UK Age verification.

Alain De Vos

Alain De Vos

The intend was good , protect children.
However it was never made to include everyone, certainly not 5% Linux or FreeBSD users. So it is not inclusive, more it is explicitly exclusive.
A certain user base is excluded...
And for tech companies making money out of "profile generation" of users, that is to log your internet behaviour, build a profile on this, the opensource users are not interesting... So now there is age verification but NO PRIVACY. Great job UK lawmakers. And some more paperwork to it. It will be better :)
 
It still needs a conspiracy. I expect all of the US, UK and EU internet providers will suddenly launch a networking standard that involves an isolated ID channel which will be the enforcement. No ID, no connection.
Pretty much 1 giant firmware update for all consumer phones and modems...
 
This is going on in the US as well. I wrote my state senator (calmly, nothing about you stupid idiot, etc) and got back a generic reply how they're protecting children but protecting privacy too. It's sad, but people are so incredibly stupid that they get away with it. We (and not just the US) have the government we deserve.
 
Scrotto something totally unrelated sorry if i do.
When as a European i buy an amazon. Amazon US ok, billed. Deduced from VISA, No checks , except password login.

Here in Europe Amazon , a QR code its shown, you must scan this with your GSM, & bank application. Check is very rigorous. This is nice.

On Age verification, different Countries in Europe might have different directions. Note, UK does does not belong to "European Union".
Will have a look how , to see it here in Belgium now.
Funny thing, some States in US are the biggest producers of "Adult content", and when i look , when wife does not see (very very booring content).
& then California tells yeah we go this direction now. We are more HOLY then the POPE in Rome.
 
Note , i will not say we are "best", worst in many places.

Belgium (EU): Follows "Privacy by Design." Any age check must prove you are old enough without revealing exactly who you are. The goal is to verify an attribute (age), not an identity.

The Belgian Data Protection Authority (GBA/APD) strictly forbids platforms from collecting extra data under the guise of an age check

There is "Government application", which uses in background "Anonymous digital tokens".
https://belgianmobileid.github.io/doc/authentication/
 
I hope the future sees a massive return to telnet/SSH BBSes. (and dare I say dial-up for those who want to use it, though people may be forced to depending on how invasive the ID system may become)

Use a program like SyncTerm to connect and you're good to go! (YouTube has a bunch of videos about it)

When they eventually enable technology where you can be scanned like a bag of peas for ID, it's game over. The only choice is an alternative to the net. The introduction of cell phones ruined the web.

Load up on ancient 70ies/80ies computers now, which don't have the level of snooping current and future computers will likely have.

“Go back to bed, America. Your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control again. Here. Here's American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. Go back to bed, America. Here is American Gladiators. Here is 56 channels of it! Watch these pituitary retards bang their fucking skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go, America! You are free to do what we tell you! You are free to do what we tell you!”
-- Bill Hicks

 
penguinslayer said:
Load up on ancient 70ies/80ies computers now, which don't have the level of snooping current and future computers will likely have.
Click to expand...

There are early amd64 CPUs/boards that do not have any sort of system management mode.
Having OS and browser built without extra instructions gives you a basically old school computer, but the one that can have GB's of RAM and load even JS-heavy sites (codecs are another issue).

I love BBSes and telnet and IRC and all the rest of 90s stuff but the main problem is, back then, text was main media, now, it is videos. Text occasionally goes with them, sometimes even as tags for computer parsing and not a human prose. Even audio is consumed through videos.

From here I can derive that chief issue is hosting and ownership of user generated content, now vs back then.
Back then, your content was a line of text, you could upload it to IRC server or telnet BBS so others can see it, the channel bots can log it, etc.
Nowadays we generate pictures and video and whatnot, and it brings all sorts of locality and hosting problems with it. The discord content does not have almost 0 cost as with IRC. Terabytes need to be stored somewhere and retrieved for all clients.

In my opinion it is not the protocol or the application but the user pattern.
We simply generate and deal with too much junk to be able to go back.
 
Well said, Zare. Perhaps some matured form of future hardware/networking alternatives have yet to unfold as option(s)/replacement(s).

