I don't mean to come across as a snob, or anything like that, but I find this PR really odd.

It's the authors first time contributing to this repo and it the feedback on the PR that was addressed is really odd, like some of it is super basic stuff, even if you're not familiar with the code base or the language.

Just an all round weird vibe.

This should be the time for open-source developers to use their common sense to decide whether we should push back.

If California wants to create its own Protect the children operating system, it should bear the cost and responsibility for this alone, and not export any of the sketchy political agenda to the wider open source community.

"protecting" children by providing specific ages to data harvesters.

as per usual, liberal policy doing the exact opposite thing they claim it does.

Tangentially related, but does anyone know what Poettering's "cryptographically verifiable integrity" endeavor[0] is about yet?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572

I cannot express how disappointed I am to see open source projects giving in to complying with age attestation laws.

I feel like complying really undermines any first amendment arguments. Software is a first amendment protected form of expression, giving in before getting any actual threats from the state makes your participation seem voluntary.

Systemd's participation puts the entire world into compliance with a California law

Where can I drop a file to always return 1969

Will unincorporated distros who don't comply be illegal to use in the areas passing these laws? This isn't "obscenity" -- isn't there a first amendment argument for these projects?

I had to check the date; is not April yet

Instead of protesting, large corporations decided to ploy.

They cannot loose markets, like California or Brazil.

The context is that this is in response to California in the US potentially passing a law that requires age verification on the operating system level.

Pretty good implementation imo

Having this in userdb is not bad per se. We already have a bunch of PII in there.

This should fit lennarts hubris well.

This developer should be blacklisted from all open source projects, permanently.

It's scary how much global surveillance is closing in to become a reality with states passing these lesgilations, in the name of "protecting children", but it just serves to collect citizent personal data...

And now they are creeping into open source projects too. What once was thought as the bastion of absolute freedom from the state

Interesting solution and I really expected systemd would be were this age validation would be placed if distros what it.

But if this becomes a thing in Linux for the distro I use (doubtful), I will abandon Linux after 30+ years.

I am rather confident OpenBSD will ignore this law and I expect other BSDs will to. If not, back to DOS :)

Note, I have a BSD on a coupld of old laptops for testing reasons. I test what I write in the BSDs to help find issues, that works well.

i dont like this

This is absolutely ridiculous.