7 ms·

Liberated Systemd

33 points by gasull 6mo ago

gzread 6mo ago
Why are people worried about age bracket category (optional, defaults to "over 18") but they're not worried about remote attestation (will be mandatory to view any website)?
- egorfine 6mo ago
  They are. I think this is the main reason why sane people are revolting against age groups, because mandatory KYC to use a locked-down Linux begins exactly with that: a small integer field in userdb.
  - gzread 6mo ago
    Wouldn't it begin with one of the several other fields that already exist there?
    - egorfine 6mo ago
      Ah, because they need to move parts today to demonstrate that the parts are movable. This is a today's foot in the today's door.
tux3 6mo ago
This does a terrible job explaining, but it seems to be in protest of age verification laws in operating systems. The only commit is removing a user birthday field.
- gzread 6mo ago
  The existence of the user birthday field is mass surveillance, but the GECOS field, which contains your full name and street address, and the username, which often contains parts of your name and is mandatory, somehow are not. Full access to your home directory, which includes all of your passwords and usernames and confidential data, also somehow is not an invasion of privacy.
  - spaceheeder 6mo ago
    Correct, because putting additional data in GECOS is completely optional. This isn't about having your email client know your birthday, it's about phoning home to gate functionality. Verifiability, attestibility, all the loopholes that you think make this harmless are the croaks of a frog that is unjustifiably confident that the water in the pot won't continue getting hotter.
    - gzread 6mo ago
      Putting your birthday in the birthday field is completely optional.
reconnecting 6mo ago
Perhaps I wasn't paying enough attention to this fork's commits, but what is actually happening with the birth date and where does it go?
- adrian_b 6mo ago
  There is a stupid new California law, which requires that all operating systems must demand the age of any user, and then the OS must implement an API through which any application can ask which is the age of the current user. This information is supposed to be passed by browsers to the sites you visit, so that they would implement age verification. The systemd maintainers are among the first who have rushed to be compliant with the new law, even if compliance with abusive laws does not seem the right solution. In the so-called land-of-the-free, any law that commands people how to use their own property in circumstances when what they do cannot affect in any way other humans, should have been struck down as anti-constitutional. Laws might require Web sites to have some kind of age verification, but they may not decide what people can or cannot run on their own computers. If the legislators were so concerned about age verification, there are easy and non-invasive solutions, like providing a way for each adult to obtain (without recording this transaction) a device that generates one-time codes for age verification (like they were used for online banking before the current fashion of using smartphone apps). Or if that is too expensive, some printed cards with a list of codes with temporary validity could be used, or other such methods that can verify age without providing user identity. Even such methods are worse than the right solution, which is to use parental controls instead of age verification at the sites. The requirements of the law are incredibly stupid and for now they are trivial to circumvent, but the fear is that this is only the beginning. After the legislators see that they can force anyone to work to implement such ridiculous demands, they will demand more, eventually leading to privacy-restricting measures that will no longer be easy to circumvent.
  - cogman10 6mo ago
    Apparently, this is also something that was pushed by Meta through some dark money lobbying [1]. The intention being that they'd already implemented age verification in their side and they wanted to force apple/google to do more work. [1] https://winbuzzer.com/2026/03/18/reddit-user-uncovers-meta-2b-lobbying-age-verification-xcxwbn/ https://winbuzzer.com/2026/03/18/reddit-user-uncovers-meta-2...
SahAssar 6mo ago
The birthdate doesn't actually get sent anywhere, right? Why would adding a field for a birthdate be "mass surveillance" anymore than having fields for email, full name, etc.?
- GrayShade 6mo ago
  It doesn't, and it's optional.
- gasull 6mo ago
  Because it's the first step. “Information, once collected, will be misused.” ― Richard Stallman, How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand?, 2013
  - gzread 6mo ago
    So that's also for email address, username, right?
    - GrayShade 6mo ago
      Don't forget location.
    - worksonmine 6mo ago
      I believe Debian doesn't ask for a e-mail address on installation, but the username is obviously necessary if you're going to login. I leave "Users full name" empty and it's fine. The e-mail address also has a use, for important notifications. There are cases where the OS tries to send an email. But as I mentioned, I don't even know where to set it I've never been prompted and if I was I would leave it empty.
      - gzread 6mo ago
        Any app that has access to your age category has access to your home directory where much juicier things live. Probably including your email address, and all your passwords.
stabbles 6mo ago
The other day someone commented on this site that in the age of agentic coding "maintaining a fork is really not that serious of and endeavor anymore." and that's probably the case. I'm sure continuously rebasing "revert birthday field" can be fully automated. Then the only thing remaining is convincing a critical mass that development now happens over at `Jeffrey-Sardina/systemd` on GitHub.
- duskdozer 6mo ago
  IMO, the benefits aren't from getting mass adoption of this fork, but actually the opposite, at least ostensibly, because if it were to become "the" systemd, it would then face scrutiny and potential legal threat. This way, the maintainers can be in compliance, the legislators (who if there are any paying attention) can be superficially satisfied, while people can still avoid the antipattern. It's the "brown paper bag" speech from the Wire, basically
