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Objections to systemd age-attestation changes go overboard

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Re: Objections to systemd age-attestation changes go overboard

#21

Post by stevenalowe »

ahofmann wrote: post #18
stevenalowe wrote: post #2

There’s nothing “overboard” about pushing back on unnecessary political meddling. The operating system does not need to know your date of birth (or identity! Looking at you Micro$oft) in order to manage your hardware and software. The need to know is zero, and given the 1st Amendment I question that any political entity has the legitimate authority to compel one to alter software, open source or otherwise.

I think the "overboard" part is that the developer was doxxed and received death threats.

that is definitely overboard :(

Re: Objections to systemd age-attestation changes go overboard

#22

Post by stevenalowe »

nine_k wrote: post #15
rasz wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> full name, email and location in order to manage your hardware and software, yet systemd has had optional fields for those for years and nobody complained. maybe we should complain

Why, it's fine to have these values in a corporate environment: name, work email, office location. I'd be fine with an ability to store the birth date, the blood type, the zodiac sign, actually an arbitrary list of key-value pairs, as long as it's optional. It's only a problem when the OS insists on recording your private information to let you access your private account.

which is the logical next legislative step

Re: Objections to systemd age-attestation changes go overboard

#23

Post by db48x »

tzs wrote: post #11

Are Unix and Unix-like vendors making implementing this harder than it needs to be? Here is what is required for laws like California's. 1. To modify account creation so that in the scenarios where the law applies (account is being created for a child who is the primary user of the device) to ask for the age and/or birthdate of the child. 2. A way for applications to ask for the age range of the user ([0, 13), [13, 1…

That’s a clever start, but it has a problem. What happens when the list of age groups changes? This list is not fixed; it changes over both time and space. How do I tell the difference between a system that doesn’t support age attestation vs one that only supports age groups that I don’t know about? For example, suppose I am looking to see if the user is in the `over_13` age group, but only `/etc/age_group/adolescente` exists? What if there are multiple readable files?

Systemd’s solution is simpler and doesn’t have these edge cases. A higher level of software, such as the desktop environment, can query the user’s birth date from systemd and use their locale settings or time zone or other information to compute the correct age group.

Re: Objections to systemd age-attestation changes go overboard

#24

Post by stevenalowe »

GrayShade wrote: post #3
stevenalowe wrote: post #2

There’s nothing “overboard” about pushing back on unnecessary political meddling. The operating system does not need to know your date of birth (or identity! Looking at you Micro$oft) in order to manage your hardware and software. The need to know is zero, and given the 1st Amendment I question that any political entity has the legitimate authority to compel one to alter software, open source or otherwise.

The operating system does not need to know your full name, email and location in order to manage your hardware and software, yet systemd has had optional fields for those for years and nobody complained. They added an extra optional field for the date of birth. > Some of this has been fueled by a misinformation campaign that has targeted the systemd project and Taylor specifically, resulting in Taylor being doxxed an…

unfortunately the article does not mention who is responsible for the alleged misinformation campaign

Re: Objections to systemd age-attestation changes go overboard

#25

Post by razingeden »

nine_k wrote: post #16
tzs wrote: post #11

Are Unix and Unix-like vendors making implementing this harder than it needs to be? Here is what is required for laws like California's. 1. To modify account creation so that in the scenarios where the law applies (account is being created for a child who is the primary user of the device) to ask for the age and/or birthdate of the child. 2. A way for applications to ask for the age range of the user ([0, 13), [13, 1…

This is a great idea. It very compactly implements a barebones parental control system: a parent (with admin access) can assign an age group to a user account, and apps which care can easily check it. I think it's exactly how such a system should work: apps, sites, etc should declare an age limit, and the user's OS should decide if it's going to give the user access to them. This approach is opposite to having the us…

Well you got me there.

For the most part, I actually agree that Ubuntu is an appropriate operating system for toddlers.

