Fedora Project Leader Suggests Linux Distros Could Adopt Apple's Age Verification API
https://itsfoss.com/news/fedora-leader-suggests-age-verification-api/Open linkView original on lemmy.nz189
Comments115https://itsfoss.com/news/fedora-leader-suggests-age-verification-api/Open linkView original on lemmy.nz
How bout
I was about to say exactly that
How about no?
Why do some people just have the worst fucking ideas...and why is "some" starting to feel like "most"
Because media propaganda makes it seem as if the majority have certain views. People don't like to be on the outside so if the media can trick people into conforming then they will try that.
happy fediverse birthday!
Oh, thanks! I hadn't noticed actually!
Ok well I suggest Fedora Project leader get fucked. Plenty of other good distros bub.
Why are we listening to a person who tried to link a file directly from their downloads folder?
Also the original post that the article is referencing on the fedora forums is suggesting that we remove all networking support from baseline linux as some way to comply/circumvent the law.
I'm sorry, but I just can't take anything said in that forum post seriously.
I have a feeling that a lot of those who replied have not really read the article, that contains some nuances. I do not like the idea of age verification, but the project leader's proposal is apparently not even official (and more like a hypothetical in a discussion thread on their forums.
Please read more than headlines, lol.
But it's boring and won't give you the feelingn of being right.
Dang, am I about to become an Arch user?
I already got BSD on a spare laptop. Granted it was freeBSD and I think I might switch to OpenBSD since the latter's foundation is Canadian and not US based.
But yeah if they go through with this I will be uninstalling it off my gaming machine and switching to Arch 100%. I really appreciated that line about it "not being April fools" when it was introduced in their github thread.
Theres also artix which is basically arch without systemd.
It's a lot easier to use than one would guessed it at first. Much easier, than wrestling with getting the right cmake/gcc versions every time on Debian the moment you don't want to use not a 2+ years old version of something.
If youre not picky and want to use the default setups, arch install is so easy now. The script is very easy to follow and takes like 10 mins to install depending on your network speed. The only "hard" part during the install is connect to the internet. But iwctl takes care of that
For solutions that back on actually "verifying" the age by requiring credit card or government ID, those suck.
As described, this is an administrator self describing the age, which doesn't mean much to anyone except kids of people who apply parental controls to systems their kids have access to.
Accounts already require your "full name" but we don't consider that "full name verification".
This proposal seems to be in the spirit of least intrusive means to let parents opt into this stuff if they want, with no ties to identity compromising third party/state "verification".
Question is whether this sort of solution that at least gives parents some chance will satisfy the lawmakers long term. For the wave of laws now, it seems to suffice to self attest age.
They don't require anything. You can leave that empty or just put John Doe. All that is required for an account on a Linux system is a username and a password.
Well strictly speaking the full name field is always there, but a lot of people have the full name "".
But less pedantic, perhaps require was the writing word, but same principle, put whatever you want in dob field, default to 1970 or something.
I don't think they were referring to Linux in general, I think it was specifically talking about Fedora
I don't think fedora has unique requirements for user info
As long as I have root, I’m as old as I wanna be.
Not if age verification is done by a digital signature from the smart card in your government issued ID.
sudo rm /bin/evil-age-verification-binaryOr if it's done through systemd: git clone, remove the offending code, and compile.
I already skipped all these tedious steps: Void Linux with runit .
so you're a few steps behind me then, i threw my computers in the trash and started a farm
Oh wait, there aren't people chiming in to call me and others a fucking idiot and a stupid man child and all the other talking points for suggesting that the systemd merge was going to escalate?
Fascinating. I wonder where they all went. Maybe they're on the BSD forums now, but somehow I doubt it.
Sure I can chime in here.
You did actually read the post correct? Not just the title? The original poster, Jef, is talking about implementing a Unix socket or a dbus protocol similar to what apple already has. They are literally just referencing their definition for a struct.
So no this will not be ID verification, it won't ask for face scans, and it won't necessarily send the data anywhere.
The article is just using the big A word as some boogeyman to generate clicks and further rile up the community.
The systemd change is benign and this is not proof of your slippery slope theory.
Edit: I swear literacy rates in the linux community must be dropping.