- Ferret7446 6mo ago
  At some point people will realize that not having an optional data field might not be worth the effort of indefinitely rebasing a revert and recompiling, since they could just not set the field for their user account by doing nothing
wewewedxfgdf 6mo ago
Here is the changes: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/71ad73569d9a5e258852b1c3c9c9d5366b0f0da0 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/71ad73569d9a5e2588...
- pera 6mo ago
  Context/related submission: Store birth date in systemd for age verification https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47436240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47436240
- gzread 6mo ago
  Wow. Literally right next to the birthday field, which is apparently a gateway to mass surveillance, is physical location, which is apparently not?
  - liveoneggs 6mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecos_field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecos_field
  - iamnothere 6mo ago
    Why not just add national ID number then? Surely that won’t be a problem either?
    - NekkoDroid 6mo ago
      If you wanna save it in your user record sure, why not? Though the main problem would be that there isn't a "national ID number" everywhere in the world, so the format would be near arbitray.
dark-star 6mo ago
systemd also stores the real name of the user using this computer in the same user record. Why not remove that as well, as it could uniquely identify the user of the computer? Or the uuid field...
- gzread 6mo ago
  Because this is a reactionary political statement and not a well thought out privacy project
  - iamnothere 6mo ago
    Funny that the supposed “reactionary” statement is the one opposing bills backed by anti-porn activists and the Heritage Foundation.
    - BoredPositron 6mo ago
      The problem is the law itself not whether a software package complies with it. Let me rephrase: people like you are the real problem, rather choosing to harass software maintainers that are merely following a ridiculous law instead of harassing your government to not implement it.
      - duskdozer 6mo ago
        "Just following orders"
        dark-star 6mo ago
        guys, it's just a friggin data field in a local config file! Nothing that will end the world. You can all come back when that supposed "law to force OSS to implement an actual age verification" is being discussed. Otherwise, please get rid of all your knives (those are used to stab people by the thousands RIGHT NOW!) and your guns (those are used to shoot people by the thousands RIGHT NOW!) before complaining about a feature that is killing nobody
znpy 6mo ago
As i get old i get more and more annoyed and this useless armchair activism. This piece of software is useless and cannot be employed anywhere and it’s essentially a futile exercise in virtue-signalling. The problem is not technical, it’s political. Go and make some actual political activism, don’t shit out useless software.
- karmakurtisaani 6mo ago
  But shitting out useless software is what we do here!
  - znpy 6mo ago
    Fair point.
- iamnothere 6mo ago
  This particular project is making a small political point, that this attempt at regulation of FOSS is useless and easily circumvented. The impact is proportional to the effort (small) but it’s not useless any more than running an ad would be. Ageless Linux is a similar project, but with a larger possible impact, as it has the potential to serve as a test case for overturning the law. By directly and flagrantly violating the law, it serves as a magnet for prosecution.
  - znpy 6mo ago
    Moot point, moot-er argumenting. Lawmakers are barely aware that github exists.
- SuperNinKenDo 6mo ago
  As I get older I get more and more annoyed reading useless comments like yours.
Brian_K_White 6mo ago
This project everyone is laughing at actually accomplished what was probably it's only goal. I was alerted to proof of systemd's priorities. I mean I already knew but nothing beats a good solid action when it comes to trying to say it to anyone else.
- jasonvorhe 6mo ago
  I'm not sure I'm parsing what you're writing correctly. What?
- Spivak 6mo ago
  They added an optional date of birth field to a user directory. Are you mad at LDAP for contributing to the surveillance state? Folks have absolutely lost the plot on this one. These laws are stupid, this implementation is fine. Be mad at your legislators, being mad at some swedish guy won't help you any.
the_biot 6mo ago
So this looks like a spite fork intended to make a point, not likely to become a widely used fork of systemd. However, 1) he is right, and 2) systemd's recent full-throated embrace of AI for programming make it clear that systemd really is in dire need of a fork. This project has gone full corporate insanity. I was never one of the vocal anti-systemd folks (I think it's a huge improvement over SysV-style boot stuff), but the risk of this project was always the monoculture aspect. It's on approximately every Linux install, and it's going bad FAST.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- mongol 6mo ago
  I have missed the AI angle in relation to systemd. Has it been discussed on HN by any chance?
  - NekkoDroid 6mo ago
    Not that I know of, but it also isn't really anything worth talking about imo. They added claud review as additional "eyes" on PRs (which already found actual bugs missed by maintainers) and added an AGENTS.md for the people using agents. They require disclosure of usage of agents (including which one) to know to be ready for the usually pitfalls encounted with them. Like... they could say they entirely ban agents usage in their repo but how likely is that someone that wants to use them just doesn't contribute because of the policy instead of hiding the usage? IIRC it also effectively is the same policy as the Linux kernel.
jmclnx 6mo ago
Just move to a non-systemd distro and disable this madness. I am kind of hoping systemd succeeds in adding age validation. That will probably enable distros like Slackware to fly under the radar. My only worry is Firefox, Chrome will be changed to expect this systemd validation.