Re: Objections to systemd age-attestation changes go overboard

#26

Post by jojomodding »

stevenalowe wrote: post #24
GrayShade wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The operating system does not need to know your full name, email and location in order to manage your hardware and software, yet systemd has had optional fields for those for years and nobody complained. They added an extra optional field for the date of birth. > Some of this has been fueled by a misinformation campaign that has targeted the systemd project and Taylor specifically, resulting in Taylor being doxxed an…

unfortunately the article does not mention who is responsible for the alleged misinformation campaign

I doubt it has been top-down coordinated. So what do you expect the article to say?

Re: Objections to systemd age-attestation changes go overboard

#27

Post by razingeden »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #4
stevenalowe wrote: post #2

There’s nothing “overboard” about pushing back on unnecessary political meddling. The operating system does not need to know your date of birth (or identity! Looking at you Micro$oft) in order to manage your hardware and software. The need to know is zero, and given the 1st Amendment I question that any political entity has the legitimate authority to compel one to alter software, open source or otherwise.

> It was to be expected that some members of the community would object; the actual response, however, has been shockingly hostile. Some of this has been fueled by a misinformation campaign that has targeted the systemd project and Taylor specifically, resulting in Taylor being doxxed and receiving death threats. I think we can agree this is overboard

> I think we can agree this is overboard

Yeah it’s not like these people are IRC operators or something!

Re: Objections to systemd age-attestation changes go overboard

#28

Post by wormius »

1. Harrassment of these devs is wrong (no matter how shitty Lennart and systemd is (for those of us who dislike it)).

2. Why do the worst of the worst have to be on "my side" (like this harrassment, and other issues, where they are polar opposites of me when it comes to social issues). But. You have to go to war with the army/allies you have, and if that means I have to be in bed with ... a certain unduke, then I guess it shall be.

3. I remember when statements like the following would have been laughed at by the free software/"open source" community. Instead of acquiescing, and saying "well we have to plan for this big totalitarian overreach" (if you think it isn't, look at Palantir and all the big tech CEOs getting their mitts everywhere), it would have been calling to RESIST and do everything we can technically, organizationally and politically to push back against this, but here we are willingly just building our future prisons. At the behest of giant "open source" corporations who "have nothing to hide" after all.

Of course systemd is NOT a free/libre project in any sense of the word, which is all the more reason I distrust it, and this latest is going to push me off it (I'm on Cachy now). But like I am, we all just sit in the boiling water. I'm still on Firefox for example. I'm on Facebook. This is why it's important to resist BEFORE, so it doesn't become a systemic thing where everyone feels compelled to "go with the flow".

(the following, as referred to in point 3): "Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek replied that while it was possible California's law would be changed, ""similar ideas are popping up in other contexts and it's unlikely that they'll all go away"". Ultimately, Luca Boccassi merged Taylor's changes after a bit of back-and-forth about the implementation."

If I could trust that "it's just a field, maaaaan" fine, but I don't. I see how politics is played and plays out and it's the people who are building this that should reconsider, because they ARE enabling future abuse of these systems merely by putting them in. "Oh look - we now have an affordance there's no reason not to exploit it and put it in our central repository of "authentic" validated computer users).

How long before felons are disallowed from owning/using computers? No matter how necessary that is (and I don't mean "1337 hackers" just "we must punish 'the bad guys').

If I felt we were in a forward moving direction maybe I wouldn't be so resistant, but the past 15-20 years should have taught us well about this process of enshittification and corporate capture of tech in a way we never thought possible (just like the shock of the AT&T room wiretap back in the 00s, etc...)

That said, stop harrassing these people in this manner, it is not good and does a disservice for "our cause". Goddamnit, people.

Re: Objections to systemd age-attestation changes go overboard

#30

Post by nine_k »

razingeden wrote: post #25
nine_k wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great idea. It very compactly implements a barebones parental control system: a parent (with admin access) can assign an age group to a user account, and apps which care can easily check it. I think it's exactly how such a system should work: apps, sites, etc should declare an age limit, and the user's OS should decide if it's going to give the user access to them. This approach is opposite to having the us…

Well you got me there. For the most part, I actually agree that Ubuntu is an appropriate operating system for toddlers.

I ran a Debian box for my daughter when she was a toddler and a pre-schooler. She was good at selecting her favorite movies and music in XBMC, and enjoyed simple drawing apps.
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