- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
- linux@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
- linux@lemmy.world
Some of you need to watch this video, and hang your head in shame.
Dylan Taylor has been receiving constant harassment, including threats to his life and safety, for actions done collectively by SystemD. The article by Sam Bent was explictly mentioned as part of the harassment campaign, and rightfully so.
I don’t think enough people realize that this is catastrophically bad. It’ll discourage people from becoming open source developers, it’ll discourage people from using Linux, and it’ll discourage legislators from taking the Linux community seriously.
If you ever wished ill upon another human being for complying with a relatively inconsequential law, you are better off never touching a computer again. The Linux community has collectively gone so far beyond what is acceptable here.
I’m going to bullet my thoughts on this whole thing because I’m annoyed by the general response, and the implementation as well:
- I don’t wish harm on the dev and I don’t dislike them. I don’t even know them
- Death threats are ridiculous; that’s the working class attacking itself again
- That said, I want to know what compelled this dev to preemptively implement this field not in 1 but in 2 separate PRs
- Both the field and the law itself do not serve the user at all; it’s a bullshit vague law that is using children as cover—again (I’m old enough to know how this game works)
- I’ve always viewed Linux as the rebel among all of the corporate slop we have to constantly dodge, so it is super gross when I see changes in Linux that were made to appease laws built and pushed by fascist tech companies and governments
- Did the dev even open a line of discussion anywhere, or was the PR supposed to be used for that?
- What’s his motivation? Money? Fame? I’ve been a programmer for 20 years and I’d never jump on a chance to add something that aligns with laws I think are unethical dog shit—especially in the Linux space where the whole goal is to not be Windows
- I’m a bit frustrated with the casual “what’s the big deal?” mindset that a lot of people I’ve encountered have about this. Are we not living through the same timeline where the US has fallen under the control of a fascist regime that is being eagerly assisted by Meta, Apple, Microsoft and a ton of other massive corporations? How do people not see that this is the beginning of the wedge? And let’s say it peters out and nothing else happens. I’m not going to be ashamed of the fact that I was a squeaky wheel over it because I’ve seen how these things go. You follow the money and suddenly the bigger picture comes into focus. Why on earth a meager single little dev would implement this, unprompted, is just beyond my reasoning.
This reminds me of when Guillermo Rauch from Vercel praised Trump multiple times. Bro, you’re not Tim Cook. You’re not Ellison, Zuck, or Musk. You’re not even on their level. You’re not going to get on their radar. I have PTSD from fellow tech folks being weirdly aligned with fascism and this whole dumb thing is giving me that vibe again. I don’t think this is that 1:1, but this is like the metal scene. You have to dodge the fascists that seem to weirdly permeate corners of the culture. People that refuse and get annoyed by right-wing labels, but still help right-wing grifters, are their own unique brand of pathetic.
I’ll be upset when a cloud-connected Linux component prevents the system from working unless the real name and birth date fields have been verified
until then, this is just as inert as the real name field which has been there for decades, and far less useful for surveillance than the real name field which has been there for decades
Except this field has been implemented explicitly for this age verification laws. If this was for some random birthday greeting when you open terminal, i think fewer people would be up in arms. context is everything.
if this moron implements compliance with laws that record a birthday today, what is stopping him adding 3rd party verification of id tomorrow? So far his track record is corporate bootlicker. You cannot trust projects where this guy is a contributer to
what is stopping him
The pull request approval process? It’s quite easy to recognize that one change is harmless and another is not. The slope is not THAT slippery.
I completely understand objecting to the systemd change, I also object, but acting like the fascists have already won is a bit crazy.
No, let’s wait till we’re at the bottom of the slope. Then start objecting.
As I said, I also object, but you have to realize you’re literally just doing the slippery slope meme unironically. The part that makes it a fallacy is the unjustified assertion that more egregious changes are the inevitable result of the first one, except the first one is materially harmless and in line with existing PII fields in userdb. It’s completely reasonable to expect systemd to go no further than it already has.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
It is slippery, I have described the process UK is taken here https://piefed.social/comment/10693725
Age verification laws: slippery slope. Sure. I agree.
