RE: https://hostux.social/@rfc1036/116279298917087751

Ignoring the "fascist" angle for a second (I saw no proof in the blog post of this being 'orchestrated', be that by fascists or anyone else).

I think both things can be true at the same time – governments around the world are fast-tracking laws to verify the identity of Internet users online under the guise of "protecting children", with suspicious level of speed and coordination.

But also, systemd adding an optional 'date of birth' field is not the same as "systemd introducing age verification".

Is it possible that this field will be used in the future to require users to verify their age? Yes, just like the existing 'Location' field may be used in the future to require the user to verify their home address, and the realName field may be used to require the user to specify their full legal name.

That being said, we can't ignore the timing and the explicit justification for the PRs as stated by the author. Quote: "Stores the user's birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws..."

And yes, there are already Medium posts making the rounds that paint the author to be some kind of a sleeper agent who "came out of nowhere" and got his PRs approved by "Microsoft employees".

Being a fan of Hanlon's razor, I think the author simply seized the opportunity, and decided to do a bunch of drive-by PRs to big Linux-adjacent projects, in order to be able to put "systemd contributor" on his CV.

Is this stupid and akin to using COVID shortages to scalp toilet paper? Yes. Is it a malicious plot by Microsoft to sneak age verification into Linux? Probably not, they don't care about Linux on the desktop enough, and if they did, they wouldn't need to be subtle or design elaborate plots to propose adding age verification to it.

There's also a very obvious reason why you see so many posts/articles/toots about it – and yes, a lot of them include misrepresented/wrong information, fear mongering and clickbait titles.

Everybody is already on edge because of the 'age verification' stuff that's taking place all around the world. And like a lot of people, I also thought "well, if Windows/macOS asks for my ID, at least there's always Linux".

Seeing some big Linux-adjacent projects not only refusing to react to it with anything other than "absolutely not, go fuck yourself" but even accepting PRs and discussing how best to comply with those laws really breaks my heart.

And even if the aforementioned PRs do not 'verify' anything, the communication from systemd developers has been lackluster.

From the politics standpoint, even if I did think that a 'birthDate' field was useful, I would either have asked the author to reword his PR (because it has nothing to do with the "age verification laws" and wording it this way would obviously create a huge shitstorm online, which it did), or made a public announcement explaining the change and assuring the users that systemd will never try to 'verify' your age.

It's clear that AI assisted coding is dividing developers (welcome to the culture wars!). I've seen a few blog posts now that talk about how some people just "love the craft", "delight in making something just right, like knitting", etc, as opposed to people who just "want to make it work". As if that explains the divide.

How about this, some people resent the notion of being a babysitter to a stochastic token machine, hastening their own cognitive decline. Some people resent paying rent to a handful of US companies, all coming directly out of the TESCREAL human extinction cult, to be able to write software. Some people resent the "worse is better" steady decline of software quality over the past two decades, now supercharged. Some people resent that the hegemonic computing ecosystem is entirely shaped by the logic of venture capital. Some people hate that the digital commons is walled off and sold back to us. Oh and I guess some people also don't like the thought of making coding several orders of magnitude more energy intensive during a climate emergency.

But sure, no, it's really because we mourn the loss of our hobby.

[1/2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/10/uk-society-authors-logo-identify-books-written-by-humans-not-ai

https://gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-vs-community.html

*UK Society of Authors launches logo to identify books written by humans.* I support this specific campaign, because it is a campaign for honesty and against worthless Pretend Intelligence. It may help people reject PI slop. However, I continue to reject the selfishness of most of the same authors, when they demand

[2/2] the power to stop human readers from honestly and truthfully sharing copies of human-authored books with other humans.

End-to-End Encryption is good but metadata protection counts as much. Names, group descriptions and memberships, avatars, who talks to whom ...

Both #deltachat and #signal go to great length to protect all the metadata that WhatsApp grants itself gratuitously. #Matrix stores similar scales of metadata on their servers, even if you can choose which server stores it.

Everything is better than #Telegram which additionally stores message contents in all group chats/channels and most 1:1 chats.

We just released Krita 5.3 and 6.0!

https://krita.org/en/posts/2026/krita-5.3.0-released/

So, for anyone who cares, here's a long-form response, personally and from my POV as head of #Teckids, regarding the discussion around birth date in #systemd:

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2026-March/052087.html

OpenAI to Shut Down the Sora Video App

#Business #Digital #AI #OpenAI

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/openai-shutting-down-sora-ai-video-app-1236546187/

#OpenAI #Sora è morto.

(Attenzione al volume!)

The man who coined Metaverse now says Meta’s glasses are creepy https://www.theverge.com/tech/899797/metaverse-neal-stephenson-headsets-goggles-glasses-creepy-no-business-case

🇪🇺EU governments confident they can bully our representatives into surrendering and voting YES to indiscriminate #ChatControl.

🛑 Today at 3 PM (agenda vote) and tomorrow at 11 AM (final vote) we can kill #ChatControl!

📞 Call your MEPs NOW: https://fightchatcontrol.eu #NoMeansNo

🇮🇹I governi dell'UE pensano di poter bullizzare i nostri rappresentanti per farli capitolare e votare SÌ al #ChatControl.

🛑 Oggi alle 15:00 (ordine del giorno) e domani alle 11:00 possiamo uccidere il #ChatControl!

📞 Chiama ORA i tuoi eurodeputati: https://fightchatcontrol.eu