I agree with you on that. My original point was simply that expecting every single parent to run their own blocking isn’t feasible, nor effective under real world situations.

And a proxy site doesn’t require installing third party software.

I’ve been saying for a while that we should start presenting lawmakers with secure ways to do age verification, instead of relying on lobbyists to do it. Lawmakers will inevitably pass these kinds of things, so at least make sure the groundwork is there for it to be done securely instead of just bitching about it when Meta lobbies to be the third-party age verification system.

Have the government set up a database with every single name, DOB, ID number (SSN, for the Americans), and a password that the individual has set up on the provided site. Then have them use a known hash for each one, essentially turning the password into a salt. And the hashes can be stored in a simple database that determines whether or not someone is old enough.

Next, the device hashes the user’s inputs for name, DOB, ID number, and password. If you want to require an ID, that photo can be verified directly on the device, because even phones are powerful enough to do things like OCR nowadays. Now the device sends that hash directly to the government, and asks “hey, does this hash match someone who is over {age of majority}?” The government’s system automatically responds with a simple yes/no.

Your device can now automatically respond to any age verification checks, so there’s no need for individual sites or apps to ask for your personal info. They can simply ask your device, and your device can respond automatically. The user never even needs to see an “are you over {age}” prompt, because it all happens before the site or service even loads.

It’s essentially the same idea that Tor uses, where routing your traffic through three nodes helps ensure security. The first node (the site, in this case) only gets the verification from your device. The second node (your device) can keep your info entirely on the device, so it never needs to send it to any third party. And the third node (the government) never sees your browsing data. The only device that actually sees both your personal info and your browsing data is your device, which you control. You didn’t need to send a third party any extra data about yourself to verify every individual site or service. Everything about your info stays entirely on your device. And the government didn’t get any of your browsing info, because the device was simply asking if you were old enough to be verified.

For shared devices (like desktops) this could be done on an account level. Same basic concept, except the “is over {age}” flag could be set on the user account. “But my privacy” folks start to rabble about this, (because it usually implies something like a Microsoft account) but I can guarantee Microsoft already knows roughly how old you are. So parents can log in with their verified account to watch porn, and kids will get unverified accounts that redirect them back to a “hey it looks like you’re unverified. If you’re old enough to view this content, here’s how to verify your device” page.

For parents, protecting your kids is now as simple as refusing to verify their devices/accounts and protecting that password (so they can’t just use your info to verify themselves behind your back). Hardware verification can be done securely.

Exactly. There are so many people in this thread who really seem to underestimate how much time and effort it actually takes to keep kids from playing the games their peers are playing. Keeping a teenager from looking at tits is a full time job by itself, which would require all kinds of invasive privacy violations. As the old adage goes, the strictest parents make the sneakiest kids.

but free ones really suck IMO

Kids don’t care. They’ll use whatever is available. Free ones are almost undoubtedly collecting and selling your browsing info too, but kids won’t care about that either. Now your attempts at blocking them have made their browsing less private.

and they aren’t very obfuscated so they can be easily blocked too

And now you’ve fallen into the whack-a-mole trap, which is exactly what most parents don’t have time for.

there are methods to detect VPN traffic so that could be blocked too

Methods available on residential ISP-provided modem/routers? That’s the only “networking gear” that most households have. I think you may be falling for the Average Familiarity trap.

If you wanted to go ballistic you could even set a whitelist of services and everything else gets blocked

Sure, and your kid can just buy a cheap prepaid SIM card to keep under their mattress. Data plans are stupid cheap, and kids are resourceful. Hell, I can walk down to the corner store and buy an entire android phone for like $50. Will it be a good phone? Fuck no. But it’ll get access to the internet. And if a neighbor or nearby business has unprotected WiFi, I don’t even need the prepaid SIM card.

If you’re trying to stop a 14 year old from looking at tits, you’re already in a pitched battle against an opponent who will never run out of determination. My original point was simply that parents don’t have the time or resources to constantly play cat and mouse with whatever kids are using to jork it. There are entire private companies and government departments with hundreds of full time employees who specialize in parental controls, and they still struggle to keep up. Parents who work full time (and who probably aren’t tech literate enough to do anything more than click the “Enable AdGuard” button when setting up their router, if their router even supports AdGuard) simply won’t have the time or resources.

Hah, I typoed. Fixed now. I shouldn’t comment before I’ve had my coffee.

Yup, I’m also squarely in the “good for them, it doesn’t really affect me in the slightest and they deserve to feel safe” boat. But I also have a sneaking suspicion that the guys like us aren’t the ones who would be upset about this. The Venn diagram of “men who wouldn’t get angry about this” and “fucking creeps” is probably close to being two separate circles.

It takes a pretty smart and determined kid to get around network controls

Proxies and VPNs exist for a reason. If the entire country of China can’t keep up with the number of VPNs and proxies poking holes in their Great Firewall, what makes you think individual parents have the time to do so? You never used a proxy site to access blocked content on a school computer? It doesn’t take a high degree of technical skill. You just google “proxy site” and paste whatever URL you wanted into the site.

Long story short? You should kill the container and change your related passwords/API keys. The dev tried censoring it for a while, but couldn’t keep up with the posts. They eventually nuked the entire sub and deleted their Reddit account. They also privated their GitHub and changed their username.

It was a lymph node disorder, commonly caused by tuberculosis.

