies 🤔

it doesn't need to be a replacement repo, can just be a supplemental one

[umbral nimbus]

but the laws also require all apps to implement it too

even fastfetch

even ls (coreutils)

even feh

[cedar carbon]

that's... not how it works

[umbral nimbus]

isnt the repo a covered appstore

so they need to request the age from systemd

and if the function doesnt exist

ig it wont compile

we can prolly use 100 as a placeholder if the code really depends on it

but then, thr systemd patch would be enough
int getAge() {return 100;}

[scarlet agate]

already doing that lol

[scarlet agate]

no?..

[cedar carbon]

ah neat

[scarlet agate]

you need to look into how pacman worksss

[umbral nimbus]

o u can do this without the 2nd package manager?

right

[cedar carbon]

the birthdate stuff in systemd isn't present in any of the public header files, so it's impossible for stripping it to break compilation, linking, or runtime symbol lookup of anything

[ember wharf]

ohhh

[scarlet agate]

yes sadly someone tried to add at pacman level for no reason

someone shut that down fast though

It is apparently being added to archinstall for some reason

[cedar carbon]

the archinstall one seems especially dumb because based on the PR it looks like a mandatory step there

you can obviously put a fake date, but it forces you to enter some date, you can't leave it empty. which means it's not even optional. a mandatory field is mandatory regardless of whether it is "verified" to be correct

[vale mulch]

the guy who made that PR for archinstall is the same guy who made the PR for the systemd birthDate field, im not surprised in the slightest LOL

[scarlet agate]

they tried adding a fucking age ranges field to PKGBUILD 😭

[vale mulch]

actually i wanted to ask, has the arch linux devs made a statement yet about age verification

or is it still just silence so far

[scarlet agate]

silence ig

[vale mulch]

bruh

[scarlet agate]

idk

I will be voice for arch ig 🔥

[umbral nimbus]

i think hes being funded

[vale mulch]

not surprised

[trim marten]

polyak is still debating tbf and it's arch, why would they comply

[scarlet agate]

are you talking about bluca? like I said most of these problematic people work for some big company

[umbral nimbus]

have you's seen the news about meta

[scarlet agate]

what

that they funded this shit?

[umbral nimbus]

yea

theyve been funding almost all age verification things if i understanded it correctly

[dawn dune]

i hate meta

[scarlet agate]

yep

[vale mulch]

welcome to the club

[scarlet agate]

whatever this non-sense was 😂
https://gitlab.archlinux.org/pacman/pacman/-/merge_requests/353

they act like they'll reconsider it soon for some reason. I have no fucking clue what the MR description says that for

[cedar carbon]

the description sounds like sarcasm tbh

so I can't tell if the PR was opened with the intention of it getting declined

[ember wharf]

is this project legal to use

[umbral nimbus]

not in brazil

its legal in US till like 2027 if no updates

[ember wharf]

What happened to brazil

[neat lance]

Hi. I just found this thread. Author of the PR here. You don't have to believe me, but I'm not being paid for this change, nor is it unreasonable for me to make a PR against archinstall. I have contributed to it greatly in the past. We have different views of how these laws need to be addressed, but I'd like to avoid any conspiracy theories 🙂 I put out a blog post here if you care to read it https://dylanmtaylor.com/posts/2026-03-25-my-first-contribution-to-systemd.html but if you believe there is some sort of conspiracy, I suppose you won't trust anything I have to say.

It's almost 100% true that Meta is behind funding the laws themselves, but not the developers working on PRs for Linux projects.

As long as the discussion stays civil, I'd be happy to answer some questions and clarify things.

As far as whether or not that PR will end up in archinstall, I'm going to defer to the Arch leadership there. I think they're speaking with legal counsel. There's a tracker here: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/project-management/-/work_items/61.

[neat lance]

It's a mandatory field that you can't skip in that PR because the law as written doesn't allow for age to not be checked during user creation. If it were optional it would almost certainly be found to be "non-compliant" and it might as well not even be raised as a PR.

If we say it's "required" if it were to ever come up in court you could claim that you tried to implement proper controls.

Also, obviously you can install Arch Linux without archinstall at all, and obviously there's no way to verify it, nor could there ever really be one in a TUI installer.

[umbral nimbus]

no fucking way 😭 bro actually came

even if you are innocent, this is prolly the worse time to make that pr. i feel kinda bad for u

i mean having that field makes sense if you look at the other fields. id make that pr if i had the same idea but not rn

[neat lance]

I think it was timed somewhat poorly. People clearly have overreacted. It's insane. I expected some push back or iterating through what the final implementation looks like. Sure. Death threats? Dude, that's insane.

They used my doxxed home address to have me visited by Mormon missionaries. I mean come on.

You don't have to believe me, but that's ridiculous

[umbral nimbus]

but ive heard youve been making pr's about age. i didnt rlly check but is that true

[neat lance]

And I literally said the law was stupidly on the PR I opened on archinstall but people conveniently ignore that like it's irrelevant

PRs about age where?

I started out xdg-specs with it being an age prompt not birthdate.

That was dropped

David edmundson is working on a portal for the age range stuff. It's a sensible approach. What you're going to want to do is re-implement that portal to return 18+ every time. No value is a value in opsec.

If everyone else is returning 18+ and you don't, that's in itself trackable

You'd just patch whatever bit checks the storage and return 1900 or 1970 or something every time

[umbral nimbus]

yea ur right too

[long kite]

I'll say this, the internet is fully of terrible people that take it the wrong way. Especially the linux community, We got to have some of the worst people out there in our community that go to the extremes. Instead of going after people and distros, they should be vocalizing their concerns to the state instead which is something I've been doing.

[neat lance]

People on reddit and discord saying I deserve it and I'm just asking for attention is wild. You don't know my intentions and there's no way to prove them one way or another.

And I was called a coward too for making my twitter private. Did you see the quality of discussion there? It was non stop racism and anti semetic remarks and calls for violence and people editing my photos. Insanity.

