I'm not having a problem with YT, and I'm in the UK.

You are probably right that it is deeper. According to their website :

.. which doesn't reveal much. The thing is, Microsoft, Apple and Google (for Android) already have central infrastructures in place that can or do keep a registry of their users, such as the now compulsory on-line Windows 11 account. These registries can easily be expanded to include a birthdate and anything else. I have heard that the latest iPhone update is asking users for age verification - not waiting for if/when they go to an adult website, but asking straight away. So those big tech OS companies can give a cheerful thumbs up to the new legal requirements, cheerful because it enables them to learn even more about their users than they do already.

However Linux is de-centralised and has no such infrastructure, so each distro could need to maintain its own registry of users. Clearly only the big players like Ubuntu and Red Hat could afford to do that. That is where systemd could come in : it is a common component in most Linux distros (or all in Poettering's dreams), and systemd could be the software entity that communicates with a single registry of users across all Linux distros - a registry operated by Amutable of course.

At present we do not know which way things will go, except badly.

No, that is not the only way possible, and it is not the way it is happening in the UK which has required age verification for NSFW sites since last July. It is also being applied by other sites (ie Safe for Work) for membership, out of fear. Here it is done by one of :

1) A website moderator looking at your face via your device camera - done by some small hobby forums.

2) Sending a shot of your passport, driving licence or credit card to the website for a moderator to assess.

3) The website using a verification agency who are sent a shot of your passport, driving licence or credit card. Larger websites do this (like social media) and these agencies have sprung up like mushrooms; our friend Lennart Poettering has just started one, although most are in India like other tech support and tech scamming companies.

In fact the UK government have distanced themselves from the verification process so they can't be blamed when things go wrong, like your personal details, credit card details, or entire identity being sold by fake "verification" agencies.

The UK Online Safety Act does not stop you from seeing many NSFW websites without age verification anyway. A friend told me.

I understand that these new "driverless" printers (but isn't Airprint a driver of sorts, built into CUPS?) have come about thanks to people needing to print from smartphones. Smartphones could have printer drivers of course, but they seem to have provided the impetus for some standardisation. I guess the fancier, proprietary, driver software is now in the printer itself, like Postscript printers were before cheap Win-Printers overtook the market.

What is amazing is the short notice that Brazil gave to requiring an age indicator in operating systems.  In fact I don't think they did give any "notice", they just passed a law that required it to be done within a few weeks. Perhaps they did give notice to Microsoft, Apple and even Canonical, but even if they did I can't imagine they did to the likes of Knoppix, Slackware, SystemRescue, DamnSmall, the other 400 minor distros - or Devuan.

I heard that Brazil acted as fast as it did in a knee jerk reaction to a particular video that has gone viral on the web and was displeasing to the Brazillian government. Does anyone know if this is true, and if so what it was about? It must have been a heck of a video.

I would have thought that any age indicator in the OS would need to be in an agreed format for websites to read. Is anyone aware of any industry group working on this? Or will it just be left to Microsoft to set a de-facto standard that everyone else must follow (if MS even allow that to be possible), or be locked out. I can just imagine MS devising a system that involves age verification via the MS mothership, so you need an MS account even if you are on Linux and MS can record every website you visit.

I didn't even know that Firefox could save passwords. I wouldn't trust it to. I recommend in future saving them in an encrypted file with a copy in several places, including a pen drive.

I have DSL (Damn Small Linux) on an ancient Pentium III tower with 500 Mb of memory, a 4Gb HDD for DSL itself, a 2Gb HDD for Windows 95, and a 40Gb HDD for data. I use it as a NAS to hold backups of important data in case I have a failure on my main PC, and only switch it on occasionally for transfers.  DSL is based on Debian and my installation uses JWM (Joe's Window Manager) for the GUI.

The Win95 is just to use with a fast bulk Logitech scanner which they chucked out from work when they moved to NT and Logitech didn't have a later driver for it, and also to remind me how awful Win95 was. I installed Windows first, but the DSL installation failed to add it to the boot menu, so afterwards I installed an old-time boot manager called Smart Boot Manager.

@chris2be8  Those images are on imgur. It is a casualty of the UK's Online Safety Act : imgur has decided that the cost of meeting its requirements is too great to be worthwhile so they have blocked access from the UK instead. I can't say I blame them.

That is quite a backstory behind Dr "Bob" Dobbs.

Yes, I'm aware of Slackware although I have never used it, and the modern Slackware logo is an "S" on a blue roundel. Searching for other info now, it seems that the Slackware logo back then was Tux with Bob's image on his chest.

Correct, thanks for that advice and the problem is now sorted.
FWIW, the exports manual page is not available on the client where I had been looking for it, only on the server. That's logical I suppose.

onedevone wrote :

Insanely too small or insanely too large?  Or just right? - that would be really insane!

I have 16 Gb of RAM and a 27 Gb swap partition.  I thought the advice was to have the swap area at least equal to RAM. I've never seen the swap used (maybe it does when it sleeps); but what the hell, I have six drives in my PC because I've been too lazy to take any out when I've put newer ones in. The swap is on "ancient history" spinning rust 80GB drive that has an old disused Windows XP installation on its other partition AFAIR. This reminds me to check it out for bit-rot some time.

I have not managed to see a screenshot in Synaptic for a long time (years?).  I gave up trying. Best to Google for it separately to find an image for it, if there are any.