Discussion
Objections to systemd age-attestation changes go overboard
stevenalowe: 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.
GrayShade: 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 and receiving death threats.I see.
rasz: > 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
gradientsrneat: Setting aside the obvious fact that it's morally wrong to harrass people, something tells me these harrassers never do the same to developers working on closed source software for companies, having the net effect of harming the FOSS movement overall.
delichon: I think I'd feel the same way about race- or gender-attestation: none of your business. Let's not build the infrastructure into the operating system to selectively restrict civil rights by demographic.
nh23423fefe: Doesn't make sense to invoke civil rights and pretend there are no legislative limits. If a law is passed requiring age verification and the component can't attest, then its blocked. You must attest your age to vote for example.
delichon: Not every device needs to be a secure voting machine. Civil resistance is an appropriate response to such an effort.
nine_k: 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.