I read it and just like the systemd merge, this isn't the end for this.
We can circle back when it turns into full blown identification standards though if its more comfortable for you to come to terms with the reality then.
Also, "won't necessarily send the data anywhere" isn't exactly comforting.
I just want to make sure that we do agree on a few things.
Given that, I think we can ultimately agree that the NY, UK, Germany, and I think also the Brazil laws are bad and cannot be fixed with simple updates to language.
So let's focus on the law's that do not require actual verification since that is what the systemd change cites.
What issues do you have outside of that they are poorly written and ineffective or that they are a slippery slope/frog in a pot/tip of the spear?
This is not about my comfort this is about what these laws actually require rather than some imaginary law that has not even been written yet.
I figured that someone might latch onto that "necessarily" and that's the great thing about open-source. If that distro/application/os does misuse your data then don't use it or fork it.
Oh no more people are talking about how to implement the least possible invasive version of age verification! Now they're referencing standards for it!
Yeah, some of us really don't want our home PCs directly contributing to the surveillance state, and we sure as hell don't appreciate pre-compliance to the demands of increasingly fascistic states.
Unless I'm mistaken everything being discussed here is still entirely within the context of your own system. Every date you put in is unverified and would only serve for something like parental control tools.
That would be covered by the
part.
That's cool but we don't want any which you seem to not understand.
That's cool, just lie? Like there's no verification process going on here, this is a field on your system that can be set to whatever you want which will empower parents to keep their children out of platforms like discord where they will be predated on, and can be completely ignored by users like me who do not have any reason to restrict my own system. But keep pitching a fit over this little bullshit instead of actual age verification policies that are going to require your face id, government id, etc for every platform you interface with.
EDIT: It really feels like you people just react to the headline and don't even read the article. One of the core points of their discussion in the first place is that the entitlements oriented approach to parental controls is better and that it seems that legislation is poorly informed for going after an age-centric approach in the first place. These people aren't the boogeyman trying to fuck over you and yours, they're contributors trying to figure out how to make their platforms better in the face of obligate compliance.
That's cool but we don't want any which you seem to not understand.
inb4
Ah yes, the beginning of history.
In the beginning,
GodK&R created thedinosaurstime_t.Glad I ditched Fedora a while ago.
That's not enough. Just like with systemd, you will be made to care about what the corporatist Microsoft-garglers at Red Hat do, whether you use it or not.
Is there a swastika in that image?
I didn't see it until you pointed it out. Imo looks unintentional, just an unfortunate result of the circuit traces being arranged as they are.
Yeah, tbh a swastica is an amazing symbol, such a shame nazis made it their emblem.
Because they are corporate-backed I can understand why Fedora would need to think about this, but I would never use them again. The surveillance state will stay the fuck out of my devices. The discussion also seems to be centered on GNOME?
We’re not legally required to have age verification here so if they try that shit here we’re just Gina nice to Arch/arch like :/
Yeahhhh
We use Debian and ripped out systemd (replaced it with openrc) a bit before all this happened. Feeling really good about that choice now.
(unrelated: plural gang! :3)
-- Frost
We’re still relatively new to Linux even after a year of switching. Started learning more about the terminal just to get comfortable with it and it’s not hard at all, just got to remember ask the commands haha (did make a cheat sheet lol)
(Unrelated: Yoooo plural gang!!!! :D) -PJ & Sam
(*wags tail at both PJ and Sam!!* =^.^=)
yeah! Terminal's super useful but also kind of daunting.
If y'all haven't seen the man pages, they make an excellent reference. Honestly, they're basically written more as reference than as tutorial type stuff most of the time. So that's there whenever your cheatsheet doesn't cover something.
Also we use zsh (without plugins, you don't need plugins) and it's got really fancy autocomplete. We can just type
-and hit tab and get a list of all the options for that command (that zsh knows about; I don't think it goes and reads man pages for you or anything like that). I can't remember how you turn that on but I think it's something you can do from zsh's initial setup wizard. I don't know if bash can do the same thing or not, I think probably not (but we're not super up to date on bash).(I'd avoid fish, which you might also run into if you go looking for fancy features. It's known for really fancy features but it's also not compatible with normal shell scripts, which'll screw you up if you ever want to get into scripting. zsh does normal shell script syntax (with the exception of protecting you if you forget to quote your variables) and also has really nice fancy features like the autocomplete.)
