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Kids can bypass some age checks with a drawn-on mustache
- nick486 5mo agoI guess thats one important upside of age verification systems I didn't think of. They encourage creativity and a healthy disregard for stupid rules.
- eszed 5mo agoOf 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.
- noufalibrahim 5mo agoThere were so many of these wink-wink things I wouldn't know about if not for trying to brute force LSL.
- distances 5mo 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.
- palata 5mo agoI learned to read very early because I really wanted to be able to start the games on the family computer (instead of having to ask an adult to do it for me). And only then I realised that it was all in English :-).
- 21asdffdsa12 5mo agoNowhere does the us "center of the universe" mindset shine more through, then when to expect the world to remember the presidential dogs name.
- yazantapuz 5mo agoI don't think that the larry games where to be released to the whole world.
- 21asdffdsa12 5mo agoLife is sweet, when you life in the cultural nexus that is a English speaking country and do not have to pay the translation tax.
- yazantapuz 5mo agoI live in south america.
- distances 5mo agoWell, 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 :-)
- lazyasciiart 5mo agoI 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.
- bko 5mo agoOf course rules are circumvented. Maybe even frequently. But that doesn't mean on the margin none of this stuff has an impact and is not worth the effort. It's the whole "kids are going to drink anyway so I may as well buy them booze" brain rot.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- belorn 5mo agoThere is one thing I do not remember, and that is if Leisure Suit Larry was advertised toward children and how much of Leisure Suit Larry revenue sales came from 0–12 years old, adolescent of 13–17 years old, and then adult customers. It could be that that Leisure Suit Larry age verification was actually fairly good, if one put it in relation towards how much of their customer base and revenue came from selling the game to young children.
- teeray 5mo agoIt’s hilarious when adults forget how smart a motivated group of children with an ocean of free time can be.
- forlorn_mammoth 5mo agoSolution: make sure the kids don't have any free time. Let's schedule their days for optimum productivity instead.
- vavos 5mo agoAh, The steryotipical asian parent approach
- mrguyorama 5mo agoThe vast majority of children are not motivated. They will implement any workarounds they are directly told, but have zero understanding or skills required to develop a workaround themselves and no intention or desire to become technically literate. The vast majority of kids are stuck when you've blocked the first two returns for a google search for "Proxy" HN is in a crazy bubble. The vast majority of kids live normal lives, and don't spend their time trying to get around filters and things because that's boring to them. Most children don't have an ocean of free time. They are playing their video game or watching their shows or whatever.
- dec0dedab0de 5mo agoWe had as much fun trying to answer those questions as we did playing the game. They knew what they were doing. offtopic, I would love remakes of all the old sierra games, with a local llm doing the text interface.
- charcircuit 5mo agoOne 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.
- i_think_so 5mo agoThat'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?
- croes 5mo agoParents who work fulltime, some even more than one job?
- jochem9 5mo agoSays 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).
- i_think_so 5mo agoOof. Now I has a sad. :(
- Dylan16807 5mo agoIt's possible to design something parents can control without using lots of their time to do so.
- croes 5mo agoSo you are back to > what if we didn't try to shoehorn a stupid and unworkable technological solution into this problem space
- i_think_so 5mo agoWell of course. What else did they expect kids were going to do? This whole idea was braindead from the start.
- jl6 5mo agoMaybe age verification will encourage kids to be more social in person, because they’ll need to have at least two inside the trenchcoat.
- bcjdjsndon 5mo agoKids also not allowed outside..
- Hoodedcrow 5mo agoHow so? You never see kids outdoors?
- bcjdjsndon 5mo agoI mean I see em, but I feel like there should be a lot more playing in the street.
- noosphr 5mo agoStreets are for cars now.
- qball 5mo agoMost parents are too afraid of the State kidnappers (and the Karens who call them) for that.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Hoodedcrow 5mo agoIDK about "most", there are plenty of kids on the streets. Like, just going to and from school and extracurriculars gives opportunities.
- throwawaytea 5mo ago
- kleiba2 5mo agoThey also use VPNs, as anyone would have predicted within two seconds. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn72ydj70g5o 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 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn438z3ejxyo
- marcus_holmes 5mo agoit's funny, but this is not going to end well.
