“Elect” — small problem, if the bloated Cheeto bites the dust before the 2028 election, he becomes Couch-fucker-in-Chief automatically. Nothing we can do on our end.

I thought one of the first rules about being an evil dictator is to make sure to pay your troops decently so they don’t turn on you.

He’s gonna find out pretty quick that loyalty goes out the window when they’re not getting paid.

Again, it depends. If a site is using SNI, the host header is outside the encrypted payload. That can be scanned without breaking https. You can redirect like a proxy, verify the age and then let the original traffic through.

For old style SSL sites you could evaluate by IP and do the same though it would be a broader stroke.

The worst one would be if they forced a national proxy with their own trusted root certificate, but I don’t even want to get into that one.

What about it? There are tons of ways to deal with that. If it’s an SNI based site, the host header lives outside of the encrypted payload and can be actioned on. They could couple it with IP based whitelists. Or they could push it down to an account level and require it to connect to the internet period. They can approach it almost any way a corporation could. Sadly digital access hasn’t been enshrined as a right anywhere, and it’d be a fine line between enforcement and great firewall of China approach.

I’ve been thinking about the idea that it should be on the government to implement any restrictions it might want to place, so than it’s not an undue burden to the site owner. That way if the UK wants age verification, it should implement it and then it can add whatever site it deems without impacting someone in another jurisdiction.

The downside is it means inserting the government into the network with each country (and state in the US) having its own firewall, so I don’t know if that’s any better. But somewhere along the way the government said that they want to control it, so it should be their problem to solve.

And residents put it right back.

Doesn’t much matter, Zelensky has already said that’s a non-starter and their constitution forbids it anyway.