Adding optional age field to systemd userdb: not slippery. Systemd isn’t being weaponized as an age verification suite. It’s just not happening.
Whats wrong with Age verification? its fine to verify age, the problem with the age verification laws is the issue of how age is being verified. In this case its fine because its local first and privacy respecting.
Age verification requires doxxing yourself in order to actually work, and if it doesn’t require doxxing yourself then it won’t work and it can be bypassed, so pointless capitulation granting ease into more authoritarian forms in the future. You don’t see why any actually functional age verification is a problem while fascists are trying to control all the digital architecture?
No it doesnt. If I ask are you 18 and you reply no/yes that is verifying your age without doxing you. This field is for when the user is NOT admin on the machine. This field would be filled out by the parent when they’re setting up their kids machine.
What is the point of a field like this if you can literally put anything in it you want? Your not verifying anything. The next logical step is to add proof.
If you’re a user that requires age verification (IE a child) then you cant just add it. Your parent will be the root user controlling your account.
Like I said, any actually FUNCTIONAL age verification. Your example verifies absolutely nothing.
How does that verify nothing? It provides perfectly fine age verification.
Its not suitable for proving your age. Its adding a field which is a stepping stone to future gating and more control over something that isn’t even applicable to most of the users of the system.
Why not then add a live filter to ensure that you don’t call Putler’s war in Ukraine and call it “SVO” as you are supposed to? Its the law over there and many years older than this one. People already have gone to prison for not complying with it. But hey lets make that a part of linux too. Its law after all… Do you see how stupid it is to blindly comply to something that doesn’t even apply to you?
How is it not suitable? If I setup my kids age and an app wants to use the portal to check if he is over 18 and it returns no. That suitable age verification and its privacy respecting. Which is what is being suggested.
There are already parental control packages exist in the Linux infrastructure which are not tied to low level modules such as systemd https://github.com/biglinux/big-parental-controls if you want, you can install it. Its fork is available in the Arch ecosystem for example that mentions it complies with the BR implementation (https://github.com/jersobh/arch-parental-controls)
- This is entirely optional package that claims to be privacy orientated (I haven’t tried it) that a system administrator can install if they wish.
- My router, an Asus one has parental controls settings already
- My ISP router, bog standard one has parental controls settings already
- My ISP account has parental controls settings already at account level, if Ia m not technical enough, I can call them and ask them to set it up
- My phone provider has parental controls
Why do I need MORE parental controls shoved down my throat when I do not desire it nor wish for it? But this time in a core component of alot of linux distributions.
Oh and before you tell me “but ExoticCherryPigeon, its an optional field”, sure, but here is the example of the slippery slope curtsey of UK:
Take a look at the history of this act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_age_verification_in_the_United_Kingdom
We are now at the point where I need to use a CC to tell some 3rd party that I want a wank.And what else is happening now? They are suing websites not based in UK! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023#Enforcement, but that’s not all, although not at the law stage, there are some talks about also now restricting VPN’s https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/uk-government-says-it-may-age-restrict-or-limit-childrens-vpn-use-following-new-consultation.
A lot of websites also not based in UK jurisdiction have simply self censored UK users before they get ISP level blocked.
If this is not an example of a slippery slope, I don’t know what is!
TL;DR tools already exist, we do not need more tools that will be a privacy nightmare
I dont care about some slopcoded week old project. This is not a serious alternative.
it would be very interesting to see that attempt
but Poettering has already said that functionality doesn’t belong in systemd so I’m not sure where anyone would raise such a PR
seems like an Ubuntu/RedHat level distribution design to pull in a brand new age-verification / mass-surveillance component, or maybe modify an existing telemetry component
the birth date field only made it into systemd because it’s user metadata that is consistent with what is already stored there, whereas surveillance does not
for now, at least
again, I’d be very interested to see what happens with follow-up PRs
Poettering closed the pr that was reverting this age field. What happens is adding more and more control in the future to conform to whatever idiotic laws someone might make. Should we then also implement a filter for what you type online to conform with Russian law about calling their war “SVO”? Its their law after all, so why not make the rest of the world conform? Its already years older then this age verification?
rejecting the revert is completely separate from accepting additional age-check / mass-surveillance PRs, you know this and you are being willfully ignorant
I would be very upset and very surprised if hypothetical follow-up PRs were merged into systemd, and I’m betting they will be rejected
How is it different? The ready acceptance of additional fields specifically for age verification is clearly proof enough that any further bullshit will be accepted just as quickly. PR description clearly outlines it is for the sole purpose of age verification…
What else could the point of these fields be?
