Apropos of age verification in the UK & US…it's a great time to re-read Dave Langford's 2000 short story "Different Kinds of Darkness".
It's a sequel to his 1988 short story "BLIT", about a kind of black-and-white image that basically crashes your brain. (This came out before Snow Crash!) Naturally, they get used by terrorists.
In DKoD, classroom and school bus windows are blacked out to keep schoolchildren from accidentally seeing BLITs. But you can't hide everything…
P. S. when I first saw a QR code, my first thought was BLITs.
