I also wonder whether or not grapheneos, or open source Linux OSs in general, will face any repercussions for failing to comply to these regulations due to the relatively low user count.
The self-important creator of Systemd has personally blocked that PR, if I’m hearing correctly, which would suggest he or his employer Microsoft is all in on it.
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.
“I’m not picking a side” and “this future proofs standardization” is of little comfort, that is seriously suspect. I ought to look to alternatives to SystemD(odge the issue failed).
Maybe this’ll take the shine off that wunderkinder mess and people will finally be free to choose something more reliable. I love how RH pushed this beta software so hard and my reboots are now just shite – unreliable and occasionally ridiculously delayed.
I’ll be glad to see the back of that metastatic shitball.
That’s just systemd adding a birthdate field to their userdb. Doesn’t require that it be filled out or accurate, and especially doesn’t require it to be validated against a government database. I don’t see it as fundamentally any different from adding a userdb field for favorite color, phone number, or blood type.
Without 3rd party validation, I really don’t see the privacy issue with an age field. Without verification, it is, at worst, one more byte available to hash into a unique identifier, but you can feed that field from /dev/random at every query and poison even that hypothetical.
Localized age checks ARE a good system and are something that should have been in the OS for decades. It is the basis for being able to make “child accounts” and is a genuine requirement for Linux to be a meaningful option for “normal people”. And having a protocol for software/websites to request that is a very good system to build on that.
We talk about how the problem of kids getting exposed to horrendous shit is a problem of “bad parenting”. This is the tool you provide to allow parents some control.
The issue is not the age check. The issue is verification. To my understanding, the California legislature explicitly does NOT require a third party. So it is literally just you saying “Sure, whatever. I was born in 1901. Now load the Maya Woulfe video faster”. And yes, this is a step towards that. But so is having network access or user accounts at all.
Even if we say I agree with this, why even ask for a specific year? Separate into child and adult, and let the super user make that change when asked.
In theory I’m not opposed to it existing as an option, but I do not like it being mandatory at all. Websites and applications should never be allowed to know any PII without explicit consent.
Even if we say I agree with this, why even ask for a specific year? Separate into child and adult, and let the super user make that change when asked.
Different countries (actually different regions within said countries) have different laws related to what “kids” can and can’t see and what age defines a “kid”. How much that matters is up to you. But it provides an automated check that ALSO avoids having to say “Hey mom? I just turned 18 and for no reason whatsoever it would be great if you could switch my account to an adult. Also make sure to knock and don’t look too closely at my laundry basket ever again”.
Websites and applications should never be allowed to know any PII without explicit consent.
And what do you think you are providing every time you tick “Yes, I am 18 years or older” or “Yes, I was born in 1920 or whatever the first option is now”?
That’s there point, with this websites will just know the users age, before it was the users choice: “are you 18 or over?” But now it will be: “I know you’re 37.567 years old” user has no idea. Maybe we should add religion and skin color too
"You have selected ‘Caucasian Christian’. Permanent light mode has been activated and you can no longer look up porn on Sunday.
You have selected “Arabic Muslim”, sensor access has automatically been granted to determine when you are facing Mecca. If you have too many friendly fire incidents in CoD, the US will deploy reaper drones to your IRL GPS location.
On a more serious note:
There’s been a lot of talk about protecting kids, but none about protecting grandma from scams and AI misinformation if her systemd age field indicates she’s 65 or older. Why is that? Is it because kids don’t have rights, so who cares if by protecting them we prevent them from developing a shred of digital literacy? Or is it because the over 65’s can vote and kids can’t?
The idea of storing age in the OS is that end programs don’t actually access it directly. They get age ranges, like child/adult, not the actual birthdate. In theory, it’s much more private than uploading your id and photo to every random website/app that you use.
Cookies already exist and there is countless leakage (both intentional and unintentional…). Like most things, you are not as private and protected as you seem to think you are. Just because a website is asking you to tell it (which is mostly for compliance, not knowledge) doesn’t mean they already know that you said you were 250 years old but your shopping habits suggest you are actually in your 20s and live in Detroit and really enjoy pegging.
