The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification into Linux | Hacker News Reader

The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification into Linux

sambent.com

15 pointsrjmunro13 comments

Ugly drama filled rant post full of childish name calling. We get it, age verification is corporate sabotage. Playground name calling doesn't fix the problem.

Ugly and also has the hallmarks of an LLM written piece. Is this another AI Agent hit piece?

Also, if I was a corporate simp conspiring to destroy Linux, this is exactly the type of stupid hill I would try to bait the open source community into dying on. If they add a stupid compliance feature that everyone bypasses in practice, there isn't much I can do, but if they insist on openly flaunting the law I can go to war.

So not factually incorrect? Saying it's drama and childish is name calling, is that not the very think you're saying you're against? I noticed you didn't point out where it's factually wrong.

I'm probably missing something, but I don't think this is as bad or as useless as the article implies. E.g. as a parent I can set up my kids PCs with their age so stuff like app stores know to only serve them age appropriate things to download. It's the minimum to comply with the laws. It doesn't stop anyone owns a machine, but it does provide a useful option to set if you want it.

Malicious compliance of having the OS accept an arbitrary date and report that for verification purposes seems good to me.

Or a small step that enables actually problematic real compliance, combined with a bad precedent: a "secure" way to populate that birth date field is a plausible future drive-by contribution.

There is a line of reasoning out there that giving every system a different birthdate, and trying to fill it with as much false information as possible, is one way of balancing the scales. I'm not sure how useful it is, kind of like when a website asked for your age and you just put in whatever.

I'm not a huge fan of this website, I also saw the "Microsoft's "Fix" for Windows 11: Flowers After the Beating" article on the homepage today and I think I saw the original (or was this one updated?) article about age verification in Linux from the same source.

The visualizations are (must be) LLM-generated which really just feels like slop. This and the Windows 11 article seem to be more filling in meandering text around the useless interactive/moving graphics then actually conveying information.

It seems like it's literally just a blog-spam site.

Why didn't systemd reject these changes? Was there an internal debate that the article doesn't cover, or is it the arbitrary decision of other "volunteers"?

As I understand it, anyone with commit permissions can commit a PR, no matter what the community or even other devs think. So, no debate. Just commit and that's it. I don't even remember ever seeing a "block commit" setting or something that would prevent commiting a PR before discussion takes place and "block commit" is lifted.

Anyway, the discussion is pointless. Poettering approved. He probably would have commited the PR himself if he saw it in time.

One minor off-topic comment, I like the quiz at the bottom of the article. It could be neat to have sites implement something like this to discourage people from commenting without reading and absorbing some of what they've read. It seems it would be fairly straightforward to implement with an LLM summary/questions.

Unix and OSS used to be the rebellion. What happened

Reply on news.ycombinator.com