Don’t be logical. You’re supposed to cry fascist and hurl slippery-slope fallacies like this is the Reichstag Fire.
Are we not living through the same timeline where the US has fallen under the control of a fascist regime that is being eagerly assisted by Meta, Apple, Microsoft and a ton of other massive corporations?
Because the real fight is not on the internet or computers.
It’s one battlefront of many, and a fairly significant one. As we’ve become on online society, computer software has come to encode human rights to expression and privacy. Those rights are worth fighting for.
What I’ve learned is that it’s basically impossible to convince people that the only real way to solve this is violent revolution.
The real fight is on multiple fronts.
People protesting (legally and peacefully) have been targeted based on social media accounts. This is closing the gap to allow similar fascist behavior on an even more personal level.
But it probably realistically has to be organized on it, since that is the global communication network…
Death threats are understamdable cause his move makes damage to huge amount of people. It is like a terrorism
I don’t think enough people realize that this is catastrophically bad. It’ll discourage people from becoming open source developers, it’ll discourage people from using Linux, and it’ll discourage legislators from taking the Linux community seriously.
Sure, but personally, I don’t want a linux community that’s driven by corporate needs and governments that have been paid off by them. I don’t view it as a catastrophe, if that’s the version of “the linux community” that we lose.
None of that is to say that harassing devs is correct. It’s not, and never is. Harassing anyone with death threats and dogpiling is not on. But if we take that out of the picture, negative pushback that drives away devs that would otherwise have helped implement universal age gating isn’t something I’m terribly upset over, because I don’t want the version of community they’re taking us towards
this version IS the community and they’re not taking us anywhere where we weren’t already going.
linux is a much a product of our society as are other things like pop culture and capitalism. corporations of all sizes and reaches (ie red hat, ibm, google, facebook, etc.) have always steered the path and decided upon the development trends that linux has always taken and the only people who could have prevented or mitigated further centralized enshitification (aka the linux kernel developers group) bent over backwards to comply with the american government’s overreach when they kicked out russian developers.
age verification is just the next step into this overreach and it too is being driving from the same corporate/government source that forced us all to accepting things like systemd or libvirt/kvm (facebook for the former and red hat for the latter) to service their profit motives.
like american politics, it’s still possible to reverse the trend; but also like american politics; it requires a greater deal of collectivist action that westerners are unwilling to risk out of fear of losing their own tiny piece of the pie.
[the linux kernel developers group] bent over backwards to comply with the american government’s overreach when they kicked out russian developers.
I though that was mostly due to Linus being a typical Russia-hating Finn, but I never investigated.
i also wouldn’t put this past him given the reactionary tendencies he’s demonstrated in the past; but i suspect that a threat of non-compliance == treason from the federal government probably had a bigger impact.
and if you’ve ever had the displeasure of working for the federal government; you’ll hear horror stories of how capricious and draconian the selective enforcement of treason can be.
a typical Russia-hating Finn
Russia seems to have that effect on their neighbours (until those neighbours get invaded, annexed, and the population dispersed, so the area can be called Russia. See Karelia and Ukraine for some recent and ongoing examples). So sure, could be that.
He sure was a big ol’ dick about it I will admit. Saying anyone who disagreed was a bot or Russian troll really pissed me off at the time.
Its supposed to be open.
On a completely unrelated, off-topic note. Here is the same person talking about Google’s new “advanced workflow” for “sideloading apps” on Android.
The title of his blog post is “Google’s New Android Sideloading Flow Is a Fair Trade”…Figures.
You mention the title but not the content of the essay. Did you read it?
Edit: At first glance, the article seemed actually well-meant. Didn’t have the context of how bootlickery it was.
TL;DR is that he says his initial reaction was “frustration” but then he goes on to parrot everything Google said to justify this.
