The systemd change ‘just’ adds a birthday field to the user data, where you could store (or don’t) the users birthday, that then could be used by other applications to request an age bracket.

The Arch-change doesn’t effect real arch Linux. It modifies the archinstall script (so, irrelevant, if you install according to Wiki) to ask the user for their birthday during installation and stores it for systemd.

Unknowingly?

Ingress was quite transparent about the goal of gathering real-world data to allows development of future technologies like self-driving and navigation.

It’s the reason, why I started playing it around 2012.

OK, yes, that obviously makes sense, considering the amount of these Charakters.

I know about it, but didn’t recognize the code. So I assumed, they encoded some text to make it harder to read. So I tried decoding it.

Turns out, if you decode this in UTF-16, it turns into a japanese sentence

契ȑ璝寣䇘앖噣삈

Which means (according to DeepL)

The sound of the wind rustling through the trees

And now I’m confused, why.