33 points by gasull 6mo ago

Why are people worried about age bracket category (optional, defaults to "over 18") but they're not worried about remote attestation (will be mandatory to view any website)?

egorfine 6mo ago
They are. I think this is the main reason why sane people are revolting against age groups, because mandatory KYC to use a locked-down Linux begins exactly with that: a small integer field in userdb.
- gzread 6mo ago
  Wouldn't it begin with one of the several other fields that already exist there?
  - egorfine 6mo ago
    Ah, because they need to move parts today to demonstrate that the parts are movable. This is a today's foot in the today's door.

tux3 6mo ago

This does a terrible job explaining, but it seems to be in protest of age verification laws in operating systems. The only commit is removing a user birthday field.

gzread 6mo ago
The existence of the user birthday field is mass surveillance, but the GECOS field, which contains your full name and street address, and the username, which often contains parts of your name and is mandatory, somehow are not. Full access to your home directory, which includes all of your passwords and usernames and confidential data, also somehow is not an invasion of privacy.
- spaceheeder 6mo ago
  Correct, because putting additional data in GECOS is completely optional. This isn't about having your email client know your birthday, it's about phoning home to gate functionality. Verifiability, attestibility, all the loopholes that you think make this harmless are the croaks of a frog that is unjustifiably confident that the water in the pot won't continue getting hotter.
  - gzread 6mo ago
    Putting your birthday in the birthday field is completely optional.

reconnecting 6mo ago

Perhaps I wasn't paying enough attention to this fork's commits, but what is actually happening with the birth date and where does it go?