For example,
57% of adults worldwide experienced a scam in 2025
It is to protect people from scammers. It isn’t aimed at power users (Sounds very much like “It is to protect the children. This isn’t aimed at power users”).
There is no mention of https://keepandroidopen.org/ and what it means for developers of free and open android applications.
There is no mention of statements made by developers of applications like F-droid, Obtainium and Newpipe who have openly said that they do not agree with this step from Google.
There is no mention of how this can potentially demotivate individual android app developers and drive them away from the platform entirely (here is an example of this).
There is also no mention of how most of these malware, adware and nagware infested apps used by scammers are ironically on Google’s own Play Store.
Other that that, no. I’m sure I did not read the content of his essay carefully enough. More importantly, my opinion doesn’t matter. I’m just a reactionary idiot. But I wonder what the developers of those free and open source applications on F-droid, applications that cannot be installed via the Play Store (but their scammy fake versions can be), will react to this being called a “fair trade”.
57% of adults worldwide experienced a scam in 2025
Sure. I experienced a scam and I told them to “fuck off”.
That’s not 57% fell for a scam, or 57% of android users got scammed by “side loaded” software. It’s cherry picking a stat just justify a monopolistic practice.
Wow. Thanks for clearing that up. That was the first time I heard about the “advanced flow” and the criticism surrounding it.
Sure seems like a useful idiot at best.
Yeah I’m not going to give this guy his desired victim role. He put a lot of effort into make privacy invading pull requests. Death threats and doxxing is too far but he deserves some insults.
No he doesn’t. We need to focus our anger on the legislators/ lobbiers (Meta in this case).
You know it’s possible to do both, right?
Adding birthday fields is not privacy invading in itself.
Yes, of course. If you ignore current reality, then it’s not privacy invading…
No, it literally just can’t violate your privacy in any way. You have complete control over what, if anything, is placed in that field. No information about you can be gained or disclosed by virtue of the systemd change alone. You can think it’s a bad change because it signals intent to follow a trend of supporting privacy-invading age verification, but you can’t say this specific change in itself is privacy-invading.
You’d have complete control for now.
Don’t give them an inch.
I don’t support the change. That’s not my point. My point is that if we’re going to argue the dev being threatened isn’t a victim because he’s actively harming privacy, we should be aware that the changes he proposed are not actually harming privacy at all.
Systemd is free software. The four essential freedoms necessitate that you have complete control forever.
The only way that you could lose control is if your hardware manufacturer took away the ability for you to install your own operating system. But then the choice isn’t going to be Windows or a Linux flavour personally blessed and tivoised by Lennart, it’s going to be Windows or a brick.
What the hell else is it used for?
It’s mostly not going to be used at all.
Then why is it necessary?
Adding a birthday field is not privacy invading in itself the same way brandishing a knife is not assault in itself.
Context matters. I’ve held knives before and it was completely inocuous. I’ve used knives to chop vegetables, to spread butter, to carve something out of wood, etc. If I pulled out a knife while in a heated argument with someone that’d be a whole other story, and I don’t think “I was just holding the knife, is it illegal to hold knives now?” would exonerate me from accusations of intent or threat to assault someone.
In any other context adding a date of birth field would be inocuous. You’re not required to use it after all. But in this context as I understand it, it is explicitly infrastructure for age verification, even if it is not age verification in itself.
If you have to fill them in, it is.
If you have to fill them in, it is.
Thanks for letting us know you’ve done zero research. You don’t have to fill it in just the same as you don’t have to fill in the RealName and Email field.
Thanks for letting us know you’re an ass.
It’s not a software issue that requires research. It’s a philosophical question of requiring something purely for authoritarian reasons and this is step one.
You don’t, and you don’t have to fill them in with accurate information, so it isn’t.
You don’t, until you do.
Well, It depends on where.
deleted by creator
Unfortunately appeasement upwards has been taken advantage of over and over.
It’s logical to take a stance of ok what can we do to head off the bigger problem. But the truth is, over authoritative governments and tech businesses will overstep that rational offering. So appeasement needs to stop, and recognising this as the line is already occurring.
I am not gonna wish harm on the guy, but I really don’t have a lot of sympathy for a techbro simp.