Like no shit I didn't want to leave my twitter public

I was debating even messaging here because people apparently hate me now

[long kite]

Regardless on how controversial the decision regarding this topic no one deserves death threats. Thats a bigger problem than the age verification topic itself

[neat lance]

If you read what I wrote, and actually consider it, from my point of view can you see how what I'm proposing isn't a horrible thing to implement? I would NEVER make a PR with code I wouldn't personally run on my system

I am also a Linux user.

Also it's 2 AM here. Haven't slept normally in days ...

And consider this ... I am contributing with my real name in the open. If I wanted to make a nefarious change I'd make a new account with a common name like Joseph Smith or something and submit the PR under that. Or make up a name since people contribute anonymous too. Obviously I didn't expect this reaction.

[umbral nimbus]

if we share this convo on diffrent platforms, maybe theyll forgive u? (just maybe)

[neat lance]

Have you seen the conversations I have already had with various folks like Brodie?

[umbral nimbus]

no

[neat lance]

I don't think facts matter at this point

People just want a person to take their frustrations out on

It's easier to punch down than to punch up

Go after the law makers. Put this energy into something actually useful

[umbral nimbus]

dont worry then, theyll forget it in a week or 2

[neat lance]

https://tboteproject.com/git/hekate/microsoft-systemd-findings-public is never okay.

And https://www.sambent.com/the-engineer-who-tried-to-put-age-verification-into-linux-5/ is so gross it's ridiculous

I probably can't even link to the doxxing pastebin but even if I could, I'm not about to say "here's where to conveniently find my address and SSN"

I got this one taken down like 4 times. They keep repeatedly posting it.

So sorry if I sound a little bit jaded... But I've been dealing with some shit.

[umbral nimbus]

...

man

[neat lance]

And they're wasting ingredients at this poor Domino's by placing pickup orders with my info. They called to tell me it was ready. They probably threw out that pizza because I didn't pick it up.

How disgusting is it to hurt unrelated third parties regardless of how you feel about me?

I've had car sales calls from several states away because people have been filling out forms. Gay porn and religious literature sent to my email... someone tried to sign me up for the UK communist party

Like it's so over the top I can't even believe it myself.

And in isolation, it's an optional date field.

Some of the comments are nasty too. "I hope [employer] is down a Senior DevOps Engineer in a few days" style edginess.

Anyway I'm going to try to get some sleep. If this space isn't a shit hole when I wake up I'll try to answer some questions.

Oh, and my name is on the change. It's not a secret in that sense. That's not why mods are removing posts. It's clearly because they can't moderate the comments section and the personal attacks are completely out of hand. Even on Brodie's video the comments are sometimes like "good riddance, he deserves it". Like WTF? That's shameful.

[ember wharf]

Can you somehow track who did some of this

and report them to the police or something

[neat lance]

I've filed a report with the FBI already. As far as tracking? Most likely not, no

https://itsfoss.com/p/94d272ed-a622-4049-8e84-d0ece2c0ca3b/ who knows if this will help or not, but my hope is people realize I'm not some pro-surveillance nutjob.

[quaint dirge]

@neat lance Hi, I understand that you not actually funded by any entities, and I dont support doxxing or hurting anyone IRL. However, for your PR and contribution, I do have some questions.
First of all, why make a PR to systemd and other open source software when age verification havent be adopted by most countries and states yet? I understand that yeah we cant wait until every country require this and then we can add this, but currently afaik only CA and Brazil have this kind of law passed. Do you understand that it's making a law that only affect a small amount of users everyone's problem? I dont know if you recoginize this, but systemd and other software adding age verification related stuffs could be also seen as the industry's approvement for such laws, and could potentially push other countries and states approve such laws? Personally I dont find the idea of making users have to more things in order to not comply with foreign laws reasonable
Secondly I wonder if you understand the age verification laws could be really harmful for users' privacy? Tho residents of CA and Brazil have no choices, users in other areas could avoid the potential danger on their privacy when this age verification isnt generalized and pushed to them? I think by these days' experience(no offense intended, I'm only describing what I think), you understand the importance of privacy right?
The last part is the "but law is law" part, you understand that some laws including this age verification law is only regional and for most users they dont need to comply to it, and they shouldnt be affected at all in the first place? Just because some areas have this kind of laws dont mean the whole open source community should adopt to this. Now here's a question: If some countries and states pass a law that require the user to provide their religion, race and other sensitive information when creating a new account on an operating system, will you still support adding such fields in userdb?

[cedar carbon]

personally I still find the archinstall PR much worse than the systemd one. adding a mandatory data collection step to an installer where the only way to "avoid" it is to put in fake information, to a project that barely has any ties to the US, where it is very dubious whether it would even be subject to the laws in question, due to a jurisdiction that represents, at most, 3% of population. the eagerness to jump at the opportunity to add in these things to codebases where it is extremely unlikely they'd ever be required is still very weird to me

[neat lance]

There is a likelihood individual maintainers would be liable if they are in the US or otherwise subject to us law.

[neat lance]

It's enacted into law in CA and others are pending. It wouldn't surprise me if other countries follow too. Yeah it's shitty to have it affect other countries but the alt. Is to maintain and of some sort and have users specify country during installation, to see if it needs to be required or optional. That's a maintenance nightmare. I don't think the local data stores in this manner is an issue compared to every app and OS rolling their own. I addressed that in my blog post. Companies contribute more to FOSS than unpaid individuals and they are almost certainly not going to be exempt from following it if they do business in those states. That would be deplorable to have religion or race in there, but I think birth date is fine and didn't AD have it as an attribute for like 30 years or something? It's a natural characteristic that every human has. I don't love it but that's how I'm looking at this issue.

I imagine this is going to be extremely divisive. That said, I strongly believe users should be able to do whatever they want on their system

I've definitely got some conflicting feelings there with other identifiers, but those aren't proposed and we'd have to consider how to address that if it ever were to be.

