I've been looking since March 2024. Having no reasonable options in sight, have reopened https://informationr.us/

I expect a lot of comments on this article to be varieties of "this is terrible"... but it's really not, and I happen to have significant knowledge here. There is a big caveat, though, which I'll explain below.

First, the basic thing that makes strong, reliable age verification possible in the EU is national ID cards. In every EU country, as far as I know, you can get a national ID card basically from birth. A few issue at birth by default, but even those that don't allow parents to apply for cards for their kids at basically any age, and it's not uncommon.

I get the widespread American resistance to a national ID card, but I really think it's misplaced. There are risks, yes, but on balance the benefits are far larger.

Second, when the EU says you can verify your age without revealing your identity, they seriously mean it. I worked on the ISO 18013-5 mobile driving license standard, and its protocol is the basis for the age verification scheme (18013-5 also supports privacy-preserving age verification). The protocol enables cryptographically-secure privacy-preserving age verification, providing, essentially, a single cryptographically-verifiable bit answering the question "Is this person over age X", for specific legally-important ages. A great deal of effort goes into ensuring that the keys used to sign the bit cannot be linked to the identity of the person. One important element of that is the signing keys are single-use, so if your prove your age to two different web sites, they can't compare notes and notice that your proof of age used the same signing key, thereby proving that whoever you are, you visited both.

Note that under the 18013-5 design, if the verifier (e.g. the web site receiving proof of age) could collaborate with the issuer (the government), they could deanonoymize the holder (the person proving their age). Work is ongoing to devise protocols using group signatures or other cryptographic constructs that make verifier/issuer collusion fruitless. It's been a couple of years since I worked in this space, so I don't know if those new approaches have gone into production, but if they haven't, they will.

The big caveat I mentioned at the top is that there is no way for these systems to verify that the person who is providing age verification is the legitimate holder of the national ID upon which it's based. That is, a kid can steal their dad's ID and use it. Because the age verification is truly, strongly anonymous, there is no way for anyone to detect or prevent this... yet.

The "yet" is because people are working on incorporating privacy-preserving biometric authentication into the scheme. This is a little tricky because to provide privacy it's critical that the biometric acquisition and matching happen entirely in the user's device (or in the chip in the national ID card). But it can be done. Making it sufficiently secure, sufficiently reliable and sufficiently cheap is a significant engineering challenge, but it's being worked on. In another decade or so, the caveat may be removed.

If all of this seems silly to you... well, the age verification for porn may be, but the privacy-preserving selective proof technologies are general-purpose, and able to answer any age verification question any many other useful questions in a strongly privacy-preserving way. In any case where you need to prove something about yourself (age, city of residence, driving privileges, etc.) right now you need to provide the complete contents of your ID, which reveals far more about you than is necessary. The combination of cryptography, secure hardware and clever protocols used in this age verification can fix that, generally, enabling us to identify, authenticate or prove things about ourselves with only the minimal information absolutely necessary. It's a good thing.

And, honestly, it's a good idea to keep very young children away from porn.

This was a default judgement as no one was present to defend Anna's Archive. As such, since no one objected, the remedy is the one proposed by the plaintiffs. This is how the legal system works, there is nothing unusual going on here.

The "worldwide injunction" is, however, an issue the judge should have stepped in on. The USSC ruled on the subject last year that universal injunctions are beyond the power of a district court to grant.

Based on my experiences as a teenager, I would say that "typing and mousing" did indeed affect my reproductive success... but not in a positive manner.

Used routers that can run FOSS router software abound because factory firmware updates ended though many are amply fast for their real use case. I just flashed my old 6700v3 with FreshTomato which is simple to do. I'd upgraded but kept the 6700v3 as a ready backup. (I don't believe in being one-deep on comm gear including computers.)

Of course any PC with two or more NICs can route and there are plenty available. "Home lab" enthusiasts make all sorts of interesting appliances from tiny PCs with ethernet and wireless with space to add a second single or multiport network card.

Routers are computers after all.

Absolutely not. The charge/discharge round trip losses will be a few percent, maybe 10% if the batteries are in bad shape. The price difference between peak and off-peak is often 5-10X. Commercial users also get hit with demand surcharges based on the peak draw during the month and those can really make a huge difference. Using batteries to smooth out those peaks can be a bigger savings even than avoiding draw during peak times.

Even for residential use, the savings can be significant. I have batteries and I'm on a time-of-use plan that charges me 5X as much during peak hours (6-10PM) as the rest of the day. I make sure the system is set up so that I never draw any power during peak.

You can discuss the post, but just calling it heavy lifting isn't really discussion.

Incredibly unlikely. If the claimed violations are legitimate, and webXray reported them to the state plus the attempt to lean on them, Google would get slammed, hard, both legally and in the press. No way in hell Google would risk that.

Never put off till tomorrow the poor decisions you can make today.

Also, I've never heard of Cal.com. I suspect nothing of value is being lost here.

It's possible they're buying allocated frequency bands.

They're strongly incentivized to do this without whatever force you think is necessary. Also, it's not the case that low orbit is the solve-all you appear to believe. When collisions occur, shrapnel distributes in all directions, some of which are longer, higher orbits.

It's a pleasant change from the COVID excuse.

In this job search, Linked In and Dice- but MOST of my LinkedIn devolves down into one of the above quickly. The number of scammers on Linked In is truly awesome.

No one can make session tracking with form variables or URL arguments as reliable as it is with cookies.

You should really take a look on the Internet before making these kind of posts. People have been making decently-accurate 9mm barrels at home for about ten years now, and it's clearly fairly popular because if you look up one of the required tools on Amazon the site recommends some of the others that are needed.

I haven't really been following this for a couple of years so I don't know whether anyone has progressed past rimfire barrels for rifles, but anyone can make pistol and shotgun barrels by spending $150 on Amazon and following simple instructions online.

Again, Burmese rebels have been using these guns in combat with the military, at least until they can steal a real gun from a dead soldier. They work and they're easy to build even in a dictatorship like Burma.