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1. Embed this notice
   Erin 💽✨ (erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net)'s status on Monday, 23-Mar-2026 09:10:39 JST Erin 💽✨

   Everyone seemingly getting mad about systemd adding a completely optional date of birth field to user records that is, in reality, only ever going to be filled in on the machines of children administered by parents who want such restrictions enforced, perhaps on machines administered by schools, or by people who want their computer to wish them a happy birthday.

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 23-Mar-2026 09:10:37 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     @erincandescent "only ever going to be filled in on the machines of children administered by parents who want such restrictions enforced"

     You say this as if it's not a huge problem in itself. We should not be building or shipping tools for abusive parents to use to surveil or control their children.

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 23-Mar-2026 09:19:54 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     @erincandescent That doesn't justify being part to it and essentially forcing distros to ship an abuse-mechanism unless they actively patch it out (thereby having to make a highly charged political statement).

     Yes a determined parent with technological know-how can always find a way to put such malware onto their child's machine. We should not be making it an out-of-the-box feature of "Linux".

     Doughnut Lollipop 【記録係】:blobfoxgooglymlem: repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Erin 💽✨ (erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net)'s status on Monday, 23-Mar-2026 09:19:55 JST Erin 💽✨

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker

     @dalias abusive parents will surveil and control their children whatever you do. Honestly if some of these parents decide to leave things up to the government (which is on average midly conservative) instead of themselves (which is quite often incredibly conservative) it might even be a net win

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 23-Mar-2026 09:23:56 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@mgorny/116274748222570834

     @erincandescent Combined with other things, yes. See for example:

   • Embed this notice
     Erin 💽✨ (erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net)'s status on Monday, 23-Mar-2026 09:23:58 JST Erin 💽✨

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker

     @dalias A date of birth field in a user information record is an abuse mechanism?

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 23-Mar-2026 09:26:07 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     @erincandescent Right now, there is no standard place for a DOB field to be stored or for applications to know how to access that information or use it to enforce rules blocking access to information.

     By creating standard places to store it and standard APIs to access it, you setup the infrastructure needed for these abuses to be something available out-of-the-box rather than requiring a ton of custom hackery by the abuser to setup.

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 23-Mar-2026 09:26:52 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     @erincandescent The people pushing this stuff are not good-faith. They come from right wing technofash backgrounds, work for fascist-regime-aligned companies, and want the harms that will come from normalizing having to enter an age (and in the future, have it verified against an identity) everywhere to do something with a computer.

     We don't need to be giving them the benefit of the doubt or arguing that complying with them will possibly mitigate further harms from governments. Fascists do not suddenly back down from harming you when you comply. They learn they can step on you and they come back to do it worse the next time.

     Doughnut Lollipop 【記録係】:blobfoxgooglymlem: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 23-Mar-2026 09:48:20 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     @erincandescent None of the above.

     My position is not that there is nothing harmful on the internet, but that for both fundamental reasons and reasons of political capture by people who wish harm to any children who are not straight cis neurotypical, any attempt to gate access to information will both block critically important non-harmful things and fail to block the most harmful things.

     I could go into my views on how parents should deal with these truths, but I don't believe that "how else are we supposed to PrOtEcT tHe ChIlDrEn??????" is relevant.

     Protecting children is not on the table here.

     Doing harm to children and harm to people who need to be anonymous are what's on the table.

   • Embed this notice
     Erin 💽✨ (erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net)'s status on Monday, 23-Mar-2026 09:48:22 JST Erin 💽✨

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker

     @dalias i’m not sure what your actual argument is here.

     Is it

     • “We shouldn’t provide parental controls because instead of using them responsibly to give children access to developmentally appropriate things they’ll abuse them to restrict what they can see”, or
     • “We shouldn’t provide parental controls because instead it should be the responsibility of those same abusive parents to watch over what their children are doing”, or
     • “We shouldn’t provide a system level age restrictions API because the parent might provide an accurate age to the relatively trustworthy computer (which will inevitably result in them providing it to relatively untrustwothy apps instead)”, or
     • “There is absolutley nothing harmful to children available on the internet and we should just provide them 100% unrestricted unmonitored access without age gates of any kind”?
   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 23-Mar-2026 09:59:18 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • robryk

     @robryk @erincandescent No, the direction we've always had is that *nobody has control* except someone who's hovering over them.

     Government - pushed by industry, who wants to shed legal liability for the harms they are encouraging and amplifying on their platforms - is attempting to force us to participate in building a system of parental controls that's always there.

     On top of that being bad enough in itself, it's a requirement they could change into "governmental controls" whenever they like.

   • Embed this notice
     robryk (robryk@social.wuatek.is)'s status on Monday, 23-Mar-2026 09:59:20 JST robryk

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker
     @erincandescent @dalias
     
     Parental controls imply giving a parent control over what the child sees. This goes in the direction of taking that control away and giving it to the law and whoever runs the service a young fellow is interacting with.
   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 23-Mar-2026 10:06:38 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • robryk

     @erincandescent @robryk Seriously? You think this agenda just popped up worldwide all the sudden without someone funding it all? 🙄

     The receipts purporting to pin it on Facebook haven't been verified yet, but I thought it was widely understood that they're doing this to avoid blanket bans, hoping instead of herd underage users onto reduced-harm versions of their platforms while keeping all the maximal-harm stuff in place for adult users.

   • Embed this notice
     Erin 💽✨ (erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net)'s status on Monday, 23-Mar-2026 10:06:39 JST Erin 💽✨

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker
     • robryk

     @dalias @robryk Can you tell me which industry is pushing for social media bans for under (insert jurisdiction dependent age here)s? Because it surely can’t be the social media industry which stands only to lose users from this and I can’t see anyone else who is at all affected by this

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     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 23-Mar-2026 21:10:55 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • AstroBoat

     @loptimist @erincandescent How about neither.

   • Embed this notice
     AstroBoat (loptimist@piaille.fr)'s status on Monday, 23-Mar-2026 21:10:56 JST AstroBoat

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker

     @dalias @erincandescent It should be the other way around: softwares should indicates the age limit for a content, and the system controlled by parents should decide whether the application can be run or the content can be viewed by children.