Maybe we should add religion and skin color too
To my knowledge, very few nations tie laws or access to that slippery slope fallacy. And parents generally have those same traits (at least while the kid is living with them). So I am not seeing much benefit from this?
And if/when we reach the point where that is the case? Uhm… I don’t think companies and software will be given anywhere near as much freedom to say “Sure, we’ll comply so that we can be eligible for these contracts” or “No, we won’t comply so that we can market ourselves as protecting people”
Any age check is just a good way for predators to know WHO are the actual children, and with the epstein files revealing the whole billionaire and politician interest in trafficking and raping minors, this is essentially the perfect playground for them.
Yeah, to be completely honest, the one place where you actually could trust this kind of information is on your own local (and ideally libre-oriented) OS, never leaving your device and instead obfuscated through an API that’s exposed to whatever services need to do an age check, with the potential for additional security impositions or other concessions from data requesters due to the leverage of still having your data controlled by you. This is the bonus FOSS part where we get a say on how we want our data to be exposed on our libre systems. Other users aren’t so lucky and don’t get to have any voice on how this implementation happens, so we should probably participate in the discourse for those PRs rather than condemn them point blank.
I imagine people behind this law are pretty interested in this small but powerful user base. I would just boldly assume that a lot of people responsible for independent software and privacy advocates are using Linux etc. So its a interesting user base for sure. But regulating open source software luckily is pretty much impossible and they wont give up their(our) privacy without a fight.
Also, we will see how much the user base will grow when these regulations get tighter.
Motorola* bending the knee to the mass surveillance corps and international governments comes to mind. We’ll see how their deal with GrapheneOS goes now.
EDIT
I recommend going to Ageless Linux’s site and reading up on their take on the whole issue. They clearly illustrate how poorly thought out the California law is.
The systemd dude, ever so flexible as long as the request does not come from actual users, is already working on adding this into core components, though.
Good luck building a distro that play nice with your fork, then. Systemd is embedded deep in most distro, replacing it without breaking things is not an easy task.
Damn. It’s only being talked about and people have already folded.
It’s only a date field. Then it’ll only be an API for other service integration. Then it’ll only be an optional plug into a remote service. Then it’ll only be an optional, but strongly recommended, dependency in other software. Then it’ll only be a digitally signed third-party value that’s mandatory. Then it’ll only be something most installer won’t proceed without.
We’ve been jumping from slippery slopes to slippery slopes over the past few years. It’s tiring. And the coincidental timing of all this is not helping.
is Graphene a “big name”? They talk a big game and are probably one of the biggest alternative phone OSes but all results I can find are putting them at 250k users and less than 2% of the Android market share.
But, more importantly: Do they at all care about US government contracts? Red Had have RHEL. ubuntu have whatever they call their premium OS for enterprise users. Google and Apple are obvious.
I was wondering when I would see this headline. I wonder if any other big names will make similar statements.
I also wonder whether or not grapheneos, or open source Linux OSs in general, will face any repercussions for failing to comply to these regulations due to the relatively low user count.
Hate to say it but systemd, the init system of most Linux distros, already has PRs with maintainer backing to implement DoB recording.
Some people can’t kneel fast enough.
Which already has a revert commit https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/41179
The self-important creator of Systemd has personally blocked that PR, if I’m hearing correctly, which would suggest he or his employer Microsoft is all in on it.
“I’m not picking a side” and “this future proofs standardization” is of little comfort, that is seriously suspect. I ought to look to alternatives to SystemD(odge the issue failed).
So in other words, “Sure we built the people-crushing machines, but we didn’t wire them up or turn them on.”
IBM, is that you?
Maybe https://agelesslinux.org/ or systemd free distro https://without-systemd.org/wiki/index_php/Linux_distributions_without_systemd/
I was shocked it listed LMDE but it’s a very old version (Linux Mint Debian Edition 2).
Based on a Debian version for which long term support ended 6 years ago…
SystemDOGE. It is just a matter of time before Big Balls exfiltrates our Linux data.
