Looking into systemd complying in advance with fascism ("age verification"), I was curious who is employing Lennart Poettering these days. Turns out he and some other systemd developers recently made a startup...
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@be I guess you saw the Claude thing
Startups are bad, mmkay. Kids, don't do startups.
In case you missed systemd complying in advance with fascism... https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954
Hackers in the 1990s:
We will write code so powerful that no government will be able to stop it! They can't outlaw code if it's printed in a book!
Hackers in 2026:
Some fascists in some parts of the world are making moves towards maybe threatening us, though nobody knows how their laws are supposed to work, anyway let's bend over backwards to comply in advance and lock threads so we don't have to be held accountable for our cowardice.
Kudos to System76 for seemingly being the only responsible ones trying to change the laws instead of complying in advance.
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2026-March/014797.html
Ageless Linux is actively resisting and tracking these laws, the companies lobbying for them, and how distros are responding:
https://agelesslinux.org
I am skeptical of Ageless Linux's argument that the motivation behind these laws is to make it impossible/expensive for FOSS operating systems to comply. I think the real motivation is to get ahead of the discourse about how Big Tech harms children. They want to claim that they're doing their part to protect children. That would be a great smokescreen to distract from efforts for regulations to make them change their tech to make it not harmful to anyone, regardless of age.