Yeah preemptive bootlicking before even getting sued is not a characteristic i love to see in a dev that works on one of the most important pieces of linux software.
When the Ai companys acted after this maxime, ignore laws until getting sued, there was a huge outrage but here everyone wants the same from open source companies and developers.
It seems that double Standards are fine after all.
I dunno the exact law, but I’d differentiate based on whether the law in place is bad, or good (in my opinion). Maybe the guys doing the “double standard” also think like this.
So you say that opinion and subjective classification of good or bad is the only valid measurement?
That is the issue with double standard, everyone has their own subjective viewpoint of good or bad, of morality, of which laws to ignore and which to follow. And a lot of really bad things are done all the time in the name of good and moral reasons!
Why make any law at all if only personal, subjectiv morallity matters?
This one is a very old debate, and you are taking my opinion to an extreme. Not that I think it’s particularly offensive or anything.
This question is rhetorical: would you uphold racial segregation laws because they are the law?
There are many takes one what one should do.
I don’t think the changes in question are “upholding” any law, but rather giving system admins and software devs a convenient/predefined way to attempt to comply with the law if they choose. “Upholding” the law would be requiring the field to be filled or checked.
That said, to your point, if someone proposed a race field “so that devs can implement segregation if they choose,” I’d find that reprehensible even though it doesn’t do anything on its own. Similarly, I object to the systemd change.
I would fight the law itself, not single persons.
I’m not US and my country doesn’t have such a law, can’t fight foreign laws.
I’m not fighting the dev either and I don’t approve harassment, I’m just switching to non-systemd distro, that’s the best message anyone can send against this.
I agree in principle. Thankfully, the law is not “in place” in the US yet, there’s still time to amend, repeal, etc., so we are not in trouble for now.
Ofc, John Brown would disagree with you, but he is extreme by today’s standards.
A better example would be the many people who try to block policemen from evicting people from rented apartments (mostly old/sick people who cannot pay). Ofc, one could pay for one being evicted, but that would just strengthen the landlord.
actions done collectively by SystemD
Nope. It only needs one maintainer to do the PR
It’ll discourage people from becoming open source developers
You know what will discourage Them more? Id verification
relatively inconsequential law
Give me your Id. Seriously, go and give me your ID with nothing blurred.
Give me your Id. Seriously, go and give me your ID with nothing blurred.
My age is 26.
That’s not what they asked
I also want to see your passport and your original birth certificate
That’s not what they asked
Yes, I know. I answered the question that reasonably follows from the context. Not their loaded question that assumes something which was not in the pull request.
I know a lot of people like to use the slippery slope fallacy here but even if that applies, you should limit your resistance to points where you actually have a leg to stand on. It’s not like the government would find it much harder to jump straight to age verification without this age indication step. Going all-in now just does all manner of a disservice to the cause of digital privacy.
what follows from context is you giving them your ID and birth certificate so he knows you aren’t lying about your age.
We’ll deal with that when it happens. Not fighting against an imagined threat by using the slippery slope fallacy.
Start by fighting the New York one.
except they are literally eroding privacy as we speak in this slope we have been slipping down on for a decade or two at this point, as if this is happening in a vacuum.
we can be mad at multiple things at once, especially when they are all part of the same effort.
You are right that it was a loaded question, and you had a smart answer, but the implication of this “inconsequential” change represented by the current birthdate is of course more invasive identification later.
Otherwise why would they bother, because as it is now it is useless or inconsequential.
Otherwise why would they bother, because as it is now it is useless or inconsequential.
The leading theory is that this is to help companies in California comply with the child online privacy laws.
Ah, another smart answer.
That’s not what they asked
Wrong. That is all that is asked in the Californian legislation.
so far
He didn’t comply, he collaborated. It won’t deter anyone but pro fascist programmers from developing for Linux. Your defence of the indefensible says a lot about you, too.
Don’t collaborate with fascists.
systemd maintainers rolling over and complying in advance somehow isn’t even that surprising.
I don’t get the “complying in advance” argument here. What would be an appropriate date for something like this to be accepted?