-- Frost
Got ya, will look into the zhs!! Sounds super useful. And yush found out about the man from a tutorial for useful commands in terminal. 90% of the time we’re converting files with ffmpeg and running yt-dlp lol -PJ
... sssssssiiiiiiiiigggggggghhhhhhhhhh
I went with a Fedora distro because the Intel GPU drivers were less of a headache. Guess I must now find another distro...
I would wait and be very vocal about not wanting it in the forums and stuff first.
This isn't decided and nothing has been added yet at the time of me writing this.
It deserves to be ridiculed and shot down through so that it never makes it through but the problem is Red Hat is an American company.
So I always knew this was going to happen to fedora. Still though, let's see what happens.
it's cute how you think IBM won't comply with their biggest contract holder.
I think they will, but I will wait and see confirmation before I go scorched earth and re install another version of Linux.
I know ultimately that you are right though, but I stills expect pushback and I'm hoping all this shit just gets overturned or an exclusion made for FOSS at the very least.
At least with my Core i7-4702MQ, it worked without much of a hassle on Manjaro.
Nothing is sacred to these fucks
Linux Distros Could Tell Fedora To Eat Shit.
As if their consoderation of adopting AI into their dev stack wasn't enough.
Anyone have any recommendations for distros like Fedora that don't have systemd and won't consider using AI, but do support KDE?
MX Linux (Debian based) has a KDE version, and lets you choose a non-systemd init during the install.
https://itsfoss.com/systemd-free-distros/
I’m honestly okay with leaving KDE. Cosmic is surprisingly good.
I've been going down there same rabbit hole. Right now, I'm trying to learn Slackware. Happy for other suggestions though
If you are willing to go the Slackware route, take a moment to explore Void Linux at that point...
I can vouch for Void. Used it for a while and it was awesome. Though it was before all this ai and "age verification" bullshit.
bro... wtf should i use now??
Back to Arch??
Back to Debian??
or fuck it go TempleOS.....
There is TempleOS with internet
Whoever the fuck supports age verification should be hung!!! Fuck that shit!!
Fuck age verification, but the fact that this comment gets even a single upvote seriously worries me.
If we're talking about the criminals who are harming children (social media companies, roblox, etc) and actively pushing to influence legislation that allows them to continue this behavior while punishing the rest of us while taking away privacy for normal people, then idk. Prison seems too generous for those scum.
I think the commenter here might be referring to regular people who are powerless and/of less than informed on the subject which I of course disavow. But if somelike like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk never see the inside of of a prison cell, which is much more than they deserve, there is no justice in this world.
It's the welcoming of surveillance with open arms! IF "protecting the children" is what we're after, TRULY honestly after, then social media would be banned for anyone under the age of 18!
The fact that Zuck KNOWS this (Meta and its current format) is the problem he pushes all blame to everyone and everything else. And like IDIOTS the government listens-mostly because they're all bought and paid for anyway. FB did studies back in 2014 (that's right over 12 years ago) or earlier to prove it wasnt addictive, and found it to be worse than they thought so they buried it!
My guess is, before the hearing, Zuck and crew agreed this is the way to get gov off his back and also get gov MORE data and surveillance. It's a win-win. Every obedient citizen who doesn't know/understand technology says "OK I guess" and everyone else with half a spine and understanding... Takes a stand!!
Facebook first released for 18+ users as it was for college and you needed your school's .edu address to open an account. To grow the userbase, it was opened up to more and more users which then lead to more and more deceptive practices to always get that YoY growth.
Meanwhile, it acts as an escape from reality as people hate their own lives, and "influencers" are the fakest ones feeding consumerism to others, because "if you do this one thing you can be good too" shit.
Personally, if you directly do anything to mislead/misguide others for your own selfish gain, you should feel awful about holding back those around you, instead of working together to fight the system! Unfortunately, right now, too many people feel inadequacies, so we're getting to the point where we say "fuck it" and so we do anything to get ahead...
