The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification into Linux (opens in new tab)

Ugly drama filled rant post full of childish name calling. We get it, age verification is corporate sabotage. Playground name calling doesn't fix the problem.

I'm probably missing something, but I don't think this is as bad or as useless as the article implies. E.g. as a parent I can set up my kids PCs with their age so stuff like app stores know to only serve them age appropriate things to download. It's the minimum to comply with the laws. It doesn't stop anyone owns a machine, but it does provide a useful option to set if you want it.

Malicious compliance of having the OS accept an arbitrary date and report that for verification purposes seems good to me.

I'm not a huge fan of this website, I also saw the "Microsoft's "Fix" for Windows 11: Flowers After the Beating" article on the homepage today and I think I saw the original (or was this one updated?) article about age verification in Linux from the same source.

The visualizations are (must be) LLM-generated which really just feels like slop. This and the Windows 11 article seem to be more filling in meandering text around the useless interactive/moving graphics then actually conveying information.

It seems like it's literally just a blog-spam site.

Why didn't systemd reject these changes? Was there an internal debate that the article doesn't cover, or is it the arbitrary decision of other "volunteers"?

One minor off-topic comment, I like the quiz at the bottom of the article. It could be neat to have sites implement something like this to discourage people from commenting without reading and absorbing some of what they've read. It seems it would be fairly straightforward to implement with an LLM summary/questions.

Unix and OSS used to be the rebellion. What happened