Private companies now can link all your online activities to you. Not an advertisement ID, but directly to you and your loans and your health data and whatever they're selling in the black market. Every data breach is a 100 times. It was already almost possible to directly know about you by buying data, now it's easier.
The point of this is not to verify age really. It is to verify identity. There's no way to prove someone is some age without presenting a legal ID.
Also, it's not just porn, facebook, online gambling etc. It is the OS based on some bills. So ALL your activities.
> There's no way to prove someone is some age without presenting a legal ID.
Sure there is.
Verifiable Credentials and other similar standards allow this to be delegated in such a way that there is no need to present ID or even let the site know who you are. The site can issue a request to a third party that simply provides back "Yep, we attest that this request was approved by someone over 18".
Depending on the exact scheme, the request may forward you to a broker, who will then forward the request (and your web session) on to the trusted third party of your choice which has already performed ID verficiation (usually a bank). The bank sends a signed response back to the broker, the broker sends a signed response back to the requesting site.
Is it perfect? Maybe not 100%, the broker knows there was a request from a restricted site forwarded to a given bank. The bank knows you have approved a request. There is likely to be an identifier of some sort sent from the site all the way through to the back-end so you know you're not being MITM'd. But in theory nobody should have the full picture.
No practical way I should say. Realistically, it's pretty clear that lawmakers really just want to shove it through in the simplest way possible. Which is probably private third parties.
And private third parties are very shady. They have effective monopolies and no significant public face to care about. I think we have seen this pattern play out in healthcare, compliance and other industries already.
Also idk about banks being the effective gatekeepers to the internet and eventually all technology. Just feels like its not their place to do that.
Read every alternative volunteered here. Imagine any world where in the next 5 years they can't be enshittified, sold to a predatory private equity, their support lines AI-ified, their headcount reduced by 40% without your knowledge, etc etc. 27 years is a very long time.
A competent IT person can have a backup plan for every expected failure. They can't control registrar level screw ups.
Companies explicitly selling you "bulletproof domains" like MarkMonitor have screwed up big time.
Also as an IT guy, asking to register a new domain with X is much easier than asking to transfer a long held domain away from Y.
500mg from a capsule and 500 from cough syrup 4 times a day is still fine. With a 100% safety margin still.
If you’re taking more meds than that without clinical supervision Id say something is wrong in the system or your medicine practices.
Where I’m from it’s common to walk to the nearest pharmacy and get meds when needed. Even over the counter stuff like paracetamols. And talking to the pharmacist. They’ll ask what you’re already taking and tell you what else to get.
There is no other technology to do age verification at scale.
Apple, Google and such will contract out this age verification to a third-party which will ask you to upload your ID and a 3D face captcha, which the third party will delete within 15 days, but somehow magically still make it into an unfortunate, unavoidable data leak a couple of years later.
I think you are assuming what their definition of "verify" is going to be, but it's not actually written in the text of the bill, so we don't know. Similar laws in some states only asked the OS to collect the age, it specifically doesn't say that the information must ever be accurate, stored or used for anything.
Collecting the age will be done via a photo of a legal US state ID. We can take bets but, as the article points out, only two vendors can do this and this is how they do it.
I agree. App store is really horrible. Why is it that when I'm searching for a first party or a very very popular, the first result and many of the other results are weird scammy malware like things? I don't particularly care about the stupid homepage ads tho, I think thats just because I have "personalize app store recommendations" turned off.
Search inside Settings (both mac and ios) was also really really stupid for a long while. Why are you taking me to some random accessibility toggle when I'm looking for "displays" ? But I checked right now and it's good.
LOL at the risk of sounding like a shill, I think Apple was right on time with these features. They added it after on-device CPU/neural engine was finally powerful and efficient enough. These features arrived at once on macs, iphones and ipads, and they arrived at the same time on your friends' devices.
IMO Android suffers from not controlling it's hardware. I can't ever be sure if the hyped new feature will come to my phone because I'm not using a Pixel or a Samsung.
I just have a cheap second hand PC with a couple of good drives running LAN only Immich and a few other backup tools. This, in parallel to cloud backup, makes the setup both mobile and reasonably fault tolerant.
I'm quite wary of using SD card for backup. Too easy for me to lose.
There is a list of valid characters accepted for a passcode. That list was created, the characters debated, and a consensus reached by Apple engineers (I hope, for all our sakes. I don't want to imagine a world where this bare minimum level of engineering diligence wasn't done by a trillion dollar company)
Just have an automated keyboard test for every new release to ensure those characters aren't broken.
That's the thing: you don't! The charset for passwords should be always inputable even if no one is using it.
If you wanted to reduce the size of the charset, you'd basically create a transition plan, and ask everyone in the world with a passcode to set a new passcode and validate that against the new charset/rules. A company that can perfectly transition the world from x86 to ARM can surely manage that.
Jobs was a perfectionist and a minimalist. Part of minimalism is that sometimes you delete marginal features (arrow keys) that you still end up wanting back.
If you never delete too many features, you aren’t deleting enough features.
I am 100% sure that Steve Jobs could have shipped a broken Czech keyboard if that was in pursuit of some random abstract like purity or minimalism. "iOS keyboard has too many keys. Reduce keys make them larger. People should not use these obscure symbols anyway". (extrapolated from a couple of biographies and a couple of books on 1980s Apple I read, this is very consistent with his character).
As for iOS 26, no reasonable person would have let it ship. From one source (John Gruber -> "Bad Dye Job") the previous head of Apple's UI design team who lead the UI team was just not a UX designer, he was just a visual designer or something. I think it shows.
As much of a snob that Jobs was it's nonsensical to say that he would've knowingly insisted on changes that locked users out from their devices. That's just nonsense. At the very least there would've been a prompt to change the password phrase or some such in upgrade. And if it did happen as an oversight, it would've been patched on the first report and some heads would've rolled.
But that's the difference. Jobs might've done something like this for a reason. That's not what happened here. He probably wouldn't have tolerated it as a bug.
The point of this is not to verify age really. It is to verify identity. There's no way to prove someone is some age without presenting a legal ID.
Also, it's not just porn, facebook, online gambling etc. It is the OS based on some bills. So ALL your activities.
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