That’s just systemd adding a birthdate field to their userdb. Doesn’t require that it be filled out or accurate, and especially doesn’t require it to be validated against a government database. I don’t see it as fundamentally any different from adding a userdb field for favorite color, phone number, or blood type.

Without 3rd party validation, I really don’t see the privacy issue with an age field. Without verification, it is, at worst, one more byte available to hash into a unique identifier, but you can feed that field from /dev/random at every query and poison even that hypothetical.

If you only need it to be accessible inside your home, then you just need to run your own DNS. Have your dhcp point at your DNS and your DNS declare itself the master for your domain.

To get full functionality, you’ll probably want to have your registrar point to the public IP you get from your ISP as the domain’s authoritative name server.You should be able to script it to update the registrar when your ISP changes your IP, but that usually happens infrequently enough to do manually. Obviously can’t do that if you’re behind CGNAT.

To get Lets Encrypt certificates, you can do the DNS challenge. If your ISP gives you a (even inconsistent) public IP, you can do fancy ‘views’ with your selfhosted DNS, where it responds with private IPs inside your network and your ISP-given IP outside your network. I have certbot set up to expose my DNS & web server just before it starts its renewal process, then close the firewall after. Once you have the certificate, you can move it to where ever it will actually be used.

Rats fleeing the sinking ship is exactly what we need.

I’m not saying to forgive and forget the past, but it has to be possible for the rats to jump ship. If we just trap them all in a corner, then we give up any chance of peaceful transition of power. Hold them responsible for what they’ve done so far; not for what might happen next.

Yeah, it’s definitely part of the class of trick questions meant to catch people giving rote answers to partially read questions. I imagine that a lot of our routine conversations are just practiced call-and-response habits, and that’s why genAI can seem ‘real.’ But it can’t switch modes and do actual attentive listening and thinking, because call-and-response is all it has - a much larger library than any human, but in the end, everything it says is some average of things that have been said before.

Get a 20x20x4" filter, and the fan will suck it right to itself. Don’t even need mounting materials.

Growing up in the 70s, whenever I was sick, I’d get 7-up and saltines.

Probably just scream that Kamala would have done the same thing, but worse.

University assumes every student has mobile phone svc & the will to share their number, so the rest are excluded from school resources that require 2FA by SMS

When my university went 2FA, I told IT I didn’t want to use a phone, and they gave me a Yubikey. OTP-only, I can’t do any management, including to use it for other sites, and I couldn’t bring my own passkey/dongle/etc, but I was happy they had at least made a (zero out-of-pocket) allowance for people who didn’t want to give up their phone.

But I think some of this loss of autonomy reflects maturing technology. I was in school just as the internet became mainstream. Email, usenet, definitely web, were cutting edge technologies that university geeks were basically making up as they went along. By the 2000s, they were everywhere. Mundane, even at scale. An email address was no longer a badge of geekdom, but just a thing that everyone had to have and a burden for the university to provide. It’s the IT equivalent of landscaping.

The places where universities are still leaders are hard to see, because they haven’t been commoditized for sale on Amazon or as ad-bait on Google. 3D printing came out of universities. Stabilized and semi-autonomous drones. I don’t know what the new hotness is that will be everywhere in 5-10 years, but I’m pretty sure it’s some grad student just dicking around with a cool thing today.

If you’ve ever read Upton Sinclair’s It can’t happen here, the parallel between his “marching clubs” and our Proud Boys/ICE are hard to miss.

ICE recruits people the police rejected. It’s what happens when your political ideology is more important than any morality. IOW: when the ends justify the means.