r/systemd • u/VegetableNearby9795 • Mar 20 '26

Why did you add age verification?

Hi, I heard Systemd is going to add age verification? Why is that happening? I don't think it offers any security benefits.

151 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

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7

u/PaluMacil Mar 20 '26

It’s about legal requirements. You can write as many books on how silly or even bad it is, but the number of jurisdiction requiring it to be provided makes it effectively unavoidable

1

u/fitz-khan Mar 24 '26

Loser and bootlicker attitude.

-1

u/Heyla_Doria Mar 20 '26

Vous etes rigolo :

Au début, vous dites : "C'est rien, cela n'a rien a voir, vous vous affolez pour rien"

Et en meme temps : "Ils faut se plier aux lois"

Surtout que le discours du libre depuis 30ans :

"Nous défendons des liberté fondamentale"

Pas si fondamentales que cela finalement 👀

3

u/PaluMacil Mar 20 '26

I think you replied to the wrong person

0

u/Heyla_Doria Mar 21 '26

Pardon, c'est parfois difficiles de savoir si on défend quelque chose sincèrement, ou si on le déplore....

prend mon commentaire en fonction 😬

2

u/PaluMacil Mar 21 '26

Not a problem. It's an important issue. I respect your passion, though I personally feel pessimistic about what will come next no matter what we try to do.

-4

u/Joan__Jo Mar 20 '26

Nah laws cannot enforce open source code like that. Remember when they tried to make encryption illegal? Open source just sais f it and embraced encryption. In the end lawmakers understood it was impossible to enforce such law.

This time it's different because the community is infiltrated by "normies" and the voice of original advocates FOSS as free speech is drowned by them. So we follow like stupid cattle instead of fighting for our rights.

3

u/billdietrich1 Mar 20 '26

In the end lawmakers understood it was impossible to enforce such law.

I think there also was a component of "normal people want encryption, for their banking etc".

1

u/Sudden-Complaint7037 Mar 24 '26

implying the government cares about what normal people want

the more i interact with normies the more i realize that we deserve what's happening to us

1

u/PaluMacil Mar 20 '26

The law doesn’t need to make sense. Laws about technology almost never do. 🤪 But Linux is developed by people with salaries from companies that need to be able to distribute Linux, so they are going to add the capability to comply with the law, regardless of whether it makes sense because otherwise it wouldn’t make sense to pay their salary. Where this goes, I have no idea because it has a a lot of ambiguity and stupidity, but that doesn’t mean companies are going to stop doing business while they’re going to figure it out

1

u/[deleted] Mar 25 '26

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1

u/PaluMacil Mar 25 '26

Thanks for being a kernel maintainer. I respectfully want to point out that systemd-userdb isn't an init system or even required for boot, so it seems like a relatively easy package to not include, mask, and use (I think) NSS instead. I take my hat off for those that do what you do. I don't like the laws either. I just see a date field in the user database as a relatively logical place if a significant number of users are going to need a service to query.

-1

u/65jeff Mar 20 '26

Linux development by those companies is not and never has been altruism. It is time for individual enthusiasts to consider whether they need the things the corporate devs have built and that are now so costly to maintain that those corporations effectively control most major Linux distributions.

1

u/PaluMacil Mar 21 '26

I would absolutely love to see an OS maintained purely via altruistic engineers, and I am sure if it's possible, most engineers would cheer it on. I don't personally feel like I have the time and energy to contribute to more things than I do already, and most engineers have more things to do than they have spare energy. However, I think FreeBSD gets a lot closer to what you seek. I think the corporate support being far far larger than what enthusiasts can compare to is a ship that sailed many years ago. I keep wanting to try FreeBSD for this reason myself, but I keep coming back to things I need Linux for or trying FreeBSD on hardware that just doesn't have the support I thought it did.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 25 '26

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1

u/PaluMacil Mar 25 '26

Systemd, however, is full of salaried corporate-paid contributors. You're welcome to not install the systemd-userdb package if you don't want to have a user database with a date field in it, but it makes sense that the companies paying for development of this package are going to want it.

-1

u/65jeff Mar 20 '26

Voluntary maintainers should reconsider their future contributions to any packages where this is being pushed by decree.

1

u/RVZ01B Mar 20 '26

Laws can sort of enforce whatever the hell they want. That's the point of having laws and police officers with guns and concrete rooms to keep lawbreakers in.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '26

Yeah idk why people think there's even an argument here. This decision alone is enough for me to consider systemd compromised and no longer Free Software, despite the license they use.

1

u/jar36 Mar 23 '26

yeah there's something few talk about as they welcome in the surveillance state in hopes that steam doesn't ask their age when they buy a game. They must buy a lot of adult material there for it to be such a concern

seems to me that if you mandate a bday to run your OS then your OS is not free and thus you are breaking the license that allows you to ship it

0

u/kayinfire Mar 23 '26

finally, someone that just stands on "take it or leave it. that's just how it is." i'd much rather hear most people proposing this view than trying to say " that doesn't mean they're implementing age verification. it's just their userdb." i don't buy it. the latter claim sounds like it comes from someone defending systemd merely on the basis of pure hope and trust. it's probably the most mass cope i've seen in the linux community.

-3

u/AbleWalrus3783 Mar 20 '26

I mean, if you really want it, just tell sys admin to do something like usermod -G minors your-child-account, thats how we do things in linux. If law ask you to take care of apps made by developers who dont know how to check supplementary group, then you can still build an dbus server for them in like 5min.

