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gloosx 13 hours ago [-]
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
dreadsword 2 hours ago [-]
Hardcore!
aussieguy1234 4 hours ago [-]
Sounds like you were more sophisticated as a kid than your adult parents
OkayPhysicist 4 hours ago [-]
Kids are highly motivated, and have a lot of free time. They make truly obnoxious adversaries.
zeec123 19 hours ago [-]
The result will be age verification with a passport or ID "to protect the children". Probably this was the goal all along.
Cakez0r 15 hours ago [-]
Tier 1 networks legally not allowed to route packets that aren't digitally signed by a cryptographic ID linked to you
Denatonium 6 hours ago [-]
Hopefully they exempt UDP traffic with a destination port of 53. Or suspiciously-large ICMP echo request and echo response packets.
dreadsword 2 hours ago [-]
Yeesh thats chilling
riffraff 19 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).
thisislife2 17 hours ago [-]
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 ...
riffraff 6 hours ago [-]
it's the other way around: the app mandates usage of ios and google because they already provide those lock downs.
RunningDroid 7 hours ago [-]
I've heard Turkey's age verification law jumps straight to "no internet access without ID"
seydor 14 hours ago [-]
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?
Cthulhu_ 19 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.
pjc50 18 hours 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.
echelon_musk 15 hours ago [-]
I'm paying Fidelity's fees instead of completing the verification process with Trading 212.
delfinom 14 hours ago [-]
Politicians worldwide are salivating at the chance of throwing their opposition and critics in prison.
nick486 20 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.
pkphilip 19 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.
spelk 15 hours ago [-]
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.
jl6 20 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.
bcjdjsndon 16 hours ago [-]
Kids also not allowed outside..
Hoodedcrow 16 hours ago [-]
How so? You never see kids outdoors?
qball 9 hours ago [-]
Most parents are too afraid of the State kidnappers (and the Karens who call them) for that.
Hoodedcrow 7 hours ago [-]
IDK about "most", there are plenty of kids on the streets. Like, just going to and from school and extracurriculars gives opportunities.
7 hours ago [-]
bcjdjsndon 14 hours ago [-]
I mean I see em, but I feel like there should be a lot more playing in the street.
noosphr 13 hours ago [-]
Streets are for cars now.
13x29a 11 hours ago [-]
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.
kleiba2 20 hours ago [-]
They also use VPNs, as anyone would have predicted within two seconds.
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.
bcjdjsndon 16 hours 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 17 hours 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 it.
contubernio 16 hours ago [-]
The vpn ban movement also has support from powerful (and corrupt) entities like the Spanish football federation ...
anthk 13 hours ago [-]
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.
2ndorderthought 16 hours ago [-]
Vpns 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.
Permit 16 hours ago [-]
> It's basically the leading reason why quantum computing is being funded.
What? Can you provide any evidence for this claim?
2ndorderthought 16 hours ago [-]
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.
bcjdjsndon 16 hours ago [-]
> Why do you think Google, the world's largest ad company, is paying money out of its ears to research those topics?
The numerous commercially viable applications of quantum computing. No conspiracy theory needed, you nutjob
2ndorderthought 15 hours ago [-]
First time I have been called a nut job. Nice
worldsavior 16 hours ago [-]
That's FUD.
2ndorderthought 15 hours ago [-]
Alright then.
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.
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.
marcus_holmes 20 hours ago [-]
it's funny, but this is not going to end well.
silon42 17 hours ago [-]
Time to go back to modems (over phone maybe) and BBSs?
Morromist 20 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.
glenngillen 15 hours ago [-]
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)
antiframe 13 hours ago [-]
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?
What are we doing even?
mschuster91 12 hours ago [-]
> What are we doing even?
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.
bilekas 19 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.
lazyasciiart 18 hours ago [-]
And that’s how the laws designed to protect children ended up producing the worlds largest collection of photos of naked children.
