Technology

I just run my own internet now, completely restricted to my own hosted websites and services. With hookers and blackjack.

I think all this regulation will make the internet small again. The pendulum will swing away from this terrible direction we've gone in. I'm okay with it. Let them ruin it. I know that there will still be places to go.

every goddamn thing needs an update or a login or some feature was deleted or now this thing cant talk to that thing. it is unbelievably exhausting. i dream of becoming a hermit in the woods somewhere.

It seems bleak but there are millions of sites and many of them aren't going to add age checks.

Not gonna matter when apps and services start blocking Linux, or even worse, should this shit creep up the chain to the ISP level and should ISPs start requiring an Apple, Google, or MS OS just to get online to begin with.

Shit even when it does impact them directly they still do nothing but accept it, while whining about it.

buy refurbished if possible

Not sure that is going to be a solution either. Have you seen HDD prices lately?

In the end, corporate buyers are cornering the market for self-use technology. Once the consumer market is gone, and habits change, there may be no going back since a new subscription market will be built and self-perpetuating. So I hope the AI bubble pops before that happens.

https://www.projectnomad.us/

What I'm worried about is whether we'll be able to connect to anything else. With open source, sure you can remove age gates, but with device attestation coming to a device near you, you won't be he able to log into your favorite game or website.

Its already like that with CloudFlare randomly blocking my Firefox on Linux install occasionally.

only until device attestation does not exist on the web. google has already tried to make it a thing, and the public backlash only caused them to continue development in chrome on android

how to solve it the age without leaking data to third party servers?

Really easily. There are multiple possible options, not all equally easy, but the best option for privacy is also the easiest.

You don't do true age verification. You mandate that operating systems and browsers work out a parental controls API and require apps and websites support that API. Then you ask (if you really want, you could demand, but I'd prefer to ask or suggest) parents to ensure their kids' devices are configured correctly. When a user tries to access an age-restricted site, it calls an API in their browser, which calls an API in the OS, which returns a simple true/false value based on whether or not the current profile is configured to be old enough to access it.

Adults don't have to do anything to prove they are adults. Merely the fact that they were able to buy a device that they control and didn't get configured as a child is the proof.

More complicated solutions if you really insist on having true age verification could involve blinded signatures. I can explain in more detail if people are interested, but the slightly simplified TL;DR is that you have a system where the user goes to a trusted age verifier (my preference is for governments to do this themselves rather than farm it out to private companies, but either works). They do the age verification using ID, face recognition, whatever, and send the user a special token that they can use to prove they were age verified but which the site can't use to determine any personal details about the user. Meanwhile the age verifier doesn't know what site the age verification was just done for.

The problem is that the services are asking for age verification, but to do that, you need to supply them personal information, and the way the information is handled is opaque. You're handing highly sensitive information to a private company that, more often than not, cannot be trusted to handle that information responsibly for the singular purpose they're tasked with.

One solution would be an official government service which supplies this information and nothing else. We have "strong identification service" in Finland, they supply your identifying information to government services and businesses that need to have the actual information on record, while you see which information gets shared. There's no technical reason this service couldn't just supply "Is this person 18+? Yes/No" and absolutely nothing else, even anything tying this person to any identifier.

Actually, if age verification would become a legal requirement, I'd expect the technical side to be exactly that. I frankly can't believe the UK half-assed this stuff and went "whatever, let private providers use whatever voodoo they can come up with to make age verification happen".