this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
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[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Feels like something systemd can solve with a compile time flag. Either have it on or off depending on if you want to legally sell it in those areas or not and away you go.

[–] spicehoarder@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 months ago

Give an inch they'll take a mile.I see your instance is UK, so I assume you don't understand how utterly insane US lawmakers are right now.

[–] bryndos@fedia.io 7 points 2 months ago (5 children)

You probably want to mod it so that whenever (in future) it's called on to send an age to an external service then it just supplies a new randomised dob or age. Another good feature would be to make sure that the OS exposes any such checks to the user.

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[–] nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

I didn't realize age verification had been put in yet? holy shit tat was fast

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[–] Fmstrat@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

After all, any and all age checks we have nowadays are a black box anyways

This is the only part I disagree with. Age verification is typically done via services like ID.me, Lexis Nexus, etc which do it via identity verification with documentation. The alternative method that most social sites have gone with is age prediction from a face scan, of which providers are more than happy to tout how they do it as differentiators. For the latter, there are even FOSS options.

[–] HereIAm@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

I think what they mean is, with a black box we know the input, documents, and output, yes you can buy beer, but we don't know the internals. How and for how long is the data stored, who is it shared with, who has access to it, how much meta data can they pull together to build a profile on you and so on.

[–] Tarambor@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (40 children)

FUCK THERE IS A WHOLE LOT OF STUPID USING LINUX. Lots of tin foil hat wearing morons making mountains out of molehills.There was no age verification support added. All that happened is a DOB field was put in so people can add their date of birth IF THEY CHOOSE TO so it can appear in their user account. It isn't uploaded to anyone, it's not checked by anyone, it is not mandatory to complete and you can leave the field blank.

[–] 9488fcea02a9@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

FUCK THERE IS A WHOLE LOT OF STUPID USING LINUX

we wanted the year of the linux desktop... well the first raft of windows refugees seem to be a bunch of these overzealous privacy types who think they're now a bunch of 1337 h4x0rs because they figured out how to get an nvidia driver working on mint.... they have more paranoia than actual tech knowledge, and their only contribution to the community is sowing dissent, and shouting about something as trivial as an optional data field.

The debian subreddit is downvoting an actual DEBIAN DEVELOPER when they tried to explain the situation

If i put on my tin foil hat, i'd say these people are being deliberately influenced to sow chaos in foss communities

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[–] tabular@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I'd like to try an alternative to SystemD but I don't know quite enough to filter the list of OS options for a gaming PC. I have Mint on desktop (modern GPU) with and OpenSUSE 14 on a server.

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[–] maplesaga@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I am aware of the Orwellian privacy implication, but how do we deal with bots, now that AI is rampant?

Something like hashcash, or what?

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[–] albert_inkman@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago (3 children)

The DOB field is different from name and address because it is a fixed attribute that never changes. Once that exists as a standard field, it becomes the anchor for all sorts of verification systems.

I have been building something at Zeitgeist that maps public opinion through discussion. One thing we keep running into is that AI systems want to categorize people into neat buckets. They will say "users under 18" vs "over 18" and move on. But real human disagreement does not work that way. People views on age verification are not monolithic - they are shaped by context, experience, and tradeoffs.

We are seeing this play out everywhere now. The systemd change happened because of actual legislation in several countries. It is not theoretical anymore. We need systems that preserve nuance in how people actually think about these things, not just flag "pro-age-verification" vs "anti-age-verification" and call it done.

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[–] webkitten@piefed.social 4 points 2 months ago (7 children)

They literally just added a field in the JSON schema to support a birth date field which is completely optional and has no relevance on the project. People are so dumb.

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[–] rizzothesmall@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 months ago (4 children)
  • Optional dob field added to distro
  • Stupid people freak tf out
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[–] favoredponcho@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 months ago
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