Someone 17 hours ago [-]
Mostly naked grownups, with a few fairly tall children who are naked, except for the fake pubic hair.
wongarsu 15 hours ago [-]
Don't worry, most "protect the children" regulation casts a web so wide it includes plenty of pubic hair and sexually active teens
jermaustin1 11 hours ago [-]
The UK government already has one of if not THE largest collection of CSAM in the world, called the CAID (Child Abuse Image Database).
17 hours ago [-]
2ndorderthought 17 hours ago [-]
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.
cucumber3732842 16 hours ago [-]
>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.
azinman2 12 hours ago [-]
So what would you do to combat the very real problems associated with (unlimited) access to known cognitive harms for minors?
2ndorderthought 16 hours ago [-]
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.
christophilus 16 hours ago [-]
It reminds me of Tipper Gore and her righteous crusade against video games.
general1465 14 hours ago [-]
I can already see angry post on reddit that some short king failed a verification test.
creaturemachine 13 hours ago [-]
This is the new version of being IDed while in your 30's.
amanaplanacanal 11 hours ago [-]
Grey beard here who still has to show id to buy beer (even non-alcoholic beer) at a certain grocery store chain.
ProllyInfamous 10 hours ago [-]
I bought beer in Tennessee, with my visiting mother (obviously 21+), and they ID'd us both (as state law requires).
It tickled her silly that she "got ID'd for the first time in decades."
I didn't have the heart to tell her they HAVE to ID everybody at purchase, here.
She glowed all day, so very happily #RIPmommabear
raffael_de 18 hours 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.
dethos 13 hours ago [-]
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.
TheServitor 18 hours 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.
sandeepkd 19 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.
15 hours ago [-]
phyzix5761 17 hours ago [-]
What if politicians are creating these systems that are easy to bypass so they have an excuse for starting to officially ID everyone?
gustavus 16 hours ago [-]
That was always the plan from day 1.
Lio 12 hours ago [-]
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.
seydor 14 hours ago [-]
The best thing to happen to tech is kids finding ways to make a fool of modern tech
eszed 21 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 20 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 20 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.
throwthrowuknow 15 hours ago [-]
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.
gschizas 12 hours ago [-]
Retail stores existed outside the US, even back then.
distances 20 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 :-)
lazyasciiart 18 hours 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.
gambiting 17 hours ago [-]
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.
AyyEye 12 hours ago [-]
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.
gambiting 10 hours ago [-]
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.
bcjdjsndon 16 hours ago [-]
Even as an English speaker the Pokémon all sounded gibberish to me so it wouldn't have been much help
riffraff 19 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.
yazantapuz 17 hours ago [-]
I don't think that the larry games where to be released to the whole world.
21asdffdsa12 13 hours ago [-]
Life 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 9 hours ago [-]
I live in south america.
cassianoleal 17 hours ago [-]
Same same!
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. :)
Thanks for bringing back the memories!
Akasazh 17 hours ago [-]
> Ken sent me
I also remember the joke that was written on the same wall 'it takes leather balls to play rugby'.
I didn't get the joke till much later, but somehow it stuck with me.
foobarian 13 hours ago [-]
> I'm from a non-English-speaking country.
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.
palata 15 hours ago [-]
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 :-).
lkramer 12 hours ago [-]
LSL 1 EGA specifically is pretty much how I learned English. It was certainly much more efficient than my teachers :)
belorn 15 hours ago [-]
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.
teeray 14 hours ago [-]
It’s hilarious when adults forget how smart a motivated group of children with an ocean of free time can be.
forlorn_mammoth 14 hours ago [-]
Solution: make sure the kids don't have any free time. Let's schedule their days for optimum productivity instead.
vavos 12 hours ago [-]
Ah, The steryotipical asian parent approach
mrguyorama 8 hours ago [-]
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.
dec0dedab0de 13 hours ago [-]
We 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.
noufalibrahim 18 hours ago [-]
There were so many of these wink-wink things I wouldn't know about if not for trying to brute force LSL.