adrian_b 6mo ago
There is a stupid new California law, which requires that all operating systems must demand the age of any user, and then the OS must implement an API through which any application can ask which is the age of the current user. This information is supposed to be passed by browsers to the sites you visit, so that they would implement age verification. The systemd maintainers are among the first who have rushed to be compliant with the new law, even if compliance with abusive laws does not seem the right solution. In the so-called land-of-the-free, any law that commands people how to use their own property in circumstances when what they do cannot affect in any way other humans, should have been struck down as anti-constitutional. Laws might require Web sites to have some kind of age verification, but they may not decide what people can or cannot run on their own computers. If the legislators were so concerned about age verification, there are easy and non-invasive solutions, like providing a way for each adult to obtain (without recording this transaction) a device that generates one-time codes for age verification (like they were used for online banking before the current fashion of using smartphone apps). Or if that is too expensive, some printed cards with a list of codes with temporary validity could be used, or other such methods that can verify age without providing user identity. Even such methods are worse than the right solution, which is to use parental controls instead of age verification at the sites. The requirements of the law are incredibly stupid and for now they are trivial to circumvent, but the fear is that this is only the beginning. After the legislators see that they can force anyone to work to implement such ridiculous demands, they will demand more, eventually leading to privacy-restricting measures that will no longer be easy to circumvent.
- cogman10 6mo ago
  Apparently, this is also something that was pushed by Meta through some dark money lobbying [1]. The intention being that they'd already implemented age verification in their side and they wanted to force apple/google to do more work. [1] https://winbuzzer.com/2026/03/18/reddit-user-uncovers-meta-2b-lobbying-age-verification-xcxwbn/ https://winbuzzer.com/2026/03/18/reddit-user-uncovers-meta-2...

SahAssar 6mo ago

The birthdate doesn't actually get sent anywhere, right? Why would adding a field for a birthdate be "mass surveillance" anymore than having fields for email, full name, etc.?

GrayShade 6mo ago
It doesn't, and it's optional.
gasull 6mo ago
Because it's the first step. “Information, once collected, will be misused.” ― Richard Stallman, How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand?, 2013
- gzread 6mo ago
  So that's also for email address, username, right?
  - GrayShade 6mo ago
    Don't forget location.
  - worksonmine 6mo ago
    I believe Debian doesn't ask for a e-mail address on installation, but the username is obviously necessary if you're going to login. I leave "Users full name" empty and it's fine. The e-mail address also has a use, for important notifications. There are cases where the OS tries to send an email. But as I mentioned, I don't even know where to set it I've never been prompted and if I was I would leave it empty.
    - gzread 6mo ago
      Any app that has access to your age category has access to your home directory where much juicier things live. Probably including your email address, and all your passwords.

stabbles 6mo ago

The other day someone commented on this site that in the age of agentic coding "maintaining a fork is really not that serious of and endeavor anymore." and that's probably the case. I'm sure continuously rebasing "revert birthday field" can be fully automated. Then the only thing remaining is convincing a critical mass that development now happens over at `Jeffrey-Sardina/systemd` on GitHub.

duskdozer 6mo ago
IMO, the benefits aren't from getting mass adoption of this fork, but actually the opposite, at least ostensibly, because if it were to become "the" systemd, it would then face scrutiny and potential legal threat. This way, the maintainers can be in compliance, the legislators (who if there are any paying attention) can be superficially satisfied, while people can still avoid the antipattern. It's the "brown paper bag" speech from the Wire, basically
Ferret7446 6mo ago
At some point people will realize that not having an optional data field might not be worth the effort of indefinitely rebasing a revert and recompiling, since they could just not set the field for their user account by doing nothing

wewewedxfgdf 6mo ago

Here is the changes: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/71ad73569d9a5e258852b1c3c9c9d5366b0f0da0 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/71ad73569d9a5e2588...

pera 6mo ago
Context/related submission: Store birth date in systemd for age verification https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47436240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47436240
gzread 6mo ago
Wow. Literally right next to the birthday field, which is apparently a gateway to mass surveillance, is physical location, which is apparently not?
- liveoneggs 6mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecos_field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecos_field
- iamnothere 6mo ago
  Why not just add national ID number then? Surely that won’t be a problem either?
  - NekkoDroid 6mo ago
    If you wanna save it in your user record sure, why not? Though the main problem would be that there isn't a "national ID number" everywhere in the world, so the format would be near arbitray.

