Off the back of my project to un-suckify BBC News’ RSS feeds (https://bbc-feeds.danq.dev) by removing non-news content and duplicate items, I
received an email this week (addressing me by the wrong name, I might add) from somebody who asked if I could do the same… for the Daily Mail.
I’m so very tempted to provide an empty RSS feed and say “there you go; that’s an RSS feed of the Daily Mail but with the crap bits removed”.
Turns out my distaste for the Daily Mail is greater than my love of clean RSS.
This article is probably “safe for work” (depending on your workplace).
It makes reference to a popular pornographic website and the features of that website. It contains screenshots, but the porny bits are blurred. The links are all safe.
Verify your age
After Pornhub introduced age check to comply with the Online Safety Act1,
I figured that I’d make an account to see how arduous and privacy-destroying the process of verifying that I was old enough to see naked people2. I thought it would make an
amusing blog post.
I felt confident that my stupid name, if nothing else, would guarantee me a hard time with this kind of automated system.
Unfortunately3,
it turned out to be super-easy for me to pass the age verification.
I just hit “verify by email” with the third-party age verification tool they use, entered an email address that’s associated with a few online accounts (not even the one I gave
Pornhub!), and… everything just worked.
Sooo… this isn’t a blog post about how insurmountable age verification is. This is a blog post about something else I discovered as a result of doing this research:
Pornhub has “achievements”!
Achievement unlocked
I was slightly surprised to see how many “social networking”-like features Pornhub accounts have. You can upload a profile photo… you have a “wall” that you can post to, and you can
post to other people’s. Your profile (unless you tell it not to) shares which channels you’ve subscribed to, which videos you’ve favourited, and so on.
Who on Earth wants those features? I mean: really? 😅 I consider myself pretty sex-positive, but I’m not sure I’d want there to be a web page with my name, photo, and a
list of all my favourite dirty vids!4
Anyway… the other thing a Pornhub profile seems to provide is… achievements:
Hurrah, I guess? The Virgin was easy, at least (snerk), unlike most of the things on my Steam profile.
I’ve only got the one achievement right now, of course, and it’s the one that you get “for free”. So it didn’t feel like I’d earned it.
I suppose I was an actual virgin, once. And I had to prove that I’m a real human to get an account. So… maybe I earned it?
Your profile page encourages you to ‘earn and show off more achievements’. Because, yes, your ‘achievements’ are on your public profile too!
But just stop and think about what this means for a moment. At some point, in some conference room at Pornhub HQ, there was a meeting in which somebody said something like:
“You know what we need? Public profile pages for all Pornhub accounts. And they should show, like, ‘achievements’ like you get for videogames. Except the achievements are for
things like how much porn you’ve watched and how often. You can show it off to your friends!”
If it weren’t for the time-based achievements like ’10 year-old account’, I’ll bet there’d be people competing to speedrun Pornhub.
Complete list of Pornhub Achievements
I’ve reverse-engineered the complete6
collection of Pornhub Achievements for you. Y’know, in case you’re trying to finish your collection:
The Virgin
Congrats! You have accessed your account for the first time! Enjoy the ride on Many Faps Road.
The Freshman
You have accessed your account for the 10th time! I take it you’ve enjoyed the 9 last times?
The Sophomore
You have accessed your account for the 100th time! Maximus Fappitus, you’re a true Pornhub warrior!
The Junior
You have accessed your account for the 500th time! If only you could get air miles for this.
The Senior
You have accessed your account for the 1000th time! If only you could get air miles for this.
The Porn Buff
You’ve watched 10 videos – This is just the beginning, trust me.
The Two Thumbs
You’ve watched 500 videos – Lotion or no lotion, that is the question.
The Cinephile
You’ve watched 5,000 videos – Be careful, carpal tunnel is a thing.
The Connoisseur
You’ve watched 50,000 videos – you are a veritable porn expert now.
1 Year Old Account
Our very first anniversary, I wish us many more!
2 Year Old Account
Two years of pleasure!
3 Year Old Account
Three years… Ah! The memories!