17 hours ago [-]
bko 17 hours ago [-]
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.
giantg2 12 hours ago [-]
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.
clutter55561 14 hours ago [-]
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.
Rant over.
k12sosse 13 hours ago [-]
Wonder 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 12 hours ago [-]
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.
If you do, try to be a bit more empathetic.
noosphr 13 hours ago [-]
Jesus christ. Your poor kid. This is how you rise someone that will never talk to you once they turn 30.
clutter55561 13 hours ago [-]
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.
mothballed 12 hours ago [-]
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.
noosphr 9 hours ago [-]
Bloomers bought their houses at 20 and had families by 22. Things change and for the last 50 years they haven't changed for the better.
mothballed 8 hours ago [-]
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.
cindyllm 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
palata 14 hours ago [-]
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).
Tangurena2 14 hours ago [-]
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.
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?
hellojesus 8 hours ago [-]
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.
iamnothere 12 hours ago [-]
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!
luqtas 11 hours ago [-]
we need a state owned and produced hardware with all the rights apps! the bible, wikipedia and Settings for turning down brightness
data-ottawa 15 hours ago [-]
If 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.
harladsinsteden 19 hours ago [-]
Life finds a way...
heavyset_go 17 hours ago [-]
Another step towards "Insert your verification probe to continue"
Tangurena2 14 hours ago [-]
I'm sure it will actually be "drink verification can to continue".
Well of course. What else did they expect kids were going to do? This whole idea was braindead from the start.
18 hours ago [-]
charcircuit 20 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.
i_think_so 20 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?
kakacik 20 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
croes 20 hours ago [-]
Parents who work fulltime, some even more than one job?
jochem9 20 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).
i_think_so 20 hours ago [-]
Oof. Now I has a sad. :(
crote 20 hours ago [-]
What if we...now hear me out....what if we paid people a living wage?
AnthonyMouse 17 hours ago [-]
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.
heavyset_go 17 hours ago [-]
There are computing and communication devices designed for kids to use.
Stop handing your kids brand new iPads and complaining, especially if you aren't willing to use parental controls.
locao 16 hours ago [-]
I'm not saying you're wrong, but Apple's parental controls just don't work.
AngryData 7 hours ago [-]
That sounds like a problem for society to fix directly, not shoehorn 30 other fixes on top of an inherently broke system.
Dylan16807 20 hours ago [-]
It's possible to design something parents can control without using lots of their time to do so.
croes 17 hours ago [-]
So you are back to
> what if we didn't try to shoehorn a stupid and unworkable technological solution into this problem space
Dylan16807 17 hours ago [-]
Depends on how you end that sentence.
If you end it with "and make a good easy to use technical solution instead" then you found my stance.
If you end it with "and just...made parents responsible for their kids?" like GP then no that's not my stance at all.
AnthonyMouse 17 hours ago [-]
> 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?
Dylan16807 10 hours ago [-]
The issue at hand of figuring out ages would not take much labor no matter how you did it.
AnthonyMouse 5 hours ago [-]
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.
croes 16 hours ago [-]
So you could say the same for original echnical solution.
> make a good easy to use technical solution instead
Dylan16807 10 hours ago [-]
> 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".
marcus_holmes 20 hours ago [-]
ok, now you've identified the real problem, how can we solve that?
bandie91 20 hours ago [-]
well, everyone need to clarify their priorities.
croes 17 hours ago [-]
Food and shelter vs children?
croes 16 hours ago [-]
Massive downvote because I don't want to blame hard working parents?
I get a hard tech-bro vibe who like to blame others to deflect from responsibilty of their technology
bandie91 20 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.
protocolture 20 hours ago [-]
Right they didnt put enough panopticon in. Got it.
pjc50 19 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)
charcircuit 18 hours 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.
ben_w 17 hours ago [-]
In addition to being illegal under GDPR, that's not going to work very well.
I don't look like the other people whose name I share.
