Children are drawing moustaches on their faces to fool online age checks - and it's working; fake birthdays, borrowed IDs, and creative facial hair bypass age checks
18h 57m ago by mander.xyz/u/Deep in technology from www.internetmatters.org
Full Report(PDF).
Literally every type of age verification ever put into place has been circumvented by children. EVERY SINGLE ONE.
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".
slippery little shitz hahaha
Age verification bypass tool soon to be made illegal:
Who posted this?
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.
John cena
It was Norman Reedus
Waldo
A Marxiat
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.
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.
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.
I can’t wait to email this to my MP
Canada Bill S209 needs to die. It’s bad legislation.
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
How about instead of trying every complicated stupid way to regulate users and especially children ..... you regulate and control companies and corporations instead.
It’s not about the kids. It’s about knowing who is organizing protests, unions, and calling out wage theft, polluters, and whistleblowing illegal activities performed by the government and Epstein class.
It’s about preventing access to online spaces, monetary transactions, and basically letting them erase you from society if you don’t offer them full-throated gratuity and allegiance.
You know, just like ChInAs sOcIaL cReDiT sYsTeM.
As usual here in the West, every accusation is a confession (or at least an idea for later)
It’s been that way for ages around the world. The 2000s were full of news stories from places like Russia, with protests about the actions of their government and the treatment of political opposition. Those stories have largely died down, not because Russia changed, but because they clamped down on dissent. The US is just catching up. It wasn’t just Russia either. We’ve seen this globally with most major political activities over the last decade or more. Where once we were getting video of events in real time, now they’ve learned to shut down the internet, censor the digital forums, 'flood the zone'. Where once you could be critical of this government or that, it has become an internet of heavily commercialized influencers. It sucks, man.
Like...Russia, China, India, Iran, Isreal, UK, and a handful of others that I can't remember.
It's happening everywhere and all in slightly different ways but it's not JUST the US. I just tend to remember Russia the best because they are the closest to what seems to be happening in the US at a visual level. The old videos of arrests and protests in Russia almost mirror the modern ICE videos. I suspect it will only get worse.
Or, ya know, make parents take responsibility for their own children and monitor what they are doing online. If you don't want your kids seeing or participating in things online then don't give them unfettered access to smart phones and computers!
I kind fo agree and kind of don't. I agree in that parents should take accountability for their children. That said, social media has been shown to be addictive and kids are frequently ahead of their parents technologically. One thing that could help is an education campaign that teaches parents how to effectively monitor their kid's online activity. Parents need some help figuring out what tools to use and how to use them I think.
You are correct and I'm a little upset at myself that I left out the fact that educating parents should be something we put money and effort into as well.
Good point. Kids know too much and get addicted too early. Adult know too little and can’t tell the difference between lies and reality. Everybody consumes way too much porn. That’s it, everybody put their phones in the garbage. No more Internet, everyone gets a landline, rotary dial, call on the other end does’t disconnect if you don’t hang yours up.
I agree, letting parents do their job of parenting is the best way to deal with this. But the problem is that that's very difficult, and they currently lack adequate tools.
The best method would be to make sure operating systems support parental controls that parents can set, and require websites to respect those settings (and browsers to support an API passthrough of the OS setting). That way there's no need to do any age verification that sends sensitive data like ID or faces to third-parties with sketchy privacy policies.
Unfortunately, when moves were actually taken to implement this kind of solution, reactionaries pushed back and made sure it didn't happen.
Combine both and demand parental controls for devices and services. The isp is paid for by an adult that's the only age check websites should need. Parents should have easily accessible tools to mark a os or browser as used by a minor.
Wifi/router side parental controls are laughably easy to get around
Utah is trying. They claim they want to hold websites liable for Utahians who use VPNs to bypass ID checks. I don't think that's going to work, mostly because I have a lot of questions about how that could possible be enforced. But it's funny to think about.
And who's payroll campaign donations are the politicians that are pushing these policy coming from?
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. 🤣🤣
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.
Vincent Adultman
I went to the stock market today and did a business
I wonder how the business industry is going these days?
Today in: "Just let the parents parent."
It's good to see a reminder that depending on the majority of parents to act in absence of real, tangible regulation is doomed to be a failure.
Good, good -- teach the children that authority is bullshit. This kind of thing is more effective than book learnin'.
Is it legal to “verify” my age to be a minor? Would less of my information be collected?
…not that any of it is accurate anyway.
I couldn't stop laughing when one of my kids showed me a picture of his 10 year old friend's effort with the texta. We are talking comical magician curly moustache. Roblox verified that account as 18 though and now that account can't talk to his school friends.