Well, the law doesn’t come into effect until Jan 1st 2027, so you could delay until then at the latest. Or you wait a bit longer to see what the enforcement looks like and make the companies/politicians at least sweat a bit from any potential fallout. With GDPR some companies took a long time of dragging their feet to become compliant (partially because initial enforcement was lenient to give them time).
Right. I thin you are ignoring some complexity here. This developer added a field to store some optional data in systemd. That code needs to be tested, reviewed, debated, and eventually needs to be merged in. Those merges, at least with large projects, don’t typically get added directly to main they get added to a release branch. That release branch then needs to be completed and merged where it will then be packaged. Then different distributions/installers need to add that field as a requirement to their code which typically goes through the same process. Then all those changes need to be packaged for release by the distros themselves.
So I’ll ask again. Assuming that distros do not want to risk being fined and financially ruined. What is a appropriate time before January 1st 2027 to open this pull request in systemd?
This would also assume that we would like to propose a solution (for the data storage) early enough that distros do not all come up with their own implementations and leave PII strewn across the system.
Never. Let shit hit the fan if it has to. Fight back instead of swallowing the whole boot.
Legitimately the way various porn sites addressed similar laws is the way to go. Verification required in this state? “Well we’re no longer serving this state’s traffic at all, and conveniently here’s the contact info of the government officials to blame, enjoy!”
Hi. Are you a maintainer of one of the distros that might be affected by this law? If you aren’t then you have no standing to blindly tell them that they should not follow the law and risk fines that would ruin the funding for their project(s).
Bringing up porn sites is a false equivalency. Many of these laws do not require verification of ID or face scans as some are incorrectly claiming. They require a birthdate be entered during installation. The laws surrounding porn sites required 3rd party age verification which many of these sites said would not only crater their traffic from these states but also introduce a privacy nightmare which would also work against their business interests.
I imagine it feels quite righteous to drop maxims like this. I too am reminded everyday how glad I am not to have to live in a fascist state.
That said I think this sort of superficial dismissal is really unhelpful.
I think the vast majority of Linux users will agree we don’t want to have to work with these laws but the reality is that we do. Far better we focus our efforts on minimising harm and promoting alternative mechanisms (e.g. zero-knowledge proofs).
Further I fear this righteousness actually serves to foster a toxic culture in the free software movement. And do you know what we call belligerent people who want to stifle dissent? Fascists!
first off, please announce that the video is from that brody clown so people can not click on that slop; needless to say, I ain’t watched it so I don’t know or care what points was made in it.
second, what OP is doing in OP and his bonehead comments is purposefully pushing a strawman argument, false dichotomy, red herring, and all the other logical fallacies in order to posture as a hero or whatever they got going on between their ears - if you’re anti this bullshit “law” then you are also pro physically harming poor FOSS “contributors”.
this fucking “contribution” shoulda been shot down like any other troll/bullshit plaguing every other FOSS project beset with ai bots and carma-farming typo-fixers and the like, and if by some mistake their “contribution” was accepted, here’s a chance to reverse it.
cali ain’t the world, which by and large ain’t got no such idiocy on the books. and if it did, I wouldn’t bootlick my way to submitting a patch to incorporate it; I would, in fact, oppose it any way I could.
that clown of a “contributor” has a history of simping for the backwardest ideas, antithetical to FOSS and I don’t care one bit what he has to say on any one topic.
Funny to see someone else with an active distaste for his videos. He sets off predatory alarm bells in my head and feels smarmy to me.
Yeah. Brody and Lunduke both have some very strange positions I don’t agree with. They also just kinda give the ick, as the cool kids would put it.
Lunduke got posted yesterday as well.
Needless to say, I ain’t watched it so I don’t know or care what points was made in it.
cali ain’t the world, which by and large ain’t got no such idiocy on the books. and if it did, I wouldn’t bootlick my way to submitting a patch to incorporate it; I would, in fact, oppose it any way I could. that clown of a “contributor” has a history of simping for the backwardest ideas, antithetical to FOSS and I don’t care one bit what he has to say on any one topic.
If you refuse to listen to the experience of the person the Linux community has been harassing, then don’t comment.
what OP is doing in OP and his bonehead comments is purposefully pushing … and all the other logical fallacies … if you’re anti this bullshit “law” then you are also pro physically harming poor FOSS “contributors”.
