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Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

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Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#11

Post by ChocolateGod »

Shank wrote: post #7

It seems incredibly silly to me that this is being rushed into systemd and other linux components. I understand Apple making changes, and even Canonical, but systemd is not run by one corporation and there is no reason to adhere to a badly written law. Why play along with the charade? If root is root, the "age verification" field does not make any sense. Why are these changes being made on a worldwide basis when the…

IIRC all that's been done is a field has been added to store the user date of birth and a protocol that can be used to retrieve said date.

That's it.

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#12

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ekr____ wrote: post #9

OP is certainly right that a lot of this legislation is written in ways that are hard to interpret and that often seem like they would have undesirable side effects even under the assumption that the basic idea is good (whether that's actually true is a whole different question). In the specific case of CA AB1043: (1) Systems are required to ask the user for their age and just trust whatever they say (2) Applications…

> Systems are required to ask the user for their age and just trust whatever they say

If you're going to do anything like this, this is the thing they actually get right. It removes the inconvenience, privacy invasion, forced use of corporate verifiers with perverse incentives, etc. Meanwhile if the user is actually a child then their age is set by their parent.

> Applications are required to query the system for the user's age range.

This is classic legislative stupidity. Applications are required to query the user's age range even if they contain no age-restricted content? Brilliant.

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#14

Post by 12972891 »

jmclnx wrote: post #3

This is a no win situation and I think systemd is making this change too early. But I have read that field is optional. But my main concern with this is applications like Firefox will eventually require this systemd age specific field and a standard systemd function to call. That means this age field will need to be populated and thus locking out the *BSDs and non-systemd Linux. If that happens, this makes the system…

[dead]

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#17

Post by DrinkyBird »

pgt wrote: post #13

Fellow software engineers, what are we doing here? Why are we letting the EU / UK define the future of software?

1. The UK and EU are rather large markets that they don’t want to miss out on.

2. There are software engineers in the UK and EU.

3. This specific implementation by Apple is not actually required by any UK or EU law, to my knowledge.

4. This specifically is or will be required by the laws of some US states and other countries.

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#18

Post by ekr____ »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #12
ekr____ wrote: post #9

OP is certainly right that a lot of this legislation is written in ways that are hard to interpret and that often seem like they would have undesirable side effects even under the assumption that the basic idea is good (whether that's actually true is a whole different question). In the specific case of CA AB1043: (1) Systems are required to ask the user for their age and just trust whatever they say (2) Applications…

> Systems are required to ask the user for their age and just trust whatever they say If you're going to do anything like this, this is the thing they actually get right. It removes the inconvenience, privacy invasion, forced use of corporate verifiers with perverse incentives, etc. Meanwhile if the user is actually a child then their age is set by their parent. > Applications are required to query the system for the…

>> Systems are required to ask the user for their age and just trust whatever they say > > This is the thing they actually get right. It removes the inconvenience, privacy invasion, forced use of corporate verifiers with perverse incentives, etc. Meanwhile if the user is actually a child then their age is set by their parent.

Well, maybe. For instance, if a child buys their own device they could set the age to whatever they want.

>> Applications are required to query the system for the user's age range. > > This is classic legislative stupidity. Applications are required to query the user's age range even if they contain no age-restricted content? Brilliant.

Note that AB1043 doesn't actually impose much in the way of requirements about age restricted content. Rather, the way it works is that the developer is then assumed to have "actual knowledge" of the user's age (See 1798.501(b)(2)(A)) and then has to behave accordingly in other age-restricted contexts.

Re: Age verification on Systemd and Flatpak

#20

Post by awesome_dude »

nout wrote: post #6

It's interesting that the package managers become choke points that can be used for government overreach. Luckily Linux is open source so I expect there will be options that just don't do this from principle. Otherwise my Intel NUC server with Debian is 2 years old, so I expect the honest age would be 2 years? I may have parts for some old PCs to put together that could get adult software I guess...

For me, the big issue is going to be mobile devices (phones, and tablets to a lesser degree)

I've already had it up to my back teeth with Google arbitrarily updating things such that the on/off button was hijacked, preventing me from switch the device off, instead triggering an interaction with freaking Gemini (what sort of IDIOT thought doing that to a device was a good idea)

I'm seriously trying to find a way to no longer run Apple or Google OS based phones - which puts me in the "Linux" or "Graphene" market

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