this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
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I find that move extremely funny, since it's purely made for sensationalism and nothing else. I mean, if you hate how systems implemented age verification, then why don't you remove its identity verification too, i.e. also optional fields for stuff like your address an e-mail that most users don't even fill out.
There is no mechanism verifying what birth date you type in - you can type whatever date you want and systems doesn't care.
I'd say no matter where you stand with age verification, this is the best solution to handle the situation. After all, any and all age checks we have nowadays are a black box anyways. There is no real knowing how other systems are checking ages, and there is AFAIK no real government mandated rules on how it is verified. They could make you scan your ID's front, back, nuclear composition and dietary preferences and give you a result that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a proper age verification procedure.
If the government wants to introduce age verification, they have to do it themselves - build an API that handles the age verification, similar to how the digital ID in Germany works, as an example. If they want proper age verification, they also have to take the blame themselves if things go wrong.
I agree with all that you've said. But why add it now? Why haven't they added it a long time ago? Or if now they remembered, why not other extra optional fields that some people might want, like gender, sex, any other field? Oh, it would be too political? I see...
you mean like adding it to a bunch of optional details already?
I'm thinking the same. I understand the people saying it's no big deal, it's just an optional field. But the existing optional fields (GECOS) have been there since the beginning of time. The original Unix user database (/etc/passwd) was created in a different time. Things have changed in the last 50 years and we now know that a simple field in an OS level database is not really an appropriate place to store PII. I don't know what the solution is, as these laws are coming and there will be some people that need to comply, but I don't think the current change to systemd is the right approach.
On the plus side - this controversy has prompted me to look into other options for my home servers and I'm loving the minimalism and simplicity of Alpine. (This isn't a knee jerk reaction - I've been frustrated by the bloated feel of mainstream distributions for a while - more the straw that may break the camel's back)
Oh, definitely I'm not saying people should just jump the gun and replace their distro for one without systemd immediately. I certainly won't, at least not without thinking about it for a while. But I also think that denying the controversy exists is not good. This is definitely controversial, for some people even a deal breaker and there are valid, real reasons why. For the rest, it's good to look at what options there are, see that there really isn't an appropriate alternative for systemd in some cases and realizing that a successful fork would be a good thing. Also, a long time criticism of the community has been that systemd does too much and it being against basic Unix philosophy. I always thought of it not being a big deal, given its modularity. But I now realize that it centralizes control and design decisions to a single org and that is certainly a weak point IMO. So a fork makes a lot of sense, but it is at this point a mammoth of the project, so it will be really hard to maintain.
My line in the sand is when a distro/app starts enforcing entry of birth date data. Having a database field to store it, or even an optional prompt for it isn't the point where I bin it.
Good distros will push default a dob of 1970-1-1, mark my fucking words.
That's still forcing a DOB, which is the line I won't cross.
I would but I've always been opposed to systemd anyway.
But for me it's a slippery slope I don't think we should even get on.
I'm curious about GNU Shepard but still haven't gotten around to swapping. Does anyone have experiences to share?
I agree. But the start of the slope isn't my exit point. My exit point is just before the slope gets too steep to get off.
This is the most sane take I’ve read in this entire debacle. Between arguing the semantics of attestation vs verification and whether we need five hundred forks and PRs, I’m glad to read this.
The biggest mistake the original PR did was not make it more clear it’s not directly because of the laws themselves, it’s to support higher level systems that may want to or need to comply. Systemd is no more complying with any present or future laws than a keyboard manufacturer is violating the law if the user uses it to type racially motivated hate speech.
That is a valid point. Of course it still would be rather anonymised, but it could always be a 'frog in the pot' type situation, where most drastic changes are introduced very slowly. My main concern at the end of the day is how much info will be required to be given to services and how much data will be actually stored. If it's anonymised, then I don't see much of a threat. If a service requires me to fully identify for an age check, that's an entirely different thing, especially considering the last of Discord's data leaks.