Age verification inherently means identity verification. There's no way to prove your age without first proving that you are YOU, either by showing your face or authenticating with some third party authority, usually government or a corporation.

The idea that you should be locked out of using your own computer until you do this is utterly insane. What problem does it solve that existing parental control tools don't? A generation of parents already trust their babies with iPads for this reason. And what of the millions of Americans who don't have current ID?

I'm glad to hear this. They're currently trying to shill the magnetically sealed pouches in the UK, but the flaws are obvious: massive bottleneck at the pouch station would delay entry and exit from the building, phones would be unavailable during emergencies or to record incidents of crime or staff malpractice, and financial burden on schools.

Students can be trusted to obey a simple "no phones in class" rule.

4 MB was an absurd size for a website in 2008. It's still an absurd size for a website.

Assuming you don't need syncing across devices, the main drawback to self-hosting is that it only receives updates while your PC is switched on. Some feeds update often enough that you'll miss stories if you don't grab them multiple times per day.

Selling alcohol to minors is illegal in the UK. Some do circumvent this by various means (e.g. fake ID or having an adult purchase on their behalf, both of which are also illegal), but the same is already true for the current age verification system.

The UK's Online Safety Act originally had a proposal that would allow users to purchase an ID code anonymously in cash from a corner store, presenting only ID to the cashier the same way as buying alcohol. This was never implemented, because it's more useful for the government and corporations to link all online usage to a government ID.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaIZc2icdTU

The full series appears to actually be free to watch on Roku Channel.

https://therokuchannel.roku.com/details/382d11be2c7e519b8105...

However, if I can be cynical for a moment: The article title is misleading. Only a few episodes have been uploaded so far. At the current rate of one episode per week, it will take until March 2028 to conclude all five seasons. That's assuming they post every episode, and allow the episodes to remain up in the long term.

For some reason, the first episode of season 1, Midnight on the Firing Line, is missing from the YouTube upload, which is a pretty critical omission. YouTube is also a minefield of spoilers in the video recommendations. I can't recommend the YouTube uploads to newcomers right now. The Blu-ray collection appears to be available for about $100.

[0]: https://seriesgraph.com/show/3137-babylon-5

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash-for-Honours_scandal

https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gZKCPk40WI

tags at every double-newline. Jekyll is useful for that; it builds automatically in GitHub Pages, which also conveniently serves as a free web host.

For the Linux newcomer, the biggest advantage of Ubuntu (or Ubuntu derivatives like Mint) is the wealth of guides, tutorials, and Q&As online, allowing you to google most common problems. You can always switch to another distro once you become more confident with Linux.