TLDW:
Brazil is requiring OS level age verification by march 17th, 2026.
New York about to vote on a law that would “require all manufacturers of internet-enabled devices, operating systems, or application stores to conduct commercially reason-able and technically feasible age assurance for users at the point of device activation.”
In order to “incentivize” age verification, The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has announced that they will ignore COPPA violations for software performing age verification.
I seem to recall that if the disk had copy protection you could also use this to simulate an earthquake as the 1541 threw its heads against the stops with all its might…
Happy days!
Ah yes, C64 floppy drive “headbanging”.
IIRC this is because rather than ship a design with a limit switch or any position sensing at all, the drive software just rapidly slaps the read head home a bunch of times to ensure it’s properly aligned with track zero. I have a hard time believing this was to reduce part count, because the drive itself is a whole-ass 6502 computer; the sale price also reflected that. Instead, I think it’s a software fix for a “sometimes an issue” hardware problem.