Yes it’s technically trivial. I have read the patch. That’s beside the point, which is social and political.

I get to decide and report what does and does not hurt me thankyouverymuch. And I do think this is a step that erodes my right to privacy, taken with shockingly little discussion. (Which got it reverted)

There’s a lot of degrees of freedom between “just comply bro” and “good luck enforcing that”. For example https://blog.system76.com/post/system76-on-age-verification

It’s definitely wrong to degrade or harass this guy for doing it.

Buuut this is being made to support a bad law that should be opposed. The law is a bellwether for compulsory age and identity verification, which should strike fear into the hearts of everyone. And especially everyone who cares about their privacy (which really should be everyone, but …).

Furthermore, it’s questionable whether a law like this can apply to open source software. IMO it really can’t - who exactly is liable? Is the world really better with ageless Linux outlawed?

If the servers have public IPs and you want the minimum possible ports open, just SSH? With passwords disabled and large keys, it’s quite secure.

If that’s still not enough for you or you need a private gateway, then Wireguard. I can strongly recommend Tailscale - It’s really an orchestration layer on top of Wireguard. You can setup your own Derp relays and head scale if you are truly paranoid. But 99.9% you don’t need all that and Tailscale out of the box will work well.

Also Tailscale isn’t a single point of failure the way you’re imagining. It’s certainly possible for Tailscale’s servers to go down, but that won’t drop existing connections.