They could’ve just bloody made social media safe for everyone, instead of making us jump through all these hoops.
Of course with porn it’s a bit more complicated, being exposed to it at too young of an age has proven negative effects.
People act as if it was a bug and not a feature. This was intended. After people sufficiently make fun of the current solution that everyone knows how easily it is broken, the next step is requiring both ID and face scan and comparing photo on ID with face scan. Congrats, privacy is removed completely. Every poster is now tied with real life identity.
The usual playbook.
We should get all of our advice from little kids. They have not yet been bound by knowing what is or isn’t possible. The meek shall inherit the earth.
We should get all of our advice from little kids.
These articles tend to lean on click-baity “One Neat Trick” headlines, while disguising the more practical hit-or-miss reality of facial recognition software. Sometimes you can outsmart the computer. Sometimes it just fouls the system and fails out. Sometimes the system works exactly as intended.
Little kids experiment around the edges of a system until they get bored or frustrated. In the aggregate, they can be very clever just through the number of permutations they try. Individually, your 12-year-old isn’t going to Hack The Internet reliably.
Pff, maybe not your 12-year-old
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Oh no. All that’s left now that the age veifications are bypassed are the extensive public surveillance. Better leave that running.
There’s always an analog loop to curb censorship. It’s just a waste of money.
Not for the people pushing for this Orwellian shit.
Most people will just comply, and “most people” is who they want to spy on and control.
Anyone know the best way to fool these age verification tools? I’ve got some Discord servers with channels that are marked as NSFW mainly out of an abundance of caution, despite mainly just being open to rude language. And others where it’s just slightly spicy memes.
I am old enough, I just don’t want to give my real face or ID to Discord or their chosen third parties. I don’t trust them. Have tried pointing OBS at videos of people staring straight at the screen, but those don’t quite seem to work.
Don’t use discord? Problem solved.
And I really am serious. We need to move away from platforms we have no control over and contribute to the problem.
We probably shouldn’t be using Discord but you’ve got to meet people where they’re at. Telling someone to just drop a service when all of their connections are there is unhelpful at best.
What else are you supposed to tell them? Its like an abusive relationship, do we just tell them “oh well” you get something out of it so just stay in it?
I mean if you want to help someone in an abusive relationship, telling them to just leave doesn’t really work there either, and for a lot of the same reasons. But you can support them in other ways until they’re able to do what’s necessary to leave.
We probably shouldn’t be using Discord
It’s a useful tool for a variety of organizational goals. Why should we have to leave? They’re the ones that suck.
Ultimately Discord is a corporate-owned social media platform, and like all corporate-owned social media platforms their best interests rarely intersect with the best interests of their users. Centralised systems like Discord always end up with a power imbalance between the users and the administrators, and if you break their rules they have it within their power to just vapourise your community without a second thought. Your organisation or community only exists for as long as you toe their line.
Useful? And losing complete control to a corporation is good how?
losing complete control to a corporation
Getting forced off of a community forum every time a business gobbles up the rights to the software is a loss of control.
Thanks, but that is a thoroughly unhelpful piece of advice.
So keep fighting the corporate entity and keep making things worse by supporting them?
I don’t know what else to tell you. You have no control, so you get what you deserve by continuing to use it. And when you continue to use it, it keeps other people thinking they need to use it, and the pain continues. Its a classic it hurts when I do this, so the answer is “stop doing that”.
Do you really need discord to be your chat server?
So to actually offer advice if you are determined to have a discord like experience: you could try Fluxer and if they implement the same restrictions you could try self hosting it.
Editing to add: Fluxer.app as the url.
I’ve already moved my gaming group to Matrix. But, and this might shock you, not every server I’m a member of consists entirely of myself and my close friends.
Sure. And so it doesnt really matter then.
Probably the best advice you’ll get today
Agreed. We need to start moving communities away
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Well, there’s always the ancient method that teens used to get their hands on alcohol when I was that age: pay someone who’s down on their luck for ten minutes of their time.
