I Spoke To The Dev Behind The Systemd Birth Date Change
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Today I spoke with the developer who introduced the PR to Systemd which added in a birth date field to userdb which spawned a massive drama and much worse as...

Some of you need to watch this video, and hang your head in shame.

Dylan Taylor has been receiving constant harassment, including threats to his life and safety, for actions done collectively by SystemD. The article by Sam Bent was explictly mentioned as part of the harassment campaign, and rightfully so.

I don’t think enough people realize that this is catastrophically bad. It’ll discourage people from becoming open source developers, it’ll discourage people from using Linux, and it’ll discourage legislators from taking the Linux community seriously.

If you ever wished ill upon another human being for complying with a relatively inconsequential law, you are better off never touching a computer again. The Linux community has collectively gone so far beyond what is acceptable here.

  • Auth@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    4 days ago

    this is entirely optional. Just because they exist doesnt mean they can be improved. The ones currently available do not cover this usecase. The use case being a locally installed application wants to check if the user is 18 before showing them something.

    • ExoticCherryPigeon@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      You do realise you can easily restrict who can run what applications (or terminal commands) by using guid? So you can easily restrict a child account being able to execute applications or games already? And you know what, this method does not rely on application developer implementing any kind of age gatekeeping using DOB field… Its generic to all distributions even ones that don’t use systemd. This is why this change is dumb and not needed.

      You can even use it to restrict access to terminal commands such as curl so children cannot download something they shouldn’t…

        • ExoticCherryPigeon@piefed.socialEnglish
          1·
          18 hours ago

          Right so mixed content steam already has parental controls specifically with an allow list

          GOG provides individual installers, so you can control its access with guid

          Content players pretty much all have child accounts

          Even locally hosted ones, like Plex already have parental controls built-in (mostly via allow lists)

          What other kinds of mixed content applications are there that already do not have some kind of parental controls implemented which are likely to actually make use of this?

          I am honestly struggling to find specific examples of the types of applications which have mixed content, don’t have parental controls or at least allow lists built in and are likely to actually implement this change. Again you are relying on developers to actually make use of this field, and outside of corporate applications (which imo are already likely to have some kind of content controls), I am struggling here to see why an indie developer would bother?