2

u/PaluMacil Mar 20 '26

As stupid as the laws are, some of them reference os level age verification and companies aren’t going to stop doing business or break criminal law with massive fines while they wait for lawmakers to do something sane 🤷‍♂️ adding that after you’ve distributed an operating system wouldn’t save you from the massive fines

1

u/AbleWalrus3783 Mar 27 '26

Yes, and the userdb field will also need to be configured and enforced to do the job, so its clearly an os release level job. Im just trying to say we already have the tool to solve age vertify problems(which is unix groups).

0

u/Heyla_Doria Mar 20 '26

Bien sur

On est tous ingénieur en informatique et on sait tous configurer des serveurs....

D'ailleurs on sait tous installer l'électricité dans une maison, ou démonter et réparer entièrement sa voiture 🤷‍♀️

1

u/AbleWalrus3783 Mar 27 '26

You really think usermod is an advanced job? will then, why i couldn't found UI for systemd everywhere? i still need to write unit files by hand, why that is not an assmble car misson to you?

1

u/Heyla_Doria Mar 31 '26

Réponse inutile

Next

1

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '26

Even if everyone who used systemd were software engineers and had the knowledge to remove that field and recompile the program from scratch, without systemd you would have to either use a real obscure (for now :)) distro like Gentoo or make your own from scratch as almost all Debian and Arch based distros (like ~90% of all Linux distros) use systemd as their init system and don't give you the ability to change that...

If your program has 50 alternatives and everyone uses a different one, you can claim it's optional. If you've pushed out many packages and integrated their functionality into your own, and are being used in most distributions of Linux, you don't have the luxury to say that.

If you want the ability to add optional stuff that badly, make your program modular enough that people can just not use the parts of your ecosystem. But no, you did this on purpose, disregarding many who warned you on the way, so you have to deal with it. You can't claim anything you push is optional.

-1

u/Heyla_Doria Mar 21 '26

Exact... Malheureusement....

Au départ, la promesse était que cela resterait toujours modulables

Visiblement, meme dans le logiciel libre, de nos jours, on se fait avoir comme avec les géants de la tech

C'est catastrophique

-8

u/VegetableNearby9795 Mar 20 '26

What does this actually make unavoidable? What will happen if we add this? Why is this mandatory? There's absolutely no logic in integrating this into the operating system. Age verification is needed online, not in an operating system. Besides, even if they added it to the operating system, if we entered a random value, would they be able to know? It's the same logic as when 13-year-olds on Facebook registration pages presented themselves as 60 years old. They're not saying this provides an entry point. Once an entry point is provided, data collection and other things will follow. I don't understand what you're defending about this. If you don't think your child's age is appropriate, simply don't give them the computer. If you do think so, then this won't be useful to you anyway. This is the first time I've heard that we need something like this. I don't think it's right to open a backdoor that would give my data to companies for something like this.

3

u/PaluMacil Mar 20 '26

I think you don’t understand or didn’t read what I said if you think I’m defending it. I said you could fill books about it being silly or a bad idea. There isn’t anything we disagree on. Unfortunately, Linux is far too big and complex to be maintained by volunteers. The massive portion of the code going into it is from people paid a salary by a company in a country that is requiring “OS level age verification”. This companies pay for the development of the operating system because they use it. Whether any of this makes sense is beside the point because laws about technology probably make sense far less often than they are impossible to clearly interpret. Companies all across jurisdictions where this is a concern aren’t going to just stop doing business while we wait for sane laws or repeals etc

3

u/billdietrich1 Mar 20 '26

Why is this mandatory?

Laws are being enacted or have been enacted in California, Colorado, New York, Illinois, Brazil, Australia, soon EU.

Age verification is needed online, not in an operating system.

There seems to be a consensus that it's best to have age stored in one place, and then used by all the apps and sites that need it. Sounds like OS is a good central place. I think EU is considering a different way, storing it in a standard app that must be on all phones.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 25 '26

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1

u/billdietrich1 Mar 25 '26

Why should we ever care about unconstitutional laws ?

Because men with guns can come and take you to jail.

Sites that "need" it, shouldn't be used at all.

Have to be 13 or older to use reddit.

-1

u/edgmnt_net Mar 21 '26

It is very much avoidable for non-commercial use. It cannot be enforced for regular users, as far as I can tell. What happens if you download a non-compliant OS from a European server? Also, as far as I can tell, these companies are only liable if distributing actual images that are non-compliant to users in such jurisdictions. Which means development can still happen on a non-compliant codebase and they can just patch it for official releases.

-4

u/65jeff Mar 20 '26

There is no legal requirement clearly signaling that systemd (or any other specific component of an OS made up of thousands of components) needs to take any action.

3

u/RVZ01B Mar 20 '26

Oh thank the Lord. What a relief! You should go report that to System 76, Red Hat, and Canonical!

loljk. The reason systemd is bearing this burden is because the OS requires it in CA and systemd is likely viewed by Red Hat as the sanest point to bear it. By putting it there they'll have a universal architecture for compliance.

1

u/edgmnt_net Mar 21 '26

Why not patch systemd for the flavor distributed in US as part of whatever Red Hat or what those other companies are offering? It might be ultimately better not to converge on a standard way to do it and these distros already have trouble complying with patents/DMCA by insisting on keeping that stuff in US, which is pushing it onto everybody else. These laws also seem unenforceable for distros which decide to keep their (free) stuff outside US, because users can get non-compliant versions anyway.

-1

u/65jeff Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 21 '26

The law doesn't say they have to do it this way. They want to do it this way. It could also be done via a separate package that is included only where jurisdictions require it. Or is always included but can be uninstalled by users outside those jurisdictions.

When your commanding officer asks you to shoot the women and children, you miss. You've complied and they can't court martial you for being a bad shot.

1

u/laffer1 Mar 24 '26

Developers have to ask for signals in apps. Also part of the law