userdb: add birthDate field to JSON user records by dylanmtaylor · Pull Request #40954 · systemd/systemd
github.com
Stores the user's birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc. The xdg-desktop-portal project is addi...

Fork time? Maybe all the anti-systemd zealots were right all along…

Edit: To address whether it is likely that this change will affect users: Gnome is planning a stronger dependence on userdb, the part of systemd where this change is being implemented. https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2025/06/10/gnome-systemd-dependencies/

Final Edit: The PR has been merged into main.

  • shirro@aussie.zoneEnglish
    1·
    14 minutes ago

    A lot of open source software is kind of ridiculous to many people. Why would you want to reverse engineer some proprietary device? Just choose one that is more open. It isn’t just about the challenge. It is also about extending freedom to do stuff as many places as possible. I might not want age verification in my operating system as its just another way to fingerprint me by big tech. And I probably won’t have it enabled or exposed. But having the option allows people to participate in the shitty, spying. predatory, manipulative, commercial hellscape version of the Internet which is increasingly facing regulation around the world. That is a freedom. Not a freedom I want but a freedom someone wants. It means they are not legally forced to use Microsoft or Apple to give all their data to the NSA and big predatory businesses.

  • njordomir@lemmy.world
    3·
    55 minutes ago

    I am a Coloradan; I have already called all 4 cosponsors of the bill here. What can I do now? Does anyone know which orgs are fighting against this? We have a petition process to get constitutional amendments on the ballot. My dream would be to collect enough signatures to get this constitutional amendment on the next ballot but I think the deadline for submitting the text (prior to collecting sigs) is late this month:

    “No form of AI or ID-based age verification shall be used as a condition for granting Colorado residents access to a website, internet service, or operating system. Age gates that rely exclusively on user-reported age may continue to be used in their current form to inform users that a website may not be appropriate for all users. Colorado recognizes that parents are the responsible party for what their children access online and that requiring ID verification for access to computing resources or digital resources is a violation of free speech and freedom of inquiry.”

  • iByteABit@lemmy.ml
    62·
    1 hour ago

    Wow that’s an insane level of bootlicking, it was completely free for them to do absolutely nothing about this nonsense law and give the middle finger if asked by the US

    I didn’t care before but it turns out the systemd haters were on to something for a long time, fuck these owners for even considering this and even locking the PR to avoid valid criticism, I hope all the contributors create a fork, jump ship and never let the previous owners commit a single line of code to it

  • CrackedLinuxISO@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    19·
    4 hours ago

    Has anyone even looked at the PR? Why is there such a big stink about adding an optional birthday field to a JSON schema? It’s opt-in and can’t be validated in any way.

    That’s like saying OpenSSL is the thin end of an anti-encryption wedge because they provide FIPS compliant modules. Or complaining that it puts your privacy at risk when you generate an SSH key and it asks for your address.

    The problem is the laws getting passed, not with software that gives people a choice about whether to comply.

    • skyline2@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      2·
      35 minutes ago

      Yes, the PR specifically calls out the laws as the reason for this change. The problem is BOTH the laws getting passed, and corporate interests complying in advance.

    • Atomic@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      1 hour ago

      Personally, I just don’t like the taste of asslicking in my distributions. Time to change to a non systemd distro.

    • Brargenzilian@lemmy.orgEnglish
      10·
      3 hours ago

      … can’t be validated in any way.

      I feel like this will be a problem for the future.

      Edit: another user already pointed out the “problem for the future” here.

      • CrackedLinuxISO@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        2 hours ago

        It definitely will be a problem, but it will be a legal problem, not a software problem. Even if the systemd devs decided to revert this commit and never collect age data, the law would still be just a shitty as it is now.

        If this law said that everyone needed to provide a phone number instead of a birthday, would everyone here be just as angry at the Bell Labs developers who wrote the GECOS standard?

    • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
      31·
      3 hours ago

      The problem is the laws getting passed, not with software that gives people a choice about whether to comply.

      OK, but the law didn’t even get written. That asshole decided to open up and deepthroat the boot before it even entered the room.

  • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
    26·
    7 hours ago

    Just think of all those Azure and AWS VMs needing age verification as they’re spooled up, destroyed and receated every few minutes…

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
    13·
    8 hours ago

    …Practically, what does this even mean for a systemd user like me?

    What app would use this? And If anything actually use the field, can’t I just enter a random date, like I have across the internet forever?

    • YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.todayEnglish
      16·
      7 hours ago

      Self reporting has long been honored as the gold fucking standard for honesty! How dare you sully that with your very discrete scrolling to a random year, and not even bothering to select a date! Our data mining overlords will be displeased.

    • Hugging Stars@programming.dev
      8·
      7 hours ago

      They implemented part of the the low level works needed to implement birth date verification. Commercial distros like Ubuntu, RHEL and SteamOS might use it for law compliance. It’ll very likely be as easy to bypass as it can be since no one really wants this.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
        3·
        7 hours ago

        You mean tied to IDs or something?