[quaint dirge]

It is true that many states have such laws pending and many countries might follow, but it's also true that such laws still have the possibility of getting denied. For the whole age verification system part, unfortunately I think it'll be a maintaince nightmare anyway. Different countries and states have different laws and they have different requirements, some may even require their own verification system but not require the exact age to be stored. It's naive to think that this would just become the general spec.
For whether age is sensitive information part, I think it is, and birth date is even more sensitive. There're countries using brith data as a part of their ID. It's a natural characteristic doesnt mean it's fine to provide it. Remind you race is a person's natural characteristic too. Age could be potentially used for targeted ads and many other usage where the user doesnt want. Local data stored in computer could still face potential hacks and some programs may start to require you to give them the permission to read the birth date from system instead of allowing the user to input whatever they want(so the users cannot protect their private information)
It'll be acceptable if it's instead of a age verification patchset. The thing I'm against is making age verification the default and people are forced to make a ageless fork in order to not comply with foreign laws.

[neat lance]

Race is a human construct, so is religion or political affiliation

And what would even be the purpose of such a field

[quaint dirge]

I understand that there're maintainers affected by such laws, and I'm fine if there's a [aged] repo(or with a name not this stupid) where there are packages like systemd-aged and iso like Arch aged edition for them

but making this age verification thingy default is unacceptable

[neat lance]

Systemd userdb will be able to be set to anything with root access and even unset. I think that's appropriate

Aged is literally what midnightbsd is writing

[quaint dirge]

yes(and that's what I think is more reasonable to follow)

[neat lance]

I think having a whole daemon for age control is overkill

xdg-desktop-portal performs the same function and userdb just acts as storage

[quaint dirge]

not a whole daemon, but the way to treat this
what I think is reasonable is a repo called aged

where packages implemented age verification is served there

and other users unaffected can have clean repo and iso

[quaint dirge]

but this could be considered as a acceptance of such laws, and it's increasing the information that could be leaked when the system is hacked for those users who are not in areas with such laws

[neat lance]

You can unset it. You still have root access.

Maybe we run a different installer function per locale. TBD.

[quaint dirge]

The only thing I dont understand is why this should be the problem of every user, not those who are under such restriction have to find ways to comply

[neat lance]

It's a tough problem to solve it selectively

How on earth would you do that

[quaint dirge]

yes
but for other normal users they might not know how

[neat lance]

If the law says ask for DOB at account creation you can't gather the info later and have the users install the age daemon themselves

And again I'm not defending these shit laws

[quaint dirge]

we dont enforce that, if a user under such laws dont follow their local law, they take the responsibility. We could serve only aged isos to CA ips and Brazil ips
I seriously doubt if anyone in CA or Brazil find a way to bypass windows' age verification and get sued for it, microsoft will have to pay anything for not enforcing it

[quaint dirge]

I understand, so I'm debating could we only make it default for those under such laws, but dont affect these not

[neat lance]

No. That's the issue. The operating system provider is so goddamn loosely defined in the law it very likely includes individual maintainers

There's the other issue Now we have a mandatory country/state selection to do that

And if that's the case we are collecting even more data and we have to modify a database of where the law applies

Which is a maintenance hellscape

[quaint dirge]

It'll be unreasonable to think so. The law doesnt specify you'll have to enforce that and work together with law enforcement to patch every loop hole

[neat lance]

Nor will we patch loopholes

This is honestly a CYA exercise to remove financial liability from contributing to FOSS

[quaint dirge]

yes, but if we dont patch loopholes and wont get sued, then we can also get away with selectively serve iso to these in restricted areas

and viceversa

[neat lance]

So now we have to build several ISOs for every dist?

That's additional compute, labor and hosting

Which also sucks

You see how this is a rock and a hard place situation?

[quaint dirge]

no? It's possible to get the user's ip and area from their request(at least with cloudflare, idk the cdn arch uses)
and we could serve the static page(and access) according to their location

it's better than serve the requirement to all users

[neat lance]

And how does that handle offline installation

[quaint dirge]

We dont. Just like those put words like "users in CA and Brazil shouldnt use this distro", we can add words like "users in CA and Brazil must comply with their laws and use the special installation media and packages. The user faces their own consequence if they fail to comply"
and if anyone use a non aged iso there, they are exploiting the loophole and it's not our business anymore

[neat lance]

Do you know how shit that solution is? I am adamantly against geoblocking Linux ISOs

Let's just agree that there's no real obvious perfect solution here without massive compromise

[quaint dirge]

It's better than forcing other users in unrestricted areas to have to pay more effort in order to not comply with foreign laws

[quaint dirge]

Obviously yes

I hate both ways the problem is which one is better

[neat lance]

sudo homectl update username --birth-date="" after install. Or put in the Unix epoch.

That way the field is useless for surveillance

Don't tell me you haven't lied about your birth date on websites before..?

[quaint dirge]

well, I guess I'll stop here. Not like I agree with you, but it's not making any progress and I dont think it's gonna make any progress and I generally want to avoid getting dragged into an argument.

[neat lance]

Alright, I think I will agree to disagree there.

[cedar carbon]

"they may start going after individual maintainers" - this does not sound like it's based on any legal analysis. just a "what if" that you hallucinated without any basis. for a distro that has a legal entity in those jurisdictions, sure, those could be targeted. but the responsibility of dealing with that lies solely with those legal entities. and the argument about shifting liability to individual users being somehow dangerous is also nonsensical - none of these laws have any provisions in them that could even hypothetically be used against end users directly, which means end users are not at ANY risk for using it despite it being incompatible with local laws. at this point all you are doing is making software worse using just baseless fearmongering

[neat lance]

(g) “Operating system provider” means a person or entity that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system software on a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.

[scarlet agate]

"this is my first time driving a car, so it's not my fault I ran over several people"

[scarlet agate]

"well I'm a cop so if the law says shoot innocent people randomly, guess I'll do it"

[scarlet agate]

You completely fail to process this law as well as the code adding in the field has literally nothing to do with limiting access by age or "protecting kids"

[neat lance]

It has a lot to do with controlling things based on an age signal. It will NOT protect kids.

It's a bullshit law, for sure.

