And then they scream RTFM at linux noobs
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2026
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"It is too late, for I have already straw-manned your argument in a meme"
There's a bunch of idiots looking to crucify someone over this. This fucking witchhunt bullshit is really shaking my faith in the basic goodness of the Linux community. Trying to make some dev that put a line of code in systemd into a pariah isn't a good look for opensource.
Edit: 4 fuckwits and counting that don't have the courage to show their usernames by telling me why I'm wrong to despise pitchfork mobs.
You won't listen anyway. Just look at your language, calling us idiots and fuckwits while pretending you're the level-headed one.
There's enough comments under just this meme and every single discussion on this topic explaining why that change is a direct attack on privacy and privacy being the reason why many of us chose Linux.
Nobody gives a fuck about your weaseling technicalities. The salient fact is that this change was made in order to "comply in advance" with totalitarian fuckery. It SIGNALS POLITICAL SUPPORT for it, and that's not okay!
I studied at the PR in question and that's not the conclusion I arrive at. Let me try to explain how this looks to me.
Also keep in mind, I do think we absolutely need to keep the political pressure on and push back on identity-gating policies with all our collective might. In that light the PR itself does the two things I'd absolutely require here: one, it allows the user to put whatever value they want in that field, including none at all, and two, it disallows all apps from reading that field without the user's active permission.
Basically it's a superficially valid implementation of a bullshit requirement that still leaves all the power in the user's hands and therefore renders the requirement meaningless. Or in other words, a huge middle finger to the proponents of age-checking.
Mind you, I feel there's also value in loud non-compliance and I'm glad some are taking that road -- keep it up, folks. But I'm leery of demands that only one single approach be taken. This needs to be fought on every front we can. And to me the PR in question reads like an effective defensive move.
Couldn't reply to me pointing out that this was merged, and was stated to be explicitly to support age verification laws, so you had to lie about it as a meme instead.
Because thats what youre doing right now, lying and spreading misinformation. You can admit it.
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(11 replies)
Storing a users birthday is useful metadata anyway. I'm surprised it wasn't stored before.
The age isn't verified is any way. You can set it to the 1800s for all it cares
your argument is an oxymoron. if the data is useful meta data, but the user can just put what ever they want as the date then itβs not storeing useful data. and that means it should not exist.
unless the point is to use it in the future where the user canβt enter what ever they want and thus legitimizes all the commotion.
How is that useful information? To what purpose?
This is not very 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 of you.
How does one enter an older DOB without causing an underflow?
Implement it as a s64 instead of a u64. Ugh, honestly. Back when it was a 32 bit integer it made sense to make it unsigned because we'd have run out of numbers by now otherwise. But as of the advent of 64 bit unix time values there's really no reason not to implement it as a signed value smh
It is stored as a json date string
Yeah like the email address and the full name of the user.
... What do you mean it's blank for 99% of users?
Email address and name are actually useful for network environments of a system admin needs to know who is the user behind a process or something. How old the user is is complete useless.
Wrong. The earliest date you can set it to is 1900!!! π
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source? i mean you went through the effort to post a meme about it at least include the relevant information
The source is the source: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/acb6624fa19ddd68f9433fb0838db119fe18c3ed
Takes a birth date for the user in ISO 8601 calendar date format. The earliest representable year is 1900. If an empty string is passed the birth date is reset to unset.
That's it. That's all it does.
Whatever was discussed in the PR, the code does precisely nothing to implement any kind of verification. It's just an optional birth date field, like tons of electronics have had forever.
earliest representable year is 1900
(Time to set it to) literally 1984!
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So theyβre introducing a system where a users age can be verified?
Hmm, if only there was a name for that.
Stores the user's birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws\
in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc.
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Well I still don't dang like it I'll tell you hwat.
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