Onno (VK6FLAB)

Anything and everything Amateur Radio and beyond. Heavily into Open Source and SDR, working on a multi band monitor and transmitter.

#geek #nerd #hamradio VK6FLAB #podcaster #australia #ITProfessional #voiceover #opentowork

  • 2 Posts
  • 275 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2024

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  • I’m sorry, but no.

    Age validation is surveillance under the guise of “protecting the children”, which it spectacularly fails at for more reasons than I can count.

    1. Everyone has to validate their age, which creates a whole infrastructure that require documents that “prove” your age.
    2. A verified “under age” user will be added to a database by unscrupulous players, creating a honeypot for predators.
    3. Age verification isn’t universal, isn’t uniform and regardless of the jurisdiction in which it’s implemented, won’t actually prevent content from being procured from sources outside that jurisdiction.
    4. One source of objectionable content is another’s entertainment, legally so, given that laws are made in isolation from each other across borders.
    5. The result of such legislation is the effective censorship of content that some lawmaker finds objectionable, which will cause more harm than good.
    6. Operating System level age verification on open source platforms will spectacularly fail since they’re published outside the jurisdiction.

    So … no.


  • I understand your point and agree that this is the thin end of the wedge.

    What we’re doing here is discussing the phenomenon and I’m highlighting some concerns.

    I believe that this is how you get a dialogue happening which will effect change, which is what we’re both advocating.

    I think that age verification is about surveillance rather than protecting children and I think it should be fought at every level.

    This is me contributing to that fight.


  • In my opinion, storing a date is pretty much irrelevant unless there’s a process that validates the supplied date, otherwise every Linux user was born on 1/1/1, if not, an administrator can “fix” that

    Furthermore, that systemd thinks that it’s the place to store such information is in my opinion beyond absurd.

    Who appointed that project the source of age truth in the Linux ecosystem? What discussion was there, who was consulted and where was the vote?




  • Why do you see this as USA only?

    Because the announcement doesn’t use UTC to announce the event and there’s absolutely no chance that anyone outside the US knows when some random timezone is, or if daylight savings is active in that timezone or not at the time of the event.

    The announcement also tells me that the organisation is run out of the USA, not a place universally known for its inclusivity or global consideration. Reinforced by a text only image with no alt text.

    I think a tech workers coalition is an interesting and potentially useful idea, but the announcement doesn’t even contain a URL to the organisation.

    Which leads to my conclusion, a USA only affair.

    I’d be delighted to be wrong, but that’s what the announcement conveyed to me.



  • This is the job for the OS.

    You can run most Linux systems with stupid amounts of swap and the only thing you’ll notice is that stuff starts slowing down.

    In my experience, only in extremely rare cases are you smarter than the OS, and in 25+ years of using Linux daily I’ve seen it exactly once, where oomkiller killed running mysqld processes, which would have been fine if the developer had used transactions. Suffice to say, they did not.

    I used a 1 minute cron job to reprioritize the process, problem “solved” … for a system that hadn’t been updated for 12 years but was still live while we documented what it was doing and what was required to upgrade it.







  • I suspect that there are other things going on there, speeds for this technology are generally fine, but you do need to figure out which sockets to use, since the best performance is when everything is on the same circuit.

    Disclaimer: I’ve used this, installed it a couple of times and troubleshooting aside, it’s worked for me.