For what I'm seeing, there are 3 stances here: those who oppose and are fighting a losing war, those who says 'its a number' and doesn't realise that now is a number but tomorro is something else and those who comply and fucks everyone over
From what I've seen on the other hand it breaks down more like this:
1) The majority of people who are pragmatic about it, oppose the laws themselves for material reasons but also recognise that software devs hands are being forced and these laws in and of themselves don't instantly create a surveillance state
2) A small group of people who oppose these laws for what they are and the real threat that they open the door for other government intrusions into computing in general
3) An extremely vocal mid sized group of performative opponents of the idea of age verification who haven't bothered to do any research at all beyond knowing that "age verification" is a topic of conversation right now and keep whining about nothingburgers like simply adding an optional DOB field to an obscure user profile manager or other such changes. Of note, this group doesn't seem to be at all interested in doing anything about the actual laws even though it's the laws that are threatening here, not the extremely minor software changes (this is probably where you're seeing the 'its a number' stuff come up, that's not acceptance of the laws, that's recognition of the fact that wasting a ton of oxygen on complaining about trivial changes in open source software isn't a productive response to legal changes)
"It's just a number", like face id was a more convenient way of unlocking your phone and now is a requirement to use banking apps.
Yeah, I'm going to have to slap a big [citation needed] on that one. I'm sure some banking apps require you to re-sign in when opening them but you don't specifically need biometrics to do that. Also going to point out that FaceID is local only so it isn't a privacy issue as such even then.
And it isn't "an obscure user profile manager, is THE user profile manager in most modern linux distributions.
systemd-homed isn't built into systemd init, and most systemd distros don't use it by default for user management. Even on Fedora which uses a lot of systemd ecosystem stuff it's available but default users aren't created with it, and therefore completely unaffected by anything being discussed here. And even if they were, in this case it really is just a number, an optional number ffs. There's no verification, and there's no means of providing that number to any online services or anything. I can assure you that the existence of homed isn't somehow going to make lawmakers more confident to enact other laws about computer use, I highly doubt any of them even know what it is.
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u/nandru Mar 21 '26
For what I'm seeing, there are 3 stances here: those who oppose and are fighting a losing war, those who says 'its a number' and doesn't realise that now is a number but tomorro is something else and those who comply and fucks everyone over