Hmm, it seems like it was perhaps not engineered for large numbers of pedestrians, but it still seems like the article is a bit hyperbolic (that said, I’m an Australian and don’t know the area, and am going off things like Google Street View and maps).

It looks like there is a road, “Patterson Plank Road”, that actually has a footpath, and has a speed limit of 40 (presumably miles per hour, so 64 kph - about the same speed as most arterial roads in Australian suburbs), and connects to the local area. Then there is a “Rd A Plaza” that seems to go around the outside of the complex, that has a footpath for most of the way, up until there are vehicle barriers. From that point, there is a wide grass verge that looks relatively well drained, and runs all the way to the start of the car park (which presumably has to be walkable to the actual entrance). It would take crossing a 4 lane road that seems to mainly serve the stadium, and isn’t well engineered for pedestrians (no pedestrian refuge islands or anything) - but people do that all the time in Australia and areas are still considered walkable.

Now if the intent is to make it harder to access on foot specifically so they can increase profits (create a problem for people and then sell them the solution), then it is possible they’ll throw up more obstacles. I think Americans might be much more tolerant of what is called ‘drip pricing’ in Australia (and is illegal), where a low initial price is presented, but then lots of additional unavoidable expenses are presented (see also, some American retailers apparently exclude taxes from pricing, many Amercian hospitality providers underpay waitstaff and then demand that customers pay a ‘tip’ or ‘service fee’ that wasn’t reflected in the menu price, and so on). In Australia, the law that is for sales to consumers, the total price has to be displayed up front at least as prominently as any other price - so unavoidable additional charges from the same (or a related) company wouldn’t fly.

I host my mail server on a VPS.

I suggest making sure you get DMARC / DKIM / SPF working, and having an anti-spam strategy (greylisting helps, but there are a few ASNs that just exist to send spam). Also make sure your IP is not on any public spam list.

The next problem you might face is that Microsoft and especially Google like to make it hard for anyone not using their services. With Microsoft, you fill in a form and jump through some hoops and they’ll start accepting your email enough to land it in spam. Unless you are regularly sending to Microsoft, it is hard to keep them accepting mail, but just sending to a free Hotmail address (owned and occasionally marked as read and deleted by you!) on cron is enough to keep occasional mail deliverable as long as none of your mail ever gets marked as spam. Google can be more of a pain to small email servers in terms of not landing in spam, but I think occasional reports of not spam will help you.

In terms of keeping down spam:

• postgrey or similar for greylisting keeps out the least serious spammers.
• The notorious spammers / bulletproof hosting is best blocked by ASN since they regularly shift IP addresses. Try a script like this on daily cron (assuming you jump to the custom BAD_AS table from your INPUT iptables rule) - please don’t run it too often since routeviews is a free public service and you should be respectful of them:

#!/bin/bash -e

TEMPDIR=$(mktemp -d)
trap 'rm -r "$TEMPDIR"' EXIT

curl https://archive.routeviews.org/oix-route-views/oix-full-snapshot-latest.dat.bz2 -Lo "$TEMPDIR/snapshot.bz2"
bzgrep -e " (15828|213035|400377|399471|210654|46573|211252|62904|135542|132372|36352|209641|7552|36352|12876|53667|138608|150393|60781|138607) i" $TEMPDIR/snapshot.bz2 | cut -d" " -f 3 | sort | uniq > $TEMPDIR/badranges

iptables -N BAD_AS || true
iptables -D INPUT -j BAD_AS || true
iptables -A INPUT -j BAD_AS
iptables -F BAD_AS

for ROUTE in $(cat "$TEMPDIR/badranges"); do
    iptables -A BAD_AS -s $ROUTE -j DROP;
done

• Despite Google being so hostile to very infrequent emails from IPs that have years of never sending spam, just because they are small, Gmail and Firebase are one of the most significant spam sources. I find client-side filtering works best for things like that which get through your other defences.
• Another spam source is Docusign. These types of companies tend to shut down individual scammer / spammer accounts, but then allow them back in for the same scam with another account.

