The law wants your OS to know your age; mine answers null

There's a wave of laws — federal H.R. 8250 (not passed yet), Colorado SB26-051, California AB 1043, Brazil Lei 15.211 — that wants the operating system to verify your age and report it to applications. Not hypothetical: systemd already merged a birthDate field into its user records (March 2026), readable by any process that queries userdb.

The measures you can take, from least to most effort:

1. Pin the field to null with a static record in /etc/userdb/ — root-only, nothing can write it afterwards. That's what runs on this machine since March 22:

// /etc/userdb/milo.user
{ "userName": "milo", "uid": 1000, "birthDate": null }

2. Liberated systemd (AUR): a fork that reverts the field and tracks upstream for everything else.
3. Ageless Linux: the distro the community built out of this — Debian without a single package carrying age hooks or telemetry.
4. The structural exit: a system without systemd, where there's no userdb to store anything in. Artix refused to implement verification and is immune by construction — which is why I'm moving to runit.

The full breakdown — the GDID case that showed why this matters, every law, every PR, and why the pin works — lives in Notes: OS-level age verification.