Little by little, everything I hold dear is getting destroyed. Computers of our own, that we control, that we can freely hack on. Everything the word "hacker" stands for. How I wish I could turn back the clock...
This goes way beyond any notion of a "hacker tweaking his electronics".
With ID checks, device attestation and a device required for any transaction, and all this data piped in to a central brain (none of which are far fetched), we're all pretty much buggered.
It is a matter of time until advertising companies claw their way in, insurances calculate individual premiums based on behaviour, and remember, we're all one legislation away from being governed by lunatics.
They'll call you in for a routine scan of your thoughts to make sure you haven't been up to any wrongthink.
Some people get so focused on providing a technical solution to the problem of age verification without revealing your full ID to the website that they forget that they’re proposing we start requiring only government-approved devices and operating systems.
I'm an optimist, but I don't think any age verification laws will gain traction without first solving the device attestation problem.
Will be interesting to see if this leads to more Linux systems being deployed. Then again with systemd supporting age sniffing (https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954), evading this becomes harder and harder.