4 Year Old Account
Most relationships don’t even last this long #funfact
5 Year Old Account
That’s half a decade of watching porn.. woah… that’s impressive.
6 Year Old Account
I guess we were a match made in heaven. Who would’ve known that 6 years later, you would still be fapping on me.
7 Year Old Account
No 7 year itch here! Thanks for 7 fappy years
8 Year Old Account
The Outlook is good: you’ve had 8 magical years on Pornhub!
9 Year Old Account
In 9 more years, your account will be old enough to view itself.
10 Year Old Account
You were really ahead of the wave – here’s to a decade on Pornhub!
I have no idea who this feature is “for”. I’d feel the same way if YouTube had achievements, too7, but the fact
that you can, and by default do, showcase your achievements on a porn site is what really blows my mind.
But maybe they ought to double-down and add more achievements. If they’re going to have them, they might as well make the most of them! How about achievements for watching
a particular video a certain number of times? Or for watching videos in each of many different hour segments of the day? Or for logging in to your account and out again
without consuming any pornography (hey, that’s one that I would have earned!)? If they’re going to have this bizarre feature, they might as well double-down on it!
I also have no idea who this blog post is “for”. If it turned out to be for you (maybe you wanted to know how to unlock all the achievements… or maybe you just
found this as amusing as I did), leave me a comment!
Footnotes
1 Don’t get me started with everything that’s wrong with the so-called Online Safety Act.
Just… don’t. The tl;dr would be that it’s about 60% good ideas, 20% good implementation.
2 Obviously if I were actually trying to use Pornhub I’d just use a VPN with an
endpoint outside of the UK. Y’know, like a sensible person.
3 I mean: it’s probably pretty fortunate that – based on my experience at least –
it seems to be easy for adults to verify that they’re adults in order to access services that are restricted to adults as a result of the OSA. But it’s unfortunate in that I’d hoped
to make a spicy blog post about all the hoops I had to jump through and ultimately it turned out that there was only one hoop and it was pretty easy.
4 Of course, the Indieweb fan within me also says that if I did want
such a page to exist, I’d want it to be on my own domain. Should there be an Indieweb post kind for “fap” for people who want
to publicly track their masturbatory activities as an exercise in the quantified self?
Or should there be a “sex” kind that works a bit like “invitation” in that you can optionally tag other people who were involved? Or is
sex a kind of “exercise”? Could it be considered “game play”? What about when it’s a “performance”? Of course, the irony is that anybody who puts a significant amount of effort into standardising the way that a person
might publicly catalogue their sex life… is probably rendering themselves less-likely to have one.
I think I got off-topic in this footnote.
5 To be fair, I’ve worked places where committee groupthink has made worse
decisions. Want a topical example? My former employer The Bodleian Libraries decided to call a podcast series “BodCast” without first
performing a search… which would have revealed that Playboy were already using that name for a series of titillating vlogs. Curiously, it was Playboy who caved and renamed their
service first. Presumably the strippers didn’t want to be associated with librarians?
6 It’s possible there are achievements I’ve missed – their spriteset file looks like it
contains others! – that are only available to content creators on the platform. But if that’s the case, it further reinforces that these achievements are for the purpose of
consumers who want to show off how many videos they’ve watched, or whatever! Weird, right?
7 “Congratulations: you watched your 500th YouTube ‘short’ – look how much of your life
you’ve wasted!”
It adds a layer of humanity and personality to the Web. It introduces me to cool new people, and re-introduces me to cool people whom I’d crossed paths with at a distance: Joe’s one of
the latter, but I’ve now taken the time to ensure he’s in my RSS reader… and, by proxy, in my blogroll.
I don’t have a return address for anybody who posted anything to me, yet (obviously I’d have masked it out from the postcard if I had!), but I feel like I ought to buy some postcards
now too. It’s only a matter of time.
And hey, maybe there’s mileage in starting an Personal Web Postcards Club or something…
Amusing announcement from the captain of my plane out of Tenerife South this afternoon. In place of the usual recommendation to keep your seatbelt fastened while seated in case of
turbulence, he advised that there was a “risk of potholes”.