Many Lemmy users have explicitly called for violence against Dylan Taylor, and many more have brought forwards implied calls to violence. The Lemmy community is broadly 50:50 on their support for said calls for the violence.
I’m commenting on your shitty takes. second, if you’ve spent decades (that’s plural yo) on this planet, then you’re familiar with the concept of a hyperbole. a hyperbole is a purposefully exaggerated statement in order to draw attention to the importance of an issue. e.g. I could eat a horse - no you couldn’t, you’re just mildly inconvenienced with what you think is hunger.
consequently, there’s a distinction to be made between actual calls to violence (of which I haven’t seen any on this platform) and vividly voicing disgust and anger.
Excellent. Just having his face out there will discourage him for good, once he gets the backlash.
There is a special guillotine for this wannabe parasite.
A mistake without regret must be punished. They are not kids acting silly. I don’t feel comfortable with a foot on my neck, even when that foot isn’t pressing very hard.
What you are really asking is how far will people go to defend freedom? Look at history, my friend.
He didn’t have to do this. If he wants to do his part to make everyone else’s life worse, then he will have to face the consequences for it.
Nah useful idiots like this deserve the shit they’ll get.
I guess he should try his hardest to get his bootlicking commit rolled back
The Lemmy community is broadly 50:50 on their support for said calls for the violence.
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There’s astroturfing. Careful with judging community vibes by obviously votes but also comments.
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There is more to “The Lemmy community” than what’s on display on .ml.
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We’re demanding that the government we pay for respect basic human needs. Privacy is not a luxury. It’s a need. They went to far with this shit so they can take the next mile. Fuck them all and fuck California’s lawmakers for doing it. We should be sending them letters of discontent too.
Lawmakers and politicians in the US ruin everything more and more everyday.
Relatively inconsequential law? Relative to what?
Death threats.
Also, basically anything the Trump administration has done.
Tying everything on the internet to a government ID is the end goal here. That is what all the age verification laws are enabling, intentionally or not.
In a land of ICE forcefully deporting people and people losing their lives in foreign prisons or just for resisting a little, do you not think privacy is more important now than ever?
This man took a step on the road of removing all of our privacy, and the community shouted “WTF DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?!?!”.
The path to privacy is to log off.
Who the fuck upvoted this shit?
That’s quitter talk
Death threats are far beyond unacceptable, but it’s naive to think this policy is without consequence. It can take as few as 3 non-personal pieces of information (examples of personal: name, phone number, street address, SSN) to uniquely identify someone. Say the kind of car you drive, your employer, and your hair color. Together those are form a strong identifier, but now add age BY DEFAULT. Even a weak set becomes unique.
That is incredibly consequential. You could be implicated in a crime you didn’t commit, protesting becomes impossible, and everything you do or say will ALWAYS follow you. The balance between citizen and government becomes irrevesibly skewed. Just because your computer will volunteer your age.
This issue should be the issue we care about the most.
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The law says an OS needs to have a way of entering a birth date.
Not the correct birth date, it doesn’t need to allow checking it. Just any date.That’s inconsequential relative to basically everything else.
The law says an OS needs to have a way of entering a birth date. Not the correct birth date, it doesn’t need to allow checking it. Just any date.
Two problems:
- For how long the check will not be needed
and - what about every place outside California ?
- For how long the check will not be needed
It may be inconsequential in a literal sense if the law isn’t enforced meaningfully, which is probably pretty likely. I don’t really care what California law says and I doubt they’ll try to convince me.
Counterpoint: fuck this guy for complying with the technofascists in advance like the bootlicker he is.
complying with a relatively inconsequential law
This downplays the impact to privacy these laws can have but sure, personal harassment is bad.
When you discover the reason for his bootlicking you will be ashamed of your words and deeds.
I’m out of the loop; what’s his reason?
Something about complying with new laws in California and North Korea I think.
Something? You think? You were talking like you knew
I think he needed an /s at the end if the original comment.
The DPRK has nothing to do with this.
Are you suggesting that Linux doesn’t attempt to comply to local laws?
That’s a serious question, by the way, not trying to ragebait you.

















