Technology

"You shouldn't have to choose between open and secure." The implementation backs that up. The friction is one-time for power users, but it's a genuine obstacle for scammers and it makes opportunistic spyware installation meaningfully harder.

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His argument: power users absorb a one-time inconvenience while vulnerable people (scam victims, children) get protected...
The pattern HN picked up immediately...

That's the true believer pattern. The argument is ideological, so persuasion is off the table. He read the laws, decided compliance was the correct response, and went to work. Every objection the community raised went nowhere: that this enables surveillance infrastructure, that lying is trivially easy, that the laws themselves are unconstitutional overreach. He'd already accepted the law as legitimate and moved to implementation...

He hit three separate projects in one week...
He agreed entirely, writing that the approach would be "completely ineffective at preventing anyone from lying about their age." He called it "hilariously pointless." Then he said Arch Linux should implement it anyway because the law requires it...

The open source community has always relied on the assumption that contributors act in good faith toward user freedom. Taylor probably believes he does. The laws say collect birth dates, so he collected birth dates, and in his framing that was being helpful.

The reason to name him is the pattern. The surveillance state runs on volunteers: people who do the implementation work for free, out of genuine conviction, with no paper trail connecting them to the money that wrote the laws...

Taylor already has the resume line and knows the codebase well enough to try again. The deadline pressure only grows, the laws are real, and someone will be next. The community needs to recognize the pattern before the PR opens, not after.

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