- silon42 5mo agoTime to go back to modems (over phone maybe) and BBSs?
- interstice 5mo agoCollectively 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.
- bcjdjsndon 5mo ago> internet freedom This "freedom" runs exactly inverse to how many normies know about the internet. The more accessible it's become, the worse it's got for freedom. They weren't regulating what they didn't know about back in the glory days
- heavyset_go 5mo agoI'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 it.
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoVpns are really under attack this year. All the LLM providers desperately don't want to have the majority of users using them. It's basically the leading reason why quantum computing is being funded. They gotta break your encryption to read your activity. Pretty sad world.
- Morromist 5mo agoThe 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.
- bilekas 5mo agoAnd 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.
- lazyasciiart 5mo agoAnd that’s how the laws designed to protect children ended up producing the worlds largest collection of photos of naked children.
- Someone 5mo agoMostly naked grownups, with a few fairly tall children who are naked, except for the fake pubic hair.
- wongarsu 5mo agoDon't worry, most "protect the children" regulation casts a web so wide it includes plenty of pubic hair and sexually active teens
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- jermaustin1 5mo agoThe UK government already has one of if not THE largest collection of CSAM in the world, called the CAID (Child Abuse Image Database).
- 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
- zeec123 5mo agoThe result will be age verification with a passport or ID "to protect the children". Probably this was the goal all along.
- Cthulhu_ 5mo agoAlready 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.
- pjc50 5mo agoYeah, 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.
- echelon_musk 5mo agoI'm paying Fidelity's fees instead of completing the verification process with Trading 212.
- riffraff 5mo agoThe EU age id app is this, with some extra privacy hurdles (the id is only on your phone not on the remote server).
- thisislife2 5mo agoAnd this will then be used by the Apple and Google to make "security" on the OS "stronger" so that "we can protect the children" better (i.e. lock down the OS even more and take control away from us consumers). In this new idiocracy, this this is how corporates and government work together to take away our rights ...
- 5mo ago
- harladsinsteden 5mo agoLife finds a way...
- pkphilip 5mo agoThe governments know fully well that simple checks for age verification will be bypassed. So they will "fix" this issue by demanding a digital id.
- sandeepkd 5mo agoThe 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.
- TheServitor 5mo agoI 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.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- raffael_de 5mo agoI 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.
- heavyset_go 5mo agoAnother step towards "Insert your verification probe to continue"
- Tangurena2 5mo agoI'm sure it will actually be "drink verification can to continue". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36542487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36542487
- phyzix5761 5mo agoWhat if politicians are creating these systems that are easy to bypass so they have an excuse for starting to officially ID everyone?
- gustavus 5mo agoThat was always the plan from day 1.
- Lio 5mo agoI mean it’s no coincidence that Labour adopted the Tory Online Safety Act and at the same time as Keir Starmer started pushing Blair’s old National ID system again. They’ve wanted total surveillance for quite a while. Now politicians and billionaires are talking about making it happen.
- fhennig 5mo agoI don't want to give my ID to every service I interact online. But I also don't think it's reasonable to ask of parents to ensure their children aren't accessing age restricted content online. What about liquor shops or strip clubs? They ask for ID, which makes sense; we're not expecting parents to make sure their children don't go into these places. But the liquor shop takes a look at the ID and then doesn't collect the data. Being entirely against age verification is not a good stance I think, but we should definitely have a hard stance on the privacy issue. There are systems that preserve privacy while still making it possible to verify you're old enough to use a service.
- estimator7292 5mo agoThere's age verification and then there's "age verification" (mass surveillance dragnet) One of these is clearly a very extremely bad thing
- wongarsu 5mo agoPeople like to make fun of and poke holes in the EU's planned implementation of this, but so far they seem to be the only ones trying to implement this in a way that doesn't give my name to every online service or give some identity provider full knowledge which services I sign up to The California bill about setting an age in the OS was another interesting idea. Have the parents police a single setting on the device, then websites and apps can query that setting. Of course that's little more than the parental controls we always had, but apparently everyone forgot about those
- basisword 5mo ago>> Being entirely against age verification is not a good stance I think I think the problem is that the internet has existed for quite a while without it. I'm sure there were similar complaints from people when you suddenly needed to pass a test to drive a car or when insurance became mandatory. >> There are systems that preserve privacy while still making it possible to verify you're old enough to use a service. What are these systems?
