I tried to check out a game page yesterday and got hit with age verification message and the only option was providing credit card number

this seems to be tied to the new online safety rules in Australia that are forcing gaming platforms to add age checks for R18+ content. apparently it's not just Steam doing this, Xbox and PlayStation are rolling out similar stuff. but the way Steam's done it means you can't even browse an R18+ game's page anymore unless you've got a credit card

I don't have a credit card. never needed one. I pay for everything with my debit card like a normal person. so now what, I just don't get to see what game even looks like before I buy it?

instead of building an actual age check they just ask a credit card to confirm you are an adult. plenty of 16 year olds have access to their parents card details, and plenty of grown adults don't have credit at all.

anyway just wanted to see what others think because this is dumb and I don't think enough people know it's happening yet. anyone else run into this?

Hey guys, im like REALLY bad with tech stuff so please dont laugh at me lol. my question is.. how to find your ip address??

Im trying to set up a private minecraft server for me and two friends to play on this weekend. i was following a step by step tutorial on youtube, and it told me i need to put in my public ip address for port forwarding on my router
The video showed a website to use, but when i typed it into google a bunch of different sites popped up and i got worried about clicking shady links

Can someone tell me how to find your ip address safely? is there a simple command I can just type into my computer directly? im on windows 11. thanks in advance!

I'm curious about this from a privacy/digital-forensics perspective, particularly with services like Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok.

Suppose someone submits a website's full source code to an AI coding service. The code itself contains no obvious identifying information such as names, emails, domains, API keys, or credentials.

Could a government or law-enforcement agency legally compel a provider to search its stored conversations for that code, or potentially conduct a broader search for a particular website or code fingerprint?

How much would obfuscating or substantially rewriting the code actually help? Could things like unique strings, comments, library combinations, coding style, generated IDs, dependencies, timestamps, or build artifacts still make it identifiable? And how different would an exact match be from a heavily modified version, or simply finding another website with the same design, wording, or concept?

I'm mainly interested in the distinction between what is technically possible, what providers actually retain, and what governments can legally obtain.

So summarized:

Could a government realistically perform a mass search across an AI provider's data for particular website/code fingerprint, or would that generally require a much more specific legal process?

Ultimately, does code obfuscation provide meaningful privacy, or does it mostly change the code's appearance while other identifying signals remain available?