The TL;DR is: It's no longer about connecting people, it's about money, data, and control! Pretty much ALL social media is a cancer designed to keep users engaged to distract them from the shitty world around them as it falls apart.
In the wise words of Sam Flynn, "We need to work together, it's the only way!" 😁
I'm not talking about the age verification, I'm talking about hanging people who support it. Y'all need to get a sense of perspective.
I know that's what you're talking about, and honest to God I'm being serious that it's so offense and disgusting for anyone NOT in gov to support this!! It's THAT fucking crazy!!
I don't care if you're left or right leaning. This is not a political thing at all, it's purely bowing to the fucking overlords with money who give NO FUCKING SHITS about anyone else!
Depends on how its verified
Any form of age verification is a violation of user privacy.
if im the root user then no user on my system has privacy
It's not about your system. It's about every system connecting to the Internet. It's not local age verification, it's widespread monitoring by the government.
They said any form of age verification. I can verify the age of users on my system
Read the room.
...which is precisely why I'm not on your system. ;)
Ok cool. Completely pointless comment
I hope OpenSuse doesn't follow, or I will have to switch to a fully community distro that have already said the f word to age verification
The antix linux call gets stronger and stronger for me everyday. I have it on a 23 year old laptop and it runs quite well, although it isn't as clean as a using a full DE. While I do like running an enterprise grade OS, I'm happy to ditch any weak-willed organization that won't stand up for itself or it's users and become a radical antifascist communist cypherpunk hippie anarchist (on the outside).
I believe MX Linux shares a lot of devs with Antix, but offers full DE's.
What problem does this even solve? On Linux, what app would even be asking how old you are? Web browsers for sure, and maybe electron apps like Discord? But what else is there?
I'm on Bazzite (based on Fedora). I'm comfy with it, moving distros is a significant effort, so I'm very unlikely to ever jump ship. If I have to make a workflow that mirrors the official Bazzite images and neuters this age check, so be it. Not that complicated.
But I'm willing to bet the community will step up and maintain browsers/apps that don't have these age checks in the first place. Firefox has many forks that definitely won't, and Vesktop will probably stub this out when it inevitably comes to Discord. If there's nothing to ask for age verification, it doesn't matter what the OS can do.
I really don't see a need to burn a distro I'm comfortable with, even if the upstream maintainers are a little dumb. There a ton of ways to bend a Linux distro to your will without throwing your hands up.
well, the app catalog, steam, certain games, ...
tbh parental controls would be useful to have. you can't be watching every minute if they are doing something inappropriate. usage time limits are also useful.
why are people so much against tools? we are so afraid of the slippery slope that we don't even consider to accept legitimately useful optional tools
can we acknowledge that what happens on the internet today is harmful to children? now, you either properly set up limits for them, or cut their access, if you want any good.
All Linux distros either come with parental controls or have a way of installing them. This age verification shit was never about protecting the children.
when I was looking I have found exactly zero parental controls for linux. which ones do you know?
Gnome has parental control https://help.gnome.org/gnome-help/parental-controls.html
But it has some serious limitations: for example, you cannot block individual website reliably. Parents can consider piholes, but DNS sink hole on local network are often trivial to bypass.
this is just limiting what apps can be opened, and it only works for flatpak apps. how will you disable all the other apps that are installed? how do you disable the shell which could be used to download a non-flatpak browser?
and as you said it does not even try to limit which websites are allowed to be visited, or for how much time can the computer be used. a pihole can be circumvented with DoH, for which there is an easy toggle in firefox, probably chrome too
Don't give your kids root permission so they can't install non-flatpak apps.
of course, but no root permission is needed for that. flatpak packages can be installed on the user level, but even if you somehow disable that, they could still just download firefox (or anything else) as a tarball, unpack it and run it traditionally
For 99% of what happens on the Internet? No. No, we can't. That would be malicious fearmongering.
For the remaining 1% (or less)? Fine and impose sanctions on any companies that produce content intended to harm children (mostly Meta, and any company that makes games with lootboxes), and their CEOs and boards.
Educate parents so they can prevent their children from accessing that harmful 1%. Fine any that refuse, and take their children away as you would any other abusers'.