[scarlet agate]

What you did is called anticipatory compliance. There was no need to go and add this, and I think I understand why you did it.

I had two theories, either you're funded by some entity, or you're contribution farming by utilizing some law that is horrible for open source as well as all the users dealing with it.

While that's disappointing and disgusting to me to say the least, you also seem to be one of the people that believe it's just an age field. With the 3D printer bans, VPN bans, etc. we are currently rolling downhill into an internet where you need an ID to log into anything. This has literally nothing to do with protecting children, and is all just farm even more advertisement data! They want you tracked, labeled, and monetized.

Now to respond to your statement that it's a waste of compute and difficult: I could not give a shit less. I have a business, I have servers, I have friends with even more servers, and I have about 5 years of programming experience that I will continue to put to use untill I'm in prison or dead. I don't stand for all the shit, and sitting here complying with it all isn't the answer whatsoever.

[neat lance]

... you're funded by some entity...
This change is so trivial anyone could have done it. It is not something that would need funding. If I as a first time contributor could get it in, literally any CS undergrad could.

You're right - on its own, in userdb, I do believe it's just a date field. With some more layers on top, an 18+ signal will be sent to apps that request it. The ID to log into everything, IMO, couldn't possibly happen in the OS level. That'll be confined within your web browser. I don't think it's for advertising. Meta and co. want to shift blame and responsibility for age verification away from them.

[scarlet agate]

It just happened so fast by the same three or four assholes pr-ing everything that it looked funded, but I was saying you weren't funded and did it for other reasons

Now, I don't believe in doxxing you and sending you mail or pizzas is the answer, but I do hope karma finds its way with all this. Can't believe I'm talking to the literal core of why developers and open source advocates are panicking right now. Idk what brought you here but I will continue to remove all compliancy bullshit from every code base. :3

If you were clout chasing by looking for shit to pr and happened to come across systemd and this law, I hope you're happy with the clout you received for doing such an awful thing. 😭

and again, it's not just a field. it's the first step in governments seeing if we'll bend to whatever laws are thrown at us.

[neat lance]

I can't speculate about governments will do. What I can say is that regardless of whatever we do, they can pass whatever laws they please... I very highly doubt that this is even on their radar because Linux is not really a consideration for these lawmakers. I think that the panic is unfounded. I would never make a pull request for something that I would not be willing to have running on my own computer. Here's the deal - the way that it is implemented is, in my opinion, the least invasive way possible while meeting the letter of the law. It is intentionally implemented in a way where you can trivially set it to anything that you would like or nothing at all. Also, with the portal implementation that I am in support of, the actual birth date itself will not be transmitted, which means that the signal that the application will receive will simply indicate that the user is an adult. Here's one thing that we need to consider: if websites and applications are checking for this age range field and it isn't there, how will they behave? You are obviously on discord. Did you know that when discord implemented age verification anyone who has not verified their age was assumed to be under the age of 13? I imagine that a lot of websites are going to act this way and perform content filtering based on the lack of the signal. This means that in order to continue to access everything on the internet, we need our systems to be transmitting something to websites. The best possible solution is to simply put in a protest date, like January 1st 1990 or the Unix epoch. And let me be very clear, there is no way possible for them to make it do actual ID verification in a free and open source software operating system without it being trivially bypassed. I really want to make sure that we never get to a place where that is legally required, but I cannot possibly think of an implementation that would be enforceable. Also, I understand your feelings. I'm not a fan of these laws.

People forking system components is something that I feel is a natural right within the free and open source software community. The fact that people feel strongly about this and want to approach the situation in a different way and avoid having any sort of implementation instead of a minimal one that is privacy protecting, or at least in my honest opinion it is. Perhaps I'm wrong, remind me in 3 years... If this leads to actual surveillance, I will personally issue a public apology. I don't think that's going to be the case.

We are going about this differently, but in my view, if this is going to be needed to be implemented, I trust the way that I will implement it to not be invasive. And obviously you don't know me so it's hard for you to understand my intent. But if you believe a single thing I'm saying, I have no intention of enabling government surveillance.

Also, I think it is silly to patch out the field. I mentioned this to it's Foss. If you are the only one not transmitting a field, that is way more fingerprintable than if you blend in and have the same signal as everyone else. For true privacy, you want to spoof the signal that is most commonly being transmitted to websites.

In my opinion, instead of patching out the field, it should be patched to always return a random value that is 18 or older on each function call. That way it is completely useless, but also on the other hand, everything thinks that you were an adult still so no content restriction would apply and there would be no way to trace you.

If I were a maintainer of something like the Tor project, that is how I would approach it. Always transmit an 18 plus signal no matter what.

Because I can guarantee you that Windows and Mac will comply with the law. And you want to look like any other user running one of these proprietary operating systems with incredibly high market share to blend in

I've put a lot of thought into this, and I have no bad intentions. I know that's really hard to convince you.

What happens when websites start requiring this signal to come from a user's operating system? We definitely need to be sending it to continue to access that content.

Even if you think I was in the wrong for making that PR, I assure you that my actions are coming from a good place.

I see the birthDate field in systemd as a neutral change, not something nefarious.

If I was being malicious I wouldn't be committing code under my own name.

[umbral nimbus]

k

[neat lance]

Well, thanks for hearing me out anyways.

[vale mulch]

I understand your point, but most of the linux community, (especially recently) wants to preserve user privacy. that's one of the core values of Linux. So of course people will push back against PRs and laws that go against that value.

I understand you just want to comply with the law, and you should have never been doxxed. That is unacceptable on all fronts, if you want age verification or not. From my understanding, linux users aren't upset about you complying with the law, it is the fact that there was barely any pushback for it, and that the PR was accepted without really much thought for user privacy. Users are worried that since this PR was merged, there will be more that will deeply affect user privacy. Systemd is on most of the popular linux distributions available, so this PR (and future PRs that are related to age verification) are going to affect way more than half of the linux community.

It's also a factor of terrible timing, in my opinion this PR should've been made way later on.

[neat lance]

Can we all just agree to be born on January 1st 1970? The field value is entirely pointless.

