mastodon - Link to source

The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification Into Linux

sambent.com/the-engineer-who-t…

The lasting damage was knowing it could happen at all: that a single contributor with no stated organizational backing could submit compliance infrastructure for surveillance law directly into the software that boots your computer, get it merged by two Microsoft employees, and have the creator of systemd personally block the removal.

The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification Into Linux

Dylan, useful idiot with commit access, pushed age verification PRs to systemd, Ubuntu & Arch, got 2 Microslop employees to merge it, called it 'hilariously pointless' in the PR itself, then watched Lennart personally block the revert.
Sam (Sam Bent)
in reply to Khrys

mastodon - Link to source

⁂ Fish Id Wardrobe

we like to think of FOSS as some sort of anarchist collective°. it never has been.

it's run by a series of people with absolute power, for the most part. the benefit is that it's a lot of tiny dictators rather than a few big ones; that in theory anyone can become one, you don't need to be rich; and that these dictators tend to have technical knowledge.

but they can still be arseholes.

° i mean, we might not CALL it that.

in reply to ⁂ Fish Id Wardrobe

friendica - Link to source

Lorraine Lee

I've long been saying that, instead of debating the relative merits of open source software and free software, we should have been demanding noncommercial software. Now it may be too late. FOSS is no anarchist collective, but arguably hacking is. Unfortunately too many of the hacker era hackers were ancaps and could be hired to do the dirty work of the powerful. But now that computing freedom is by definition illegal, maybe a new generation of hackers will arise. One can only hope.

reshared this

in reply to Lorraine Lee

mastodon - Link to source

⁂ Fish Id Wardrobe

@lori i've recently been thinking about — and this is beyond my skills, so i should really say "fantasising about" — some sort of common retrocomputing platform, maybe based on an esp32 or something, which is completely incompatible with commercial computers and so can't be used commercially.

but it would also be missing all the spy-firmware (minix in the cpu, tiny computers in usb plugs etc). maybe we could start our own replacement for the internet!

… yeah, right. sorry.

@Lorraine Lee
in reply to ⁂ Fish Id Wardrobe

mastodon - Link to source

0x0

@fishidwardrobe

Open hardware would be incompatible with modern day commercial aspirations.
Coupled with FOSS of course.

#ESP32 is more for IoT than regular computing – but you can use it for #meshcore (and other #LoRa-based projects), wish is an interesting, albeight very basic, alternative to common (controlled) networks.

@lori @Khrys

#meshcore #lora #esp32 @⁂ Fish Id Wardrobe @Khrys @Lorraine Lee
in reply to 0x0

mastodon - Link to source

⁂ Fish Id Wardrobe

@0x0 @lori folks are, amazingly, building tiny computers that run python or basic around esp32. surprised me too!

you need another chip to handle vga, and some external static RAM, it appears.

here is a project emulating i386 that runs windows 98! on an esp32!! hackaday.com/2021/07/28/emulat…

Emulating The IBM PC On An ESP32

The IBM PC spawned the basic architecture that grew into the dominant Wintel platform we know today. Once heavy, cumbersome and power thirsty, it’s a machine that you can now emulate on a sin…
Lewin Day (Hackaday)
@Lorraine Lee @0x0
in reply to Khrys

friendica - Link to source

Martijn Vos

@Khrys

I don't understand what the fuss is about. This is exactly the right way to comply with that law: an optional birth date field. You don't want to have to submit an idea to your OS or implement facial recognition, and you certainly don't want to tie account creation to external services for those things, but now parents can fill in the birth date for their kids, and everybody else can ignore it. This kind of thing needs to be in the hands of parents, not external companies.

So I don't really see the problem here.

@Khrys
in reply to Martijn Vos

friendica - Link to source

Martijn Vos

@Khrys

The lasting damage was knowing it could happen at all: that a single contributor with no stated organizational backing could submit compliance infrastructure for surveillance law directly into the software that boots your computer, get it merged by two Microsoft employees, and have the creator of systemd personally block the removal.


What the hell is the issue here? Do you need to be a member of an organization to submit a PR? And if the lack of organisational backing would be a problem, why is it a problem that the people merging it do work for an organisation? The only thing that matters is that an official committer approves it.

This whole article sounds like pointless fear mongering. If there's anything else to it that I'm missing, I'd love for someone to explain it.

@Khrys
in reply to Martijn Vos

mastodon - Link to source

draeath

let's take it a bit further too. Nobody uses a pre-built systemd straight from upstream, every distribution is building and packaging it.

This seems very trivial to patch right back out and/or put behind a define. (I would actually be surprised if it wasn't like that, to make compliance with different jurisdictions easier).

This is literally just an additional field for dbus' consumption, right? Tempest in a teacup.

This entry was edited (4 days ago)
in reply to Jules 🍺

mastodon - Link to source

Irom

@julesbl @mcv
Another problem is that it starts implementing surveillance infrastructure without any pushback. Looking at many governments now I don't think that's advisable.

The law was lobbied into existence by Facebook/Meta and friends.

old.reddit.com/r/linux/comment…

tboteproject.com/

@Khrys

Age Verification Lobbying: Dark Money, Model Legislation & Institutional Capture

Investigative research into age verification lobbying, dark money, and model legislation
The TBOTE Project
@Khrys @Jules 🍺 @Martijn Vos
This entry was edited (4 days ago)
in reply to Jules 🍺

friendica - Link to source

Martijn Vos

@Jules 🍺 @Khrys

We've long depended on software maintained by fewer people than that.

The point is: anyone can contribute, committers review and approve. If that has always been a reasonable process, why not now? There are lots of open source projects where the creator of the project has more power than that, and we've always accepted it because we trust the maintainers, and when they break that trust, the community forks, which has also happened plenty of times.

