big85

Are Verbatim's M-Disc Blu-Rays still really M-Disc? There was something about how they changed the recipe a few years ago, and the counter-argument was that Blu-Ray discs are non-organic anyway, which was the main feature of M-Disc DVD.

Major changes:

1. You must be 18 to use Dropbox. Previously, you had to be 13 if in the United States, or 16 if higher. Dropbox may use information "Dropbox may use and rely on information from third parties, including age signals from app stores, for the purpose of enforcing this restriction."

2. Your account may be terminated if you don't have a Paid account and haven't accessed for 6 months. Previously, it was 12 months.

3. If you have multiple accounts tied to the same email address, and one is banned, the others may also be banned.

4. "Refunds are only issued if required by law." -> "Refunds are only issued in limited circumstances or if required by law."

5. You automatically agree to the new terms if you continue to have an account. Previously, it was only if you continued to use the service.

6. Some terms covering Teams accounts.

There is just such a HTTP header, for adult sites. It's not granular enough to set individual age ratings, just to mark a page as 18+.

<https://www.rtalabel.org/page.php?content=howtofaq>

XKEYSCORE, the UK system brought in to allow warrantless surveillance for national security purposes and child abuse prevention, ended up being used for such minor offences as catching people dumping rubbish in other people's bin, or parents lying about their child's address to get into a better school district. In the United States, the same system was used for low-level offences like cannabis possession.

LumiWeather for AmigaOS runs on 2 MB RAM.

UK Parliament accepting submissions for evidence regarding the effect of the Online Safety Act (including its failures and detrimental effects, I should note). Deadline is 7 September 2026.

All this ostensibly to keep teenage boys from watching Pornhub (when parental controls already exist).

The real reason, of course, is to force people to connect strong real-life identifiers to online activity. Mobile first, then Windows. Then Linux is too weak to oppose on its own, and will adapt or die.

So much for the EU's mission to reduce e-waste.

This event is excellent advertisement for GrapheneOS and its privacy and security features.

The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Measure of a Man" discusses this topic. Data, an android, is put on trial to determine whether he has personhood, or is merely a machine. One of the best early-season episodes.

It's bizarre to see 8GB spoken of as barely sufficient for basic uses. I remember when the baseline was measured in megabytes.

If you don't fight government overreach now, it becomes permanent.

There's also Nectarine Demoscene Radio: https://www.scenestream.net/demovibes/

No, I want to know specifically.

The Wikipedia entry on Chat Control doesn't go into enough detail on what exactly it does, only the history of its legislative process. Can someone update it?

Parental controls. Client-side blocking of content. Apple's parental controls are so good that parents give young children unsupervised internet access--the entire generation if iPad babies. Current iPads even use on-device AI to detect nudity in photos and prevent them from being taken, sent, recieved, or viewed.

The existing paradigm is on-device parental controls. It's worked for the past 30 years, and the alternative is forcing everyone to show government ID to use websites.

I vaguely recall a story about an employee who discovered that their company's sales department was acquiring a lot of new customers to hit some metrics, but rarely actually closing the deal. The employee spent months chasing up incomplete sales orders, and discovered that the sales department's apparent success was illusory.

Most VPN companies won't implement age verification, because their purpose is privacy. This is really an attempt to ban VPNs. This won't be popular when 70% of the population uses VPNs.

UK government has been talking about digital ID for a while now. The existing verification methods are too vulnerable to cheating (fake beards, fake ID, borrow dad's credit card, etc...), so the logical next step is direct government ID numbers. The goal is to link all online activity to a unique identifier to make it easier to punish dissent.

> You don’t. You can’t. So everyone gets carded.

Exactly. A little at a time. First it's adult sites, because if you need to show ID to buy alcohol, shouldn't you need ID to buy pornography? Once that's accepted, expand the sphere of control to non-adult sites too by redefining everything as 16+.

I suspect something like this is on the way, in the long term. Every site has some Cloudflare captcha or the like to guard against the AI scraper bots. Eventually, we may need some kind of token which is only issued to real humans.

<meta name="RATING" content="RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA" />

I wonder why the rating code is so complex. Pornhub.com has this code enabled, but it also uses a simpler <meta name="rating" content="adult">. 4chan also uses the latter.

We have parental controls on devices. The change forced by the UK government is to give control to corporations, instead of the parents.

Parents are much better at knowing their own kid's age than corporations are. Teens keep fooling the age verification (pointing the camera at a video game character, using fake ID, even drawing beards on their face with a pen). But they aren't going to fool their own mother, and they don't need to trust ID verification startup with photographs of everbody's teenage kids to do it.

About 2 million adults in the UK don't have government-issued photo ID. Certainly many 16-17 year olds will have trouble verifying their age. They're blocking huge sectors of the UK population from being able to use the internet normally.

Indeed. I don't see why the verification process has to be done once per user per website, instead of once per user. That maximizes costs, inconvenience, privacy risks, and compliance failures.

This is bizarre, then, because the on-device Apple system just enables the existing parental controls by default, while the online verification systems are easily cirvumvented.

There's still the issue of how to verify the user to give them that 1 bit. The current tools do not trust the user or the user's device, because the user could lie or modify the software on their device. But once my ID leaves the device, it becomes a privacy issue. You also have the problem that every pre-2026 device no longer functions with any site that requires the 1 bit.

Then enable parental controls on your children's devices. But don't enable it on my device, because I'm an adult.

The actual goal, of course, is to create pretext to ban VPN services which don't ID their customers.