Note that of the spam that gets through if you have the basic defences, it’s probably a similar level to big corporate hosted mail, so don’t let this deter you (I just hate spammers).

deleted by creator

is it technically possible to accurately verify someone’s age while respecting their privacy and if so how?

With your constraints yes, but there are open questions as to whether that would actually be enough.

Suppose there was a well-known government public key P_g, and a well protected corresponding government private key p_g, and every person i (i being their national identity number) had their own keypair p_i / P_i. The government would issue a certificate C_i including the date of birth and national identity number attesting that the owner of P_i has date of birth d.

Now when the person who knows p_i wants to access an age restricted site s, they generate a second site (or session) specific keypair P_s_i / p_s_i. They use ZK-STARKs to create a zero-knowledge proof that they have a C_i (secret parameter) that has a valid signature by P_g (public parameter), with a date of birth before some cutoff (DOB secret parameter, cutoff public parameter), and which includes key P_i (secret parameter), that they know p_i (secret parameter) corresponding to P_i, and that they know a hash h (secret parameter) such that h = H(s | P_s_i | p_i | t), where t is an issue time (public parameter, and s and P_s_i are also public parameters. They send the proof transcript to the site, and authenticate to the site using their site / session specific P_s_i key.

Know as to how this fits your constraints:

Let the service know that the user is an adult by providing a verifiable proof of adulthood (eg. A proof that’s signed by a trusted authority/government)

Yep - the service verifies the ZK-STARK proof to ensure the required properties hold.

Not let the service know any other information about the user besides what they already learn through http or TCP/IP

Due to the use of a ZKP, the service can only see the public parameters (plus network metadata). They’ll see P_s_i (session specific), the DOB cutoff (so they’ll know the user is born before the cutoff, but otherwise have no information about date of birth), and the site for which the session exists (which they’d know anyway).

Generating a ZK-STARK proof of a complexity similar to this (depending on the choice of hash, signing algorithm etc…) could potentially take about a minute on a fast desktop computer, and longer on slower mobile devices - so users might want to re-use the same proof across sessions, in which case this could let the service track users across sessions (although naive users probably allow this anyway through cookies, and privacy conscious users could pay the compute cost to generate a new session key every time).

Sites would likely want to limit how long proofs are valid for.

Not let a government or age verification authority know whenever a user is accessing 18+ content

In the above scheme, even if the government and the site collude, the zero-knowledge proof doesn’t reveal the linkage between the session key and the ID of the user.

Make it difficult or impossible for a child to fake a proof of adulthood, eg. By downloading an already verified anonymous signing key shared by an adult, etc.

An adult could share / leak their P_s_i and p_s_i keypair anonymously, along with the proof. If sites had a limited validity period, this would limit the impact of a one-off-leak.

If the adult leaks the p_i and C_i, they would identify themselves.

However, if there were adults willing to circumvent the system in a more online way, they could set up an online system which allows anyone to generate a proof of age and generates keypairs on demand for a requested site. It would be impossible to defend against such online attacks in general, and by the anonymity properties (your second and third constraints), there would never be accountability for it (apart from tracking down the server generating the keypairs if it’s a public offering, which would be quite difficult but not strictly impossible if it’s say a Tor hidden service). What would be possible would be to limit the number of sessions per user per day (by including a hash of s, p_i and the day as a public parameter), and perhaps for sites to limit the amount of content per session.

Be simple enough to implement that non-technical people can do it without difficulty and without purchasing bespoke hardware

ZK-STARK proof generation can run on a CPU or GPU, and could be packaged up as say, a browser addon. The biggest frustration would be the proof generation time. It could be offloaded to cloud for users who trust the cloud provider but not the government or service provider.

Ideally not requiring any long term storage of personal information by a government or verification authority that could be compromised in a data breach

Governments already store people’s date of birth (think birth certificates, passports, etc…), and would need to continue to do so to generate such certificates. They shouldn’t need to store extra information.