> 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.
codedokode 15 hours ago [-]
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.
throwaw3y 15 hours ago [-]
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
codedokode 15 hours ago [-]
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.
techdmn 14 hours ago [-]
You are punching down instead of up. The problem is not children, or parents, but the state trying to enforce restrictions.
a96 14 hours ago [-]
The problem is all the complacent people not fighting this obvious dystopian spiral.
13 hours ago [-]
orbital-decay 14 hours ago [-]
I originally read your previous post as sarcasm (hard to tell on the web) but now I see you're describing an absolute hellhole without a hint of irony
mjmas 14 hours ago [-]
> let them all go there and not bother normal people.
The normal state does include people with children.
mothballed 14 hours ago [-]
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.
codedokode 13 hours ago [-]
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.
rpdillon 13 hours ago [-]
Yes, one of the biggest mistakes I see some people without children make is believing that they have no vested interest in people raising children.
noosphr 13 hours ago [-]
Becuae if it wasn't the kids it'd be drug dealers. If it wasn't drug dealers it'd be terrorist. If it wasn't terrorists it be Nazis.
This isn't about kids. It's about control and the people too stupid to give it to policians.
For some reason everyone has something that turns their brain off and makes them happily turn over freedom to people who hate them.
fhennig 16 hours ago [-]
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.
wongarsu 15 hours ago [-]
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
estimator7292 16 hours ago [-]
There's age verification and then there's "age verification" (mass surveillance dragnet)
One of these is clearly a very extremely bad thing
basisword 15 hours 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 14 hours ago [-]
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.
fhennig 13 hours ago [-]
> What are these systems?
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
I'm not doing it for bloody discord or bsky DMs.
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.
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
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
They must really be scared of the voice and power anonymity gives normal people who wouldn't normally have it.
It's basically the leading reason why quantum computing is being funded. They gotta break your encryption to read your activity.
Pretty sad world.
What? Can you provide any evidence for this claim?
The numerous commercially viable applications of quantum computing. No conspiracy theory needed, you nutjob
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.
Or ... https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5752369/ice-surveillanc...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/02/27/us-go...
https://www.wired.com/story/dhs-surveillance-phone-tracking-...
What are we doing even?
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.
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.
<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.
It tickled her silly that she "got ID'd for the first time in decades."
I didn't have the heart to tell her they HAVE to ID everybody at purchase, here.
She glowed all day, so very happily #RIPmommabear
"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.
Logically parents are probably best suited to gate the content for their children how they see it fit.
They’ve wanted total surveillance for quite a while. Now politicians and billionaires are talking about making it happen.
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'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.
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.
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. :)
Thanks for bringing back the memories!
I also remember the joke that was written on the same wall 'it takes leather balls to play rugby'.
I didn't get the joke till much later, but somehow it stuck with me.
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.
And only then I realised that it was all in English :-).
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 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.
offtopic, I would love remakes of all the old sierra games, with a local llm doing the text interface.
It's the whole "kids are going to drink anyway so I may as well buy them booze" brain rot.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics)#
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Code_word
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic
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?
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36542487
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?
... 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
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.
Stop handing your kids brand new iPads and complaining, especially if you aren't willing to use parental controls.
> what if we didn't try to shoehorn a stupid and unworkable technological solution into this problem space
If you end it with "and make a good easy to use technical solution instead" then you found my stance.
If you end it with "and just...made parents responsible for their kids?" like GP then no that's not my stance at all.
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?
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.
...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".
I get a hard tech-bro vibe who like to blame others to deflect from responsibilty of their technology
btw, yes, we must not lose the skill of parenting. no any technology give it back to us.
"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)
I don't look like the other people whose name I share.
Famously, neither does this guy: https://iammarkzuckerberg.com
Yeeeah .. this is not the sort of thing that GDPR ought to allow, though.
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.
The normal state does include people with children.
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.
This isn't about kids. It's about control and the people too stupid to give it to policians.
For some reason everyone has something that turns their brain off and makes them happily turn over freedom to people who hate them.
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.
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
One of these is clearly a very extremely bad thing
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?
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.