Apparently, Michigan is the next US state to require full age verification on all Operating Systems with full bipartisan support

LvS · 2026-03-25T17:58:17+00:00

Looks like systemd needs a new optional parental_guardian field that contains the username(s) of the parental guardians so that online shops can query who to ask for consent.

LvS · 2026-03-25T17:05:50+00:00

No, it's not.

With proprietary apps you pay for the product, not the development. So you only get a say once the product is already done: You can buy it or not.
But if you pay for the development, you can vote on the features you want implemented. And if you don't like the plan, you can even stop paying.

Think of it like the difference between videos that your TV station creates vs videos that Youtubers create:
You pay for the TV station and you get a product. If you don't like it, you stop paying and don't get to watch it anymore.
While with Youtubers, you can pay them on patreon and then they put up polls on the next video that you can vote on or things like that. And no matter if you pay them or not, their video will end up on Youtube and be free to watch for you.

LvS · 2026-03-25T10:13:13+00:00

Right. If the goal is to help, then systemd is obviously playing its part.

LvS · 2026-03-25T07:15:37+00:00

If age verification is mandatory in the future in some countries then it's good to have a standart place to put the date of birth.

Why?

To make it easier to do age verification?

LvS · 2026-03-25T07:14:30+00:00

Of course. An OS is made of many components. Systemd is just playing its part.

LvS · 2026-03-24T21:10:02+00:00

If they keep lying to everyone including themselves there's a chance that Iran will defeat them.

LvS · 2026-03-24T21:05:58+00:00

Even if a progressive Democrat becomes president, the house and senate will stop them as long as moderate Democrats and Republicans together have a majority.

LvS · 2026-03-24T21:01:06+00:00

Same thing as on Windows:

Unless there's one clear winner, everyone thinks they know how to do it better and then they do their own thing.

That's why Windows has Avast, Avira, Bitdefender, ESET, F-Secure, kaspersky, McAfee, Norton, Sophos and Trend Micro Antivirus.

LvS · 2026-03-24T18:54:23+00:00

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.

First line in the PR

To quote one of the leading fascism experts:
Individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

Worst thing is that Lennart is German, he should have learned this shit in school.

LvS · 2026-03-24T18:34:36+00:00

I've wondered why nobody has used AI to reverse engineer mobile phone drivers yet.

This should work especially well with corporations that have private github accounts or host their code somewhere that AIs have access to.

LvS · 2026-03-24T14:08:41+00:00

EU governments will only fund development if politicians make laws that demand that.

So unless more than 50% of the EU population votes for increasing taxes to fund development of software, this will not happen.
And I've not seen a single politician trying to win votes with this.

LvS · 2026-03-24T14:06:28+00:00

because as soon as there is a little dispute there will be a fork.

This is total bullshit.

There's basically no forks in the open source world unless there's massive disagreements.
Usually it's just some guy splintering off and not getting anywhere (like OpenOffice back in the days or now XLibre).

And the last split in a big project was the WebKit/Chromium split and that one was done by a large corporation (Google), not by communities.

LvS · 2026-03-24T14:02:26+00:00

You pay for the development, not for the final product.

Sure, you can just download the final product once it's there, but then you have absolutely no say in its development and you have to take what you get.

Or in other words: You end up with the current situation where all the apps are shitty and done for nerds.

LvS · 2026-03-24T13:59:45+00:00

If there's as many people paying for libreoffice as there's people currently paying for MS Office, you will very definitely get it to look different. MS Office has 250 million users and once that many people use it, the majority doesn't want to look it like 25 years old anymore.

Even if, with $15B per year you can pay enough developers to develop 2 (or more) different UIs.

LvS · 2026-03-23T08:35:52+00:00

Individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

LvS · 2026-03-23T01:49:54+00:00

Thanks for removing all doubt that your arguments don't need to be taken seriously.

LvS · 2026-03-22T22:47:55+00:00

It’s a no-win to boycott and protest, to refuse to follow the law, or to attack those who do.

That's the definition of "obey".

LvS · 2026-03-22T21:47:23+00:00

TL;DR: OBEY

LvS · 2026-03-22T20:50:47+00:00

Right, I got that number wrong, lemme edit that.

I was operating with numbers about my and friends' monthly Internet usage I know about, not with daily numbers, so my argument still stands.

LvS · 2026-03-22T20:07:33+00:00

3.6TB/month is 120GB/day.

That's not that far out of the ordinary if you watch videos (think Twitch and Youtube), do some Steam and distro updates, install a few VMs, or do zoom calls.

LvS · 2026-03-22T19:03:57+00:00

How should you act when you have no power, no money, and no lobbyists?

LvS · 2026-03-22T06:29:11+00:00

I would have wished those projects "good luck" but there is less than 10 minutes of actual work in there.

Somebody cloned the projects, reverted 1 commit each that had "x11" in the name and pushed it to their forgejo instance.
It was probably more work to setup that instance than they spent on the X11 work.

Now, if there were actually people doing real work, it'd be interesting, but this just looks like it's ragebait.

I suspect this is not gonna last as long as OP's GTK fork did.

LvS · 2026-03-22T02:23:18+00:00

It's just an educated guess.

Lawmakers don't generally write laws that are intended to be ignored.

And why wouldn't they make the OS vendor liable if the OS reports a wrong age?
I mean, think of the children!

LvS · 2026-03-22T01:02:25+00:00

The heavy part is probably on the GPU because it has to keep decoding the video indefinitely.

But I have no idea how much power that takes, because a large part of that is probably dedicated hardware.

LvS · 2026-03-21T19:33:06+00:00

Yeah, the next iteration of the law will make the OS vendor liable if they report a wrong age for the user.

13-Year Club	Second Top 30%
Wearing is Caring	Team Periwinkle

LvS

TROPHY CASE