SystemD Adds Optional 'birthDate' Field for Age Verification to JSON User Records (itsfoss.com)
- Reference: 0181065534
- News link: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/26/03/21/0424203/systemd-adds-optional-birthdate-field-for-age-verification-to-json-user-records
- Source link: https://itsfoss.com/news/systemd-age-verification/
They note that the field "can only be set by administrators, not by users themselves" — it's the same record that already holds metadata like realName , emailAddress , and location :
> Lennart Poettering, the creator of systemd, has clarified that this change is "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. "
>
> In simple words, this is something that adds a new, optional field that can then be used by other open source projects like [3]xdg-desktop-portal to build age verification compliance on top of, without systemd itself doing anything with the data or making it mandatory to provide. A [4]merge request asking for this change to be repealed was struck down by Lennart, who gave the above-mentioned reasoning behind this, and further noted that people were misunderstanding what systemd is trying to do here.
"It enforces zero policy," Poettering said. "It leaves that up for other parts of the system."
[1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954
[2] https://itsfoss.com/news/systemd-age-verification/
[3] https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal
[4] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/41179
Love systemd (Score:2, Flamebait)
SystemD has genuinely been a positive on the computers I administer and has saved my butt multiple times. I had numerous occasions with sysvinit where "dependencies" had to be implemented using "sleep" commands in shell scripts and as a result the system wouldn't come up properly. So please do not take this as one of the tribal kneejerk anti-SystemD people.
But... this is idiotic, and SystemD is rapidly turning into a parody of itself. The other week they announced they were integrating a whole new "VM" syst
Re: (Score:2)
Poettering is trying to implement Emacs inside the kernel
Re: (Score:3)
> But... this is idiotic, and SystemD is rapidly turning into a parody of itself.
You are starting to understand why the systemd haters think like they do. If Poettering had proposed a drop-in replacement for SysV init and then stopped, I would have thought, "Why not?" But we got a hairball of event-logging, network management, file mounting, user authentication crap all bundled in.
But what really sank it was when I discovered that it was relatively simple to launch SysV shell scripts from the unit files to start services, thus saving all the work involved in re-inventing the wheel. And
Re: (Score:2)
A VM? A hypervisor you mean? Don't they need some sort of a kernel to implement that?
Re: (Score:2)
People were saying that since the inception of systemd. Why write binary logs and develop special new tools to manipulate these logs when the old tools did the same thing with plain text for decades.
Enforces no policy (Score:4, Informative)
... yet supports the easy implementation of bad policy beforehand. Technical choices are policy choices, Lennart. You can't get away from that.
This is all in line with the systemd attitude: more monolithic, less extendable or modular. More like Windows, less like UNIX.
I am excited for when SystemD gets AI (Score:2)
It won't need the user anymore. Makes me think of the Dean Koontz novel Demon Seed.
I said SystemD (Score:1)
Would incorporate age verification and I was down-modded. Doesn't seem so far fetched now, does it?
Poettering is simply positioninh systemd (Score:2)
The enforce policy
He likes to do things stepwise
Re: (Score:2)
Does he still contribute since taking employment at Microsoft?
Uncertainty (Score:2)
I note that you can only enter an exact date into this system. As well as allowing users to be ambiguous, (for instance, if you want to broadcast being over 18 only,) some people don't know their exact birth date and would need a range.
relax, we were only thinking of the children (Score:2)
You know, age 63 and up. They're the remaining people that can tell the time from an analog display, like a wrist watch.
Okay, Boomer signing off before this californi-age-verification creeps into those once-promising genealogy applications and f-all else besides.
Legal landmine (Score:3)
California (AB-1043) and Colorado (SB26-051) may seem to require age verification. But US federal law, the Privacy Act of 1974, seemingly contradicts this. If states are effectively deputizing every operating system to collect information and deliver it ad hoc through intermediates, it still violates the spirit and principle of this federal act.
The fact that this particular implementation in SystemD stores the new birthDate field in the
regular (non-privileged) JSON. Meaning that there is little user control over which applications get access to this information.
If at the very least, the user was able to control access to PII in their SystemD / unix accounts, then I think they would potentially have a legal leg to stand on.
As they stand right now, we're only a lawsuit away from reverting the change in the git repo. No need to fork, if SystemD wants to bend over backwards for California and Colorado law so badly, then we can take them to court in the US. Honestly, taking them to court in California would probably be the most effective right now.
Not very good at this (Score:5, Insightful)
"It enforces zero policy," Poettering said. "It leaves that up for other parts of the system."
"Calm down, stop being so jumpy. The explosives around your neck will not detonate. Unless I push this button."