Kids bypass age verification with fake moustaches
88 points by dreadsword 5 hours ago | 41 comments

eszed 4 hours ago
Of course they do. Only fools expected anything else.

Does else anyone remember the "age verification" on '80s video games? Some of them were hilarious. I think it was Leisure Suit Larry that asked multiple choice history questions that I guess were meant to be impossible for fifth graders to guess. I was the local history nerd, so I remember getting calls from classmates, like "we're trying to get into a game; when was JFK assassinated?" If I didn't know I'd ask my dad, who never knew he was contributing to the delinquency of (other) minors.

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distances 3 hours ago
> I think it was Leisure Suit Larry that asked multiple choice history questions that I guess were meant to be impossible for fifth graders to guess.

I'm from a non-English-speaking country. We didn't understand the questions at all, but all us kids in the neighborhood got into the game just fine with some brute forcing.

Also, coming up with the expected commands in the game was way beyond our skills so we'd only advance to a point where someone had seen and memorized others play. Didn't matter, as it was one of the only games in the system so we'd play it anyway. I still remember how hard it was to type "ken sent me" in the allotted time window.

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21asdffdsa12 3 hours ago
Nowhere does the us "center of the universe" mindset shine more through, then when to expect the world to remember the presidential dogs name.
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distances 3 hours ago
Well, the main hurdle was that we were 7-9 years old iirc and didn't know any English at all, beyond the memorized "knock knock" etc. So the topic of the questions wasn't on the table :-)
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lazyasciiart 37 minutes ago
I love this story. I remember seeing two pre-literate kindergarten kids playing on a gameboy or similar handheld, one of them teaching the other strings of button presses for things like “save game” - just navigating through all the menus by memory.
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riffraff 2 hours ago
I think everybody does this to some extent.

Like, I remember someone telling me at one point that the thing in Head over Heels was a Dalek with prince Charles head. I didn't know either of those.

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noufalibrahim 10 minutes ago
There were so many of these wink-wink things I wouldn't know about if not for trying to brute force LSL.
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Morromist 3 hours ago
The next age verification tech will involve checking tallness so we'll have kids standing on eachother's shoulders in a big trenchcoat to do the very adult act of installing linux.
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bilekas 2 hours ago
And when they need to find a way to circumvent this, they will ask for the full height picture without clothes on. Instead of addressing the problem of this entire idea and implementation they will continue to double down on it.
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lazyasciiart 39 minutes ago
And that’s how the laws designed to protect children ended up producing the worlds largest collection of photos of naked children.
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nick486 3 hours ago
I guess thats one important upside of age verification systems I didn't think of. They encourage creativity and a healthy disregard for stupid rules.
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zeec123 2 hours ago
The result will be age verification with a passport or ID "to protect the children". Probably this was the goal all along.
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riffraff 2 hours ago
The EU age id app is this, with some extra privacy hurdles (the id is only on your phone not on the remote server).
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Cthulhu_ 2 hours ago
Already a thing for a lot of services (like financial), but still. There's better ways that don't involve sending your ID or facial scans to a first or third party.
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pjc50 41 minutes ago
Yeah, I set up a trading212 account lately and they wanted ID scan + live video. I mind that a bit less for finance: identity theft is real, and there are significant disadvantages to me if someone can set up a bank account in my name without getting ID checked.

I'm not doing it for bloody discord or bsky DMs.

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sandeepkd 2 hours ago
The only good justification of it can be that the companies can claim that the age verification was done as per Terms of Service, so in the future no parent or parent group can come after them for the content. Along with better targeted advertising by identifying the target audiences.

Logically parents are probably best suited to gate the content for their children how they see it fit.

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jl6 3 hours ago
Maybe age verification will encourage kids to be more social in person, because they’ll need to have at least two inside the trenchcoat.
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raffael_de 23 minutes ago
I think the reverse Hanlon's Razor applies here:

"Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice."