- bengale 5mo ago
- data-ottawa 5mo agoIf you’re in Canada please write your MP about bill S-209, which brings this nonsense here. As someone on a tech forum, we’re the only people who can really articulate the issues with the age verification approach. It’s really the worst solution to these problems with awful tradeoffs.
- EmbarrassedHelp 5mo agoYou should also write the Cabinet Ministers, including the heritage minister Marc Miller.
- ChrisArchitect 5mo agoSource: https://www.internetmatters.org/hub/research/online-safety-act-report-2026/ https://www.internetmatters.org/hub/research/online-safety-a...
- ChrisArchitect 5mo agoSome more earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48017190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48017190
- spelk 5mo agoIn a similar vein: A while ago, Chinese adolescents were bypassing age restrictions for playtime in Mainland China by using the published national ID numbers of insolvent debtors (which are apparently published online to ensure that no financial institutions extend credit to them) to sign up for accounts. From what I understand, they started partially masking these national ID numbers in response to that.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- codedokode 5mo agoI think, the best way to keep children from dangerous content is large fines for parents, for example, $4000 for every adult video their child was traumatized by due to their negligence. 50% of the fine is shared with the person who reported the violation (including site operators). After all being a parent is a responsibility. Such law would not cause inconvenience to normal Internet users without children, would provide additional source of income for vigilant people and underpaid school staff, and would result in much higher degree of compliance. Why you guys don't elect people like me.
- throwaw3y 5mo agoDon't you think our society has already pushed too far in the direction of mandated helicopter parenting? You can hardly let your kids play independently nowadays in the US without getting a CPS check-up due to someone believing kids should be on leashes; what your proposing is significantly more draconian
- codedokode 5mo agoMaybe, but why normal people without children need to experience inconvenience, Internet restrictions and verifications just because there are a minority of negligent parents? Children are parents responsibility. Instead of banning adult sites, is not it better to ban families with children from Internet? Make some family-friendly Internet and let them all go there and not bother normal people.
- mjmas 5mo ago> let them all go there and not bother normal people. The normal state does include people with children.
- mothballed 5mo agoProbably not in places like Germany where over half the population is over 45. As US becomes more like child-devoid europe, it will become even more hostile to children. And parents will be more and more slaves to the state, to raise children however society says they ought to be raised. The purpose of the parent is to pay and be punished, the purpose of the outsider is to rest on the smug shoulders of the state and proclaim how morally superior they are at no cost to themselves. As it becomes increasingly apparent having children is a suckers game where everyone piles on the penalties to you while eagerly awaiting the social security payments of your children (you make ~all the investment, then they take the profits), they will have even fewer.
- palata 5mo agoReading the comments here, I see a lot of criticism along the line of "age verification doesn't work, it's completely stupid". I believe it is counter-productive, because "not having age verification" is a lost battle. Unlike E2EE (where it is impossible to give access "only to the good guys"), it is possible to implement age verification in a privacy-preserving manner. And look at the ChatControl fight: even though it is not possible, we are still struggling to convince politicians of it. Good luck with age verification where it is actually possible to do something. It should be a public service: just like the government issues IDs already, it should run the privacy-preserving system that allows citizens to prove their age. We should fight for that, otherwise we will get non-privacy-preserving systems managed by private companies (which is already starting).
- data-ottawa 5mo agoI'm writing my (Canadian) MP to this effect. There are a lot of issues with the UK approach. Privacy is a big one. But requiring this on every service is both a tax on the service and requires constantly authorizing stuff. That opens up the possibility for scams, data misuse, etc. And no, saying we said to only use the data for verification clearly doesn't work. It didn't work for discord, or Persona, or Tea or AU10TIX or any others. Verification now means sharing that data with credit agencies and third party databases. Verification means keeping some data to resolve customer support disputes. There's data leakage for training and creating derived data products like biometric embeddings for future use. Third party verification is a security nightmare. I don't know why device based approvals abd controls aren't considered at all. Or really any privacy preserving technique. And all this for ~54% efficacy?
