Some of you need to watch this video, and hang your head in shame.
Dylan Taylor has been receiving constant harassment, including threats to his life and safety, for actions done collectively by SystemD. The article by Sam Bent was explictly mentioned as part of the harassment campaign, and rightfully so.
I don’t think enough people realize that this is catastrophically bad. It’ll discourage people from becoming open source developers, it’ll discourage people from using Linux, and it’ll discourage legislators from taking the Linux community seriously.
If you ever wished ill upon another human being for complying with a relatively inconsequential law, you are better off never touching a computer again. The Linux community has collectively gone so far beyond what is acceptable here.
Counterpoint: fuck this guy for complying with the technofascists in advance like the bootlicker he is.
Yeah the fact that this “guy” wouldn’t be on video or audio even with the guy interviewing him and only did DMs furthers my suspicion that this dude is straight up a bot or a group of people working for a company.
Seriously, has anyone ever seen or heard this person? He has a blog and stuff where he parrots Google talking points and the like.
Weird doing an interview all by DMs honestly.
People normally don’t want to record video of themselves while actively being lynched. The ones that do are the exception, not the norm. Hell, most people don’t even want to do that as part of a job application.
And in the first place, there’s no reason to suspect this is a bot. There’s nothing abnormal about any of this, with laws mandating age indication and someone suggesting adding an age field alongside the user’s full name and email address to the user.json.
Yeah both are good points actually you’re probably right
Can someone explain why it isn’t just a boolean that say is adult or something like that? Maybe I misunderstood but it seems like the new California law would approve that.
But I would rather the parents to use parent control.
If the system stores the actual age, that means they could automatically change said boolean.
Also the California law requires users be divided into one of four age brackets. Not just adult/not-adult.
And besides it’s just common sense that systemD have an age field. They already have a name field.
Yeah I’m not going to give this guy his desired victim role. He put a lot of effort into make privacy invading pull requests. Death threats and doxxing is too far but he deserves some insults.
No he doesn’t. We need to focus our anger on the legislators/ lobbiers (Meta in this case).
You know it’s possible to do both, right?
Adding birthday fields is not privacy invading in itself.
Yes, of course. If you ignore current reality, then it’s not privacy invading…
No, it literally just can’t violate your privacy in any way. You have complete control over what, if anything, is placed in that field. No information about you can be gained or disclosed by virtue of the systemd change alone. You can think it’s a bad change because it signals intent to follow a trend of supporting privacy-invading age verification, but you can’t say this specific change in itself is privacy-invading.
You’d have complete control for now.
Don’t give them an inch.
Systemd is free software. The four essential freedoms necessitate that you have complete control forever.
The only way that you could lose control is if your hardware manufacturer took away the ability for you to install your own operating system. But then the choice isn’t going to be Windows or a Linux flavour personally blessed and tivoised by Lennart, it’s going to be Windows or a brick.
I don’t support the change. That’s not my point. My point is that if we’re going to argue the dev being threatened isn’t a victim because he’s actively harming privacy, we should be aware that the changes he proposed are not actually harming privacy at all.
What the hell else is it used for?
It’s mostly not going to be used at all.
Then why is it necessary?
If you have to fill them in, it is.
If you have to fill them in, it is.
Thanks for letting us know you’ve done zero research. You don’t have to fill it in just the same as you don’t have to fill in the RealName and Email field.
Thanks for letting us know you’re an ass.
It’s not a software issue that requires research. It’s a philosophical question of requiring something purely for authoritarian reasons and this is step one.
You don’t, and you don’t have to fill them in with accurate information, so it isn’t.
You don’t, until you do.
If you have to fill them in, it is.
If you don’t have to fill them in, it isn’t.
You don’t have to fill them in, therefore it isn’t. QED
actions done collectively by SystemD
Nope. It only needs one maintainer to do the PR
It’ll discourage people from becoming open source developers
You know what will discourage Them more? Id verification
relatively inconsequential law
Give me your Id. Seriously, go and give me your ID with nothing blurred.
Give me your Id. Seriously, go and give me your ID with nothing blurred.
My age is 26.
