Because somewhere on their side they have a synchronization process that runs periodically every 10 minutes. If you click the link directly some of your information will be sent to a system that doesn’t yet know the link has been sent because it wasn’t synchronized.

Complete failure of design but from an IT standpoint it is understandable.

I can confirm the watching wildlife part. Maybe we can get a few more experts in here for a full empirical proof

Yes, cloudflare will not tamper with your record because you are not important enough to be worth the reputation loss. Realistically, no harm will come to you from cloudflare.

However! They are still the party that could theoretically cause the largest amount of damage to both you and your users.

Cloudflare cannot track visitors of my website, the only malicious thing they can do is to tamper with my DNS record.

They “cannot” only because they say so. Changing your DNS record allows them to read 100% of all incoming traffic even if it is TLS encrypted (because they can acquire a valid TLS certificate for your domain through a DNS challenge).

DNS is the most important foundational stone. Whoever controls your DNS can redirect all of your users to any address they want AND present a valid TLS cert through a DNS challenge. They can also redirect all E-Mails of the associates domain, and if any address was used to register an account, they can reset that accounts password. Trusting someone to handle your DNS is the highest trust you can put on someone on the internet. And that is both for a website povider trusting the registrar of their domain and for a end user with their DNS resolver.

Windows will break your bootloader in a few updates time. It will literally check all drives in your PC and put a windows bootloader on it, overwriting any others that are already there.

With a tiny bit of offsec you can make pretty bulletproof setup.

Work only exists inside of a Win11 VM. It never touches the underlying system! All files associated with that VM (most importantly the virtual disk) live on a separate partition, or better separate drive. That partition is not mounted in fstab. So under normal circumstances it should never be mounted. So any fuck up they do to their Linux system will leave that partition untouched. If worst comes to worst that can boot a live iso from USB and run their work VM from there.

I would trust that setup infinitely more than having windows as a base system.

For smaller (indie) studios it can make sense. If the game costs more money to developed than the developer has, preordering is indistinguishable from crowdsourcing like kickstarter. It removes the need for the developer to take a loan and investors, possibly giving up creative freedom.

Anything backed by a (big-ish) publisher should never be preordered!

Yeah standard bash Ctrl+r is just so painful. I much rather use “history | grep searchtearm” than that awfull search. fzf is a whole other level. But nowadays I just use fish shell which IMO has even better search than fzf

Not sure if there are tar pits with dinosaur bones but there are bones (not petrified bones) of post-dinosaur megafauna like sabertooths in the La Break tar pit in Los Angeles. There probably exists a real dinosaur bone somewhere on the planet.

Both of those are screwed over by the healthcare system and the companies perpetrating it. If you cant afford healthcare or don’t understand it because it is to convoluted, that is a result of the policies of healthcare providers.

Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. If OP is unable or unwilling to fix a problem that is important to her, why isn’t she allowed to pay someone to fix it?

You wouldn’t say its toxic if she threatens to call a plumber after OP promised multiple times to fix the leaking toilet.

While not caring about the things that should matter to them

Dont even need to make it open source for that. Just use either visual studio/vsc or have the code on github (private repo so not OSS)

But that is also the worst part of boarderlands

The verifier does not have the information which sites you use. That’s the point of the setup. All communication goes through you, never the site to the verifier directly. You only pass cryptographic values between them that does not include identifiable information (neither about you to the website, nor about the website to the verifier). The verifier knows who you are, the website knows that you are old enough. Nothing else.

This system does nothing to protect against an allowed user helping a not allowed user to gain access

There is no system in the world that can fully prevent an authorized user to grant access to an unauthorized user. Even with an all time on camera and screensharing I can still find ways to have someone else control my computer while I “authorize” the connection with my face in the camera

Super easy. Technology has existed for quite some time and was already used in the encrpytion of web traffic.

Basically: you sign up with your “age verification institution” (ideally a service of your government because they have your ID anyway and no profit motive). This involves createing a private key (reaaaaaaaaaaly long password that is saved in a file on your device) and saving the public key with that institution. They also check your ID to ensure your identity and your age.

When you want to visit a 18+ website, the website sends you a nonce (loooooong random number). You take that nonce and send it to the verifier, along with a signature of your private key (and the age they want you verified against). The verifier verifies your signature using your public key. They then sign the nonce with their own private key, thereby verifying, that you, the owner of your private key (whos identity and age they have verified) are above the asked age theshould. You then send the signed nonce back to the 18+ website and they can verifiy the signature to confirm that a trusted age verifier has verified your age.

The site never has access to your identity and the verifier never knows which site you visited, only that you wanted to visit a website that wants to know if you are of a certain age.

(The corresponding technology was used for OCSP Stapling in TLS verification … and has been discontinued last year because nobody was using it …)

The cosmologies are difficult to compare because “power” in middle earth is just kinda … power. Sauron doesn’t need to have a “chain lightning lvl 10, 100.000 damage per second” ability. He can just … exist, and all the evil (or just lesser willed) creatures around will just fully accept him as their leader and do whatever he says. It a cosmic force or aura that is never quantified in any way. Same with ganfalf. He does very little magic. His power is also mostly in his presence that compels the good guys to do good things.

You can read right?

Führer = Hitler
Something-Führer / Führer-Something = not Hitler

The word Führer is 99% used for Hitler. There are many variants that are OK to use though. Most notably Anführer (if Führer is leader, Anführer would be “the one who leads ahead”) which is the common word to use for leader. Others are composites like Bergführer (mountain guide).

The swastica also existed before the nazis but is now forever tainted.