I often lament on how people will share a 2 hour video instead of simple text and expect you to watch it all, then throw another 1 hour video at you later. TEXT WAS KING, damnit. :cool:

Edit: "They" dictate what type of routers we can have, they allow M$ to dictate to hardware manufactures standards and other bullshit, it's a mess. We need to get back to building in garages and networking in ways apart from the herd. They know alternatives to MacOS and Windows are becoming more popular and they want to stamp it out (ID bullshit).
 
penguinslayer said:
Load up on ancient 70ies/80ies computers now, which don't have the level of snooping current and future computers will likely have.
Click to expand...
I did this last week. I built an isolated DOS and NetWare5 network using just 1Ghz 686 thin clients that had 1GB or RAM and 1GB SSD. Neither DOS or NetWare could make use of the full spec of these machines but I loaded up my old copies of Borland C++ 3.1 and Paradox 3.5 and they both performed well. I will not keep this setup, it was just a bit of fun to try. I will however look at PXE booting FreeDOS from iSCSI backed by ZFS. I may end up adding another VLAN for a FreeBSD/ZFS/Samba4 network exclusively for my recently resurrected PXE booting DOS clients.

I haven't had a go at compiling one of the 'new' DOS browsers yet. By new, I mean the last surviving of their breed. I have found ODI drivers for Realtek NICs that can be used with an ODI to Packet driver shim. Internet access for HTTPS will likely have to be via a proxy that allows HTTP only from the DOS browsers.

Something else to explore is DOS or DOSBOX-X within Bhyve.
 
MG said:
It still needs a conspiracy. I expect all of the US, UK and EU internet providers will suddenly launch a networking standard that involves an isolated ID channel which will be the enforcement. No ID, no connection.
Pretty much 1 giant firmware update for all consumer phones and modems...
Click to expand...
We've already got it – the 'Max' messenger --
en.wikipedia.org

Max (app) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

It's pre-installed on all smartphones and tablets sold in Russia. Big Brother is watching you. So what? There's no escape from it.

Of course, you can delete it from your phone/tablet, but...it won't change anything...:rolleyes:
 
penguinslayer said:
The only one I remember trying many years ago was: Arachne. It had to have been in the late 90ies when I tested it.
Click to expand...
I had it running on a 386 with a 8-bit 3com network card. It's very stable but if you have 10 visitors at the same time it stacks up hours of processing jobs.
It probably works better with a IDE2USB disk interface instead of an original harddrive but that didn't exist yet..
 
I have in operation

- Olivetti XT PC (M19) with 7.16 MHz CPU, 640kB RAM, EMS and network card, with full TCP/IP connectivity
- A built PC based on Silverstone retro desktop case, with i440BX TriGem board, Pentium 2 running about 5 soundcards and multiple OSes, mostly a DOS gaming machine
- A built PC based on my late 2000s daily driver, Q6600, 8 GB ram, EMu 1212m, Windows 7, audio DAW stuff

We should open a thread to talk about assorted retro computer stuff :)
 
There is a great TCP stack for DOS called mTCP. It is not resident, but a library for client code. And it brings a lot of client apps, not only small tools but full irc client and ftp daemon - the latter is absolutely awesome to move data in and out of very old PCs over the network.

Here is a 3rd party browser that uses it - https://github.com/jhhoward/MicroWeb

Arachne has a lot of stuff built in like email client it is not just a web browser. I think it is cool for machines such as 2 MB 386s. With 4 MB you can comfortably run protected mode Windows 3.11 with tcp32 and a early windows GUI browser
 
Zare said:
Arachne has a lot of stuff built in like email client it is not just a web browser. I think it is cool for machines such as 2 MB 386s. With 4 MB you can comfortably run protected mode Windows 3.11 with tcp32 and a early windows GUI browser
Click to expand...
I know who to approach should I ever dabble in DOS again. :) I was more into Apple // and a bunch of other systems back in the day... some were very primitive.

Sounds like Arachne has matured a lot since I tested it so many years ago!
 
MicroWeb is another DOS browser but it has a maximum display of 640x480 VGA.

I found these 1280x1024 Borland BGI compatible drivers for C++ so there is potential for a DOS browser to run higher resolution displays.

But then there is multitasking, 386 protected mode, DOS extender, JavaScript, CSS and rendering compatibility. Being an operating system that has no concept of user accounts is the only reason why DOS would be worthwhile for browsing compared to a frozen in time FreeBSD 15.0 system. FreeBSD could be upgraded to an age-verifying version if such a thing comes into existence, but DOS cannot.
 
I took over a turbo pascal bbs and rewrote it in ASM for speed. This was 1988 to 1992.

On a 386/40 it compiled and linked under MSDOS in about 45 seconds.

I dragged it out and compiled on my i7 big machine. Nothing happened. Just returned to the command prompt. Checking further I found it completed in 0.1 second.

I no longer own modems so it won’t run but it did compile.
 
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