That’s not what they asked
I also want to see your passport and your original birth certificate
That’s not what they asked
Wrong. That is all that is asked in the Californian legislation.
so far
That’s not what they asked
Yes, I know. I answered the question that reasonably follows from the context. Not their loaded question that assumes something which was not in the pull request.
I know a lot of people like to use the slippery slope fallacy here but even if that applies, you should limit your resistance to points where you actually have a leg to stand on. It’s not like the government would find it much harder to jump straight to age verification without this age indication step. Going all-in now just does all manner of a disservice to the cause of digital privacy.
what follows from context is you giving them your ID and birth certificate so he knows you aren’t lying about your age.
We’ll deal with that when it happens. Not fighting against an imagined threat by using the slippery slope fallacy.
Start by fighting the New York one.
except they are literally eroding privacy as we speak in this slope we have been slipping down on for a decade or two at this point, as if this is happening in a vacuum.
we can be mad at multiple things at once, especially when they are all part of the same effort.
You are right that it was a loaded question, and you had a smart answer, but the implication of this “inconsequential” change represented by the current birthdate is of course more invasive identification later.
Otherwise why would they bother, because as it is now it is useless or inconsequential.
Otherwise why would they bother, because as it is now it is useless or inconsequential.
The leading theory is that this is to help companies in California comply with the child online privacy laws.
Ah, another smart answer.
They don’t want to be correct, they want to be outraged.
This is the same Reddit-brained nonsense that ruined those communities.
I would like to live in a world that does not inspire outrage
Relatively inconsequential law? Relative to what?
It may be inconsequential in a literal sense if the law isn’t enforced meaningfully, which is probably pretty likely. I don’t really care what California law says and I doubt they’ll try to convince me.
The law says an OS needs to have a way of entering a birth date.
Not the correct birth date, it doesn’t need to allow checking it. Just any date.That’s inconsequential relative to basically everything else.
Death threats.
Also, basically anything the Trump administration has done.
Death threats are far beyond unacceptable, but it’s naive to think this policy is without consequence. It can take as few as 3 non-personal pieces of information (examples of personal: name, phone number, street address, SSN) to uniquely identify someone. Say the kind of car you drive, your employer, and your hair color. Together those are form a strong identifier, but now add age BY DEFAULT. Even a weak set becomes unique.
That is incredibly consequential. You could be implicated in a crime you didn’t commit, protesting becomes impossible, and everything you do or say will ALWAYS follow you. The balance between citizen and government becomes irrevesibly skewed. Just because your computer will volunteer your age.
This issue should be the issue we care about the most.
Enabling fascists hardly makes him a victim
Nor does it prevent him from being one
first off, please announce that the video is from that brody clown so people can not click on that slop; needless to say, I ain’t watched it so I don’t know or care what points was made in it.
second, what OP is doing in OP and his bonehead comments is purposefully pushing a strawman argument, false dichotomy, red herring, and all the other logical fallacies in order to posture as a hero or whatever they got going on between their ears - if you’re anti this bullshit “law” then you are also pro physically harming poor FOSS “contributors”.
this fucking “contribution” shoulda been shot down like any other troll/bullshit plaguing every other FOSS project beset with ai bots and carma-farming typo-fixers and the like, and if by some mistake their “contribution” was accepted, here’s a chance to reverse it.
cali ain’t the world, which by and large ain’t got no such idiocy on the books. and if it did, I wouldn’t bootlick my way to submitting a patch to incorporate it; I would, in fact, oppose it any way I could.
that clown of a “contributor” has a history of simping for the backwardest ideas, antithetical to FOSS and I don’t care one bit what he has to say on any one topic.
Funny to see someone else with an active distaste for his videos. He sets off predatory alarm bells in my head and feels smarmy to me.
Needless to say, I ain’t watched it so I don’t know or care what points was made in it.
cali ain’t the world, which by and large ain’t got no such idiocy on the books. and if it did, I wouldn’t bootlick my way to submitting a patch to incorporate it; I would, in fact, oppose it any way I could. that clown of a “contributor” has a history of simping for the backwardest ideas, antithetical to FOSS and I don’t care one bit what he has to say on any one topic.
If you refuse to listen to the experience of the person the Linux community has been harassing, then don’t comment.
what OP is doing in OP and his bonehead comments is purposefully pushing … and all the other logical fallacies … if you’re anti this bullshit “law” then you are also pro physically harming poor FOSS “contributors”.
