i_am_not_a_robot
Elon is not in Brazil, and making the service available via CloudFlare was not an action taken in Brazil. Brazil should be able to seize assets in Brazil and change how they block access to prevent Twitter from doing business in Brazil, but arresting people in other countries for something like this is extreme.
large companies who can afford the security infra to do those checks and store that data
There is no such company. This is just another way to ban “harmful” content. Verifying your identity and age to access restricted content is practically guaranteed to result in your identity being compromised within your lifetime.
Having a non-garbage domain provider can be a luxury. I used to work at a place where we were paying boatloads of money for certificates from Sectigo for internal services, and they were charging us extra per additional name and even more if we wanted a wildcard, even though it didn’t cost them anything to include those options. Getting IT to set up the DNS records for Let’s Encrypt DNS verification was never going to happen.
Is it baffling? Live service games are all about extracting as much money from players as possible via loot boxes and battle passes. The best game is the game that makes the most money. Therefore, live services are the optimal type of game.
A large percentage of those hosts with SSH enabled are cloud machines because it’s standard for cloud machines to be only accessible by SSH by default. I’ve never seen a serious security guide that says to set up a VPN and move SSH behind the VPN, although some cloud instances are inherently like this because they’re on a virtual private network managed by the hosting provider for other reasons.
SSH is much simpler and more universal than a VPN. You can often use SSH port forwarding to access services without configuring a VPN. Recommending everyone to set up a VPN for everything makes networking and remote access much more complicated for new users.