He left MS in January
Ugh of course. Thanks for pointing that out
That has already been closed
Maybe this’ll take the shine off that wunderkinder mess and people will finally be free to choose something more reliable. I love how RH pushed this beta software so hard and my reboots are now just shite – unreliable and occasionally ridiculously delayed.
I’ll be glad to see the back of that metastatic shitball.
DoB recording, and ID age verification, are two different things though.
No, they’re the same in this context.
I’ll just plug Devuan, Slackware, Gentoo and many others.
That’s just systemd adding a birthdate field to their userdb. Doesn’t require that it be filled out or accurate, and especially doesn’t require it to be validated against a government database. I don’t see it as fundamentally any different from adding a userdb field for favorite color, phone number, or blood type.
Without 3rd party validation, I really don’t see the privacy issue with an age field. Without verification, it is, at worst, one more byte available to hash into a unique identifier, but you can feed that field from /dev/random at every query and poison even that hypothetical.
You are absolutely right, we are not in fact getting screwed, they are just applying the lube for later. (Shamelessly stolen from elsewhere)
Whoosh.
Plesse don’t give them any ideas. Here’s a list of what’s currently included
https://systemd.io/USER_RECORD/
Localized age checks ARE a good system and are something that should have been in the OS for decades. It is the basis for being able to make “child accounts” and is a genuine requirement for Linux to be a meaningful option for “normal people”. And having a protocol for software/websites to request that is a very good system to build on that.
We talk about how the problem of kids getting exposed to horrendous shit is a problem of “bad parenting”. This is the tool you provide to allow parents some control.
The issue is not the age check. The issue is verification. To my understanding, the California legislature explicitly does NOT require a third party. So it is literally just you saying “Sure, whatever. I was born in 1901. Now load the Maya Woulfe video faster”. And yes, this is a step towards that. But so is having network access or user accounts at all.
Even if we say I agree with this, why even ask for a specific year? Separate into child and adult, and let the super user make that change when asked.
In theory I’m not opposed to it existing as an option, but I do not like it being mandatory at all. Websites and applications should never be allowed to know any PII without explicit consent.
Different countries (actually different regions within said countries) have different laws related to what “kids” can and can’t see and what age defines a “kid”. How much that matters is up to you. But it provides an automated check that ALSO avoids having to say “Hey mom? I just turned 18 and for no reason whatsoever it would be great if you could switch my account to an adult. Also make sure to knock and don’t look too closely at my laundry basket ever again”.
And what do you think you are providing every time you tick “Yes, I am 18 years or older” or “Yes, I was born in 1920 or whatever the first option is now”?
That’s there point, with this websites will just know the users age, before it was the users choice: “are you 18 or over?” But now it will be: “I know you’re 37.567 years old” user has no idea. Maybe we should add religion and skin color too
"You have selected ‘Caucasian Christian’. Permanent light mode has been activated and you can no longer look up porn on Sunday.
You have selected “Arabic Muslim”, sensor access has automatically been granted to determine when you are facing Mecca. If you have too many friendly fire incidents in CoD, the US will deploy reaper drones to your IRL GPS location.
On a more serious note:
There’s been a lot of talk about protecting kids, but none about protecting grandma from scams and AI misinformation if her systemd age field indicates she’s 65 or older. Why is that? Is it because kids don’t have rights, so who cares if by protecting them we prevent them from developing a shred of digital literacy? Or is it because the over 65’s can vote and kids can’t?
The idea of storing age in the OS is that end programs don’t actually access it directly. They get age ranges, like child/adult, not the actual birthdate. In theory, it’s much more private than uploading your id and photo to every random website/app that you use.
If they age or birthdate is there it could leak, regardless of the API.
Cookies already exist and there is countless leakage (both intentional and unintentional…). Like most things, you are not as private and protected as you seem to think you are. Just because a website is asking you to tell it (which is mostly for compliance, not knowledge) doesn’t mean they already know that you said you were 250 years old but your shopping habits suggest you are actually in your 20s and live in Detroit and really enjoy pegging.