dark-star 6mo ago

systemd also stores the real name of the user using this computer in the same user record. Why not remove that as well, as it could uniquely identify the user of the computer? Or the uuid field...

gzread 6mo ago
Because this is a reactionary political statement and not a well thought out privacy project
- iamnothere 6mo ago
  Funny that the supposed “reactionary” statement is the one opposing bills backed by anti-porn activists and the Heritage Foundation.
  - BoredPositron 6mo ago
    The problem is the law itself not whether a software package complies with it. Let me rephrase: people like you are the real problem, rather choosing to harass software maintainers that are merely following a ridiculous law instead of harassing your government to not implement it.
    - duskdozer 6mo ago
      "Just following orders"
      - dark-star 6mo ago
        guys, it's just a friggin data field in a local config file! Nothing that will end the world. You can all come back when that supposed "law to force OSS to implement an actual age verification" is being discussed. Otherwise, please get rid of all your knives (those are used to stab people by the thousands RIGHT NOW!) and your guns (those are used to shoot people by the thousands RIGHT NOW!) before complaining about a feature that is killing nobody

znpy 6mo ago

As i get old i get more and more annoyed and this useless armchair activism. This piece of software is useless and cannot be employed anywhere and it’s essentially a futile exercise in virtue-signalling. The problem is not technical, it’s political. Go and make some actual political activism, don’t shit out useless software.

karmakurtisaani 6mo ago
But shitting out useless software is what we do here!
- znpy 6mo ago
  Fair point.
iamnothere 6mo ago
This particular project is making a small political point, that this attempt at regulation of FOSS is useless and easily circumvented. The impact is proportional to the effort (small) but it’s not useless any more than running an ad would be. Ageless Linux is a similar project, but with a larger possible impact, as it has the potential to serve as a test case for overturning the law. By directly and flagrantly violating the law, it serves as a magnet for prosecution.
- znpy 6mo ago
  Moot point, moot-er argumenting. Lawmakers are barely aware that github exists.
SuperNinKenDo 6mo ago
As I get older I get more and more annoyed reading useless comments like yours.

Brian_K_White 6mo ago

This project everyone is laughing at actually accomplished what was probably it's only goal. I was alerted to proof of systemd's priorities. I mean I already knew but nothing beats a good solid action when it comes to trying to say it to anyone else.

jasonvorhe 6mo ago
I'm not sure I'm parsing what you're writing correctly. What?
Spivak 6mo ago
They added an optional date of birth field to a user directory. Are you mad at LDAP for contributing to the surveillance state? Folks have absolutely lost the plot on this one. These laws are stupid, this implementation is fine. Be mad at your legislators, being mad at some swedish guy won't help you any.

the_biot 6mo ago

So this looks like a spite fork intended to make a point, not likely to become a widely used fork of systemd. However, 1) he is right, and 2) systemd's recent full-throated embrace of AI for programming make it clear that systemd really is in dire need of a fork. This project has gone full corporate insanity. I was never one of the vocal anti-systemd folks (I think it's a huge improvement over SysV-style boot stuff), but the risk of this project was always the monoculture aspect. It's on approximately every Linux install, and it's going bad FAST.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
mongol 6mo ago
I have missed the AI angle in relation to systemd. Has it been discussed on HN by any chance?
- NekkoDroid 6mo ago
  Not that I know of, but it also isn't really anything worth talking about imo. They added claud review as additional "eyes" on PRs (which already found actual bugs missed by maintainers) and added an AGENTS.md for the people using agents. They require disclosure of usage of agents (including which one) to know to be ready for the usually pitfalls encounted with them. Like... they could say they entirely ban agents usage in their repo but how likely is that someone that wants to use them just doesn't contribute because of the policy instead of hiding the usage? IIRC it also effectively is the same policy as the Linux kernel.

jmclnx 6mo ago

Just move to a non-systemd distro and disable this madness. I am kind of hoping systemd succeeds in adding age validation. That will probably enable distros like Slackware to fly under the radar. My only worry is Firefox, Chrome will be changed to expect this systemd validation.