dusty.ninja

people on reddit are doing a whole lot of yapping about age verification in Linux

I would generally agree that the whole approach of these laws is total dogshit and clearly a wedge issue to enable stricter surveillance laws in the future

at the same time though, the actual implementation and potentially having a portal which exposes the users age bracket seems totally reasonable as a way to implement parental controls... I'm also not totally against holding service providers to higher standards for data processing when it comes to minors, and hey if they're doing that why shouldn't adults get the same treatment?

what im totally miffed about though is why the fuck would you get mad at systemd for adding a birthDate field to userdb, what would you have them do? Would you rather every desktop environment had its own way to store this data??

An XDG portal for this also means you can *trivially* write a stub that always identifies you as an adult or even lets you pick per-app (heck maybe per website! that might be the new cursed way of avoiding trackers under late stage capitalism)

and yeah it sure would be shit if we get real-id laws in a few years, but systemd or XDG standing on "principle" and refusing to implement this API is absolutely not going to lead to better outcomes for anyone. The last thing we want is for users in certain regions to wind up relying on implementations maintained by distros or random individuals, if we need to have this crap the least we could ask is that it's maintained by established and trusted people in the open source community!

Google has news on what you will need to do for still being able to sideload apps:

* enable developer options
* confirm that you are not tricked
* restart phone and re-authenticate
* wait one day
* confirm with biometrics that you know what you are doing
* decide if you only want unrestricted installs for 1 week or forever
* confirm that you accept the risks
* enjoy the few apps that still have developers motivated to develop for a user-base willing to put up with this

https://goo.gle/advance-flow

I might be the best baker of all time

Init scripts will no longer be of any concern to us. I have just received word that #systemd v260 is out. The last remnants of the old unix philosophy have been swept away - unit files now have direct control over their services

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/releases/tag/v260

RAM kits are now sold with one fake RAM stick alongside a real one to create a performance illusion — 1+1 'value pack' offers desperate psychological relief as the memory shortage worsens

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/fake-ram-bundled-with-real-ram-to-create-a-performance-illusion-for-amd-users-1-1-value-pack-offers-desperate-psychological-relief-as-the-memory-shortage-worsens

<- "FFS" seems inadequate TBH

Updated Debian 13: 13.4 released https://www.debian.org/News/2026/20260314 #debian #trixie #03

Updated Debian 13: 13.4 released https://www.debian.org/News/2026/20260314 #debian #trixie #03

Updated Debian 13: 13.4 released https://www.debian.org/News/2026/20260314 #debian #trixie #03

The MacBook Neo is such an interesting machine that it coaxed a thousand-word-essay out of me: https://samhenri.gold/blog/20260312-this-is-not-the-computer-for-you/

Gonna go to jail because I let Claude Code do my taxes.