What’s more annoying: half-baked AI slop open-source patches or April Fools’ Day with programmers trying to have some fun? This year, April 1 is seeming more patches than usual.
Besides the Linux patches to allow IPv6-only builds and to allow deprecating “legacy” IPv4 that does carry some elements of actual intent for better separating IPv4 and IPv6 in the kernel, there are also other April 1 patches this year on the Linux kernel mailing list.
There is a patch floated to block any “emacs” binary from executing. If the filename matches “emacs”, it will return a new “EMACS” error for those that aren’t fans of GNU Emacs.
Meanwhile given all the ongoing concerns around US states pursuing user age verification/attestation at the OS level and the impact on open-source software, veteran Linux developer Christian Brauner posted a VFS kernel patch for his take on the situation. With the patch he posted today, new files would not be created on the file-system unless there is a prctl(PR_SET_BIRTHDATE) set with the user’s birth date. Without a birth date or at least not being 18 years old, the VFS layer would not allow new files to be created.
That patch is here for those curious.
