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Ageless Linux and systemd-censord
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Jamie Zawinski ☛ Ageless Linux
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Jamie Zawinski ☛ systemd-censord
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Debian ☛ On the need for a censorship API for legal compliance reasons in some countries and U.S. states
Systemd units will be created for every desired censorship function, and will be started based on the user’s location. For example, a unit for Kazakhstan will implement the government-required backdoor, a unit for China will implement keyword scans and web access blocks (more on this later), a unit for Florida will ban all packages with “trans” in the name (201 packages in current stable distribution), a unit for Oklahoma will ensure all educational software is compliant with the Christian Holy Bible, a unit for the entire United States will prevent installation of any program capable of decoding DVD or BluRay media, and a unit for California will provide the user’s age to all applications and all web sites from which applications may be downloaded. As can be seen, multiple units may be started for a given location.
All communication will be over D-Bus, with each application proactively asking systemd-censord for permission to perform any operations which may foreseeably be restricted anywhere in the world. A standardized list of permissions will need to be developed, as well as standard personal data fields, such as user age. Blobs for the storage of media player keys and digital rights management content could also be added as additional functionality.
It's FOSS:
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Someone Forked Systemd to Strip Out Its Age Verification Support
systemd is the init system and service manager that most major Linux distributions ship with by default. It boots the system, manages services, and has taken on more responsibilities over the years than a lot of people think it should. For some, running a distro that avoids it entirely is a feature.
The project's latest move has not helped its reputation among the skeptics. Last week, developers merged a pull request adding a birthDate field to its user records, tied to age verification laws in California, Colorado, and Brazil.
Earlier, we covered what that actually means, but to recap, the field is optional, can only be set by an administrator, and systemd itself does nothing with the data. It is simply a standardized field in the user record file that other projects like xdg-desktop-portal can build age verification compliance on top of—distros that do not need it can ignore it entirely.