[HN Gopher] Objections to systemd age-attestation changes go ove...
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Objections to systemd age-attestation changes go overboard
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 22 points
Date : 2026-03-31 16:49 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lwn.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
| stevenalowe wrote:
| There's nothing "overboard" about pushing back on unnecessary
| political meddling. The operating system does not need to know
| your date of birth (or identity! Looking at you Micro$oft) in
| order to manage your hardware and software. The need to know is
| zero, and given the 1st Amendment I question that any political
| entity has the legitimate authority to compel one to alter
| software, open source or otherwise.
| GrayShade wrote:
| The operating system does not need to know your full name,
| email and location in order to manage your hardware and
| software, yet systemd has had optional fields for those for
| years and nobody complained. They added an extra optional field
| for the date of birth.
|
| > Some of this has been fueled by a misinformation campaign
| that has targeted the systemd project and Taylor specifically,
| resulting in Taylor being doxxed and receiving death threats.
|
| I see.
| rasz wrote:
| > full name, email and location in order to manage your
| hardware and software, yet systemd has had optional fields
| for those for years and nobody complained.
|
| maybe we should complain
| nine_k wrote:
| Why, it's fine to have these values in a corporate
| environment: name, work email, office location. I'd be fine
| with an ability to store the birth date, the blood type,
| the zodiac sign, actually an arbitrary list of key-value
| pairs, as long as it's optional.
|
| It's only a problem when the OS _insists_ on recording your
| _private_ information to let you access your _private_
| account.
| db48x wrote:
| It is an optional field, and so far there is no software
| that asks for this information, let alone insists on it.
| stevenalowe wrote:
| which is the logical next legislative step
| stevenalowe wrote:
| unfortunately the article does not mention who is responsible
| for the alleged misinformation campaign
| jojomodding wrote:
| I doubt it has been top-down coordinated. So what do you
| expect the article to say?
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| > It was to be expected that some members of the community
| would object; the actual response, however, has been shockingly
| hostile. Some of this has been fueled by a misinformation
| campaign that has targeted the systemd project and Taylor
| specifically, resulting in Taylor being doxxed and receiving
| death threats.
|
| I think we can agree this is overboard
| razingeden wrote:
| > I think we can agree this is overboard
|
| Yeah it's not like these people are IRC operators or
| something!
| ahofmann wrote:
| I think the "overboard" part is that the developer was doxxed
| and received death threats.
| stevenalowe wrote:
| that is definitely overboard :(
| gradientsrneat wrote:
| Setting aside the obvious fact that it's morally wrong to harrass
| people, something tells me these harrassers never do the same to
| developers working on closed source software for companies,
| having the net effect of harming the FOSS movement overall.
| delichon wrote:
| I think I'd feel the same way about race- or gender-attestation:
| none of your business. Let's _not_ build the infrastructure into
| the operating system to selectively restrict civil rights by
| demographic.
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| Doesn't make sense to invoke civil rights and pretend there are
| no legislative limits. If a law is passed requiring age
| verification and the component can't attest, then its blocked.
| You must attest your age to vote for example.
| delichon wrote:
| Not every device needs to be a secure voting machine. Civil
| resistance is an appropriate response to such an effort. The
| author prefers proactive cooperation.
| youarentrightjr wrote:
| > You must attest your age to vote for example.
|
| How does this relate here, or to computing generally (barring
| electronic voting machines)?
| dizhn wrote:
| This reads like a company piece.
| tzs wrote:
| Are Unix and Unix-like vendors making implementing this harder
| than it needs to be? Here is what is required for laws like
| California's.
|
| 1. To modify account creation so that in the scenarios where the
| law applies (account is being created for a child who is the
| primary user of the device) to ask for the age and/or birthdate
| of the child.
|
| 2. A way for applications to ask for the age range of the user
| ([0, 13), [13, 16), [16, 18), [18-infinity)).
|
| Implicit is to store enough information from #1 to support #2.
|
| The way I would store that information is by creating a
| directory, say /etc/age_group, and in that creating one file
| named after each age range. These files would be owned by root
| and not group or world readable.
|
| On creating an account this applies to add an access control list
| (ACL) entry for that account to the appropriate file in
| /etc/age_group that allows that user to read it.
|
| Then for #2 the way applications can check is by simply checking
| which files /etc/age_group it can open.
|
| This should be more portable than the other ways I've seen
| proposed. POSIX access control lists are included I believe on
| every major Linux distribution (and also MacOS, FreeBSD, and
| maybe other BSDs).
|
| This would give application writers on most Unix and Unix-like
| systems a common way to check if they are on a system that
| implements the California law (does it have /etc/age_group?) and
| a common way to check age group.
| nine_k wrote:
| This is a great idea. It very compactly implements a barebones
| _parental control_ system: a parent (with admin access) can
| assign an age group to a user account, and apps which care can
| easily check it.
|
| I think it's exactly how such a system should work: apps,
| sites, etc should declare an age limit, and the user's OS
| should decide if it's going to give the user access to them.
| This approach is opposite to having the user to prove their age
| (and worse, the legal identity) to the web site, app, etc.
| razingeden wrote:
| Well you got me there.