That feels kinda gross and exploitative. Because it’s not like alcohol. This is something I very well could do myself, but refuse to do on principle, because I don’t want to hand over personal data like that. Paying someone else to hand over their data feels gross.
Fair. Two wrongs don’t make a right. (And to be honest? If it were me, I’d actually just drop out of those channels. I’m used to venues on the Internet being easy-come-easy-go.)
DM the mods to fix channels. If they refuse, you’ll have to leave. Don’t give Discord any info. A community I was in moved to an alternative and it’s still there, right after Discord announced it would implement ID registrations.
Don’t give Discord any info
That’s the idea. I’m hoping people have an idea of some method to bypass it that actually works. Maybe a particular video or game that still works well. Giving them useless data.
Fwiw, they don’t do the age verification themselves. They contract it out to a third party. And as much as I trust neither entity very far, I do trust that the third party probably isn’t handing over that data to Discord. I’m more worried about the third-party being hacked/leaking data, which has already happened.
did anyone actually read the pdf?
here is the wikipedia article about the organisation doing the “research”. read their partners list and see if your conclusion changes
Age checks are common and seen as easy to complete. About half of children (53%) say they have recently been asked to verify their age, most often when setting up new accounts. According to children, the following methods were described as easy: uploading a government ID document (88%), facial age estimation (89%) and using a third-party app (88%).
Wow, they are really teaching children to upload their government ID to random internet websites who ask for it. Identity theft heaven.

Literally every type of age verification ever put into place has been circumvented by children. EVERY SINGLE ONE.
Almost like it wasn’t about them in the first place.
When I was little, my mom used to send me to the store with a note that said to sell me cigarettes, and that they were for her. When I started smoking, I used to reuse the notes to get my own smokes. I got my first fake ID at 13 so I could buy beer.
When I was 13 I could just buy beer, the trick was to make it look like you are helping your parents with groceries. So also pickup stuff like a carton of eggs, potatoes and milk. I never had any issue, but it was a different time and in Europe
Yeah, that last bit is key.
In German I think we were drinking in the clubs at that age. No “helping the parents with the eggs and milk” lol
My mum did the same thing she stopped when I used the £20 note to buy sweets, that was a lot of sweets back then.
I guess its a good thing that the point if this is just to tie a real human to their online presence and protecting kids never actually mattered.
You know, for a given value of “good” being “actually very very bad”.
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slippery little shitz hahaha
Age verification bypass tool soon to be made illegal:

Who posted this?
I asked chatgpt and they don’t know either.
John Oliver
It’s simply impossible to tell.
Well, obviously an adult, but I admit I’m a little unsure about which one. Hope that helps.
It was Norman Reedus
Waldo
John cena
A Marxist
Yeah, because it isn’t about that. They don’t give a fuck about kids seeing porn. Even when there are age checks, there will be plenty of free porn.
It’s all about being able to connect an online post with the author.
Extremely stupid idea for a law but I don’t think the people who are for this did it to sneak in surveillance. I think they are simply too stupid to understand digital tech and internet and how these laws won’t work to fix the problems they are trying to solve - namely that a lot of young do too much of the bad internet. The surveillance thing is just a bonus
I can second this. It seems to me pretty clearly that these policies are being passed based on genuine concern for the children. They’re poorly designed but they come from a good place.
Yeah, and get ready for those big platforms selectively leaking user data, sometimes with falsified stuff. Get ready for union leaders suddenly being outed for being into weird shit (often literally), all while they’re clueless and disgusted, as part of online smear campaigns. Always said that “cancel culture”/purity testing is a dangerous weapon that can be astroturfed by the enemy, and there’s already some precedent for that (most recently the whole Hasan dog thing). Even some leftists are trying really hard to cancel some “annoying” people among them.
