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It sounds easy - "just verify people's age before they access the service" - but whether we're talking about porn in the US or Australia's incoming social media laws, the reality is way more complex than that. There's no unified approach across jurisdictions and even within a single country like Australia, the closest we've got to that is a government scheme usually intended for accessing public services. And even if there was a technically workable model, who wants to get either the gov or some big tech firm involved in their use of Instagram or Pornhub?! There's a social acceptance to be considered and not only that, circumvention of age controls is very easy when you can simply VPN into another jurisdiction and access the same website blocked in your locale. Or in the case of the adult material, I'm told (🤷‍♂️) there are many other legally operating websites in other parts of the world that are less inclined to block individuals in specific states from foreign countries. There'll be no easy solutions for this one, but it'll make for an entertaining year 😊

References

1. Sponsored by: Report URI: Guarding you from rogue JavaScript! Don’t get pwned; get real-time alerts & prevent breaches #SecureYourSite
2. My trusty Synology DS1512+ finally died after 12 years of faithful service (since recording this video, the new DS923+ arrived and migration was super smooth)
3. Pornhub addressed the age verification mandate from a bunch of US states by simply... blocking them (I wonder if there's a way around that...)
4. Proton VPN has seen a "massive surge" in VPN signups from the US (...there we go 🙂)
5. The EFF reckons there is no effective age verification method (they also downplay the negative impacts of social media on kids, which I disagree with)
6. The Glamira data breach made it into HIBP (link through to a Reddit thread where the company acknowledged the breach last year, no word on whether they disclosed to impacted individuals)