And the lead dev for Huntarr said they were following best practices, and had a heavy background in cybersecurity. And we’ve all seen how that turned out.

This change 100% smells like vibe code. They refactored nearly 15k lines of code in a single push. That’s not something you just do on a whim without a team of full time devs or vibe coding. And we know they don’t have the former, so it is almost certainly the latter.

There’s a massive difference between “using AI to write code” and refactoring almost 15k lines in a single push.

The “best” uses of AI in coding are for small blocks. You don’t just tell it “I need a program that does X, Y, and Z” because that will (at best) result in horrible code. Instead, it’s best practice to use it for small blocks of code, where you tell it something more akin to “I need a function that takes {a} as a variable, does {thing}, and outputs {x}.” That way you’re not using it to generate giant swaths of code all at once, you’re just using it to generate individual functions that you can then use as needed.

But it also means that the “most skilled” (as you put it) programmers are basically putting themselves in a permanent debugging seat instead of working as a developer. And in many cases, debugging code can be just as (or more) difficult than writing the initial code. It’s also why senior devs exist to audit code from junior devs, because it’s assumed that junior devs will inevitably make mistakes that need debugging, or will make code that clashes with code from other junior devs. And it’s the senior dev’s job to ensure that the code is both functional and integrated properly.

And this “adding 15k lines of code and ripping out 10k lines” push smells a lot like the former “write me a program to do {thing}” usage.

And yet there are cases like the Huntarr debacle, where the dev simply thought “and make sure your code complies with best security practices” to their vibe code prompts actually made it secure.

They added 14k lines of code in a week, and ripped out 10k lines of existing code. That’s not something that a skilled programmer can reasonably vet in that amount of time. This is showing all the signs of AI slop, and none of the signs of debugged or vetted code.

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I just don’t tend to delete torrents at all. I have torrents going all the way back to when I built my current server, almost two years ago. Just set your bandwidth caps, and let the torrent client manage what to seed. Some of my shit is only like .1 ratio because it’s not popular or there are lots of other seeds… But I have a few others that have ratios in the literal hundreds. I think my most popular torrent is a PSX ISO bundle for emulators, and it’s currently sitting at a ratio of like 350.

I have qbittorrent set to quit when the DL is done.

Which won’t stop someone from detecting that you torrented it. Without a VPN, your IP is openly visible to anyone else is joins the torrent. And since there’s no way to fully throttle seeding, (at least not without actively wrecking your leeching speeds), closing the client after the torrent completes won’t make a difference. They’ll already have your IP logged, and will be able to send angry letters to your ISP.

I mean, there are certain games where the online community actually breathes a lot of life into a game. Lots of open-ended games have fantastic online communities. For instance, Factorio’s online community is largely focused on sharing factory blueprints, finding better ways to optimize your setups, and modding.

In fact, the biggest “controversy” surrounding Factorio is that the company’s founder is a bigot. The official Reddit sub actively turned against him. The mods even started deleting his inflammatory posts and comments for breaking the rules, which is a nice piece of irony. Imagine creating a game and then having the entire fanbase turn against you when you start blowing dog whistles.

We had an employee break procedure, make a dumb mistake, and cause ~$160k worth of damage to a mission-critical piece of infrastructure. It happened due to her own inattention and disregarding her “here’s how to shut down at the end of the night” checklist, at like 8PM. Basically, instead of doing steps A, B, C, and D, she went “eh I know what I’m doing,” jumped straight to step D, and suddenly heard very expensive noises. It required me and her supervisor to pull an overnight shift to get a bodged workaround in place, just to be ready for the next morning at 8AM. And even then, the gear was out of commission for about a month until we could get it fixed.

All in all, it was about $80k worth of equipment repairs, $40k in equipment rentals (to keep things running in the meantime), and about $40k in additional labor (we had to hire specialized contractors to fix the gear).

The employee 100% thought she was going to get fired when it happened. We were obviously angry and disappointed that she made such a dumb mistake, but we didn’t yell or chastise her. We simply told her to go ahead and clock out for the evening, and we’d deal with fixing things overnight. She tried to say she could stick around to help… But this was already at the end of her shift, she was obviously not in the right headspace to pull an overnight shift, and we were both too frustrated to have her around at the time. She was crying on her way out the door.

The supervisor decided to keep her on instead of firing her, for this exact reason. She didn’t get a raise, but she didn’t get fired either. She got reprimanded, but her supervisor was confident that she would never make the same dumb mistake again. And now her story is used as a cautionary tale to drive home the importance of following procedure when we’re training new hires.

Can’t search on google.com without allowing JavaScript, but it turns out Lite.DuckDuckGo does, and for me at least gives vastly better search results.

That just means you prefer Bing search results. DDG simply proxies Bing Search and removes the tracking elements. So you’d get the same search results with Bing… Though Bing may sort those results differently, since they’d use tracking to push certain sponsored results to the top if they think you’d be more interested in them.

Yeah, the entire compressed thing is only ~40GB if you exclude media like photos, audio files, videos, etc, so it’s surprisingly easy to keep a local backup. You need some specialized software to be able to read the compressed data without fully unzipping it, but the software is FOSS so anyone can use it. Even if you include images, the file is only like 120GB, which is easy for anyone with a NAS. I’ve had the 40GB version on my NAS for a while, and happily leave it to seed.