Canceculture is naziism
it’s not just the author, but the author’s address, friends, family, employer, coworkers, shopping list, where they go and what they do in their spare time, what kind of health issues they have, who they’re having affairs with–pretty much everything, wrapped up in a bow by AI, ready to be spreadsheeted/cross-referenced across all those data points.
what fascists do
Dig deep enough, you’ll find something on anyone.
and any skeletons in your closet apparently only matters if you’re opposed to fascism… be maga = get away with literally anything
Then just tick the ‘straight to jail’ box next to the names that are the ‘wrong’ color
They’re doing this age verification on purpose just to spy on adults lol
Don’t forget that they are also doing this to desensitize and normalize this for children…
Fascism starts with attacking the minorities. In this case minors are the tool, and reducing their rights to ashes will only enable further progression of fascism. It essentially feeds on discrimination.
Agreed. Divide and conquer
got to get em when they are young…
I can’t wait to email this to my MP
Canada Bill S209 needs to die. It’s bad legislation.
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Oh that’s a great idea to use politicians to get past age checks assuming of course they don’t get butthurt enough to claim it’s full on fraud
You have to have the word Parody on it somewhere. Then it is not fraud. The thing looks so stupid anyways and has the security feature markings from my id anyways. I am not fooling a human.
My email is now 9 pages long…
Do not do this if you play in grey hat territory. You are going to be on a list.
Not sure what you mean by that.
I’m just writing an email to oppose this, my email is not like the above poster. I am just laying out arguments why this is a bad solution and will not work.
Which is what we’re seeing with kids drawing moustaches and borrowing IDs at will.
Fuck, didn’t realize this cancer had reached Canada
Politicians don’t seem to function this way though. They don’t concern themselves with implementation details. People will vote for age verification even if it doesn’t work.
I’m in my mid thirties and I’d still buy a mask or something to trick these systems if and when this becomes a thing in my country.
Guy Fawkes uses a lot of online services.
Same I have absolutly no respect for big tech
As someone who spent my formative days figuring out how to bypass early digital locks my school was putting in place to “protect us” … The system loses this game. Every time. You are taking kids with nothing but time, no apparent drawbacks, and everything to gain… And placing them against “good enough” implemented by people who could give two shits about it.
This will continue to lose until they twist the knobs too tight and hit false positive central… And oops now the populace hates it. Control for thee is fine until its for me.
Tale as old as technology itself.
Remember the V-Chip? LOL
It pains me to say I do - hah. The south park movie bit on it was perfect.
Mine was simple, but great. IE was hidden/removed in our typing class, maybe 5th grade. I guessed you could type a www.domain.tld in Word and when you pressed space, got a clickable URL that was still tied to IE. I knew about the URL, but learned it would still open with IE hidden. 🤣🤣
I used to go to the “about Microsoft Works” pop up under the “help” drop down in Works (yes I’m old), and then click a URL on there that would open up a functioning IE window.
We used to get up to so much shenanigans in high school computer classes… I remember playing Unreal Tournament over LAN with like half the class without the teacher knowing
It was Quake for us 😅 I’m not even that old, it’s just the only game that was small enough to store on the shared network without being discovered
Even with false positives it won’t change anything. It’s just a small group of people. It’s worth it to “save the children”. If “the system” rejects you, then you must be at fault. Maybe we can even sell a “Super ID Check”. Just a one time $200 fee and then the system will leave you alone. (For 3 years, then pay the fee again, but renewal is even faster this time.)
I’m not saying its going to happen quickly… But filtering in many forms has been tried in the past and they all died similarly. Some vocal group gets inconvenienced by it and then, under scrutiny, the blemishes get paraded out and the project dies a slow ugly death.
The actual reason for the push right now is meta (among others) just want to wash their hands of the responsibility… And that aligns with some tech bros wanting to hoover up peoples ids and resell that info. The whole thing will sour once there’s a significant leak that ties risk into that bottom line and nobody will want to carry it.












