That actually makes a lot of sense, ha.

(Just in case you aren’t familiar with the Culture: yep, anyone or anything in it would be famtastic.)

Fuck, Id be okay with any random Culture citizen

Did they still not release the actual torrents though?

And why would they implement it in a somewhat private manner if it could be implemented in a privacy-infringing manner?

I honestly don’t think most democratic governments have an interest in making this privacy-infringing. Lobbyists/companies on the other hand… But all the more reason to write legislation that ensures age verification must be handled like this.

That already tells the government that I’m accessing porn because why else would I need to confirm I’m an adult online?

Cinema rickets for FSK18 movie? Ordering alcohol? Gambling? Renting a car?

Basically anything you’re only allowed to do as an adult.

But that’s kind of why I mentioned, it’s just one rough draft for such a protocol.

It should be Dot Dot! But it’s Dot Dot Dot! - sanest Bitchard moment

It’s mostly just that I don’t want the government to know precisely which websites I visit. Nor do I want the the porn sites to know exactly who I am.

I understand, I want that too. It’s easily possible though (just one example for a scheme):

• you visit porn site
• porn site sends your browser a random nonce
• you/browser tell government service: sign this if I’m >18
• government signs the nonce + a timstamp to prove freshness
• your browser forwards the result to the porn site
• porn site can verify signature per standard public certificate chains
• now porn site has proof that you are >18, but knows nothing else about you; and government only knows that you wanted proof that you are an adult, but not for what site or purpose you wanted to prove that

Alternatively, if we go the “device has an age bracket field browsers access” route, it’s even simpler, and just as if not more privacy preserving.

In that case: sorry to blow up on you. I have seen to many comments on here claiming these things while being 100% serious. I just saw your comment and incidentally had time to write the above for once, so, here we are.

I agree that there’s no way to completely cut teens off from porn. Your torrent example is perfectly demonstrating this.

But I also do not understand the current outrage at anything trying to improve the situation, even when it’s not some stupid “scan your face” scheme.

I’d also like to think so. In this case though, this was clearly not what was intended, and also involved a lot of porn.

So let me get this straight:

When I was 13, I managed to figure out the router password, disabled child protection for myself, then watched porn on my Android 2.3 phone that I had managed to put a custom ROM on because I liked the way it looked and had no idea what a “launcher” was yet.

This is not a hypothetical btw.

My parents were smart enough to enable appropriate blocking and secured access to those settings. I’m not sure something on-device was available at the time, but I included the bit about the custom rom to demonstrate that, even though I didn’t know WTF I was doing, I was more than capable of fucking around with the tech to get it to do what I wanted.

So were my parents in breach of their duties on child protection?

I don’t think they were. They actually did educate themselves (visiting a course / parent meetup to discuss and learn how to protect me from the Internet), and implemented everything they learned.

I was just a little shit and found a way around this.

And this is NOT an edgecase. Because guess what. It takes one kid in the friend group to figure out a way to circumvent parental controls, and then EVERYONE knows how to do it.

It simply does not fucking matter how well intentioned, knowledgeable, and present the parents are (mine were all of that).

Going “this would not be a problem if parents parented” is the LAZIEST fucking excuse, and I’m sick and tired of reading about it on here.

(Because I probably have to make it clear: I’m not advocating for photo/passport scanning, third party age verification,… and all that bullshit. What I think would be a FANTASTIC idea would be privacy-preserving age verification. There are two good ways to do this: 1) on a login attempt, prove that you are of age by presenting a fresh, signed token from a government service proving that you are over 18, and nothing else; site does not get any info, government does not know what you were trying to access; 2) a device-level age field. Proof here comes from the device itself, and can be 100% privacy preserving; just a “yep, is of age”. In this scenario… GUESS WHAT, PARENTS GET ENABLED TO PARENT “PROPERLY” BY PROVIDING THEM WITH A GOOD, SIMPLE, PRIVACY-PRESERVING TECHNICAL SOLUTION.)

Federated ForgeJo can’t come soon enough.

Spent 3 months in New Zealand on my own at 18. Had an absolutely fantastic time. Also came back home much more adult than when I left.

True… But I still would love to feel excited about the game again, and jump back into that “good” feeling. It’s a fun world!

Interesting discussion on this from yesterday on the NixOS forums:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/compliance-with-u-s-age-verification-laws/75791

I actually had a fantastic time with ESO in the early game, because everything was new and fun and magical.

1k+ hours in I started feeling like that.

Yeah the UX for setting it up was not great. Conversely though, the UX for using it has been fantastic so far. My biggest concern was that the clients would feel dated (on Android esp), but no, they’re surprisingly polished!

Oh no! And just when I finally got around to setting up an XMPP server, too!

Yep.

Grew up with a steadfast pacifist / non-violent mindset. “Use words, not weapons”, “if you resort to violence, you’ve already lost”,…

The past 10 years have, well, awoken me, if you will. There’s an entire class of people that needs to be tabula-rasa-ed for the benfit, no, for the survival of the remaining 99%.

There literally is no other way.

Your last point resonates with me deeply.

It’s also one of the main drivers for my frustration with / rage against the unfair economic system we live in. Working 10-20hrs/week should be the goal, so we can have most of our days to ourselves doing the things we love.

So do they

Here’s the email I got from them:

Dear xxx,

This mail is to inform you about an unfortunate, but necessary price change that we must make.

There have been drastic price increases in various areas in the IT branch recently. That is why, unfortunately, we must also increase the prices of our products.

The costs to operate our infrastructure and to buy new hardware have both increased dramatically. Therefore, our price adjustment will affect both your existing products and new orders.

The underlying causes of the increased costs are, among others, the exploding demand for AI-related computing power and for cloud services. In addition, raw material prices and production costs have also generally risen for manufacturers. The costs for RAM and SSDs especially have risen by a large amount. For example, the cost for DRAM memory has increased up to 500% since September 2025. And according to market researchers like TrendForce, this price trend will continue throughout the year.

We have genuinely tried hard to optimize our costs and to prevent increasing our prices for as long as possible. But we can no longer compensate for the strain that it has placed on our operations. We want to continue to deliver quality products that meet both our standards and your expectations, so we must take this step.

The price changes will take effect on 1 April 2026 for both new orders and existing products. For orders placed before 1 April 2026, but delivered after 1 April 2026, the adjusted prices will apply.

The following existing products, listed under the customer number specified in the subject line, are affected by the price increase as follows.

Product previous price New price as of 1 April 2026 Server Auction € 43.56 € 44.87 all prices incl. 21% vat

We know that price changes are always a challenge for everyone. However, we believe that our products’ prices and conditions still have a competitive price-to-performance ratio.

We have prepared a list of all new prices for you on Hetzner Docs at https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availability/price-adjustment. Starting on 1 April 2026, the new prices will also be on our website.

If you do not wish to continue your contract, you can cancel the products within the regular cancellation periods via your administration interface.

We hope that you will be able to understand and accept our decision, and that we are sorry that we have to change our prices.

If you have any questions, we will be happy to help. Please log onto your account and go to “Support” in the menu and create a support request.

Kind regards,

Hetzner Online