Many Lemmy users have explicitly called for violence against Dylan Taylor, and many more have brought forwards implied calls to violence. The Lemmy community is broadly 50:50 on their support for said calls for the violence.
I’m commenting on your shitty takes. second, if you’ve spent decades (that’s plural yo) on this planet, then you’re familiar with the concept of a hyperbole. a hyperbole is a purposefully exaggerated statement in order to draw attention to the importance of an issue. e.g. I could eat a horse - no you couldn’t, you’re just mildly inconvenienced with what you think is hunger.
consequently, there’s a distinction to be made between actual calls to violence (of which I haven’t seen any on this platform) and vividly voicing disgust and anger.
Excellent. Just having his face out there will discourage him for good, once he gets the backlash.
There is a special guillotine for this wannabe parasite.
A mistake without regret must be punished. They are not kids acting silly. I don’t feel comfortable with a foot on my neck, even when that foot isn’t pressing very hard.
What you are really asking is how far will people go to defend freedom? Look at history, my friend.
He didn’t have to do this. If he wants to do his part to make everyone else’s life worse, then he will have to face the consequences for it.
Nah useful idiots like this deserve the shit they’ll get.
Some more for the “I haven’t seen any calls to violence” crowd.
he should have chilled the fuck out over deepthroating boots as soon as he saw them. Fuck around , find out.
What I’ve learned is that it’s basically impossible to convince people that the only real way to solve this is violent revolution.
I’m glad to hear he’s getting his shit fucked, maybe he’ll roll back the commit.
EDIT : This fucker is lucky with the amount of hate he’s getting, there’s plenty of people who hate his guts over what he did, and didn’t personally reach out to yell some sense into him
I guess he should try his hardest to get his bootlicking commit rolled back
So they added a date of birth field. Not technically doing anything wrong but a concerning direction morally. If it wasn’t for the fash / authoritarian bullshit in the world that field wouldn’t be a problem.
However, the question is how should the Linux community respond. Rather than grabbing pitch forks we should do what the Linux community does best. Support the alternatives, be it a fork or a replacement stack.
I’m watching for what lands and becomes popular. It seems inevitable that Devs in countries that aren’t forcing ID checks will build what we need. I hope to see either a fork of systemd free from redhat influence (always suspicious of large corps), or a true set of alternatives that can realistically replace the systemd stack.
The community will drive the change. Put down your pitch forks, pick up your keyboard yourself, or just support the good Devs instead.
I expect someone will just make a systemd patcher package that removes the field and provides clean error handling for anything that tries to use it.
I think the discussion we should be having instead is engineering ethics.
I think Dylan’s letter clearly showed he isn’t really involved in “FOSS radical” circles and has the usual engineering mindset (that was described in the Sam Bent blogpost). Not that I personally blame him, engineering schools raise students for this, and the corporate structure further enforces it with the strict hierarchies where you do whatever management orders you to do. What’s important is that there are many devs who clearly aren’t tied into the ethics discussion part of engineering. There’s even research on engineers’ attitudes afaik, and its conclusion was that freshly graduated engineers’ first response was to implement changes without thinking about the ethics part, and after further prompting and discussion, they could be convinced that this change was bad and they need to push back.
I’ll leave a two links here so when people iwsh to read, they know where to find good stuff.
- Constructive Technology Criticism Annotated Syllabus - I know Medium sucks but the scribe.rip copy I saved suffers link rot
- Awesome critical tech reading list - you can just
git cloneit and read it without browser
I don’t think enough developers realize that the majority of users does not want this. They’re acting exactly like the legislators: “we don’t give a shit about what the people think”.
The legislators won’t take the Linux community seriously, because the developers aren’t taking the community seriously either.
The majority of users do not care, and even if they did it’s still not the user’s place to demand the FOSS developers listen to them. That aside, this is an issue of personal attacks and harassment directed at an individual developer, the project is another matter.
Harassment of an individual developer, or anyone really, is grossly immoral, counterproductive, and reflects poorly on the Linux and Lemmy community.
I was with you, particularly with your anti-violence stance, until this comment.
