Currently, I can't check my Bluesky direct messages until I've allowed the Epic Games-owned KWS to look at either my bank card, my ID, or my wizened visage. As I'm based in the UK, it's not just Bluesky I've got to worry about either, with similar verification processes now present on Reddit, Discord, and even my partner's Xbox.

This is all due to the Online Safety Act, which came into effect in the UK last year. For many, these age checks are an annoyance at best—but they also represent something that will have ramifications far beyond the British Isles. The UK's Act was designed in part to ensure children in the UK could not easily access "harmful content." This is a broad term that includes but is not limited to pornography, content that promotes "self-harm, eating disorders, or suicide," and "bullying".

To comply with the act and differentiate children from the adults, many platforms have opted for age-gates like the one I'm encountering on Bluesky. Almost 70% of Brits surveyed shortly after the Online Safety Act came into effect said they supported it…though 64% didn't think it would be all that effective. Indeed, I could log into a VPN to get past the UK-based Bluesky block—though unfortunately for me, I am stubborn, lazy, and cheap (apologies if you've been trying to get ahold of me).

Besides all that, I'm not especially keen to hand over my personal data to a third-party age verification vendor such as KWS for data privacy reasons. As recently as October, a Discord security breach may have leaked 70,000 age-verification ID photos. Discord's primary age-verification partner, K-ID, was keen to clarify that it was not involved.

As Jacob has previously outlined, there are better ways to implement age checks. As it stands, though, I'm not naive enough to think the data I keep elsewhere is in hands that are any safer. However, not submitting to an age assurance check makes for one less point of failure from which my likeness or even my official documents can leak out.

Discord first announced it would be using Brits as age assurance guinea pigs back in April 2025, but it turns out that may have all been prologue. Just in case you've been napping under a cool mossy rock for the last while, the social platform caused quite a stir this month when it announced it would be rolling out age verifying facial scans and ID checks globally this March. The case can be made that it is 'complying in advance,' as the UK's approach to online safety potentially serves as a preview for PC gamers further afield.

On the one hand, yeah, I'd rather children growing up today didn't see all the things I saw thanks to having unfettered internet access throughout the early oughts. I'd also rather young'uns now didn't have to experience all the harassment I experienced at the hands of my own peers, newly empowered by that unfettered internet access.

On the other hand, the internet answered a lot of questions I was absolutely not going to ask my parents; when I see a vague term like "harmful content" I do have to wonder what genuinely educational resources on the wider internet—say, regarding art history or personal health—might end up age-gated because someone somewhere has decided they're tantamount to 'pornography.'

I'm only just the other side of 30, but Section 28 was still in effect for some of my school years. For those who don't know, Section 28 was a law that prevented schools in England, Scotland, and Wales from doing anything that could be interpreted as "intentionally [promoting] homosexuality or [publishing] material with the intention of promoting homosexuality". So, until the law was repealed in the early 2000's, a lot of schools simply pretended LGBTQIA+ folks didn't exist. The internet, for all of its faults, helped to fill that deafening silence for me.

Even so, I remember there being content blocks back in my day, too, and I know I found more than a few ways around those. Indeed, if we take just Discord today, our James has found not one but two different ways to fool its face scans—though the platform may already be formulating a counter to these workarounds.

Shortly after issuing assurances that not all users will even have to undergo an age check, a since-edited support article revealed that some UK users "may be part of an experiment where your information will be processed by an age-assurance vendor, Persona." Amid reports of folks easily fooling its primary third-party vendor's age verification checks, Discord may have been seeking to diversify its defences.

Persona's investors include Peter Thiel, co-founder of ICE's premier surveillance provider, Palantir. Though Persona and Palantir are two totally separate companies that do not share either data or operations, that's still a pretty grimy connection. Not least of all because earlier this week, the US Department of Homeland Security reportedly subpoenaed a number of major online platforms—including Discord, Reddit, Google, and Meta—in order to obtain the personal details of accountholders who had been critical of ICE or identified the locations of its agents. We don't yet know if Discord complied, though we have reached out for comment.