To my knowledge, very few nations tie laws or access to that slippery slope fallacy. And parents generally have those same traits (at least while the kid is living with them). So I am not seeing much benefit from this?
And if/when we reach the point where that is the case? Uhm… I don’t think companies and software will be given anywhere near as much freedom to say “Sure, we’ll comply so that we can be eligible for these contracts” or “No, we won’t comply so that we can market ourselves as protecting people”
That doesn’t seem like a great argument for doing something that further reduces privacy and protection.
This is being baked in because of US law. I wouldn’t be surprised if the US made some federal laws requiring your religion in the near future.
There’s a big difference between data collection and government mandated identification.
Any age check is just a good way for predators to know WHO are the actual children, and with the epstein files revealing the whole billionaire and politician interest in trafficking and raping minors, this is essentially the perfect playground for them.
Yeah, to be completely honest, the one place where you actually could trust this kind of information is on your own local (and ideally libre-oriented) OS, never leaving your device and instead obfuscated through an API that’s exposed to whatever services need to do an age check, with the potential for additional security impositions or other concessions from data requesters due to the leverage of still having your data controlled by you. This is the bonus FOSS part where we get a say on how we want our data to be exposed on our libre systems. Other users aren’t so lucky and don’t get to have any voice on how this implementation happens, so we should probably participate in the discourse for those PRs rather than condemn them point blank.
^^^ If you needed proof that lemmy is overrun with bots just like everywhere else.
I imagine people behind this law are pretty interested in this small but powerful user base. I would just boldly assume that a lot of people responsible for independent software and privacy advocates are using Linux etc. So its a interesting user base for sure. But regulating open source software luckily is pretty much impossible and they wont give up their(our) privacy without a fight. Also, we will see how much the user base will grow when these regulations get tighter.
They can simply say on their download pages that residents of Brazil and California are not allowed to use their OS.
Motorola* bending the knee to the mass surveillance corps and international governments comes to mind. We’ll see how their deal with GrapheneOS goes now.
Sure. Let them be sued on profits made 😂
Linux Distros (so far) Refusing Age Verification
EDIT
I recommend going to Ageless Linux’s site and reading up on their take on the whole issue. They clearly illustrate how poorly thought out the California law is.
I think this might be the first and only time I’ll ever see Omarchy getting upvotes on this site.
The systemd dude, ever so flexible as long as the request does not come from actual users, is already working on adding this into core components, though.
Systemd is open source so it can be forked to have features removed.
That’s what Devuan does.
Slackware hasn’t adopted it (yet?).
Gentoo took the sane approach and gives their users choice of init system.
There are also the BSDs
Good luck building a distro that play nice with your fork, then. Systemd is embedded deep in most distro, replacing it without breaking things is not an easy task.
The systemd mod is not a gateway. It’s just a date field.
Damn. It’s only being talked about and people have already folded.
It’s only a date field. Then it’ll only be an API for other service integration. Then it’ll only be an optional plug into a remote service. Then it’ll only be an optional, but strongly recommended, dependency in other software. Then it’ll only be a digitally signed third-party value that’s mandatory. Then it’ll only be something most installer won’t proceed without.
We’ve been jumping from slippery slopes to slippery slopes over the past few years. It’s tiring. And the coincidental timing of all this is not helping.
Okay. But right now, it’s only a date field.
Genuine question:
is Graphene a “big name”? They talk a big game and are probably one of the biggest alternative phone OSes but all results I can find are putting them at 250k users and less than 2% of the Android market share.
But, more importantly: Do they at all care about US government contracts? Red Had have RHEL. ubuntu have whatever they call their premium OS for enterprise users. Google and Apple are obvious.
GrapheneOS has a deal with a hardware manufacturer, Motorola. I’d consider this refusal to be a big deal on those grounds alone
Frankly I think they are the largest os vendor that is going to take a principled stance on this.
Big enough for a headline, not big enough to make a difference.
I would go so far as to say they are only big enough to make an updoot-bait headline at that.
How can age verification be misused?