When 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
Additionally tier 1 networks legally not allowed to route packets that don't include an attestation that they were produced by a computer running only approved software.
And 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 ...
I assume that everyone's ID is identifiable by willing state actors (at least adults) . Perhaps they want to create databases of possible child terrorists?
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.
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.
In 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.
I 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.
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.
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
Go tell Tebas that the AEPD fines over LaLiga app can be astronomically huge. Also, telecomms' disruption and suplantation (MITM) in Spain can make both Tebas, the ISP CEO's (and mid managers) among the judge jailed in the spot.
I2PD supports quantum-resistant encryption schemes. On LLM's, no sane hacker would use that turd ever. Free as in freedom software it's incompatible with a 66GB slopware acting as a SAAS with source stealing and relicense laundering.
Why do you think Google, the world's largest ad company, is paying money out of its ears to research those topics? The sooner people realize all major us tech companies are contractors for the us department of war the better.
Go ahead use metas verifier, give your biometrics to openai, type all your personal and financial information into copilot for advice, email your boss tell him anthropics boris was right you are now redundant, click on all of the ads you see, only engage with your peers on Facebook to let the algorithm decide how that goes, only drive in roads with flock cameras to stay safe, turn off your ad blocker, don't use vpns, etc. it's your life.
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.
My 12yo son is already significantly taller than me! We had to use his passport to prove he’s much younger than these systems report because they were locking him out from chatting to his friends (said the age gap was too big)
Wait, am I understanding correctly: for your child to chat with their friends you had you send a copy of their passport to a stranger in the Internet because "a system" thought they were older looking that their friends?
We forced parents to both work 40 hours and more including commutes and mandatory overtime, which led to an insane demand to have "safe spaces" for children where they do not need a parent.
yeah :( I'm definitely not in the pro "kids need to be protected from the internet/social media/whatever" camp as I'd much rather teach my kids to make smart decisions and manage it ourselves vs the government mandated solution we now have. The way it's implemented though means services (Roblox in this case) have to verify the age of the child. Those kids can only talk to other kids that are +/- some range from their own age. So it was either let him continue playing as though he's a 16yo but not actually be able to play with any of his friends, or use the identity verification provider they have to prove he's not. The whole thing is a gross mess imo.
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.
Lol. Or standing next to a dollhouse or something.
Let's be realistic here. All this age verification stuff is pseudoscience and more importantly it isn't tested or standardized at all. It's just theater so the creeps get all the data on your children they can.
Meta has made a killing, literally, exploiting children psychology. Social media is the orphan crunching machine for nonorphans or something.
>All this age verification stuff is pseudoscience and more importantly it isn't tested or standardized at all. It's just theater
<lightbulb moment>
Abdicating responsibility, standards and government enforcement are three of white collar America's favorite things.
Seems like an opportunity for someone to become a billionaire by creating a standardization and licensing agency and then paying for some shills to get the ball rolling. Give it 5yr and everyone will have to do business with you lest the feds kick in their door. Give it 10yr and the useful idiots will be in the comment section talking about how XYZ age verification mechanism must be good because it's "certified" by your garbage and that the sky will fall if we get rid of it.
I hope I'm too jaded, but frankly I don't think I'm jaded enough.
They are trying for it that's for sure. It reminds me of the us war on drugs for some reason. Obviously I don't want kids doing drugs but it had ludicrous takes that were terrible for society. I guess there aren't enough wars going on? Have to go to war against the Internet or something now.
"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.
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.
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.
I 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.
We 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.
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.
> 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.
That wasn’t the era of global releases via the internet. You had to either buy it in person or, order by mail or get a copy from a BBS. It was an American game made for Americans.
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 :-)
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.
I played through the entire Pokemon Yellow without understanding a lick of english. You just remembered what the commands did, and you learnt by experimenting.
Thanks for this comment -- it dredged up a memory I had almost forgotten.
I did this but inverted. When only pokemon red/blue were out in the US I downloaded a rom for pokemon yellow (discovered on whatever p2p I was using at the time) when searching for pokemon to play in an emulator. I didn't know it existed at the time and it was in Japanese. When I told my friends "pikachu follows you around!" None of them believed me.
