- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
- linux@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
- linux@lemmy.world
Some of you need to watch this video, and hang your head in shame.
Dylan Taylor has been receiving constant harassment, including threats to his life and safety, for actions done collectively by SystemD. The article by Sam Bent was explictly mentioned as part of the harassment campaign, and rightfully so.
I don’t think enough people realize that this is catastrophically bad. It’ll discourage people from becoming open source developers, it’ll discourage people from using Linux, and it’ll discourage legislators from taking the Linux community seriously.
If you ever wished ill upon another human being for complying with a relatively inconsequential law, you are better off never touching a computer again. The Linux community has collectively gone so far beyond what is acceptable here.
Some of us are old enough and have seen enough to KNOW this is not the end of this. They start with little non things like this (age attestation), see how the population takes it, and when they are sure a majority are onboard with this “Not really invasive, voluntary thing” they change it up to be more invasive and non voluntary(age verification). No, this guy shouldn’t be getting death threats, that is stupid, but he should hang his head in shame for complying in advance. The more we fight this, the longer it will take. I am sad the youth of today will never see the web I did.
Honest question: are you sure this thinking is not a slippery slope fallacy?
You seem to imply that adding self age attestation inherently necessitates ID verification.
I do not agree with this line of thinking. Instead, I reason that this PR was merged because it is not harmful, and a potential future PR implementing ID verification would not be merged. These are two separate things (PRs/merges), which are not in any way tied to each other causually.
I see it more as a boiling frog, look at California/Colorado/Brazil and I think NY is getting in on it as well, then there is the UK/Australia starting points. The Gov’ts and meta etc are looking for buy in. As the discussion dies down after attestation you will see them try to take another step to submitting actual ID (you have the infra in place, just add this API…) give it a year or so after we’ve moved on to another subject
Any time “they” cry Maude’s line “Won’t someone PLEASE think of the children!” the children’s safety is the furthest thing from their mind. I hope I am wrong, but I have seen too much stuff like this to hold my breath. The more we fight every step the longer it will take to come into effect and we can hope for more buy in, from the less educated on this invasion of privacy of the population, to the resistance instead of acquiescing in advance. Linux distros are the last stand against it from major OSes, Microslop/Apple/iOS/Android are all on board, no fight. There is at least 1 distro that changed their EULA to say that their OS is not to be used in California or Colorado and lists the date that the laws come into effect.
Instead, to ACTUALLY think of the children, parents should be using the built in Parental Controls available on all OSes to keep their children from going places they shouldn’t. Getting into fantasy land here but, these controls should have simple to follow instructions so parents can easily set them up with no tech knowledge, simple access to curated blocklists (a great job for LLMs) so they can easily add an approved block list by age range, and in the case of phones the parental controls should block resetting of the phone to factory settings unless from the parental control settings.
PR vs Merge is a moot point here, I am looking at the bigger picture to see where these choices are leading. By itself the attestation is pointless as anyone can put anything they want, but it is step one - buy in. We should never just look at what is going on around us in isolation or the bigger picture will crush us all.
I hope I didn’t ramble too much here and lose my focus.
I’m still not convinced there is a direct casual link between the merged attestation and some future surveillance. Your speculation that this is some deliberate political strategy for some gradual escalation from attestation to surveillance is not logical evidence, but some belief you have, which holds no weight in an argument; it stands that you have no concrete evidence against your logic being a slippery slope fallacy.
You did concede to my argument by admitting “by itself the attestation is pointless.” Good to know we agree that there is outrage over nothing.
By saying “PR vs merge is a moot point”, you’re running away from a logical/technical debate by being dismissive; you are openly stating you don’t care how the mechanics of these foss projects actually work. Again, you can have a speculative opinion, but that is not a logical argument.
When you argue parents should be using OS parental controls, you do know that that’s exactly what the systemd age attestation PR is building, right? It seems you’re fighting against the very infrastructure needed for your preferred solution.
Finally, you conflate local infrastructure with cloud APIs (vindicating my claim that people opposing this are ignorant to the actual code being merged): Systemd is a local init system. Connecting the local userdb age integer to an external, network reliant govt API is a monumental leap in implementation and architecture, not a simple “add this API” patch that can be quietly slipped in without the entire foss community noticing and revolting. The attestation PR, for instance, had around 200 comments, of back and fourth refining of implementation and discussion, before merge.