They’re not. They’re using this as an excuse to become paid gatekeepers of the internet as we know it. All that’s happening is that Cloudflare is using this to menuever into position where they can say “nice traffic you’ve got there - would be a shame if something happened to it”.

AI companies are crap.

What Cloudflare is doing here is also crap.

And we’re cheering it on.

That may be but without sources that say “let’s make the format more obscure” this is just opinion. Your opinion, OpenOffice opinion, IBM opinion etc.

Look for example at the 1904 dating system that Microsoft still has to support. Real customers still use this shit.

I’m not saying Microsoft has always exhibited good behaviour. But their crappy approach tends to be on the go to market side.

Office still has to support a leap year bug to allow banks to run their crappy Lotus based record keeping. Lotus for Darwin’s sake!! There is so much history in these files and what office has to do with them.

In addition to that, with great respect to the hard working developers on LibreOffice, at least some of what seems like “unnecessary complexity” in Microsoft’s format is most likely just requirements LibreOffice isn’t solving or haven’t even encountered yet. You don’t get to Office’s size without having to deal with the most insane batshit crazy backcompat or compatibility issues.

It’s worth recognising that the eIDAS 2.0 / DSA regulation across the EU will function much the same way and lead to age gating requirements across the EU too. So if your definition of a shithole country is that it has online age-gating you might have to soon move away to something much better. Let me know if you find it.

In the UK all pornography has to be sold in a licensed store for which you have to be 18 to enter.

Yes, obviously the internet has made that slightly anachronistic at this point, but age restrictions and having to prove your age is extremely common here.

16 to buy a lottery ticket. 18 to buy a scratch card. 16 to buy an energy drink. 18 to buy tobacco. 16 to drink a low-alcohol drink with a meal and an adult in a licensed establishment. 18 to buy a drink in a licensed established. 18 to buy alcohol to take away (“off licensed”).

Kids have to prove their age ALL THE TIME. My daughter never goes anywhere without a means of proving her age.

Why is online special?

Your analogy is poor, in my humble opinion. The alcohol you have in your home you had to be legal age to buy in the first place. Similarly if you had a porn DVD at home you would have had to prove your age when you bought it (at least here in the UK). Given that online pornography is streamed there is only “now” to prove that you’re of legal age to watch it.

Are you against age gating on everything? If not, why is age gating on some things fine but age gating on other things wrong?

In the U.K. you can buy alcohol online. When it gets delivered the delivery driver has to check your age before handing it over to you.

I totally understand that. And FWIW, I used to sit squarely in the camp that this wasn’t just foolish, it was nefarious.

But the challenge is really in how the UK has decided to implement this - zero knowledge proofs should have been a legal requirement like it is the the EU infrastructure regulation.

If there really, truly was no way to tie back proving your age to who proved their age, then surely this is a good thing? The slippery slope argument I understand but it is, at heart, at fallacy. “Well, if you start putting people in prison for murder, then pretty soon you’ll start putting people in prison for breathing”.

I’m obviously against having to prove your identity to access some content. But can I not support having to prove your age (in a fully anonymous way) without automatically saying “let’s know exactly who is accessing what and when”?

FWIW, Denmark has had this digital infrastructure in the last 10 years and it’s been the foundation of a huge transformation in terms of how people interact with the government services.

It’s also extremely privacy preserving and while Denmark is actually moving forward with an age proving infrastructure like Britain, it’s designed with zero knowledge proofs so literally no-one knows where you have proved your age.

I don’t have a problem with the infrastructure. I have a problem with how Britain designs and uses the infrastructure.