Haha, that's incredibly cool too! I actually played through a rom of Pokemon Green for the exact same reason - it was cool, no one at school believed me Pokemon Green was a real thing.
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.
My brother and I had a notepad with all the questions and possible answers, and we'd run the game several times until we got through, then make a note of the answers. Eventually we had all of them.
"Ken sent me" is buried in my brain for that same reason. :)
Same, our solution was to pirate Softice, then step through the startup to find the checks and replace them with nops or point at the desired location. Sierra games were not that amenable to this though because of the interpreter.
I 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 :-).
There 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.
The 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.
Of 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.
None 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.
I 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.
I let her have WhatsApp when she was 13. She’s autistic and couldn’t disconnect at all. Her friends got pissed off with her because of something that was said on a chat. She lost her friends at school and ended up being bullied. Masked pretty well too, so when we found out it was too late. Missed years of schooling. I’m pretty sure she will be living with me once she turns 30, so yeah she will be talking to me alright.
Being quietly hated is blissful on the range of ways children can mess with you. If the worse reason they can come up with is hating you because you didn't give them enough free shit in the form of electronics or apps then you're doing pretty good. There will always be a reason why a vindictive person can choose not to talk to you.
At that age I had a half-time job and bought my own shit, except rent. A 17 year old should be doing that if they want their own non-locked-down phone. If they aren't, they should be thankful for whatever they are getting beyond bare necessities.
Then they should be even more thankful for whatever free shit they're getting from OPM rather than bitching the free shit they're getting isn't good enough to one of a handful of those on earth actually to give it to them.
I'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.
Reading 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).
That won't happen. Because the intent of the people pushing for "age verification" has nothing to do with the "think about the children" moral panic. It has to do with eliminating encryption and eliminating online anonymity. It is a dog whistle.
I disagree. Maybe that's the intent of some people.
Now go in the street and ask random people: "if there was a safe way to protect your children from accessing XYZ on the internet, do you think it would be a good thing?".
Clearly one very real problem for parents right now is that if all the other kids do it, then it's hard to prevent your kid from doing it ("everybody is on TikTok, they make fun of me because I have no clue what's happening there"). If you can prevent most of them from accessing the service, then suddenly it becomes normal for kids not to use it.
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.
There 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.
> There is no such thing as privacy protecting or anonymous age verification
There most definitely is privacy-protecting age verification. You go to a government office, you show your ID, they give you a piece of paper that officially says "over 18 years old". Now you have a piece of paper that says you're over 18 but doesn't say who you are, and the government won't know where you use it.
On the Internet, the idea is the same, but with cryptography.
By privacy-preserving, we usually mean that you get some kind of cryptographic token from an entity that knows who you are (and can attest that you are above age), and that token is anonymous, so when you use it to access a random service, that service cannot extract information about you from the token, except that you are above age.
It is possible, it just had to be implemented properly. We could complain about politicians not understanding that, of course. But if you spend 5 minutes reading complaints about age verification, you will see that nobody cares about understanding... if the people doesn't care, why would the politicians?
To date I haven't seen an implementation that preserves privacy and doesn't allow for easy bypass because person A generated infinite tokens and hands them out via a rest request.
I have seen implementations that preserve privacy. But fundamentally it means that an adult could give a token to a kid, as you say. But how bad is that? We don't need a perfect system, we just need it to be good enough that it prevents most kids from accessing stuff they shouldn't access. Some kids will always find a way anyway.
A simple solution to "generate infinite token and hands them out via a rest request" could be one of:
* Rate-limit the token generation. Nobody needs thousands per day, right?
* Make it illegal to distribute tokens. The server sees if you request an abnormal amount of tokens, and... it knows who you are. Not too hard to investigate.
* Make "honeypots" that scare the children when they try to access/buy the token.
I don't think it makes the concept completely useless.
But you can't preserve privacy while rate-limiting token generation unless you have a way of identifying someone, which could be as simple as requiring an account.
And even if it's illegal to hand them out, it's not hard to set up a tor site to do it. I would be first in line to counter the state with such an implementation of this is the path we tread.