Well, that's not entirely true. There are legitimate benefits for parental controls.

Not that that's the point of discussion here.

[vale mulch]

Im mostly worried about governments seeing this and wanting to take advantage of it so they can target Linux too

[neat lance]

Like if you have a 5-year-old child or something, having it identify them as a child so that they don't see it all content might be useful.

They are going to see 18+ not the actual value.

The desktop portal sits in the middle, and handles brokering the information to the application.

It does this by calculating what range the birth date falls into

So as long as you're older than 18, the value literally doesn't matter

[vale mulch]

I understand that, it's mostly in the future if lawmakers were to see this, they can use it as an excuse to target linux since systemd is on a majority of distros

linux has been a controversial topic and i feel like it could be a gateway for changes

[neat lance]

They don't need an excuse to target Linux. Do you think they give a shit about us? They will pass whatever laws they want.

Honestly, all the ire that I received should have been directed to them.

[vale mulch]

that's one thing i do agree with

the only thing i wish was different is that there was more conversation about it before it was merged. i feel like that is one of the big reasons why people were pissed

you aren't at fault just because you're the author

[neat lance]

There was almost 300 comments back and forth with seven different maintainers of the systemd project reviewing my changes.

I don't know how much more conversation was warranted.

[vale mulch]

i worded that wrong, i mean more time really

for a controversial PR, it was really quick to get merged

that's what ive heard from others anyway

[neat lance]

At the end of the day it's just a field that could possibly store a birthday. That's why it was merged without hesitation.

There is really no policy enforcement at all here

[vale mulch]

i also want to say i am really sorry that you've been getting an insane amount of fire recently for this

im not one of those people but as a linux user this really hurts me

especially since to me, linux should be a community where we all work together

not hate each other

[neat lance]

I just received a shipping notification from some Islamic foundation saying that they sent me a Quran and a bunch of material that I requested. The amount of disgusting behavior towards third parties is just is a disgrace

People are sending shit to my house, having Mormon missionaries bother me, signing me up for car sales solicitations. It's fucking stupid

[vale mulch]

the fact that people are willing to do that over a PR is insane and just completely fucked up

people don't know how to read the comments, i saw you saying it was dumb

from my understanding, the only reason u made that PR was to unwillingly comply

and just have the required amount, if that makes sense

[neat lance]

Maybe I AM an idiot, but in my mind, I was trying to help out by coming up with a solution that I believe is a reasonable technical approach to what is being asked by these laws.

[vale mulch]

just because you made a mistake doesnt mean you deserve to have this much backlash and harassment towards you

[neat lance]

I guess we'll see what happens, huh? But honestly, I don't think there is a possibility of any verification we cannot circumvent

[vale mulch]

it was just bad timing imo

[neat lance]

Like the ONLY way that is possible is UEFI bootloader locking

I also said this here https://itsfoss.com/dylan-taylor-systemd-controversy/

[vale mulch]

i just don't know how its even enforcable

[neat lance]

You'd have to basically block root access and lock down UEFI

and also restrict LD_PRELOAD

and have some sort of third party ID checker

It's so far-fetched it boggles my mind people think it's a serious concern

[vale mulch]

thats the thing, this law is so unenforcable for linux

[neat lance]

I've been using Linux for over 20 years. I know how a lot of pieces work and fit together. It is so hilariously trivial to bypass anything when you have the source code.

[neat lance]

Yes, holy shit, it's like you just said the thing I've been saying

This is paper compliance

It's a cover your ass exercise so we can say "Look, we have age checks"

[vale mulch]

ive been saying it since the start, but people are still freaking out

ive only been worried because governments are crazy asf rn

there is a lot of tension rn in the world, this age verification bs started at such a terrible time

[vale mulch]

ive only used linux for about half a year now, so you're way more knowledgable than I am lol

but one of the reasons i joined linux was because of privacy, but even i know that this law is so unenforceable for linux

people are freaking out without actually reading what was going on in the PR

[neat lance]

This PR on its own does literally nothing. I personally think the people forking systemd and switching distros are misguided.

Reinstalling is very quick. Wait and see is the best approach

Save an iso off of something and if things are as bad as you think they will be, spend an afternoon installing again

I am very confident everything will be perfectly fine

Everything here feels super knee jerk reactionary and emotional instead of logical

[umbral nimbus]

what is even going on

[vale mulch]

to me I still don't enjoy the compliance behind the PR (im not blaming you, the PR would've been made either way just like what u stated earlier in this thread), but I do hope for the best and I think that eventually this will just get removed once things settle. Also the whole conspiracy theory shit with you being funded is so stupid because why pick you of all people to do this? Not trying to be offensive im just saying

[umbral nimbus]

i dont think it should be removed

[neat lance]

There is no reason to remove it. It's an optional field. How many people put in email addresses or their real name and location in userdb? Those have been there for YEARS

[umbral nimbus]

therere alr email and stuf

[vale mulch]

removed or not, i just hope it STAYS irrelevant and optional lol

[umbral nimbus]

fr

i dont want to see a future where some systemd fork gets into the repos

[vale mulch]

all these conspiracy theories about "some random open source developer is being funded by all big money corporations and governments!!" is so weird to me

why risk being doxxed and get targeted by thousands just so u can make a PR about an optional birthdate field and get some money out of it

to me, my family and my own safety is more important than taking money from some corpo giving me money for making an extremely controversial PR

from what it looks like @neat lance, you did it out of good intentions

thats what i think anyways

[neat lance]

Even if I'm wrong and I'm an idiot for making this feature, I'm not so braindead that I'd submit something malicious using my real name and email address with my personal domain in it that has my resume on it

[vale mulch]

exactly what i mean lol

it was just bad timing

[vale mulch]

off topic but have any of the other contributors been trying to help you out or spoken to you about what's been going on?

especially with the whole doxxing thing

[neat lance]

Numerous.

I've had so many maintainers reach out to me. From Arch, Fedora, and the Universal Blue projects.

As well as some contributors to systemd and some people from the freedesktop project.