In most jurisdictions, part of the definition of a not-for-profit (of which a charity is a more restricted subset) is that it doesn’t exist for the benefit of the members / shareholders, or a specific person.

So creating a charity / NFP and asking people to pay into it is usually okay, but the purpose of that charity can’t be to enrich you, and it is a separate legal identity (i.e. taking a charity’s funds and giving it to yourself would be embezzling). Many jurisdictions allow for sports clubs to exist as not-for-profits, but they’d generally need to be for the purpose of organising a whole team to practice, compete and so on.

Generally charities can employ people to do work for them and pay them, but (varies by jurisdiction) they generally need to be not paid above a fair market rate for the work they actually do to advance the goals of the charity.

If the goal is to help a legitimate cause, you could also ask them to donate to an existing not-for-profit for the cause.

Disclaimer: IANAL, and anyway all of this would vary by jurisdiction - not legal advice!

Attacking a military ship is generally not a war crime (as defined by international law such as the Geneva treaties, Rome Statute etc…). It is an act of war (same as invasion or bombardment of another country), and is likely to see retaliation by the attacked country.

Aggression (i.e. unprovoked acts of war) is against the Charter of the United Nations, which also includes the International Court of Justice as a dispute resolution mechanism. It is up to the United Nations Security Council (at which the US has a veto) to authorise enforcement of ICJ rulings.

If a nation is acting to protect another nation facing aggression from the US, it would be legal for the attack US military ships. The reason why they wouldn’t would more be that it would likely bring counter-retaliation from the US.

Liberal by itself is an ambiguous term, so it’s generally best to prefix it with another word / prefix to clarify.

e.g. Neoliberal / Classical liberal - aligned to what I think parent post is saying. Implies economic right. Socially liberal - probably what the GP post means, meaning in favour of social liberties. Can be associated with economic left (usually coupled with positive protection of social liberties) or the economic right (e.g. libertarianism - usually believe government shouldn’t trample social liberties, but businesses can). Liberal is also a political party in many countries - e.g. in Australia it is a (declining, but formerly in power) right-wing party.

That said, I believe most wars are started for reasons of cronyism / crony capitalism, to distract from issues or project an image for the leader and/or for reasons of nationalism, and politicians from all sides will give an insincere pretext aligned to the politics people expect them to have.

So back in 1994 my neighbours and I agreed that I’d give them my anti-theft fog cannons, as long as they promise not to steal my stuff.

Then in 2014 they sent some buddies in to burgle my place, and got away with a chunk of my stuff - and I know it was said neighbour behind it, because they now openly claim what was taken is theirs (of course, I never agreed with them on that).

Then since February 2022 they’ve started regularly burgling my place - in the first few weeks, they tried to take literally everything, but fortunately I hired good security guards and they only got away with about 20% of my stuff (including what they stole in 2014).

I’ve been trying to make arrangements for a monitored alarm system that will bring in a large external response if more burglaries happen, but the security company doesn’t want to take it on the contract while a burglary is in progress - but they did sell me some gear. I’m still working on getting the contract.

They say they’ll stop trying to burgle my place as long as I promise not to ever get a monitored burglar alarm, to officially sign over the property they’ve already stolen and to stop trying to get it back, stop buying stuff to protect my property from the monitored security company, and that I fire most of my security guards.

Do you think this is really their end game, or if I agree, do you think they’ll just be back burgling more as soon as I make those promises, with fewer security guards and stuff to protect my house? After all, I did have an agreement with them back in 1994 and they didn’t follow that.

With the added complication that it’s unlikely that Mangione actually killed anyone - someone killed someone in favour with the Magats, so by their logic, someone has to be killed to send a message.

Like how likely is the story that someone (who looked nothing like the surveillance photos released at the time) was called in by restaurant staff, and despite having allegedly travelled a long distance from the scene of the crime, and many opportunities to destroy everything, had a manifesto confessing to the crime, and the murder weapon still on him? Despite him having no prior inclination towards that sort of thing even?

Hopefully any jury has good critical thinking skills and can see through an obvious set up.