Age verification is one thing, but I routinely verify my id online. Banking, insurance, taxes, various other government things, car registrations, some of the kids school stuff and so on. We have pretty decent infrastructure in place here in Finland and the entities I identify myself online already has my info anyways. I can use either my banking app or mobile verification to securely prove I am who I claim to be and the systems have roughly the same user experience than MFA tokens.

Each of those are roughly zero-knowledge, the website I log in receives just “User with login token xxx is IsoKiero with SSN 123456789” and the tokens expire after a while. Also there’s restrictions in place that my insurance company can’t just sell my data to whomever unless I opt-in for their “marketing” program (not going to happen) and even then there’s some limitations on how they can use the data.

The same system could be adopted to age verification, but that’s a whole another can of worms.

Sound and power consumption. At least in my case those are important if I was going to store data at my mothers house. Power consumption might not matter that much, but HDD sound definetly does. And even with spinning rust hardware cost would be somewhere around 250€ compared to ~20€/month of cloud storage.

YMMV, in my scenario it’s just easier to use a cloud provider.

That absolutely works, but when I built my offsite backup to hetzner I also thought about setting up own hardware and came to conclusion that for myself it doesn’t really make a ton of sense. New RPi + 4TB ssd/m.2 drive with accessories adds up to something around 400€ (if that’s even enough today), or few years worth of cloud backups. With own hardware there’s always need to maintain it and hardware failures are always an option, so for me it makes more sense to just rely on big players with offsite backups. Your case might be different for various reasons, but sometimes renting capacity just makes more sense in the big picture.

I’m using proxmox backup server to make copies of full virtual machines, it takes care of encryption and verification of the data, so it’s not exactly the same than your scenario. Borg Backup is commonly recommended, but restic and dejadup are worth checking out too.

I use hetzner storagebox for similar needs. It’s not encrypted, so you need to manage that by yourself, but they support a ton of protocols and pricing is decent, even if they’re increasing the price shortly.

Wikipedia has a decent history lesson on Fedora. It’s not just sponsored by Red Hat, it practically replaced the open version of RHEL, so it’s pretty tightly tied to the Red Hat company. CentOS was a bit similar case, which is now discontinued and functionally replaced by AlmaLinux.

Red Hat has already a lot of control over the project, but if they decided to do something stupid with it, something else would take Fedoras place pretty quickly, so I don’t see any ‘corporate threat’ to Fedora nor Linux community in general. That’s the way things have been for a long time and Red Hat has contributed quite a lot to the Linux development over the years which we all can enjoy.

Fedora might get obsolete in the future, maybe because of changes in Red Hat or maybe for some other reason. New distributions raise and others pan out for multiple reasons. Mandrake (or later Mandriva) was somewhat popular at the time, but it’s now dead. Damn Small Linux had it’s userbase for a while, but it’s also now dead, like a handful of other somewhat decent sized projects.

Leaked data doesn’t even need to be dangerous to life. I, like many others, don’t have “nothing to hide”, but I don’t still want my real name next to a list of content I’ve watched from streaming sites. Also I don’t really want my identity tied to this pseudonym, or any other accounts on any platform. There’s a crapload of problems and it would be a heaven for scammers if there was no way to stay at least relatively anonymous around the net.

Philip Morris: 1 pack of cigarettes per day is not addiction.

Team expects, may be useful, could be used, prototype, are currently investigating and so on. Cool piece of technolgy, but no even mention when they’d expect that to be commercially available, if it’s even possible to manufacture in commercial scale. Like many other new battery chemistries and technologies, it shows promise and makes a good headline, but at this point that’s pretty much it.