I don't know if they wish to be personally named, so I won't.

I also reached out to Lucas Holt because he's been getting roasted a bit too on anonymous imageboards. I linked him to some threads about him and let him know.

He's the guy who maintains Midnight BSD

[vale mulch]

ahh okay

im glad that you have people to support you

going through this alone would be a nightmare

[neat lance]

You know, a lot of other FOSS maintainers support the change, and the approach I took. ElementaryOS is publicly in support of it for instance.

So it would have almost certainly happened in some fashion, regardless. The change might not have been identical but people do wish to not face problems from these laws

[vale mulch]

yeah i agree, it would've definitely happened eventually

you were just the first to do it

and thats what sucks, most people don't think that this would've eventually happened

[neat lance]

Karol Herbst, one of the core maintainers of freedesktop, too.

Like I'm clearly not the only one with this idea.

[vale mulch]

yea exactly

its just sad because this is really starting to split the FOSS community

over something that most people already lie about anyways 😭

[neat lance]

The idiotic thing is we all agree the laws are dogshit

[vale mulch]

yeah, one side has to reluctantly comply because their income relys on it, while the other side wants to completely revolt and protest

and it's funny cause the other side won't be affected monetarily

[neat lance]

We can do BOTH

[vale mulch]

for most of them anyways

[vale mulch]

yeah, but people think there is only black and white to it

which sucks

[neat lance]

Have a compliant implementation that corp distros can use to not get sued into oblivion and some other solution that says "Nah, screw that, we're going to return a random date each time"

Do you think it would upset me if people patch out this code or make a fork? No!

[vale mulch]

a lot of people think their privacy is at risk, and thats why people are freaking out and panicking

but they don't read what is actually going on

[vale mulch]

that's the thing, if people were to actually pay attention then maybe we would've had something like this already

[neat lance]

You're free to answer either way, this is an opinion question. Do you think that NOT returning an age signal would make people more trackable if everyone else has one?

Because I believe that to be the case

One of the core principals of the Tor project for protecting whistleblowers is blending in and not being fingerprintable

[vale mulch]

it would only be untrackable if everyone didn't return an age signal

[neat lance]

A lack of a data signal is in itself a signal

That makes your traffic unique

If EVERYONE ELSE has an age signal and you don't it makes you more trackable not less

Just a thought experiment 🙂

[vale mulch]

give an age signal but just lie about it pretty much, because that would blend in with the rest of them

so much is going on in the world right now that its overwhelming 😭 age verification, wars going on, america itself going haywire (glad to be canadian but still), the economy going to shit

[neat lance]

That is what I have been saying

[vale mulch]

everyone is tense and its making us turn against each other for such little things

[neat lance]

We're on the same team here. I'm not some crazy surveillance shilling nutjob.

[vale mulch]

i know you aren't, you just made the first move

[neat lance]

Literally from the hit piece on me:

Verbatim
Taylor acknowledged in the Arch Linux PR that his age verification feature "will be completely ineffective at preventing anyone from lying about their age." He called it "hilariously pointless." Then argued it should be implemented anyway.
Source: archinstall PR #4290 →

[vale mulch]

people believe that you were the one who orchestrated all of this when in reality you just wanted to have bare minimum compliance

[neat lance]

But they gloss over that fact entirely

Like doesn't that make you think "Hmm, maybe there is more to this?"

[vale mulch]

people tend to not see from both perspectives

in my personal opinion, i don't exactly enjoy the fact that it's being put into archinstall, but i doubt that you wanted it either

[neat lance]

Right. It's called covering our asses

If a court were to look at it and say we're non-compliant we can say "See, we check their age right here."

As of the time of publishing all of that I was the second largest human contributor in the history of archinstall. But also I "came out of nowhere".

You don't have to take my word for that. https://github.com/archlinux/archinstall/graphs/contributors

[vale mulch]

i wonder how they would even be able to enforce charges for that, who would the charges even go to

[neat lance]

Who the hell knows. That's the problem

[vale mulch]

knowing the government, watch them say all of the contributors get charged

[neat lance]

I quoted the law here. Any person who develops an OS.

Let me find it, one sec

#1485531917741985802 message

I've publicly commented on all of this, yet also people have called me a coward for making my Twitter public. Like, have you seen the type of messages on there I was getting? It wasn't constructive, it was just abuse.

I am not paid to work on this stuff, and I chose not to engage them.

[vale mulch]

i mean yeah you were getting doxxed and harassed for making a PR

getting doxxed over something as small as this is astronomically stupid and fucked up

[neat lance]

Still am. The quaran thing was just a couple of hours ago. But the hate mail has hugely tapered off.

[vale mulch]

they love making it so broad so that they can use it wherever they want

the lawmakers know nothing about computers and how much it actually affects developers who make 0 money off of their work

[neat lance]

People don't read what I write or say and just come to their own conclusions or don't believe me and say I deserve it.

[neat lance]

I literally said that.

[vale mulch]

imo we should always try to see from both perspectives

[neat lance]

Quoting myself. "Lawmakers are largely technologically illiterate. They have no idea how things actually work, probably don't know Linux and FOSS exists, and are thinking of iPhones and Androids when they write these bills. For what it's worth, these bills were passed by both parties with very little dissent."

[vale mulch]

especially in these cases

[neat lance]

I also think the ageless linux script isn't the right approach. It sets a bunch of random stuff that literally nothing checks and reeks of being 100% vibe coded.

I think a .patch that makes birthDate return a random value is way more effective

Well, not really random.

[vale mulch]

yeah it has to be over 18 lol

[neat lance]

Random between 1900 and current year minus 25 or so

[vale mulch]

but still random values

[vale mulch]

thats the shitty part, these old lawmakers don't actually know anything or even research into it, but they make the laws anyway

[neat lance]

It's also not a useless value entirely. I don't know if people actually read my blog post, but I link to https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2026-March/052087.html

You wouldn't believe how much traffic my website has gotten. I wish I put ads on there lol.