I’m sure the analogy makes sense to the Brits aboard, but I hope it translated well for the Spanish speakers on this plane!
My partner Ruth and I are staying at the Meliá hotel down in the city, from which amazingly I was able to get a WiFi connection despite the
considerable distance!
As others have observed, the hint is misleading for this cache. Substitute the word “right” in place of the word “left” and the hint makes more sense!
Ruth and I made several attempts today without success: a muggle was sat nearby in such a way that access to the GZ was obstructed. We took a
walk to the nearby Anglican church – whose architecture, if you ignore the volcanic rock, is uncannily like that of Anglican churches in the UK – but then we returned the muggle had
very much set up camp and was going nowhere. We attempted to find a way to the cache from the opposite side without luck, and eventually had to give up. 😔
After solving the riddle yesterday, my partner Ruth and I came up from the seafront to find this cache today. What a delightful spot to hide
the cache, and what a wonderful puzzle (and spot of local literary history) with which to bring us here.
SL, FP awarded. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK. TFTC!
In January 2024 I participated in Bloganuary, a “write a blog post every day for a month” challenge organised by Automattic. I wasn’t
100% impressed by the prompts made available and was – as an employee of Automattic – shuffling towards trying to help make them better in a future year. To be part of the solution!
There’s definitely something in this ‘winter sun’ thing that seems to help me stay sane in the cold dark months. This morning, I’m blogging from a
hotel balcony in Peurtro de la Cruz, Tenerife.
Of course, two significant things changed since then:
As part of a sweeping range of redundancies, I was let go from my position at Automattic2,
and
Automattic ceased running Bloganuary: I’m guessing that the folks responsible for making it happen were among the many that Automattic decided to axe, or else their shifting
priorities – reflected by their waves of layoffs – are no longer compatible with providing that service to bloggers.
Ah well, I figured. I’d just do my own thing. I can write something for every day in January 2026, can’t I?
Generating a chart...
If this message doesn't go away, the JavaScript that makes this magic work probably isn't doing its job right: please tell Dan so he can fix it.
In general, I suppose I’ve been blogging more-frequently lately. Why is that? I guess it’s been a realisation that a blog post doesn’t always have to be polished to perfection.
I still write long-form posts which require research and planning, like setting up a network of Windows 3.x VMs just to get screenshots of what
programming then looked like or making that podcast episode with the music in it… but I’m also feeling more-free to just
express myself in the moment. To share things I see that look interesting or funny or
pretty, or just whatever I’m thinking. I’ve been using “kinds” to categorise my posts so it’s easy for people to avoid my more-inane stuff if
they like, but that’s a secondary consideration because ultimately… I blog for me.
Anyway… all of which is to say that I’ve been writing more and I’ve been loving it. The best way to read more of what I’m writing, if you’d like to, remains: by subscribing via RSS.
1 I’d anticipated having a lack of Internet access, but in fact 4G was widespread
throughout both islands and overall I managed to post something on every day except three in January 2025.
2 Based on friends I’ve spoken to, there seem to have been a lot more folks let go since;
the company seems to be shrinking quite a lot, which might go some way to explaining my second observation too.
My partner Ruth and I were disappointed not to be able to hike any of the trails up here today – they’re all closed – but enjoyed finding both
the nearby Virtual and this Earthcache geocaches. The evidence of lava flows (that remain to this day!) are really quite impressive.
If I’m on holiday and a hotel offers me eggs benedict for breakfast, I’ll almost always order it. But I’d never make it at home.
I tell myself that this is because hollandaise sauce is notoriously easy to mess up. That I don’t want to go through the learning process only to make something inferior to what I eat
as a holiday treat.
But maybe it’s just that my brain wants to keep eggs benedict as a signifier that I’m on holiday. That I can unplug from the world, stop thinking about work, and enjoy a
leisurely breakfast with some creamy eggs and a long black coffee.
Maybe eggs benedict just has to remain “holiday food”, for me.
RSS readers rock. Having a single place you connect for a low-bandwidth bundle of everything you might want to read means it doesn’t matter how slow the WiFi is on your aeroplane, you
can get all the text content in one tap.