But at the end of the day, it seems to me most people here are irrationally panicking about this. Isn't the field optional? Isn't what goes in the field entirely under the user's control?

By all means discuss this honestly, but I don't see anything here that justifies the hype and panic.

@Khrys @Jules 🍺
in reply to Martijn Vos

mastodon - Link to source

Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦

Say there's a law requiring collection of people's ethnicity. Or of their gender, allowing only two options. Or of their religion. Or legal, government issued names and id numbers. Oh, they're all optional in most jurisdictions and in fact defined in ways that are noncompliant with other laws. But what's the big deal? We'll just add an optional field name to standardize the schema. There's no mandatory mechanism or verification. Just making the data cleaner.
@mcv @Khrys
@Khrys @Martijn Vos
in reply to Martijn Vos

mastodon - Link to source

George Liquor, American

@mcv Never heard of a slippery slope? It's a longstanding tradition in our legal system. Start with something that seems innocuous enough. Then when enough people have been lulled into complacency by arguments like yours, the law changes into something onerous and we're stuck dealing with that.

It's very basic stuff.

@Martijn Vos
in reply to sebsauvage

mastodon - Link to source

BigGrizzly

@sebsauvage Comme je le commentais sur SeenThis dans la semaine, c'est la première vraie démonstration qu'il y a un problème avec systemd et que ce n'est donc finalement pas qu'un problème technique, et qu'il y a aussi un problème politique.

seenthis.net/messages/1163717

Ret - Mastodon

https://furry.engineer/ret/116261339761579758 ❝More systemd shit, sorry... But the more I look at this project the worse it gets.
seenthis.net
@sebsauvage
This entry was edited (4 days ago)
in reply to sebsauvage

mastodon - Link to source

Lien Rag

@sebsauvage

Que le libre fonctionne comme il est censé le faire ?
Un contributeur voit un problème (réel : les lois sur la vérification de l'âge, poussée par Meta), propose une solution (bonne ou mauvaise, à débattre) qui est acceptée par certains projets, ce qui déclenche une shitstorm (bon cet aspect là est moins "comme le libre est censé fonctionner" que "comme il fonctionne en vrai") et le BDL ferme le ticket en disant "c'est optionnel donc chacun reste libre".

@Khrys

@Khrys @sebsauvage
in reply to Fazal Majid

mastodon - Link to source

Two? foxes in a trench coat

@fazalmajid You mean the very same Poettering which was responsible for this commit github.com/systemd/systemd/com… which was "Found with Claude Code Review" and it broke systemd-boot in one of the release candidates (260 RC3) github.com/systemd/systemd/iss…

"Anything LLM-generated will not be committed without a thorough human review" in practice. Yeah.

systemd 260-rc3 systemd-boot doesn't boot · Issue #41098 · systemd/systemd

systemd version the issue has been seen with 260-rc3 CPU architectures issue was seen on x86_64 Component systemd-boot Info systemd-boot menu doesn't show, stuck at the BIOS logo. 260-rc2 worked. B...
tambry (GitHub)
@Fazal Majid
in reply to Khrys

mastodon - Link to source

Bloognoo

'He read the law, took it at face value, and started writing code. The word for what that is sits somewhere past malice, something more insidious: an engineer who treats compliance as engineering, who sees a legal requirement the way he sees a technical specification, and will implement whatever the spec says regardless of who wrote the spec or why.'

Zealot. The word is Zealot. His god spoke and he responded.

This entry was edited (4 days ago)
in reply to Khrys

mastodon - Link to source

Kerplunk

The lasting damage was knowing it could happen at all: that a single contributor with no stated organizational backing could submit compliance infrastructure for surveillance law directly into the software that boots your computer, get it merged by two Microsoft employees, and have the creator of systemd personally block the removal.

NO, THE LASTING DAMAGE IS ACCEPTING INTRODUCTION AND USAGE OF OF SYSTEMD.

Paid for by IBM and later Microsoft to dominate (destroy) Linux

in reply to Khrys

mastodon - Link to source

Kevin Karhan

cyberfascism at play..

infosec.space/@kkarhan/1162670…

Kevin Karhan :verified: (@kkarhan@infosec.space)

@bazkie@beige.party the problem isn't #SystemD but #Cyberfascism and #Bootlickers. - I'll *refuse to comply* with any *"#AgeVerification"* demands in @OS1337 as a matter of principle, just like I'll bever comply with cyberfascist demands by #Roskomna…
Kevin Karhan :verified: (Infosec.Space)
in reply to eobet

mastodon - Link to source

Violet/Multi

@eobet Based on the rest of the articles on the platform, the ones I've peeked over are written in a similar style: They are technically true, I'm not sure if the framing is known or even intentional. As if somebody fed research into an LLM, seriously proofread the outgoing article and also generated "top facts" as well as the graphics out of it
@eobet
This entry was edited (3 days ago)
in reply to Khrys

mastodon - Link to source

jonathankoren™

let’s be completely honest here. The choices are:

- Non compliance resulting in everyone complaining that your device is “broken”
- Non compliance (this option)
- Full compliance with outside verification (a horrible option)

If a mandated API is made called, then easiest option is just to return “adult” and move on, rather than the millions of people complaining that “it doesn’t work”

I really don’t get what the point of this hit piece is.

in reply to jonathankoren™

mastodon - Link to source

Remember Remember 7th November

@jonathankoren The point is that you don’t just give away your freedom because it’s easier. You *at least* say ‘fuck you, make me’ first.

There are way more people for who this is NOT law than for who it IS. So much for the land of the free and the home of the brave.

@jonathankoren™
This entry was edited (4 days ago)
⇧