Quality explanation.

Computer needs practice to get program right.

A delightful character arc.

I’m betting a corporate slavery jihad of environmental degradation.

Look out, San Diego!

What am I seeing here?

Without a fan he will become uncomfortable and begin to smell

no way to verify it isn’t beyond “trust me bro” and I don’t trust them

If the verification service is structured like oauth, then the request could be passed through the browser as signed plaintext. You could verify that the requesting site is only passing a minimum age request to the service. That would be as straightforward as viewing the interaction in your browser’s debug tooling.

If you say that you don’t trust the signature, and that it could be used to smuggle identifying information across, there’s a couple of ways to deal with that: open source and audited provider governed by legislation; information theory that would show personally identifying information wouldn’t fit into a field of that size; and “personal auditing” where you can try throwing data at the service to see if you can trick it into accepting invalid input (that really goes with the previous point, because the only field you can usefully vary is the signature).

I can’t speak to Germany’s system, but there’s no need for a site to tell the verification service its identity. If it just asks “is the current session authenticated to someone over 16” and gets an answer back. Identity of both parties remains secret.

The identifying site doesn’t need to record IP or other identifying information. It just needs to answer “yes” or “no” when queried about the current user. It could use a similar handoff mechanism to oauth.

The cost of a hack turns into getting a list of people in the region, rather than people who use a given service. Arguably, that’s less problematic.

I’m still fucking amazed that I can just put my phone on a fancy circle and it sticks there until I pull it off. I’ve had that thing for like a year and it still feels like magic.

Also:

With a 70% non-compliance rate, that isn’t entirely surprising.

Platforms are even less likely to implement real reforms that the author alludes to.

The platforms aren’t complying with the law:

Of the parents who reported their child had an account on each platform prior to 10 December 2025, around 7 in 10 reported that their child still had an account on Facebook (63.6%), Instagram (69.1%), Snapchat (69.4%), and TikTok (69.3%). Around 3 in 10 reported that their child no longer had an account. One in two of these parents (48.5%) reported that their child still had an account on YouTube following the age restrictions coming into effect.

https://www.esafety.gov.au/sites/default/files/2026-03/SocialMediaMinimumAgeComplianceUpdateMarch2026.pdf

I draw the line at dwarf trafficking.

That only works if you rarely see the error. If the software pukes often, it gets grating.