(I’m using Capy Reader to connect to FreshRSS, by the way.)
An RM Nimbus was not the first computer on which I played Game of Life1. But this glider is here symbolically, anyway.
I can trace my hacker roots back further than my first experience of using an RM
Nimbus M-Series in circa 19922.
But there was something particular about my experience of this popular piece of British edutech kit which provided me with a seminal experience that shaped my “hacker identity”. And
it’s that experience about which I’d like to tell you:
Shortly after I started secondary school, they managed to upgrade their computer lab from a handful of Nimbus PC-186s to a fancy new network of M-Series PC-386s. The school were clearly very proud of this cutting-edge new acquisition, and we watched the
teachers lay out the manuals and worksheets which smelled fresh and new and didn’t yet have their corners frayed nor their covers daubed in graffiti.
I only got to use the schools’ older computers – this kind! – once or twice before the new ones were delivered.
Program Manager
The new ones ran Windows 3 (how fancy!). Well… kind-of. They’d been patched with a carefully-modified copy of Program Manager that imposed a variety of limitations. For example, they had removed the File > Run… menu item, along
with an icon for File Manager, in order to restrict access to only the applications approved by the network administrator.
A special program was made available to copy files between floppy disks and the user’s network home directory. This allowed a student to take their work home with them if they wanted.
The copying application – whose interface was vastly inferior to File Manager‘s – was limited to only copying files with extensions in its allowlist. This meant that (given
that no tool was available that could rename files) the network was protected from anybody introducing any illicit file types.
Bring a .doc on a floppy? You can copy it to your home directory. Bring a .exe? You can’t even see it.
To young-teen-Dan, this felt like a challenge. What I had in front of me was a general-purpose computer with a limited selection of software but a floppy drive through which media could
be introduced. What could I make it do?
This isn’t my school’s computer lab circa mid-1990s (it’s this school) but it has absolutely the same
energy. Except that I think Solitaire was one of the applications that had been carefully removed from Program Manager.
Spoiler: eventually I ended up being able to execute pretty much anything I wanted, but we’ll get to that. The journey is the important part of the story. I didn’t start by asking “can
I trick this locked-down computer lab into letting my friends and I play Doom deathmatches on it?” I started by asking “what can I make it do?”; everything else built up over
time.
Recorder + Paintbrush made for an interesting way to use these basic and limited tools to produce animations. Like this one, except at school I’d have put more effort in4.
Microsoft Word
Then I noticed that Microsoft Word also had a macro recorder, but this one was scriptable using a programming language called WordBasic (a predecessor to Visual Basic for
Applications). So I pulled up the help and started exploring what it could do.
And as soon as I discovered the Shell function, I realised that
the limitations that were being enforced on the network could be completely sidestepped.
A Windows 3 computer that runs Word… can run any other executable it has access to. Thanks, macro editor.
Now that I could run any program I liked, I started poking the edges of what was possible.
Could I get a MS-DOS prompt/command shell? Yes, absolutely5.
Could I write to the hard disk drive? Yes, but any changes got wiped when the computer performed its network boot.
Could I store arbitrary files in my personal network storage? Yes, anything I could bring in on floppy disks6
could be persisted on the network server.
I didn’t have a proper LAN at home7
So I really enjoyed the opportunity to explore, unfettered, what I could get up to with Windows’ network stack.
The “WinNuke” NetBIOS remote-crash vulnerability was a briefly-entertaining way to troll classmates, but unlocking WinPopup/Windows Chat capability was ultimately more-rewarding.
File Manager
I started to explore the resources on the network. Each pupil had their own networked storage space, but couldn’t access one another’s. But among the directories shared between
all students, I found a directory to which I had read-write access.
I created myself a subdirectory and set the hidden bit on it, and started dumping into it things that I wanted to keep on the network8.
By now my classmates were interested in what I was achieving, and I wanted in the benefits of my success. So I went back to Word and made a document template that looked
superficially like a piece of coursework, but which contained macro code that would connect to the shared network drive and allow the user to select from a series of programs that
they’d like to run.
