4 ms·
Revert "userdb: add birthDate field to JSON user records
- wasting_time 7mo agoIf anything, the POSIX passwd specification should be updated to include age instead of introducing yet another dependency on systemd for something that affects the entire ecosystem.
- rebolek 7mo agoNo, do not poison passwd, let systemd choke on this.
- jmclnx 7mo agoIf you have to have age, then I agree /etc/passwd is the best place. But that means a user's birth date will be public viewable, for some people that would be an issue. In my opinion. bdate should not be stored anywhere in Linux or any UNIX type system. Linux and the BSD should ignore these laws completely and we move on from this. I still do no understand why the Linux Foundation is not chiming in. By keeping quiet all the LF is doing is reinforcing the perception that LF is fully owned by "Big Tech".
- 1718627440 7mo agoAlso a user account is not necessarily a person. Most of those on my machine, certainly aren't.
- tzs 7mo agoI don't know about the similar bills, but the California one only applies to the accounts of children.
- anthk 7mo agoFreeDOS has no accounts. Neither hasn't Haiku, nor Amiga. And any OS from 8 and 16 microcomputers with FPGA's have no concept of that either and if they can run Frotz they can for sure play Interstatal Zero, (I-0.z5), both in English and a faithful Spanish translation (Interstatal Cero). Oh, you are now able to run a 18+ game even under a PSP, a PDA, an old phone with no concept of accounts at all (J2ME interpreter), classic Mac's, a Post Script file and even FreeDOS. Go try implementing accounts under FreeDOS or CP/M. Now potentially a 18+ game can be showed to billions of native (and non-native) English speakers from nearly any OS sice 1979, even under a PostScript file (zmachine.ps), albeit it needs to be extended. This law it's idiotic and it shows. Will they ban retrocomputing with Amiga OS 3.1 running on FPGA's or what? They can run the modern web with TLS 1.2/3 with AmiSSL. They can run IRC against Bitlbee and login into Steam, Jabber, Discord and Mastodon with relative ease. Gemini can access most JS-less webs at gemini://gemi.dev and Gopher clients for sure it might be some adult content referenced at gopher://magical.fish and gopher://sdf.org, even if it's just mildly NSFW, such as harsh language and sex references. The Javascript-less web, too. Usenet, more adult discussions and content, maybe with heated flame wars. And for sure they can run Frotz with that mentioned game game, at full speeds.
- subscribed 7mo agoGECOS fields are mandatory. You may just ignore them for your daemons.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- rascul 7mo agoIn what cases are they mandatory? I've been leaving them blank for decades.
- subscribed 7mo agoTheir existence is mandatory (see:/etc/passwd format). You're free to ignore them/leave empty unless your server's policies say otherwise.
- badgersnake 7mo agoIt would be a surprise to everyone if systemdb did the right thing.
- isatty 7mo agoYep: they won’t.
- 3eb7988a1663 7mo agoPoster failed to add that camelCase was obviously a bad call.
- noosphr 7mo agoSystemd has gone from a technical cancer for Linux systems to a political one. If only every major distribution didn't break backwards compatibility to play with the cool kids. Time to get back to programs that do one thing and do it well.
- cluckindan 7mo agoWell said. systemd is against the UNIX philosophy and shouldn’t be the default.
- exe34 7mo agosadly this is a revert. I wish they would go all in, and encourage everyone to move off.
- noosphr 7mo agoIt is a rejection of a revert. From the comment closing the revert by Poettering: >It's an optional field in the userdb JSON object. It's not a policy engine, not an API for apps. We just define the field, so that it's standardized iff people want to store the date there, but it's entirely optional.
- exe34 7mo agooh right, that's great then, let the Titanic maintain course!
- 9dev 7mo agoHave fun debugging your brittle init scripts. All my systemd servers are working flawlessly, have done so for years, and will continue to do so. The Linux ecosystem would be such a vastly more enjoyable place if you people would take all that energy you put into that petty fight over systemd into something productive.
- noosphr 7mo agoI'm on OpenBSD. Seeing Linux drama at this point is just entertainment. The inferior technology stack pushed by big tech and defended by people who know better has been something else. You'll take my software freedom from my cold dead hands.
- tomth 7mo agoAge verification through the OS could make parental control much easier. Just set the age of your child on a given system with your own account, and apps and websites can signal what the minimum age is, and then the OS can decide to block it or not. Could be very privacy friendly compared to the current online methods, like what Discord did. Of course, I'm not in favour of actual verification of the age attribute. And I've heard the slippery slope arguments. But if I were a parent this would be great. Problem with setting up parental controls currently is that it takes some effort and knowledge of these tools, not every parent has that. I mean, even people who do, are usually chaotic in the digital domain, like for example, (re-)using very bad passwords. So why expect people to do better with parental controls?
- badgersnake 7mo agoYou probably shouldn’t have kids if you’re not prepared to look after them.
- tomth 7mo agoI would agree when it comes to the most basic real-world skills, but even then you cannot prohibit it. When it comes to digital skills, no, you cannot expect everyone to understand it. Even when it comes to GUI tools. It's just not realistic.
- exe34 7mo agoban the selling or providing of general purpose computing to children. we can already do it with alcohol and cigarettes. any parents caught providing such things to their children go on a register and have mandatory courses on parenting.
- tomth 7mo agoThis could be an option with children under the age of 12. Maybe only let them use a computer or gaming console in the living room, or something like that.
- jlund-molfese 7mo agoIt rubs me the wrong way that the person opening this PR says "we have decided not to implement OS-level age attestation" when they seem to have no prior involvement with systemd, and it's clearly not their call to make. I wouldn't go so far as to call it astroturfing, but it's the same thing that's irksome about anyone claiming to speak on behalf of a group they actually have no involvement in. Feels like someone trying to score cheap points.
- crooked-v 7mo agoThe "we have decided not to" in the initial post is weird. Was this somebody trying to, what, gaslight the maintainers into changing their mind?
- pixelmelt 7mo agoIt sounds weird because Claude wrote it
- monksy 7mo agoRichard Stallman stikes again about his statements on free and open systems. (With those you can fork and remove nonsense)
- bradleyy 7mo agoWhile disappointing, Poettering is essentially a "wrong decision machine" so I don't know what anyone would expect. And the author of the PR came in a little hot, which probably didn't help.
- robutsume 7mo ago[dead]