The answer to disagreements in the Linux world has been to fork a project or make your own. This is different, neither devs nor users will have a say if these various laws are instituted.
The majority of users do not care, and even if they did it’s still not the user’s place to demand the FOSS developers listen to them.
Linux is not a megacorporation. It is an array of different interests that still manage to get lots of interesting stuff done, even with those differences.
This was not a cool thing to say.
FOSS developers have the right to ignore people who are making demands that are unreasonable or not in line with their vision.
Oh, come on. Pretending that foss devs have no connection to users or the community is not a take based in reality. The Linux world is full of changes made or reversed by community sentiment, even for bigger players like Canonical.
The very core of Foss is allowing popular and useful projects to gain momentum by appealing to users. Sure, you can fork a project or start your own, but that independence of the devs is rooted in community support to go do what you want.
And I’ll repeat myself: this is different, foss devs and users both will not have the option to just “go do their own thing” if these laws all become reality.
I don’t wish Dylan harm, and I’m not doing anything to him. I also believe nobody here is sending threats. If you saw the video, you probably noticed that it contained a screenshot from 4chan. 4chan users have been known for terrible behaviour and they are conspiracy-minded fascists, who also oppose this change (others fascists would like this as long as it’s not them being spied on). I’m almost completely sure that they are the ones doing the bullying, not users from here.
I’d prefer if the age verification landscape would be fragmented an unusable, compared to systemd offering it in a consistent manner. Websites will use the offered APIs and will use it for extending fingerprinting. No, fake birth dates won’t save you. Even the disabled canvas API is used for fingerprinting. It just shouldn’t be exposed at all. Not that it matters because every other OS will comply and desktop linux is negligible.
The arguments presented in the video won’t convince anyone who bully people on the internet. They are most often fash and they believe that only power matters. Bullying is exerting power over people, and if they succeed in bullying them into reverting the change, they will be satisfied. Not that I think it will achieve anything, but they do. They follow Carl Schmitt’s teachings.
On “better ways to make a change”: If somebody doesn’t live in the US, and lives in sort of a dictatorship, they can neither affect murican lawmaking nor do their govt listen to anyone other than a few. If this age attestation/verification shit comes into place, their only choice here would be to go and not install systemd-userdb (or use linux without systemd). The disabled API would probably break even more websites than disabling 3rd party javascript. Their govt could also use the fingerprinting to spy more on citizens (they prolly already do).
As a thought experiment: please recommend them a better way than bullying. No, not living in a shithole country is not an option. No, they don’t have the spare money to found/donate to an existing org that fights against this. Also, companies pushing this would just outspend them.
There’s also the aspect of corporate influence over linux. It directs changes in order to further business interest over normal users’ interests. Personally, I prefer companies be out of linux and would accept lower-quality things. But also, I think the ones most hurt by these laws are the system integrators (mentioned in the video), who actually need to do things that align with normal users’ interests.
On the parental control thing: yes, age things could be used for it, but the parents know better than the computer, and user settings would be preferable (for example, kid should be able to this and that program, open this site, but not others). I think it shouldn’t be the websites who decide. Yes, parenting takes a lot of time, but we can’t substitute it with automatated fence-building.
Edit: elaborate on "fascists.
A good response. Informative, mature, and well thought out.
I don’t wish Dylan harm, and I’m not doing anything to him. I also believe nobody here is sending threats.
True, but publicly wishing ill upon someone for something as trivial as this (i.e. something with zero basis in the real world) is extremely toxic. The odds are slim he’d ever be seen on Lemmy, saying the kinds of things some people here have been saying publicly demonstrates a tremendous lack of empathy and maturity. And that this community is so accepting of those kinds of words is a real problem.
There’s also the Sam Bent article, that was posted here on Lemmy. That’s probably the most directly harmful thing someone’s done. By sharing that article it’s possible someone here was inspired to harass him, and even though nobody probably did the risk is non-zero.
lmfao this entire situation is just the average rational person vs big tech lapdogs
Threatening anyone with harm because you disagree with them is horrible. Things have gone too far on the internet. If we just ran after everyone who we disagree with then we wouldn’t have civilization left.
Damn people like you really think that you can negotiate with traitors