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Comment by Shank | Hacker News Reader

It seems incredibly silly to me that this is being rushed into systemd and other linux components. I understand Apple making changes, and even Canonical, but systemd is not run by one corporation and there is no reason to adhere to a badly written law. Why play along with the charade? If root is root, the "age verification" field does not make any sense.

Why are these changes being made on a worldwide basis when the laws that have been introduced are a relatively small fraction of the world? California isn't going to go after individual systemd maintainers. Will California go after Torvalds? I doubt it. Apple? Surely, but this is, quite frankly, a ridiculous thing to even suggest for inclusion into these setups.

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Open source is driven by contributions. Most of the time, if someone wants a feature, implements the feature, and submits a reasonable PR to a project, that project will have the feature. In this case, the PR appears to have been written by someone who is not a regular SystemD contributor, and (through a bit of Googling) works for a FinTech company with no obvious interest. I can't comment on why that individual wanted to add support. However, once someone added support, the question for SystemD is not if it is worth implementing, but if it is worth merging. At this point, it becomes a simple case of "the most intolerant wins". For people who care about complying with CA style laws, this feature is critical. For people who don't care, this feature is fine. I doubt it will even make it on mosts lists of SystemD feature bloat that most people don't care about.

This is the same reason a bunch of the food in your pantry is certified kosher. No one is going to not buy something because it is kosher. But if paying a thousand dollars a year to put a small circle-u symbol on the back of your box can increase sales by 1% among observant Jews, most companies are going to do it.

> No one is going to not buy something because it is kosher. But if paying a thousand dollars a year to put a small circle-u symbol on the back of your box can increase sales by 1% among observant Jews, most companies are going to do it.

Contrary to perceived politics, many Muslims will eat kosher food because it's a superset of halal rules (excl. alcohol).

It's a globally consolidated certification through organizations like the Orthodox Union. This is unlike halal which is local and has many scammers offering to pencil whip compliance. This means many Muslims will prefer kosher to "halal" food to avoid due diligence on the certification agency.

To tie this into age-verification, companies and ecosystems will use the strictest method that makes them globally compliant. Consumers will prefer that convenience even in the presence of intense political beliefs.

A bank that uses seamless OS-level age checks everywhere will win against one asking manually in the jurisdictions it isn't required.

I hope everyone’s bank knows how old they are— what with all the documentation we have to cough up to keep us safe from Terrorism , patriot act, 9/11, never forget, etc

> systemd is not run by one corporation

Two corporations, e.g. Canonical and Red Hat, might suffice.

I hope everybody remembers how systemd was thrust upon the community by having Gnome largely depend on it. This was mostly done by efforts of Red Hat, and that sufficed.

IIRC all that's been done is a field has been added to store the user date of birth and a protocol that can be used to retrieve said date.

That's it.

Okay, but why do this now? If it’s such an important feature and unrelated to the barrage of legislation, why was this not implemented a few months or years ago?

Because someone came with a pull request for this; this additional field was meant to support a feature in something else they were working on (an xdg portal). It was a simple PR that addressed a need that the programmer had. And it was accepted.

California has both vendors and clients that are big enough to warrant immediate compliance. A very measurable chunk of Linux is from corporations, most major advancements are corporate backed in some way.

>It seems incredibly silly to me that this is being rushed into systemd [...]

Making user-hostile changes seems exactly on-brand for systemd, to my mind.

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