UK Age verification.

[vmb]

I still have working 5 inch floppies from my Apple // systems.

They must be around 40 years old!

 

[vmb]

little do lawmakers realize that they're opening up a significant surveillance opportunity.

Law makers just get paid to do what they are told. They rarely read or understand the law they make.

Don’t Be Silly: Lawmakers “Rarely” Read Legislation and Oftentimes Don’t Understand It . . . But That’s Okay – Penn State Law Review

www.pennstatelawreview.org

 

[vmb]

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...

I doubt a firmware update is needed. They have been able to do this for more than twenty years.

Carrier IQ - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[penguinslayer]

The oldest CD-ROM I can find here today is one from 1994, 'Internet Tools' from InfoMagic. I think it has packet drivers and other DOS programs and source code.

You have me beat. The oldest CD-ROM I have is Corel Linux, which came with the book, "Corel Linux For Dummies." It was Debian based and was a nice try, though M$ killed it. It was from 1999/2000 I believe.

 

[blackbird9]

As Steve Gibson on Security Now put it, little do lawmakers realize that they're opening up a significant surveillance opportunity.

They do know...

 

[blackbird9]

Apart from older versions of freebsd... there are still historic versions of slackware available. For example, on utah univ. ftp site they have iso's for all versions of slackware from 3.2 onwards.
lftp slackware.cs.utah.edu:/pub/slackware/slackware-iso/slackware-3.2-iso> ls
drwxr-xr-x -- ..
-rw-r--r-- 650M 2004-05-07 21:38 slackware-3.2-install.iso
-rw-r--r-- 60 2005-09-28 01:36 slackware-3.2-install.iso.md5

Also available on archive.org https://archive.org/details/linux-slackware-3.2
That was released in 1997.

As for hardware... perhaps a thinkpad 760, which were based on P90 cpu's. AFAIK, that generation of cpu did not contain an ME.

IBM ThinkPad 760 Series - MacDat

Specifications and other info about the IBM ThinkPad 760C, 760CD, 760L, 760LD, 760E, 760EL, 760ELD, 760XD, and 760XL.

macdat.net

Actually you may not need to go that far back. The ME was introduced in the Q965 chipset, so anything based on Q945 should not contain an ME. Q965 was introduced in 2008, according to this link:-

A Semi-Comprehensive Guide to The Intel Management Engine and Circumvention Thereof (+ AMD PSP Notes)

For almost two years now, I have avoided all Intel systems with the 965 chipset and newer, instead opting to stay with the 945 chipset and older in order to bypass the security issues surrounding the Intel Management Engine within the unclear 2006 to 2008 general period of initiation. However...

forums.macrumors.com

So a PII box may be ok.

 

[AlfredoLlaquet]

The intend was good

I never believe any politician's intention is good. For them, everything is just a means to secure their power or obtain more.