This kind of malicious compliance is exactly what this dogshit Think Of The Children Act needs. Convenience is everything to the majority of population.
If other major sites and resources do this, then the pressure from the people impacted by it will force UK PLC to un-fuck this awful legislation.
This is the most cooker meme I’ve seen (to date) on Lemmy…
It certainly removed my ability to say “Companies are shoehorning AI into everything! I wouldn’t be surprised if they do it with Notepad…” as a form of mockery. It was one of the first damned victims.
Edit: I’m genuinely surprised technical people (with appropriate rights on their PCs) still use it, though. I switched to Notepad++ nearly 20 years ago.
In case anyone is unaware of the point of this: it’s about the UK’s (for now) new age verification law, where you have to be 18 to have a credit card.
This really is the least-worst implementation of this I’ve seen so far, providing you have (or can get) a CC.
And at least it lets you continue buying games/content until this awful law gets repealed or rewritten by competent adults.
Doubling down on the batshit. Everyone knew VPNs were going to be the low effort workaround to this authoritarian batshittery.
I get what the (well meaning, I think) people lobbying for this are trying to achieve, but everything from the lobbying to legislation to enforcement seems to be happening in the worst way imaginable. Almost like it’s an intentional “You want to see how badly can we do this? Hold my drink! YOLO!!”
For me, the tell was UK PLC leaving it up to the sites themselves to decide who/how the verification would be done. Classic bad management “I don’t understand the slightest thing about any of this, but HOW HARD COULD IT BE?!” response. It’s like the “series of tubes” stupidity all over again.
Pocket won’t be missed. Self-hosted alternatives like Wallabag are better and private, so switched to it many years ago. Integration (and enabled by default, requiring about:config to disable) ensured I’d never use it out of principle.
Fakespot (the website) was genuinely useful to help ID scams on Am*z*n Marketplace, though I never used the extension. But I think that enshittified in recent years, so (in the style of Stephen King’s Misery) it’s probably for the best.
Related, the Keepa extension is useful as a price rigging detector, but I expect that will “number must go up!” soon enough, too…
FTA: The IDs leaked were from people appealing age verification.
That’s different from the age verification process, which goes through a third party provider.
In short, the leaked IDs were from a standard shitty support platform (Zendesk, Salesforce, etc), not the much-advertised “safe and private” age verification system.