I think you misunderstand what "privacy-preserving" means here. The whole point is that they CAN identify you (to verify your age), but in... well a privacy-preserving manner :-).
That is, one side knows who you are, but not what you do; the other side knows what you do, not who you are.
> And even if it's illegal to hand them out, it's not hard to set up a tor site to do it.
If a kid can use Tor to get a token, they most certainly can download with torrent or use a VPN to bypass the verification. But again, it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be effective for enough kids.
> I would be first in line to counter the state with such an implementation of this is the path we tread.
In a functioning democracy, people should vote instead of vandalising stuff. In a non-functional democracy, I guess don't complain if someone burns your car "to counter the state" some day if you think like this.
My point is that we should fight for privacy-preserving solutions. And the first step is to get informed about whether or not it is possible to verify the age in a privacy-preserving manner. Not to prepare for vandalism.
Thanks. I appreciate the link. One thing I wasn't able to fully understand from the Kagi article: how does this solve the problem of "token handoff"? For example, if User A generates a token (from an unlimited search acct) and hands it to User B, whom has no association with Kagi, how does Kagi block User B's access? Or do they just assume it's fine because the token count is capped at a low enough value as to make it unprofitable for me, as a user, to purchase an unlimited search plan and then resell my plan at a lower price (making a profit on volume) by handing out my precomputed tokens to my resold subscribers to use?
I don't think that there is a need for a technical solution to that, though. In the Kagi example, probably they trust that their users won't do that, and someone could already resell searches this way (e.g. write some kind of proxy). Similarly, an adult can already help a kid get access to stuff they shouldn't. But the point is to make it harder for kids to do it on their own, for their own sake.
It's not computer security, where your system is "as weak as the weakest part". We don't care if a few kids access social media: the goal would be to make it such that the norm, for kids, is to not have social media.
Sounds 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!
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.
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?
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.
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).
Most of a "living wage" is from the cost of living. We make living space artificially scarce and then your rent is high but so is the rent on the small businesses that employ people. The restaurant can't pay the waitress more when their own costs have gone up, and the money is going to the landlords rather than the employers.
Likewise, when some megacorps capture the government and monopolize a market, the costs go up on both individuals and all the employers in other markets who are now paying monopoly rents with the money they could have otherwise used to hire more people (bidding up wages) or lower the prices workers pay when they buy their products.
Just asking them to pay more doesn't work when the party you want to pay more isn't the party which is extracting the money, and higher costs are just as much of a problem as lower wages.
> If you end it with "and make a good easy to use technical solution instead" then you found my stance.
That assumes a good easy to use technical solution is possible. What if classifying user-generated content as safe for kids is enormously subjective, and the labor required to accurately classify it even given a hypothetical objective standard would cost more than users are willing to pay to have it done?
It seems worth thinking past step one if you intend to do something. Even if you had some reliable way to know someone's age, what are you going to do with it in the context of information availability? The proposal is building a privacy-invasive age-leaking system (do you actually want adversarial/malicious services knowing when someone is a vulnerable kid?). There is no point in doing that if the "good thing" it's supposed to enable is actually a hopeless omnishambles.
Meanwhile we don't have any sound technical means of verifying age over the internet. The "use government ID" approaches are among the least effective because you have no good way to tell if the person behind the screen is the person on the ID.
> So you could say the same for original echnical solution.
...yes, that was my point. My whole argument was that it wasn't a tradeoff between "unworkable technical solution" and "make parents spend time they don't have".
(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)
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.
I 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.
Don'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
Maybe, 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.
Probably 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.
If you feel that parents are treated unfairly, the solution is to impose a tax on people without children and use it to pay the salary for raising kids. I think everybody agrees that monetary support is much better than verbal and moral support.
I 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.
People 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
>> 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.
There are some funny videos of people in pubs in the UK discussing how bad the incoming drink drive rules were, it's a similar deal I think. No one likes being restricted from something they've been allowed to do.
We could have a system where I authenticate myself against a government service only, or also licensed third party providers, they then provide me with signed proof-of-age certificates that can also be single use, and then I use them to proof my age with a particular service.
It's almost sad this AI age verification bs doesn't even pose too big of a challenge for kid's creativity
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