- EmbarrassedHelp 5mo agoThere is no such thing as privacy protecting or anonymous age verification. If you tell Canadian that such a thing is possible, they are guaranteed to harm privacy with any legislation they proposal. Just tell them no.
- palata 5mo ago
- clutter55561 5mo agoNone of this prohibition works. Kids will find ways around it, authorities will get stricter, rinse and repeat. A total shitshow. A lot of people mentioning off-license/booze/tobacco like that was a success story. It isn’t. Outside main/high streets, kids manage to buy stuff just fine. Success requires enforcement, constant vigilance and heavy penalties. Not applicable to Meta at al. Social media is a drug. Just like crack, making it illegal won’t make it go away. Only education can change this. Unfortunately, we now have multiple generations hooked on it, so I’m not sure this is even possible anymore. I blocked all social media on my daughter’s phone until she turned 17. I am/was a massive control freak. Guess what happened after that? I still have control over her apps. I still won’t let install snapchat and every other crap app she asks for. She understands it is for her own good, but none of that matters when “all her friends use it.” The first iPhone went on sale when she was born. Obama was elected when she was a baby. The world sucks right now. Rant over.
- k12sosse 5mo agoWonder if she has a burner phone so she can talk to her friends. You've probably made her paranoid enough to know better than connect it to your wifi.
- clutter55561 5mo agoI don’t know if you are a parent of teenagers. Where I live in the UK, teenagers don’t use phone. They only communicate via chat. Relatively large sample (several schools, year groups, ages, etc) but single area. If you don’t have kids, maybe don’t speak pejoratively about the difficulties in raising children nowadays. If you do, try to be a bit more empathetic.
- noosphr 5mo agoJesus christ. Your poor kid. This is how you rise someone that will never talk to you once they turn 30.
- clutter55561 5mo ago
- seydor 5mo agoThe best thing to happen to tech is kids finding ways to make a fool of modern tech
- dethos 5mo agoWe all knew this wouldn't work (at least anyone who grew up during and after the 80s). These "rules", in the best-case scenario, are just useless bureaucracy or bloat in the name of good intentions. In the worst case, they have nothing to do with protecting kids and are just paving the way for what comes next.
- gloosx 5mo agoWhen I was a kid, I went as far as to install a key-logger on the computer to get the master password from the parental controls, silently disabling them when I wanted and enabling them again when I'm done so parents would never notice. It's almost sad this AI age verification bs doesn't even pose too big of a challenge for kid's creativity
- aussieguy1234 5mo agoSounds like you were more sophisticated as a kid than your adult parents
- OkayPhysicist 5mo agoKids are highly motivated, and have a lot of free time. They make truly obnoxious adversaries.
- cortesoft 5mo agoA true Advance Persistent Threat, although not always that advanced, but definitely persistent.
- davkan 5mo agoNecessity is the mother of invention.
- gloosx 5mo agoMost kids are more sophisticated than their parents, who are usually too tired by the burdens of life to notice
- dreadsword 5mo agoHardcore!
- giantg2 5mo agoI'm honestly tired of all this age verification stuff. It's on parents to monitor their kids, if needed, beyond the existing checks. We need to get out of thr mindset of total control. Even highly regulated stuff like alcohol sales won't stop kids from grabbing bread yeast and a frozen juice concentrate to make their own if they really want to and the parents aren't parenting.
- iamnothere 5mo agoSounds like we need some common sense mustache control. Fake mustaches should require ID, just like alcohol or cigarettes. Use of a mustache (real or fake) to bypass age verification should be a crime. Think of the children!
- luqtas 5mo agowe need a state owned and produced hardware with all the rights apps! the bible, wikipedia and Settings for turning down brightness
- 13x29a 5mo agoI firmly believe that society should rather focus on education, not new restrictions for the broadest audience. Mandatory age verification may limit some from accessing some types of content, but that's ulikely to actually help with anything other than narrowing perception tunnel for many and maybe stimulating some to hack around like the title suggests. And that brings costs to society, such as increased security risks (even ZKP - government seeing the data is still a massive point of failure), and infringement of privacy. And populations learn to comply with bs regulations. While tracking and addictive algos could be blanket banned for everyone regardless of age.