phx

Or possibly if a product gets a lot of reviews in a short time, to prevent review bombing

That sounds pretty close to what I'd expect, except for it presumably still being tied to the person overall

I think it's less a matter of "can't" and more a matter of "can't ... be added to bother putting in a significant effort/investment"

I mean, for the most part yes. I'm not even so much concerned about my kids viewing porn, more so than somebody else will make nasty deepfakes of them and post online etc, so age verification won't fix that.

I could see it help with discriminating between people at their "own damn computers" and bots or misinformation/psyops campaigns run out of certain foreign countries though (assuming any ID also ties back to parent country).

So uh, do they have a list of domains that should be blocked then? One that we can check out to... uh... ensure our kids aren't going there and stuff.

You can kinda already do that with parental controls on kids' devices and many routers, as well as services provided by ISP's. In Canada there's also a free national DNS provider that has a tier the filters out known malicious and/or adult sites at the DNS level depending on which hosts you point at.

The ONLY way I could remotely support age verification is if it was anonymized from the individual, similar to how companies like Mullvad do their VPN or with prepaid gift cards etc

You get a card that has a PIN behind a scratch-off section. You can buy the card for cash or order online, but there's nothing tying the buyer to the card.

Age verification can be similar where you go to a registered location, provide valid ID and like $5 to get a scratch off card. The code on the card just validates "user is 18+" but otherwise has no ties back to their actual identity.

If a site wants to do an age check, it can validate the card PIN or on phone potentially scan a 3d barcode behind the scratch-off. Maybe some hash check could be involved to avoid the need for a centralized provider.

That's how I remember it. Cursed Reddit post...

Huh, they spelled cookie wrong and used a "ch" instead of a "k"

"these tampons didn't do anything and my undergarments are now ruined!"

'well duh, didn't you read the side of the packaging?'

I'm rather suspicious of this story given the timing and the increase of "we need online ID to protect the children" narratives being pushed by various government

Not sure about these days - other than 7-11 the typical "corner store" seems to be getting increasingly rare - but when I was younger most were generally run by people that I assume were immigrants due to having some accent or other.