        Commercial services would’ve just implemented that anyway. And yeah, likely with “absolute bare minimum effort.”

        I’m still a bit confused. This thread is acting like this is a slope to systemd distros requiring an ID check, if I’m reading it right.

        • Orygin@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          3 hours ago

          Yes it’s rage bait and most here fall face first in it.
          Go petition your lawmakers instead of shitting on open source projects implementing required by law features.

            • Orygin@sh.itjust.works
              1·
              2 hours ago

              Then incite people to call their legislators. Not openly shit on maintainers of open source projects.
              I see more people here whining about systemd than about having the laws repealed. It’s simple: there are currently 0 posts about that.

        • Hugging Stars@programming.dev
          41·
          7 hours ago

          You mean tied to IDs or something?

          Anything goes, ID is one way to do it.

          This thread is acting like this is a slope to systemd distros requiring an ID check, if I’m reading it right.

          The post itself is phrased like that for engagement.

  • dukatos@lemmy.zip
    604·
    11 hours ago

    We graybeards tried to warn you about systemd but you acted as fools.

    • Liketearsinrain@lemmy.ml
      81·
      5 hours ago

      It does not help that non insignificant amounts of systemd criticism comes from Lunduke and gang, often ignoring the actual technical problems with systemd and turning into culture war.

      I don’t mean you, just my thoughts.

    • Ulu-Mulu-no-die@lemmy.zipEnglish
      18·
      10 hours ago

      Guilty as charged xD

      I know the debate around systemd is going on for quite some time, I understood the basic reasoning behind it but I don’t have the technical knowledge required to truly decide for myself, so I just didn’t pay too much attention to it and followed what my distro of choice does.

      The good thing about this “new development” is that it’s not just a tech debate anymore, it has such wider implications that it’ll be much easier for people to decide where to be.

    • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      9 hours ago

      i’m going to start dyeing mine so that people won’t just keep ignoring me like some old man yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off his lawn. lol

  • Cease@mander.xyz
    141·
    10 hours ago

    It’s so hilarious that the most recent thing that’s happened on this shitty PR is a request for Claude to review their code.

    • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
      1·
      1 hour ago

      Well, 2 out of 6 people have approved now and the person who requested for a review from Claude is Poettering himself.

      Not sure I’m a fan of AI being used in the development of systemd, but at least for now it seems they don’t want it to be built by stupid AI pull requests:

      If you use an AI code generator such as ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Llama or a similar tool, this must be disclosed in the commit messages by adding e.g. Co-developed-by: Claude Opus 4.6 noreply@anthropic.com and pull request description.

      The quality bar for contributions to this project is high, and unlikely to be met by an unattended AI tool, without significant manual corrections. Always thoroughly review and correct any such outputs, for example ensuring it accurately follows Coding Style at the very minimum. Please do not fire-and-forget pull requests without any human intervention and review, as that will likely result in low-quality results that will not be accepted, and if done repeatedly, may result in the account being blocked. As with any other submissions, authors are responsible for doing due diligence and ensuring their submissions are compatible with the project’s license as documented in LICENSES/README.md.

      As a guideline, if someone notices that a contribution (code, issues, comments) was made with the help of AI, there was likely a lack of human review of the AI generated output.

      I can see it being useful to invoke an AI review in addition to humans reviewing, just in case it catches something nobody else did.

  • Soot [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    24·
    13 hours ago

    Why would anyone on Linux, having free choice of all Linux OSes, choose one that actively compromises your privacy?

    This is why Linux should never be a corporate, paid-for ecosystem. The nerds that keep all this shit running for free will not be interested in maintaining spyware OS.

    • Ulu-Mulu-no-die@lemmy.zipEnglish
      15·
      11 hours ago

      Problem is, most distros use systemd, if they accept this implementation, distros will inherit it.

      I don’t know what it would mean for distro maintainers to revert this change, but I guess it wouldn’t be easy.

      I’m personally just happy sysvinit distros still exist, hopefully sysvinit won’t cave like systemd seems to be doing.

      • Soot [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        5·
        10 hours ago

        Very true, and this is a good argument for the importance of diversity in everything Linux.

        The fact that there are distros not using it at least means there’s room to fuck off to those if this gets out of hand.

      • SockOlm [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        1·
        16 minutes ago

        the last time I looked at this it was at like 17k, if I remember correctly.

        I cant speak much on if it actually got better, but I didnt have any issues with things missing.

        Also 30k is more than most distros have in their package managers, gentoo has about 20k for reference

        • SockOlm [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          1·
          15 minutes ago

          also these numbers are kind of hard to compare, guix probably has like 100s of emacs plugins in its repos that are counted as seperate packages

      • Qwel@sopuli.xyz
        1·
        3 hours ago

        Kinda. What I want is there now (niri, helix, relatively recent Gnome apps, librewolf), but it’s not Nix. If you want the latest wlroots bling, it’s likely not packaged. The guix pull time has not gotten better, it actually feels worse than I remember.