Maybe then I'd actually make money from this

Because right now I haven't made a cent

[vale mulch]

then people would complain ur being funded, people will find a way to complain somewhat

[neat lance]

382.8k unique visitors in the last 30 days. Do you know how utterly insane that is for a small dev site?

Cloudflare taking it like a champ lol

[vale mulch]

yeah lolol

[neat lance]

March 18 -> March 19 looks like a cliff in the dashboard. It's hilarious

Like no traffic at all and then massive traffic surge

Could have been DDOS but it's a static website...

I DO actually do DevOps for a living

[vale mulch]

sounds about right 😭 people were pissed

[neat lance]

Also, I don't get this one. Why even mention it:

His Framework
March 19, 2026, the day after systemd merged his PR, Taylor published a blog post calling Google's Android sideloading friction a "fair trade." Same argument: OS-level controls protect vulnerable people. Power users barely notice. "You shouldn't have to choose between open and secure."
Source: Dylan's blog →

Fine. There's missing context there, but fine. I did say that. So what?

Almost 400,000 people visited my website this month. That's hilariously high

Like that rivals actual journalism sites

[vale mulch]

yeah over a PR

it was a controversial PR though

so tbh im not surprised

i remember when the PR went out, almost everyone on my feed was talking about it

[neat lance]

People roasted me a bit for this one. https://dylanmtaylor.com/posts/2026-03-19-googles-new-android-sideloading-flow-is-a-fair-trade

It's off-topic, but my take: all I have to do is reboot and I can use adb to install something right away and install whatever I want via GUI in 24 hours. This is so pragmatic. Honestly, google was going to make every dev verify to get their app installed. This is a HUGE win.

[neat lance]

Fair. Also, people accused me of working at Microsoft despite having my actual resume.

[vale mulch]

not required to

[neat lance]

Like, really?

I DID work for IBM... 8 years ago.

[vale mulch]

you got like 200 conspiracy theories against u 😭 its crazy

[neat lance]

And again, who cares?

[scarlet agate]

there's more than one

[vale mulch]

people who think ur working for the government and big corpos lol

[scarlet agate]

Can the fed please stop sending essays in my project thread bruh

[neat lance]

I have worked for large corporations. I need a paycheck and job stability. Truist is huge, IBM is huge.

[vale mulch]

it's free speech? this is a horrible take

[scarlet agate]

I did and they can fuck off :3

[scarlet agate]

it's supposed to be discussion of the project and not arguing over their bullshit

[scarlet agate]

boykisser os never getting an age check 🥀

[vale mulch]

it's still on the general topic of age verification, i don't see anything wrong here

[neat lance]

I think we were having a pretty nice chat. You do you.

[scarlet agate]

There's so many hobby oses out there

Literally disregards them

Like my friend has one he made from nothing that can run steam almost

[neat lance]

That's it, I'm switching to Haiku, or Redox. /s

Haiku is actually pretty cool, it's a dedicated community of fans of BeOS basically reimplementing it. https://www.haiku-os.org/

[vale mulch]

ive heard of haiku but i havent checked it out yet

[neat lance]

Everyone knows of course that TempleOS is god's chosen operating system.

[scarlet agate]

Holy fed bro

[vale mulch]

i just noticed but we weren't arguing, i think having a discussion about what happened and what is currently happening (especially since your project is about the very topic at hand) is healthy

[scarlet agate]

"Well it's starting to happen so everyone should comply or they'll stand out"

What.

[neat lance]

Dude, do you not understand how fingerprinting actually works?

[vale mulch]

if you actually read what he said he didn't mean completely comply lol

the cherrypicking is nuts

[scarlet agate]

Like never having apis available at the COMPOSITOR LEVEL is obviously something we would want? Not gonna agree to adding an age hook to a core component of rendering shit just because of all this

[neat lance]

xdg-desktop-portal isn't the compositor though?

[scarlet agate]

Wayland

😭

sigh

[vale mulch]

for this whole age verification talk ive never heard of wayland going into the topic

[neat lance]

Wayland is literally a collection of APIs. And there would be no need to implement anything as a wayland protocol

[scarlet agate]

Yeah the fed that started the whole issue spending the next 24 hours in my thread gaslighting everyone was not on my bingo board.

If anything, the fact you're spending this long on it all makes people worry even more. 😭

[neat lance]

Wayland handles things like requests to place a window on the screen etc.

[scarlet agate]

Well thank red hat and free desktop

[safe fractal]

dylan9414 received a thank you cookie!

[scarlet agate]

it's in talks

[scarlet agate]

fuck you.

[safe fractal]

[neat lance]

Literally can't win. Say nothing, suspicious. Answer questions, more suspicious.

[vale mulch]

LMFAOOOO

[scarlet agate]

You act like the only thing in all of this is your non sense in systemd

🥀

[vale mulch]

fluf i don't understand why you're being an asshole to the guy whos constantly being harassed already lol, i understand ur frustrated but being a dickhead isn't going to solve anything

[neat lance]

No. I also added some reference implementations of date pickers

[neat lance]

Lol that shit is hilarious

[scarlet agate]

sigh

Like atp I even wonder if you two are one account

[vale mulch]

yeah im his alt account totally lol

[scarlet agate]

fr

[vale mulch]

im not glazing him, im just saying that being a dickhead isn't actually productive nor does it actually solve anything

be frustrated all you want, it won't change the past nor will it solve anything now

and im willing to have conversations with people in order to learn their perspective

[scarlet agate]

Welp Dylan regardless of whatever the hell you think of your own actions, I have been up for the last week until 4am most nights, waking up at 7am, in pain and mental exhaustion. All because I'm having to prepare and fix all the shit that started with your systemd pr. Nothing you can say is gonna make me feel better, regardless of how you feel it's started an entire domino effect that has shook the entire open source community.

So yeah, I'm not gonna be fucking peachy while discussing this with you 😭

[neat lance]

having to prepare and fix all the shit that started with your systemd pr
What's broken?

[vale mulch]

mental exhaustion...over an optional field?

that can be patched??

