A single pull request turned a quiet open source contributor into the unlikely target of one of the Linux community's most heated controversies. We interacted with Dylan Taylor to hear his side of the story.

I draw the line at when a third party internet-connected service is doing validation of ID. Let’s be honest though, I strongly believe such a thing isn’t possible on a FOSS operating system environment unless they could control what was bootable on the device at a firmware level, enforce signatures to ensure that you couldn’t boot something unrestricted, remove the ability to be root, and block LD_PRELOAD so signals couldn’t be faked. There’s probably more ways to circumvent that.

What I’m trying to say is real ID verification on Linux would be awfully hard to implement, and I guarantee you, nobody would put up with it. They’d fork to a version that doesn’t have it immediately as a protest. Right now, we’re considering implementing something akin to the date pickers that were ubiquitous when signing up for internet services in the early 2000s where it’s just an honor system.

  • ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zipEnglish
    61·
    1 day ago

    Parents could actually parent, instead of relying on the government to nanny your children.

    We don’t need this at all. The filter should be local. The content flag should be the thing broadcast. Flipping it is insanely idiotic.

    In fact broadcasting to every website that a minor is viewing is the worst thing you can do to protect them.

    • bluGill@fedia.io
      2·
      1 day ago

      Only if every parent is willing to be a “helicopter” parent who won’t let their kids out of their sight ever. If you want to give your kids some independence but you don’t want them to be able to run completely out of control you society to have guard rails so kids can do things out of your sight without getting into too big of trouble.

      • ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zipEnglish
        2·
        6 hours ago

        False.

        Web Content filtering has existed in some form for decades. This method they’re proposing isn’t going to be any more successful at it than what’s already out there-especially since kids are the excuse not the goal.

        • bluGill@fedia.io
          1·
          6 hours ago

          It is easy to bypass that filtering. Even on locked down devices. Every site that the filter misses spreads like wildfire at school (until they block that one).

          I fully agree with the rest. They are using parents’ cancerns to force bad ieeas.