The Helen Lovejoy argument "will somebody please think of the children" provided for the foot in the door. The intended outcome is that only iris scans will allow for full child protection ... and that was the plan all along.

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TheServitor 52 minutes ago
I process the manual ID reviews for a small system. I don't get many, but I have seen some funny stuff. Last week a kid tried to use a still from a Spiderman movie.
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pkphilip 2 hours ago
The governments know fully well that simple checks for age verification will be bypassed. So they will "fix" this issue by demanding a digital id.
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kleiba2 3 hours ago
They also use VPNs, as anyone would have predicted within two seconds.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn72ydj70g5o

Consequently, we're now discussing VPN bans for under 18 year olds <insert facepalm emoji>.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn438z3ejxyo

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heavyset_go 59 seconds ago
I've never seen efforts to make laws as damn bulletproof like this.

They must really be scared of the voice and power anonymity gives normal people who wouldn't normally have them.

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interstice 2 hours ago
Collectively we have fought long and hard for internet freedom, it's depressing that all it takes is a generation and some bureaucratic idiocy for all that to be undone.
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marcus_holmes 3 hours ago
it's funny, but this is not going to end well.
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harladsinsteden 2 hours ago
Life finds a way...
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i_think_so 3 hours ago
Well of course. What else did they expect kids were going to do? This whole idea was braindead from the start.
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charcircuit 3 hours ago
One big problem is that the verification is trying to estimate your age instead of looking up who is the actual person and then checking what the age is of that person. If the lookup returns that the face is that of a video game character it should reject as opposed to trying to estimate the age of that character.
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pjc50 2 hours ago
> looking up who is the actual person

"Fallacies programmers believe about people"

(you can sort of do this in countries with national ID schemes if you don't care about foreigners; for example, various people have found this in China where random things are gated behind having a WeChat account which requires a Chinese ID. You can't do this in the US or UK, which are big pushers of the ""age verification"" scheme)

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charcircuit 23 minutes ago
You don't need an Id. For example, you can crawl the internet for selfies and then try and tie that face with the person it belongs to. With enough datasets you can start to put together a database of relevant people enough that it's okay to do deeper validation for the people you did not collect a face for.
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pjc50 17 minutes ago
> you can crawl the internet for selfies and then try and tie that face with the person it belongs to

Yeeeah .. this is not the sort of thing that GDPR ought to allow, though.

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protocolture 3 hours ago
Right they didnt put enough panopticon in. Got it.
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i_think_so 3 hours ago
That's one idea. I have a different one.

What if we...now hear me out....what if we didn't try to shoehorn a stupid and unworkable technological solution into this problem space and just...made parents responsible for their kids?

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kakacik 3 hours ago
Nono too radical, parents dont have time, they need it to scroll some shitty social media cash grab to feel themselves even more shitty about their lives.

... and we would like to call our generation 'smart'. While knowing deep inside very well what a failure as a parent many of our generation are. The proof for/against are our kids right in front of our eyes and there is no escaping from this basic truth, thats why its so crushing.

Sorry gotta go, need to check some shitty sites who spy on me and try to push in vain on me some primitive ads.

/s

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croes 3 hours ago
Parents who work fulltime, some even more than one job?
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jochem9 3 hours ago
Says a lot about the state of society when parenting is outsourced to technology, so that the parents can be further enslaved (because almost no one chooses to work two jobs).
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i_think_so 3 hours ago
Oof. Now I has a sad. :(
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crote 3 hours ago
What if we...now hear me out....what if we paid people a living wage?
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Dylan16807 3 hours ago
It's possible to design something parents can control without using lots of their time to do so.
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marcus_holmes 3 hours ago
ok, now you've identified the real problem, how can we solve that?
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bandie91 3 hours ago
well, everyone need to clarify their priorities.
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bandie91 3 hours ago
whaaat? parents?? being responsible? let alone to their kids? what are you? some kind of backward medieval luddite?

btw, yes, we must not lose the skill of parenting. no any technology give it back to us.

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