Liberated Systemd

https://github.com/jeffrey-sardina/systemd

by gasull • 4 months ago

33 74 4 months ago

github.com

tux3• 4 months 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.

gzread10• 4 months 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• 4 months 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.

reconnecting• 4 months 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• 4 months 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.

cogman104• 4 months 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-2...

dark-star7• 4 months ago

It goes nowhere of course, but people seem to think that the age verification laws that are currently being drafted everywhere somehow make this the obvious next step.

They don't understand that it's still all on your computer and you can of course set the birthdate to whatever you want (or not set it at all).

tl;dr: it's a tinfoil hat fork

therealdrag0• 4 months ago

So what’s the point of the “feature” then?

SahAssar6• 4 months 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.?

GrayShade2• 4 months ago

It doesn't, and it's optional.

gasull• 4 months ago

Because it's the first step.

“Information, once collected, will be misused.”

― Richard Stallman, How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand?, 2013

gzread10• 4 months ago

So that's also for email address, username, right?

SahAssar6• 4 months ago

I believe collected there refers to actual centralized collection. This does not get sent to anyone, it lives on your computer. Or do you think that having files on your local disk means that they will be misused?

I'm pretty sure most people already have their birthdate somewhere on their computer.

stabbles• 4 months 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.

duskdozer3• 4 months 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• 4 months 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

gzread10• 4 months 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)?

egorfine2• 4 months 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.

gzread10• 4 months ago

Wouldn't it begin with one of the several other fields that already exist there?

wewewedxfgdf• 4 months ago

Here is the changes:

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/71ad73569d9a5e2588...

pera• 4 months ago

Context/related submission:

Store birth date in systemd for age verification

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47436240

gzread10• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecos_field

iamnothere3• 4 months ago

Why not just add national ID number then? Surely that won’t be a problem either?

dark-star7• 4 months 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...

gzread10• 4 months ago

Because this is a reactionary political statement and not a well thought out privacy project

iamnothere3• 4 months ago

Funny that the supposed “reactionary” statement is the one opposing bills backed by anti-porn activists and the Heritage Foundation.

cogman104• 4 months ago

Because the law requires the operating system to take proactive measures to ensure the age is correct.

You can put "Luke Skywalker" into the name fields, or even nothing at all, and there's no legal mandate that those fields be filled in or accurate.

The birthdate, however, has a legal mandate to be correct and checked for correctness by the software developers of the OS.

For example, if you visit facebook, tinder, or your bank and any of them store and communicate your actual age, the OS is mandated that it must update that field. Google's creepy analytics would also get involved here as if you put your age as a 99 year old, but google analytics show you are more likely to be 20->25 then the OS is supposed to update that age field with the better information from google.

And of course, facebook, google, and every other website can ask your browser for an age range and they are required to report it. Which makes this a symbiotic leaking of information.

All of this is about destroying anonymity on the internet. Today it's the age that needs to be perfect with communication efforts. Tomorrow it'll be the name. And of course, that will all be linked to every social media account.

Why is this bad? In many governments, it isn't. However, this presents a clear mechanism to track and monitor people who dissent with the government.

dark-star7• 4 months ago

The birthdate, however, has a legal mandate to be correct and checked for correctness by the software developers of the OS.

please tell me which law mandates that the birthdate that I put in a config file on my PC has to be correct?

znpy3• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

But shitting out useless software is what we do here!

znpy3• 4 months ago

Fair point.

iamnothere3• 4 months 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.

znpy3• 4 months ago

Moot point, moot-er argumenting. Lawmakers are barely aware that github exists.

SuperNinKenDo• 4 months ago

As I get older I get more and more annoyed reading useless comments like yours.

Brian_K_White• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

I'm not sure I'm parsing what you're writing correctly. What?

Spivak• 4 months 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• 4 months 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.

mongol• 4 months ago

I have missed the AI angle in relation to systemd. Has it been discussed on HN by any chance?

NekkoDroid2• 4 months 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• 4 months 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.

Liberated Systemd

Related Stories