Gradually, compressed over a series of floppy disks, I brought in a handful of games: Commander Keen, Prince of Persia, Wing Commander, Civilization,
Wolfenstein 3D, even Dune II. I got increasingly proficient at modding games to strip out unnecessary content, e.g. the sound and music files9,
minimising the number of floppy disks I needed to ZIP (or ARJ!) content to before smuggling it in via my shirt pocket, always sure not to
be carrying so many floppies that it’d look suspicious.
The goldmine moment – for my friends, at least – was the point at which I found a way to persistently store files in a secret shared location, allowing me to help them run whatever
they liked without passing floppy disks around the classroom (which had been my previous approach).
In a particularly bold move, I implemented a simulated login screen which wrote the entered credentials into the shared space before crashing the computer. I left it running,
unattended, on computers that I thought most-likely to be used by school staff, and eventually bagged myself the network administrator’s password. I only used it twice: the first time,
to validate my hypothesis about the access levels it granted; the second, right before I finished school, to confirm my suspicion that it wouldn’t have been changed during my entire
time there10.
Are you sure you want to quit?
My single biggest mistake was sharing my new-found power with my classmates. When I made that Word template that let others run the software I’d introduced to the
network, the game changed.
When it was just me, asking the question what can I make it do?, everything was fun and exciting.
But now half a dozen other teens were nagging me and asking “can you make it do X?”
This wasn’t exploration. This wasn’t innovation. This wasn’t using my curiosity to push at the edges of a system and its restrictions! I didn’t want to find the exploitable boundaries
of computer systems so I could help make it easier for other people to do so… no: I wanted the challenge of finding more (and weirder) exploits!
I wanted out. But I didn’t want to say to my friends that I didn’t want to do something “for” them any more11.
I figured: I needed to get “caught”.
I considered just using graphics software to make these screenshots… but it turned out to be faster to spin up a network of virtual machines running Windows 3.11 and some basic tools.
I actually made the stupid imaginary dialog box you’re seeing.12
I chose… to get sloppy.
I took a copy of some of the software that I’d put onto the shared network drive and put it in my own home directory, this time un-hidden. Clearly our teacher was already suspicious and
investigating, because within a few days, this was all that was needed for me to get caught and disciplined13.
I was disappointed not to be asked how I did it, because I was sufficiently proud of my approach that I’d hoped to be able to brag about it to somebody who’d
understand… but I guess our teacher just wanted to brush it under the carpet and move on.
Aftermath
The school’s IT admin certainly never worked-out the true scope of my work. My “hidden” files remained undiscovered, and my friends were able to continue to use my special Word template
to play games that I’d introduced to the network14.
I checked, and the hidden files were still there when I graduated.
The warning worked: I kept my nose clean in computing classes for the remainder of secondary school. But I would’ve been happy to, anyway: I already felt like I’d “solved” the challenge
of turning the school computer network to my interests and by now I’d moved on to other things… learning how to reverse-engineer phone networks… and credit card processors… and
copy-protection systems. Oh, the stories I could tell15.
I “get” it that some of my classmates – including some of those pictured – were mostly interested in the results of my hacking efforts. But for me it always was – and still
is – about the journey of discovery.
But I’ll tell you what: 13-ish year-old me ought to be grateful to the RM Nimbus network at my school for providing an interesting system about which my developing “hacker brain” could
ask: what can I make it do?
Which remains one of the most useful questions with which to foster a hacker mentality.
Footnotes
1 I first played Game of Life on an Amstrad CPC464, or possibly a PC1512.
2 What is the earliest experience to which I can credit my “hacker mindset”?
Tron and WarGames might have played a part, as might have the
“hacking” sequence in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. And there was the videogame Hacker and its sequel (it’s funny to
see their influence in modern games). Teaching myself to program so that I could make
text-based adventures was another. Dissecting countless obfuscated systems to see how they worked… that’s yet another one: something I did perhaps initially to cheat at games by
poking their memory addresses or hexediting their save games… before I moved onto reverse-engineering copy protection systems and working out how they could be circumvented… and then
later still when I began building hardware that made it possible for me to run interesting experiments on telephone networks.