There is an even worse wrinkle in the Discord-Persona 'experiment': while Discord had previously said that data like age verification face scans would only be stored and processed on users' own devices, those who ended up part of the Persona experiment may have their information "temporarily stored for up to 7 days, then deleted."

Indeed, some security researchers are already claiming to have "found a Persona frontend exposed to the open internet on a US government-authorized server."

All of that said, Persona is not part of Discord's long-term strategy, with the platform telling Kotaku earlier this week that its dealings with the vendor were part of a "limited test" that has since been concluded. That leaves K-id's on-device processing in effect, but even that doesn't necessarily end the privacy nightmare. Data breaches usually leave platforms scrambling for user good will, but Discord seems all too happy to keep walking into rakes.

One could jump ship and shop around for a free Discord alternative as I recently did, but all of the platforms I tested will likely have to implement some sort of age assurance check if they haven't already in order to continue serving users based in the UK in the future. That doesn't mean I'll be letting them scan my face any time soon; I may have to deploy Norman Reedus and his funky foetus before long as third-party age verification vendors have done little to earn my trust or a gander at my actual face.

The last couple of weeks have been such a deep breath of fresh air. It's been nice to focus on the positivity of a leap forward in gaming mouse technology with the Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike rather than doom-maxxing with more 'state of the industry' reflections on high memory prices and high GPU prices and high– well, you get the idea.

The Superstrike, if you're not already aware, puts analogue switches under the left and right mouse buttons, allowing for adjustable actuation and rapid trigger. Given these are entirely adjustable, they don't make a physical click, so the Superstrike combines this with haptic motors to generate the feeling of a click when the button reaches your chosen actuation point.

We've not had this before in a gaming mouse. Some have pointed out that the Swiftpoint Z series has had pressure-sensitive clicks for a while, but these clicks are nothing like the Superstrike's. The Swiftpoint Z has an initial mechanical click and then uses pressure pads rather than electromagnetic sensing to measure the button press.

The Superstrike's Haptic Inductive Trigger System (HITS), on the other hand, completely eliminates the initial mechanical click and allows for ultra-light actuation, plus rapid trigger. In other words, it's giving the same advantages that Hall effect and other popular analogue technologies give for keyboards.

Speaking of Hall effect keyboards, that's pretty much what we're dealing with here, in terms of how Logitech's HITS tech will likely affect the market. I don't see smaller mouse 'clone' companies ignoring it for very long; I'd expect there to be cheaper copycats within the next few months, especially given the hype over the Superstrike that these companies will no doubt have noticed.

When analogue gaming keyboards started popping up and gaining traction a few years ago—especially once they started using Hall effect rather than optical tech—there was scepticism in some corners of the internet. Some of that was very justified, because it was about the overall build quality of these keyboards, which didn't match good enthusiast typing experiences.

Now, though, we have budget Hall effect keyboards and ones that sound and feel just as good as traditional mechanical keyboards. In fact, these days, it's often worth opting for a Hall effect or some other kind of analogue keyboard (TMR, optical, induction) even if you're not a competitive gamer, just because you won't be losing out on anything, but you will be gaining the ability to set your actuation point to exactly where you like.

Any scepticism over Hall effect and other analogue technologies for gaming keyboards has been shown to be unfounded. I think the same will be true for analogue technology in gaming mice.

In fact, I think this technology has more of a chance to be vindicated even quicker than Hall effect was on keyboards. That's because we've already seen how well analogue tech can cement itself in the peripheral market, so there should be less resistance from manufacturers. And many companies will already have experience implementing this technology in their keyboards, so there's less risk on that front, too.

Admittedly, there is more of a question about the importance of having adjustable actuation in a mouse than in a keyboard. But after having used the Superstrike extensively for a couple of weeks now, I think this is an argument that will be rebuffed when enough people have tried it. The benefits, at least for tactical FPS games or very click-heavy games like MOBAs and RTS games, feel tangible and can definitely raise the skill ceiling.

And look, I'm not saying the mouse is perfect—it's not—but isn't it nice to actually get excited over something for a change, and to actually have a reason to? This is why many of us get into PC gaming hardware in the first place, is it not: because sometimes there can be exciting developments rather than piecemeal improvements?