He outsmarted himself lol
"Well, now that they found ways to bypass the checks, we need to introduce even more checks. Let's make them spit into a device every time they turn on a PC, then check their age based on their genetic markers." - Politicians
We want your children to be safer online so we forced them to self-identify with biometric data? Isn’t that part of what caused this in the first place?
Privacy, security, and regulation is the answer here, not more surveillance capitalism. But that’s anathema to the business models of every social media company so instead we get this ham-fisted attempt at jamming the square peg of “digital advertising surveillance” into the round hole of “protecting children”. The mechanical action damages everything involved.
This system is specifically and very effectively designed to monitor, analyze, addict, and sell people, and this “solution” just ends up being more engineering to that end. Asking it to selectively age-gate content is like inventing a global network for information transfer and then becoming outraged when it’s used for file sharing. Copy is an intrinsic operation of digital data, and exploitation is an intrinsic operation of social media. We’re asking it to do the opposite of what it’s created to do.
Parents should be in charge of filtering content for their children, and the government should be in charge of using the collective power of the people to regulate companies that exploit them instead of serving them. Asking social media companies to do it is backing the wolf truck up to the chicken coop while the guy hired to protect the chickens tells you “The wolves will protect the chickens from other predators!”
No, all the danger to children comes from satanic pedophiles cold-messaging strangers from trailer parks in hell. Billionaires can always be trusted with sensitive data and photos of children. Parents also notoriously never do anything bad to their children.
the SOY gmod method vs the CHAD fake mustache
What year were you born on January 1st?
1970
The beginning of time...
Oh it was a long time ago, but not so long ago that it's suspicious.
Blame to all who made such stupid software and then called it "age check"
It's not age check. It's 1984-style government invasion of privacy.
I guess now we must ban pens and markers because children might draw fake mustaches and bypass age verification.
So long humble pen. We will miss you.
A freshly-washed face is the new wiped browser history.
As I understand it, most adult content producers aren't actually interested in having minors using their sites. It seems like the easiest thing to do would be to have them add some "Adult Material" flag in their metadata, and let consumers respond as they wish to that tag - whether that's done through browser settings, router nannyware, or whatever.
Is there a technical reason this isn't what's being pushed for? I'm sure there's lobbying and "optics" reasons for not doing this, but is there any practical reason for not pursuing this, or something like it?
We already have multiple solutions for blocking children from websites that parents don't want them to access and the companies providing those situations maintain their own databases of different types of content tagged so that parents can have some control over what is blocked and what is not. This stuff has existed since the 90s it's nothing new. It requires parents taking the initiative though and really when we get down to it this is another, "but think of the children, " sort of situation where they are using child safety as cover for making it easier to collect biometric data of people online.
The hell are you talking about? Yes there are blocklists for adult domains, but that doesn’t actually block adult content since it leaves stuff like YouTube open. If you think there isn’t full on sex on there then you’ll be surprised.
The only thing that functions right now is whitelisting and it is super annoying since so many apps open a web container inside the app. All this id verification is nonsense, but providing an actually filtered internet is still nigh impossible for parents who aren’t tech savvy.
Pretty easy solution to that, don't let your kid have access to youtube without observing what they are watching. If a parent isn't willing to learn how to setup parental controls and/or web filtering and take the time to observe what their child is consuming then it shouldn't be shoved onto the government and made a problem for everyone else.
Yeah that’s a nice idea but so is parents being able to provide food and shelter for their children. However, most counties in the world have social services because we recognize what should happen and what actually happens don’t always overlap and we don’t want to starve kids for their parents failings.
Once you accept some parents either won’t or in many cases can’t, the question is what you value more: the kids in those situations or the companies profiting off the parents failures.
Plus YouTube is an easy example. There are thousands of other websites that have much worse. Making the websites themselves responsible for flagging the domain puts the onus on those most likely to have the technical know how rather than those more likely to be ignorant.
I heard three kids where able to use a trenchcoat to bypass it!
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.
Relevant Bojack Horseman : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMV8btPW4wU
The Internet views censorship as a fault and will re-route around it.
Halloween everyday.
we need to go back to the tried and true method of a calendar field to prove age. i know that kept me out of all the dirty sites back when i was born in 1979 through 84.
Entrepreneurial spirit. CAPITALISM!...yay
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.
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.
Fake mustache selling out fast
legit... lil young rebels
Its almost like AI couldnt think for itself.
I just want to try this for the lulz.