this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
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Will we have to choose between privacy-friendly Linux distros vs legal Linux distros? (lemmy.ca)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by pglpm@lemmy.ca to c/linux@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/62278765

Software changes for compliance with age-verification laws are being pushed a bit everywhere in Linux-development; for example:

It's interesting that it's the same small group of people behind these pull requests, and that discussion threads in them have been locked owing to a great amount of negative criticisms.

They say "we have to comply with the law". Which also means that if "the law" in the future will require proper verification, handling to 3rd-parties, or whatnot, then they will comply.

Well, it's their right to. They don't owe anything to anyone, and are under no obligation to report to users or to the community, nor to pay heed to anybody's wishes.

If things proceed in this direction, we users may at some point have to choose between privacy-friendly Linux distributions or legal Linux distributions. People who, like me, are worried, need to start thinking about concrete actions to take before it's too late: where to develop such distros? which channels to download and distribute them from? And so on. (And of course, more generally we need to write and protest to politicians, organize protest marches, go on strike, refuse to comply...)

It's good to remind to those who keep on repeating the words "legal" and "illegal" that for example Nelson Mandela was, technically speaking, a criminal who did and promoted illegal activity. This happens when laws become immoral.

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[–] AbidanYre@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

You simply input a random color. How they can check if it is true ? Same for any other field.

The point there is that complying with the whims of every town on the planet gets to be unmanageable. A town with <1000 people deciding what fields are present for the other 8 billion is insane. I picked color as an example for something dumb that wouldn't matter. I hoped that was obvious.

And if you can just lie about it, then why even bother including the field at all?

In some countries it would be illegal to ask for such data. (EU for example)

Exactly. How does systemd decide which set of laws to follow? The ones that say you need to report the data or the ones that say you can't?

[–] gian@lemmy.grys.it 1 points 1 day ago

The point there is that complying with the whims of every town on the planet gets to be unmanageable. A town with <1000 people deciding what fields are present for the other 8 billion is insane.

Nah, if the problem is the whim of small town I don't think someone would go to the trouble to implement it. The problem is if the law is from a country, and even in this case it would not be obvious that someone would do something.

Then there we could start a discussion about how this was handled in Systemd, but it out of scope.

I picked color as an example for something dumb that wouldn’t matter. I hoped that was obvious.

I know it was just an example.

And if you can just lie about it, then why even bother including the field at all?

Because who write the law do not understand anything about it and they are naive enough to think that everyone will answer sincerely.

Exactly. How does systemd decide which set of laws to follow? The ones that say you need to report the data or the ones that say you can’t?

That should be asked to the guy who implemented the feature and to the maintainer of Systemd. But the real problem here is that they think that what US laws say are valid everywere in the world. (Not that I have any confidence that Pottering and the other guy would answer in some intelligent way...)