But this age tracking shit will do absolutely nothing to protect children, it will do absolutely nothing to educate parents, and worse of all will do absolutely nothing to stop the companies that intentionally harm children.
Its only purpose is to control access to the Internet, and to establish a foothold to justify a slippery slope of ever worsening spyware measures, that will harm not only children but the whole population.
malicious fearmongering? all that most people know about "the internet" is facebook, instagram, tiktok and the other corporate propaganda machines. by popularity, that is absolutely 99% of the internet, and not "the renaining 1%", as you are portraying it.
wasn't that exactly what I was saying? providing tools in the freaking operating system to limit what your kid can do? but downvote me to hell because I'm clearly wrong and that will surely fix everything!
you know what it will do? with proper OS level integration, with programs taking it upon themselves, easier presets for the kid to only access age appropriate things. age brackets, that's it.
then even the web browser can manage the limitations natively, either with filterlists like what ublock uses, or when the visited website self-declares its category.
how in the fucking hell will it control access to the internet when the local system administrator can change the age bracket setting in the OS.
age verification made easy:
user has internet access -> contracts can only be made by adults -> thus age is verified...
also... whoever provides minors internet access goes to jail
the whole point of age verification is control of adults. Kids are always just excuse, people who spout "think of the children!!" style rethoric always couldnt care less about kids. Those who do dont yell about it and actually do stuff to help kids, so its easy to tell them apart.
I know this is tongue in cheek but kids should be able to use the internet. It's important that kids become digitally literate and the wonders of the internet are great.
It's so obvious that social media has made the world an objectively worse place and this is just another extension of that. Social media companies should face consequences when they harm children, full stop. Personally, I'd be fine with banning social media outright but I understand some may have free speech concerns. However, I don't see how the interests of corporate capital and the attention economy can be squared inside this circle. Corpos will always want to maximize screen-time and they don't give a hot fuck who's brain they melt. Unfortuantely we live in a world where even the president of the US is a demented pedophile rapist so I don't have much hope for people like Zuck seeing the consequences of his actions.
Social media is a societal disease and until we actually deal with the root of the problem, which honestly doesn't have anything to do with kids at all and really boils down to capitalist incentives and their relation to the attention economy, we will continue to see harms inflicted upon the digital citizens of the world.
yep.. it is meant as hyperbole
Does Fedora has a Code of Conduct? Time to update it to either be
if they really like the taste of the boot. Maybe they could remove "woke" elements altogether for that sweet fascist-controlled US money.
Please don't mix Bill&Ted with that asshole
Elon was who mixed Bill&Ted into his garbage products.
This is gonna kill Linux, which I'm sure is the intention.
Youtube requires age verification for some content since many years.
Out of curiosity, who here is still browsing YT without verified age?
Who browses YT logged in with their google account and verified age?
Too bad we don't have pool here. I would really like to see what % of people complaining about age verification here verified their age in their google account.
I've never verified my age for any operating system or website. I use YouTube logged out with an ad blocker
well well here we go again old friend:
sudo pacman -Syu
Devil's advocate, is it really that bad for someone who is a parent to be able to easily zone of their Linux distro for their children? And yeah, I get there are a number of methods to do this like locking down accounts, but something like this would have the potential of automating whom the rules apply to.
No it's a prefectly reasonable stance, but having wrong opinion or even thinking the wrong way is disallowed.
That depends on the parent, doesn't it? A tool in the wrong hands does the devils work.
Devil's advocate, does a good parent need this? Honest conversation could automate who the rules apply to.
honest conversation will not supervise the kid while you are away, and we are not living in a fairy tale where kids just magically behave.
except if you can be a stay at home parent to do this manually.
I expect everyone to make mistakes. Is it better to encourage the child to talk about it rather than hide it when they outsmart a lazy child lock?
Does a good parent place restrictions on what their child can and can't do? Yes. The thing about bad parents is that they are notoriously irresponsible. They would be the least likely to utilize such a feature.
Using software one doesn't understand to protect their child looks like a peak of irresponsibility to me.
UnderstandingUsing any software totryingrestrict a child seems a sub-optimal way to teach children the computer skills needed to circumvent it.and promotesIt encourages them to hide their mistakes from you?I'm sorry, I cannot understand your comment.