Kids bypass age verification with fake moustaches

ddreadsword about 4 hours ago 34 commentsRead Article on theregister.com

HI version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

40% Positive

Analyzed from 936 words in the discussion.

Discussion (34 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

eszed•about 3 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.

distances•about 2 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.

21asdffdsa12•about 2 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.

distances•about 2 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 :-)

riffraff•about 1 hour 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.

Morromist•about 2 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.

bilekas•about 1 hour 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.

nick486•about 2 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.

TheServitor•11 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.

zeec123•about 1 hour ago

The result will be age verification with a passport or ID "to protect the children". Probably this was the goal all along.

riffraff•about 1 hour 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).

Cthulhu_•about 1 hour 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.

sandeepkd•28 minutes 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.

jl6•about 2 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.

pkphilip•about 1 hour 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.

kleiba2•about 2 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

interstice•about 1 hour 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.

marcus_holmes•about 1 hour ago

it's funny, but this is not going to end well.

harladsinsteden•about 1 hour ago

Life finds a way...

charcircuit•about 2 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.

pjc50•24 minutes 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)

protocolture•about 2 hours ago

Right they didnt put enough panopticon in. Got it.

i_think_so•about 2 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?

bandie91•about 2 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.

kakacik•about 2 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.

croes•about 2 hours ago

Parents who work fulltime, some even more than one job?

jochem9•about 2 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).

crote•about 2 hours ago

What if we...now hear me out....what if we paid people a living wage?

Dylan16807•about 2 hours ago

It's possible to design something parents can control without using lots of their time to do so.

marcus_holmes•about 1 hour ago

ok, now you've identified the real problem, how can we solve that?

bandie91•about 2 hours ago

well, everyone need to clarify their priorities.

i_think_so•about 2 hours ago

Well of course. What else did they expect kids were going to do? This whole idea was braindead from the start.

c16•9 minutes ago

> Stronger action is needed

Because of course it is /s.

But on a real note, we all grew up with the full uncensored internet: goatse, 4chan, liveleak and the rest. What has changed? Or has the reality of the internet now become a little more mainstream, and we're now realising it's not the technology which is the problem, but the humans that use it?