How does the siduction team stand with respect to age verification in systemd?

n4ai9i522 · 2026/03/21, 18:30:26

I am talking about https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954

Never gave too much attention to the debate against systemd but something like this would seriously change my mind about keeping that running on my system, and I am concerned it will find its way into my favourite distro.

devil · 2026/03/22, 12:39:41

This is nothing initiated by systemd. Age verification in the USA is rapidly becoming mandatory across many states, particularly for accessing adult content, social media, and gaming, driven by laws designed to protect minors through the Digital Age Assurance Act. These laws often require digital ID checks, biometric scans, or third-party verification. Key methods include uploading government-issued IDs, AI-based face scanning, or checking credit databases.

There is (as yet) no comparable law in the EU that directly obliges operating systems such as Linux to carry out age verification. Instead, the European Commission is promoting a voluntary Age Verification Blueprint, based on the EU Digital Identity Wallet, the personal identity wallet. The pilot phase is underway in several countries, including France, Spain, Italy, Denmark and Greece. The basis for all this is the Digital Services Act (DSA), which has already become law and, among other things, obliges platforms to effectively protect minors and to use appropriate age verification measures. The differences between the two approaches in the US and in Europe lie primarily in where the age verification takes place and how much data is disclosed in the process.

If all these laws become actionable, everyone will have to comply with them. So systemd is just preparing for a foreseeable future.

DeepDayze · 2026/03/22, 19:27:43

There's some discussions I've seen in that Github thread that point to potential changes to the laws that exempt opensource operating systems from this sort of record keeping. Will see how that plays out in the end.

hendrikL · 2026/03/23, 09:05:53

Well, even distributions without systemd will have to introduce age verification sooner or later.

n4ai9i522 · 2026/03/24, 08:18:12

I appreciate the detailed explanation of the underlying principle and of the general outlook.
My question was on a philosophical standpoint, let me try rephrasing it.

Is it reasonable to expect that an open source project lay in place the needed framework to maybe, one day, interact with an arbitrary law that ignores the right for individuals (be them adult or underage, pc users or service managers, alike) to use their own systems as they see fit? Open source software is code, and there are plenty of ways to ship it even without the blessing of politicians.

I guess your counter-argument would be: "siduction is but a distribution for existing packages, and the actual development still receives mainly institutional sponsorship, so neither the upstream development team can make do without those sponsorships that would be lost if the code didn't abide by current laws, nor siduction team can maintain a complicated project that cherrypicks PRs from upstream and recompiiles everything downstream, so we will eventually see structural parts of the OS be updated with those versions, and will not be able to do anything about it if we want to stay on a sid-like schedule"

Am I correct?

hendrikL · 2026/03/27, 08:53:54

To be honest, we're a very small team and we don't agree with the current direction politics is taking.

Brazil, for example, imposes an incredibly high fine on a small project like ours if we don't implement age verification.
It is not possible for us to implement this now, so we have to introduce a disclaimer stating that downloading and using our ISO is not permitted in Brazil, due to the legal situation.

The Age Verification Law will soon come into force in many US states, and so on.
This is becoming a major problem for many small projects and individual software developers.

I am not a lawyer who is familiar with the upcoming laws, nor do I understand them down to the smallest detail.
Personally, I can only hope that this does not lead to the demise of many small free and open source projects, due to a lack of financial resources, infrastructure and manpower.
At the moment, I can only point to 'ageless linux' if one wishes to get rid of age verification in Debian-based and perhaps other systems.

Thas my two cents, so what shall we do?

(written with a little help from deepl translate)

n4ai9i522 · 2026/03/27, 13:55:01

Thank you for your reply, I was not aware not only of the fine, but also of the possibility of sticking the fine to you, like, what's Brazil (or even the US if it comes to that) going to do if you just ignore their laws if you're not within their jurisdiction?
Ok, silly question, as the answer is a big "you never know".
I would like to be able to suggest a solution, I understand you're but employing your own free time in an unpaid manner to maintain this very useful distribution, and you would at least expect to be left in peace, and instead you're not. This sucks big time.