I've seen some people complaining about it essentially being a G Pro X Superlight 2 apart from the new click tech, and this is a valid complaint because, yes, it's basically the same mouse, and there are downsides to this. For instance, I've noticed the Superstrike's middle click stops registering after holding it down for a while if you don't use a very firm touch, which was also a known problem with the Superlight 2. And the skates aren't great for cloth pads, either, as they're quite slow UPE ones.

The counterpoint to the argument that it's essentially a Superlight 2 is that the company has brought the mouse to market very quickly, to get the tech into people's hands ASAP and before another company does. Logitech's chief engineer Regis Croisonnier told me as much:

"Here, we knew we had a golden nugget in our hands, right? We wanted to move fast, so we took all the shortcuts we could… I think for us, it was clear that we had to move fast… we have a fantastic idea. And on the other hand, it's obvious, right? When you know it, when you have it in your hand, it's obvious, right?"

The implication, of course, is that if it wasn't brought to market as quickly as possible, then others might have beaten them to it. Which isn't a very consumer-focused reason, of course, but the benefit for us is that we get this technology quicker.

Whatever you think of that argument, though—whether you're happy with it or would have rather waited longer for a Superstrike with a different design—there's no denying that the technology is exciting.

Setting aside the specifics of its implementation in the Superstrike, HITS itself has shown the gaming mouse market that analogue and rapid trigger technology in a gaming mouse is possible and useful in some competitive games. I'll take that kind of a leap forward over slight frame rate increases, increasingly ridiculous refresh rates, 8K polling, and any number of other PC gaming hardware changes we've seen over the last few years.

The Superstrike's haptic and induction technology joins the likes of Hall effect for keyboards, OLED for monitors, and 3D V-Cache for CPUs in terms of its market-transforming power. It's just a question of how long it will take for that to come to fruition in the market at large, and even on that front, I think there's reason to be optimistic.

This week, Corsair has announced that its Frame 4000D cases are getting two new colourways: Nova and Galaxy. They have colour-shift paint finishes "that change tone as light moves across the surface". Corsair says this creates "a refined and subtle look that shifts with viewing angle and ambient lighting"

The Nova case appears to be more blue-toned, shifting to purple under the light. Galaxy, on the other hand, appears dark, phasing from grey to green, to a dark pink. These two new colours are part of the 'Vault Series' and don't just come with flashy aesthetic changes.

The Corsair 4000D Vault Series has a compact PSU shroud that Corsair says leaves space for a 120 mm fan on the case floor. The case also has a full tempered-glass side panel (as opposed to the almost full panel of the 4000D) for showing off internals, and an upgraded front-panel IO. That upgraded IO now has three USB Type-C ports (with one being 20 Gbps and the other two being 5 Gbps).

Adding to the aesthetic, these new cases have an ARGB power button, which can be used to match the lighting in the build. There's even an "MX-Style green mechanical switch for a satisfying feel." That ARGB button can be swapped with a different mechanical switch if you don't like the feel, too, which feels like the right kind of 'doing too much.'

Each version of the Vault edition case is limited to just 1337 models and can be bought right now for $140. That means these new cases are just $15 more than the standard 4000D. Well, sort of. The standard 4000D model actually comes with three RS120 ARGB performance fans, and that will cost you $60 extra.

Still, considering what you get for the money, I actually think the Vault Series is rather reasonably priced. On top of the new colours and upgraded front IO, each case is numbered, which is a neat touch.

This is the second time in just a handful of months that a piece of gaming hardware has been limited to 1337 models. Based on L33t (which is fairly retro gaming slang), the Razer Boomslang is also limited to that many units, though it'll cost you $1,337 in return.

However, Razer isn't exactly a stranger to expensive versions of its older gear (here's looking at you, Huntsman Signature Edition). I'd have to see them in person to know for sure, but congrats, Corsair, I think I see the vision with this one. I see that vision so much that I'm a little tempted to cover it in dust and RGB lighting in my gamer den.