[scarlet agate]

It's not optional

You know nothing about git then lol

Id say rolling downhill towards living in a surveillance state isn't an optional thing here

[neat lance]

It's literally optional unless the distro enables a date check in the installer.

[vale mulch]

yeah i don't, how about you teach me why it's not optional then? instead of telling me i don't know anything

[neat lance]

I guarantee you a lot will not

[scarlet agate]

I just said why

[neat lance]

git clone; git revert; git push

[scarlet agate]

Hopes and dreams of what each distro will do isn't a real safeguard

[scarlet agate]

Not that simple

[neat lance]

Or, you know, apply a patch file of a revert to upstream systemd

I know, I was over simplifying

[scarlet agate]

you still have to handle all the new commits rolling in

[neat lance]

I'm sorry, that wasn't quite accurate.

[scarlet agate]

and not all of those can be automated

Plus, the age slop is not the only problem with systemd

[neat lance]

Eh, it depends on how you approach building it

[scarlet agate]

No it doesn't depend, there are still upstream commits

[neat lance]

If you hate systemd, why not use runit or something

Yes, I know.

[vale mulch]

openrc

[scarlet agate]

You can't 100% of the have a patch that removes it

[scarlet agate]

Because apps require it oml

[neat lance]

There are ways you can make it really really easy

[scarlet agate]

we've talked about this already

[vale mulch]

tbf that is true

[scarlet agate]

Yeah

Quit trying to justify all of this oml

[vale mulch]

i'm not justifying anything, i was just talking with him bruh

[scarlet agate]

I do not need my os to require my ID in order to log in

[vale mulch]

i can't have a chat with someone and learn their perspective?

[scarlet agate]

Final verdict 🥀

[vale mulch]

yeah, no one wants that dude

welcome to the club lol

[scarlet agate]

There's no perspective to learn here you are being gaslit into thinking their actions here were acceptable

And it's pretty sad

[neat lance]

in my two cents it's just easier to have a smaller diff for the date parsing stuff. Apply the diff at build time against upstream. Make the diff as targeted as possible to the getter on the birthDate value and leave the rest of time-utils untouched. Now you have a 3-4 line patch file you might have to update once per release or so.

I might write one to prove a point

[scarlet agate]

None of this was "hey specifically this Dylan guy" it was all for removing the age shit from arch altogether to make a statement

[scarlet agate]

Mf you added it whyre you telling me

😂

Maybe don't add age bullshit into systemd? thanks?

[neat lance]

Because I don't give a shit if you patch it out, and support your right to do so

[vale mulch]

if you're not willing to see how other people think and why they did things, that is extremely close minded and you shouldn't be in the industry lol

[scarlet agate]

You're literally the core reason systemd is now shattered into a billion forks

[neat lance]

Eh, it'll calm down. Most of those will last like a week.

[scarlet agate]

I don't think listening to the other side explain why they have to be on the other side or some shit is acceptable

Like I had to participate in this and it's not my fault!!!

ugh

[vale mulch]

he isn't saying i should be on the other side he was just explaining why he did it oml LMFAO

[scarlet agate]

There's no justification or explanation

You are a terrible human being for pring this shit, I really don't care anymore

Between you and bluca systemd is fucked

[vale mulch]

a terrible human being for listening to him talk, what a statement

[neat lance]

🙄

[scarlet agate]

Has nothing to do with the conversation

Yk that.

circular ass argument bruh

[vale mulch]

we literally all want the same thing

[scarlet agate]

I'm not interested in listening to the cause of an issue complain about the issue

you had no need to go pr that shit

end of story

[vale mulch]

he was mostly complaining about how much he got harassed over it

he even admitted it may have been idiotic to make that PR

[scarlet agate]

Oh no I did a terrible thing and people are upset

Oh the horror

I'm the victim!!!

[vale mulch]

are you justifying harassment and doxxing?

[scarlet agate]

I already commented on that

[vale mulch]

reply to it or forward it

[scarlet agate]

im not repeating myself

bruh

okay

[vale mulch]

then im going to assume you are

calling me a terrible human being when you think that doxxing and harassing someone over a PR

is perfectly okay??

[scarlet agate]

.

[vale mulch]

he isn't causing a genocide he made a PR 😭 and you're calling him a fed and saying hes funded by a big corpo

[scarlet agate]

First step to fucking up all of open source is close enough for me

And I already said I was defending the funding thing I said it was one of two theories

[vale mulch]

"..but I do hope karma finds its way with all this..."

this is literally implying you want bad things to happen to him lol are we serious rn

[scarlet agate]

Yeah

[vale mulch]

you're still a terrible human being for wanting that on a person

[scarlet agate]

I didn't say what

Id be happy if they were just banned from the Internet idfk

I'm not a violent person

[neat lance]

Well, here's a patch file. This is how I'd do it.

[vale mulch]

banned from the internet for making a PR???

LMFAOOO

[scarlet agate]

Yeah

[neat lance]

4 lines if you include the comment.

[scarlet agate]

lets force bro to submit id on every website

[neat lance]

Makes the birthDate function return a random birth date between 1900 and 2000 each time.

[scarlet agate]

since we're so pro surveillance state ig

[scarlet agate]

Or just not have it, thanks

[safe fractal]

dylan9414 received a thank you cookie!

[vale mulch]

isn't the internet supposed to be free for use for everyone?? that is going against your entire philosophy of a free internet

[scarlet agate]

god damn it

[vale mulch]

we're not, he stated he wasn't lol

[neat lance]

You clearly don't understand why it was added.

And don't care to understand

[scarlet agate]

Why would I want the one taking away free Internet to come back to the Internet after the storms cleared???

[scarlet agate]

There is no justification

If it was done at any point other than when the stupid laws dropped, I wouldn't care

[neat lance]

My god dude, you need some beta blockers or something.

[vale mulch]

you're acting like he is going to cause a genocide to FOSS bro it really isnt that deep

[scarlet agate]

But we fucking complied immediately and basically let them know we'll bend over and obey whatever laws are dropping

[scarlet agate]

They already are