And the historical reason why the allocation-granularity is 64 KB instead of 4 KB (or the page-size) is that it made DLL relocation very slightly faster on Alpha AXP processors. No, really! https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031008-00/?p=42...
For the United Kingdom specifically, I've suffered the misfortune of reading the Online Safety Act, and this kind of age estimation is both mentioned and permitted by the Act.
(Not a lawyer blah blah blah)
Part 3, Chapter 2, Section 12(4) specifies that user-to-user service providers are required to use either age verification or age estimation (or both!) to prevent children from accessing content that is harmful to children.
Section 12(6) goes on to state that "the age verification or age estimation must be of such a kind, and used in such a way, that it is highly effective at correctly determining whether or not a particular user is a child."
Part 12, Section 230(4) rules out self-declaration of age as being a form of age verification/estimation.
So I suppose it'll come down to whether or not Ofcom deems Discord's age estimation as "highly effective".
This is unrelated, but something I find interesting is that Category 1 user-to-user services (of which Discord is one, as per The Online Safety Act 2023 (Category 1, Category 2A and Category 2B Threshold Conditions) Regulations 2025) are required by Part 4, Chapter 1, Section 64(1) to "offer all adult users of the service the option to verify their identity (if identity verification is not required for access to the service).".
Part of me is wondering if we are all collectively misreading Discord's intent.
They have devised a system so lackluster and unverifyable that they can claim they are following the letter without having to turn over anything remotely useful to actually verify or track people's identities.
I get the impression that is part of Discord's intent they are signalling here and a lot of the response has been maybe a bit overly vitriolic in the face of that seeming message of "we are complying with the laws because we have to, but we are doing a bare minimum to do that". Especially relating those parts of the press release to the call for a Council of Teens and increased feedback.
It feels like a modern iteration of the game of way most bars check IDs: it's a bit of an honor system most nights and for most people. On days or events of increased scrutiny they put a bouncer out front. They make a show of doing it, but at the end of the day they want to sell product and not do paperwork, so it will be the bare minimum to keep the (international) law of of Discord's back. Discord seems to want just enough CYA much more than strict "we know the age of every user". This is the "we're going to put a bouncer out front" stage of the game, not the "police are at the back door and about to raid the bar" stage. It is interesting to me how many have read this PR and jumped to believing it to be the bar raid scenario.
> I don’t understand why these extra paddings are present and why one is gone. Even with pragma pack 8, should not it be only one padding?
If you're referring to `__pad2` in the example, that trailing padding is there to ensure that the size of the struct is a multiple of its alignment, which is 8, so that if there's a contiguous span of those structures, each instance after the first one will remained properly aligned.
Without `__pad2`, that struct would be 36-bytes, which would cause every other instance in an array/contiguous-span to be aligned on 4 bytes instead of 8.
In my later school years, when I had semi-regular need for printing things in colour, I took to drilling holes in the inkjet cartridges and refilling them with cheap ink using syringes.
Which worked out to about £5 for the syringes, £5 for 400 ml of CMYK ink, and my dad already had a power drill—which was equivalent to about £104-worth of black ink cartridges, and about £312-worth of colour ink cartridges. (Now it would be about £160 of black and £480 of colour).
It only took 15-to-30-minutes to refill both cartridges, including drilling the holes.
Some printer manufacturers have implemented DRM for ink to prevent this kind of thing.
Unfortunately not, I just tried running the copy included with Windows XP SP1 on Windows 11—it relies on SheRemoveQuotesW which was removed from Shell32 in Windows Vista. (It doesn't seem to be able to use a copy of a Windows-XP-sourced shell32.dll from the working directory, either).
That's because Windows 11 only comes in 64-bit flavors and Program Manager as bundled with XP would be 32-bit. WoW64[1] can't bridge 64- and 32-bit binaries in the context of system components, such as the shell.
Try running that under 32-bit Windows 10, I never tried it myself but I have a feeling it should work.
My mother cleans schools for a living, and she once remarked to me that most of the teaching staff in the grammar schools[1] she cleaned would avoid making conversation with the cleaners, and some would even avoid making eye contact, which was contrary to non-selective schools, where most of the teaching staff would make conversation with the cleaners.
[1] Grammar schools are academically-selective, state-funded schools in the UK and elsewhere—staff and students alike are generally of a higher socioeconomic milieu than in non-selective, state-funded schools.
Not initiating conversation could be down to disinterest, yes.
But I think consistently refusing eye contact does constitute a lack of respect, if the person refusing to return eye contact has no problem returning it to the upper echelons of staff.
And, having attended one of those grammar schools, I know that some of the teachers who refused to return eye contact had no issue with faux friendliness.