Any of all of these datapoints, which took place over a decade, could be interpreted as “the moment” that I became a hacker! But they’re not the ones I’m talking about today.
Today… is the story of the RM Nimbus.
3 Whatever happened to Recorder? After it disappeared in Windows 95 I occasionally had
occasion to think to myself “hey, this would be easier if I could just have the computer watch me and copy what I do a few times.” But it was not to be: Microsoft decided that this
level of easy automation wasn’t for everyday folks. Strangely, it wasn’t long after Microsoft dropped macro recording as a standard OS feature that Apple decided that MacOS
did need a feature like this. Clearly it’s still got value as a concept!
4 Just to clarify: I put more effort in to making animations, which were not part of
my schoolwork back when I was a kid. I certainly didn’t put more effort into my education.
5 The computers had been configured to make DOS access challenging: a boot menu let you
select between DOS and Windows, but both were effectively nerfed. Booting into DOS loaded an RM-provided menu that couldn’t be killed; the MS-DOS prompt icon was absent from Program
Manager and quitting Windows triggered an immediate shutdown.
6 My secondary school didn’t get Internet access during the time I was enrolled there. I
was recently trying to explain to one of my kids the difference between “being on a network” and “having Internet access”, and how often I found myself on a network that wasn’t
internetworked, back in the day. I fear they didn’t get it.
7 I was in the habit of occasionally hooking up PCs together with null modem cables, but only much later on would I end up acquiring sufficient “thinnet”
10BASE2 kit that I could throw together a network for a LAN party.
8 Initially I was looking to sidestep the space limitation enforcement on my “home”
directory, and also to put the illicit software I was bringing in somewhere that could not be trivially-easily traced back to me! But later on this “shared” directory became the
repository from which I’d distribute software to my friends, too.
9 The school computer didn’t have soundcards and nobody would have wanted PC speakers
beeping away in the classroom while they were trying to play a clandestine videogame anyway.
10 The admin password was concepts. For at least four years.
11 Please remember that at this point I was a young teenager and so was pretty well
over-fixated on what my peers thought of me! A big part of the persona I presented was of somebody who didn’t care what others thought of him, I’m sure, but a mask that
doesn’t look like a mask… is still a mask. But yeah: I had a shortage of self-confidence and didn’t feel able to say no.
13 I was briefly alarmed when there was talk of banning me from the computer lab for
the remainder of my time at secondary school, which scared me because I was by now half-way through my
boring childhood “life plan” to become a computer programmer by what seemed to be the appropriate route, and I feared that not being able to do a GCSE in a CS-adjacent subject
could jeopardise that (it wouldn’t have).
14 That is, at least, my friends who were brave enough to carry on doing so after the
teacher publicly (but inaccurately) described my alleged offences, seemingly as a warning to others.
15 Oh, the stories I probably shouldn’t tell! But here’s a teaser: when I
built my first “beige box” (analogue phone tap hardware) I experimented with tapping into the phone line at my dad’s house from the outside. I carefully shaved off some of
the outer insulation of the phone line that snaked down the wall from the telegraph pole and into the house through the wall to expose the wires inside, identified each, and then
croc-clipped my box onto it and was delighted to discovered that I could make and receive calls “for” the house. And then, just out of curiosity to see what kinds of protections were
in place to prevent short-circuiting, I experimented with introducing one to the ringer line… and took out all the phones on the street. Presumably I threw a circuit breaker in the
roadside utility cabinet. Anyway, I patched-up my damage and – fearing that my dad would be furious on his return at the non-functioning telecomms – walked to the nearest functioning
payphone to call the operator and claim that the phone had stopped working and I had no idea why. It was fixed within three hours. Phew!
![Screenshot from Pornhub showing Dan Q's profile (0 subscribers, 69 [nice!] videos watched)'s achievements page, showing only one achievement: The Virgin.](https://bcdn.danq.me/_q23u/2026/01/pornhub-achievements-1-640x250.png)