|
| For the most part, I actually agree that Ubuntu is an
| appropriate operating system for toddlers.
| nine_k wrote:
| I ran a Debian box for my daughter when she was a toddler
| and a pre-schooler. She was good at selecting her favorite
| movies and music in XBMC, and enjoyed simple drawing apps.
| db48x wrote:
| That's a clever start, but it has a problem. What happens when
| the list of age groups changes? This list is not fixed; it
| changes over both time and space. How do I tell the difference
| between a system that doesn't support age attestation vs one
| that only supports age groups that I don't know about? For
| example, suppose I am looking to see if the user is in the
| `over_13` age group, but only `/etc/age_group/adolescente`
| exists? What if there are multiple readable files?
|
| Systemd's solution is simpler and doesn't have these edge
| cases. A higher level of software, such as the desktop
| environment, can query the user's birth date from systemd and
| use their locale settings or time zone or other information to
| compute the correct age group.
| jollyllama wrote:
| >systemd age-attestation changes
|
| WTF?
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| As a parent, I welcome these changes. When people say, "parent
| your kids," this is what I need to do that: an os-level setting
| that serves as a source of truth, a browser that reads it, and
| sites that require it.
|
| If you don't like those things then use another distro or create
| your own, branch a browser, and create your own Internet. I
| welcome that. Until then, don't say the contradictory phrases of
| "parent your kids," and resist any of the infrastructure to
| actually accomplish that.
| stalfosknight wrote:
| I'm a Mac person through and through but I've always had the
| deepest respect for the sincere commitment to freedom and privacy
| that you find in the FOSS world.
|
| I am shocked by what's going on with systemd and by how suddenly
| bootlicky LWN has gotten.
| wormius wrote:
| 1. Harrassment of these devs is wrong (no matter how shitty
| Lennart and systemd is (for those of us who dislike it)).
|
| 2. Why do the worst of the worst have to be on "my side" (like
| this harrassment, and other issues, where they are polar
| opposites of me when it comes to social issues). But. You have to
| go to war with the army/allies you have, and if that means I have
| to be in bed with ... a certain unduke, then I guess it shall be.
|
| 3. I remember when statements like the following would have been
| laughed at by the free software/"open source" community. Instead
| of acquiescing, and saying "well we have to plan for this big
| totalitarian overreach" (if you think it isn't, look at Palantir
| and all the big tech CEOs getting their mitts everywhere), it
| would have been calling to RESIST and do everything we can
| technically, organizationally and politically to push back
| against this, but here we are willingly just building our future
| prisons. At the behest of giant "open source" corporations who
| "have nothing to hide" after all.
|
| Of course systemd is NOT a free/libre project in any sense of the
| word, which is all the more reason I distrust it, and this latest
| is going to push me off it (I'm on Cachy now). But like I am, we
| all just sit in the boiling water. I'm still on Firefox for
| example. I'm on Facebook. This is why it's important to resist
| BEFORE, so it doesn't become a systemic thing where everyone
| feels compelled to "go with the flow".
|
| (the following, as referred to in point 3): "Zbigniew
| Jedrzejewski-Szmek replied that while it was possible
| California's law would be changed, ""similar ideas are popping up
| in other contexts and it's unlikely that they'll all go away"".
| Ultimately, Luca Boccassi merged Taylor's changes after a bit of
| back-and-forth about the implementation."
|
| If I could trust that "it's just a field, maaaaan" fine, but I
| don't. I see how politics is played and plays out and it's the
| people who are building this that should reconsider, because they
| ARE enabling future abuse of these systems merely by putting them
| in. "Oh look - we now have an affordance there's no reason not to
| exploit it and put it in our central repository of "authentic"
| validated computer users).
|
| How long before felons are disallowed from owning/using
| computers? No matter how necessary that is (and I don't mean
| "1337 hackers" just "we must punish 'the bad guys').
|
| If I felt we were in a forward moving direction maybe I wouldn't
| be so resistant, but the past 15-20 years should have taught us
| well about this process of enshittification and corporate capture
| of tech in a way we never thought possible (just like the shock
| of the AT&T room wiretap back in the 00s, etc...)
|
| That said, stop harrassing these people in this manner, it is not
| good and does a disservice for "our cause". Goddamnit, people.
| cetinsert wrote:
| No, they don't! Entitled people doing opinion psyops normalizing
| overreach is the problem. We are private citizens. Public
| officers need to be transparent! Not the other way around.
| tredre3 wrote:
| Are systemd developers public officers in your mind?
| mzajc wrote:
| > > I understood that the change was not going to be popular, but
| I was expecting civil discourse and a level-headed response.
|
| Not to give credit to the antisocial mob, but it would be a lot
| easier to take the maintainers' side here if the discourse was
| started _before_ the change was merged into production.
|
| It's incredibly ironic that the LWN article praises Jeremy Soller
| for having reasonable objections against the change but fails to
| mention that systemd maintainers locked the issue* when he tried
| to raise his objections (and implicitly called them spam). I
| really fail to see how anyone could expect civil discourse given
| these circumstances.
|
| * In an incredibly pathetic way too - the systemd maintainer
| responded to his comment, then immediately locked the issue
| without even waiting to see what Soller would write in return.
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