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Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

age-verifier.kibty.town

121–130 of 494 posts

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#121
post #4

The real and robust method will be generating artificial video input instead of the real webcam. I really don’t think any platform will be able to counter this. If they start requiring to use a phone with harder to spoof camera input, you will simply be able to put the camera in front of a high resolution screen. The cat and mouse game will not last long.

> I really don’t think any platform will be able to counter this. Do platforms want to counter it? Seems to me with an unreliable video selfie age verification: * Reasonable people with common sense don't need to upload scans of their driving licenses and passports * The platform gets to retain users without too much hassle * Porn site users are forced to create accounts; this enables tracking, boosting ad revenue an…

Until somebody (likely a politician or anti-porn advocacy group) decides to poke the bear and ruin it

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#122
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already support ID checks as an alternative to face scanning, if the latter proves to be untenable then it's literally a case of flipping a switch to mandate ID instead.

The long term solution would have to be some kind of integration with a government platform where the platform doesn’t see your ID and the government doesn’t see what you are signing up for. I don’t this will happen in the US but I can see it in more privacy responding countries. Apple and Google may also add some kind of “child flag” parents can enable which tells websites and apps this user is a child and all age c…

> where the platform doesn’t see your ID

ID checks aren't very worthwhile if anyone can use any ID with no consequences.

How long would it take for someone's 18 year old brother to realize they can charge everyone $10 to "verify" everyone's accounts with their ID, because it doesn't matter whose ID is used?

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#123
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't Windows Hello camera devices have some kind of hardware attestation? I'm sure verification schemes like this will eventually go down that path soon. My guess is that's probably one of the reasons Google tried to push for Play Store only apps, provide a measurable/verifiable software chain for stuff like this.

That the camera is real doesn't imply the thing it's viewing is real.

As I understand it, 'Windows Hello' requires a near-IR image alongside the RGB image.

It's not the fancy structured light of phone-style Face ID, but it still protects against the more common ways of fooling biometrics, like holding up a photo or wearing a simple paper mask.

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#125

I don't understand why (mostly) young people put so much effort into remaining customers of a service that is actively hostile against them and that they do not like. Does the convenience of remaining on a service you don't like the management of outweigh the mild effort to find an alternative solution?

I'm more than ready to leave if push really comes to shove. Wouldn't be the first time.

From experience, I know if I leave that few of my friends will follow. So I understand the resistance.

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#126
post #113
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the mild effort to find an alternative solution? Calling it a "mild effort" assumes skills that older generations took for granted but many young people seem to have been actively trained out of. We're past the era where I take for granted that aspiring programmers need to have the basics of a terminal or shell explained to them, into one where they might need an explanation for the basics of a file system and path…

I don't think it's beyond their comprehension to ask: "how can I have a chat system that I personally control?" The rest will be taken care of. Look at the Amnezia VPN. It's an app that helps you buy a VPS from a range of cloud provides, then sets it up, completely from the phone, as an exit node under user control. I don't see why a chat server cannot be set up and managed this way. It only takes one dedicated devel…

>The rest will be taken care of.

by a system with a incentive to keep them in centralized black boxes, yes.

>The rest will be taken care of.

It's never the tech hat's hard, but the networks. If people were able to just jump on a whim a lot of dynamics of modern corruption would fall apart.

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#127
Age verification itself isn't such a bad thing. I feel most people are more angry about having to verify their actual identity. Every ad provider knows your address and complete identity every time you log into anything though. I guess its the illusion of anonymity that's so popular.

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't control most of the discord communities I'm in. Some have been going a long time, and every platform migration sheds and shreds members. The 'mild effort' to move an old community to a new platform more often than not killed the community

> and every platform migration sheds and shreds members. What's the problem? You're filtering out people who don't really care about participation in whatever group or society is there. People who want to participate will move to an acceptable service and those who feel that is too much effort probably weren't participating much (if at all) anyway - in that case the only difference is the visible list of people with…

>You're filtering out people who don't really care about participation in whatever group or society is there.

You underestimate how many people would rather do nothing than be inconvenienced, sadly. If you're not the personality that the community is rotating around, you'll find the migration pretty lonely.

Heck, even esablished personalities can only do so much. Remember that Microsoft paid top Twitch streamers 10s of milllions to move to Mixer for exclusive streaming. Even that wasn't enough to give a leg up.

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#130

I don't understand why (mostly) young people put so much effort into remaining customers of a service that is actively hostile against them and that they do not like. Does the convenience of remaining on a service you don't like the management of outweigh the mild effort to find an alternative solution?

I think for a lot of people (me included) Discord isn't just a chat service like WhatsApp but more of a "home base" where you can hang out with all your friends, make new friends, share media, chat, play games together, stream games to each other, etc.

In the gaming sphere it's so universally used that all the friends you've ever made while gaming are on it, as well as all your chat history, and the entire history of whatever server you met them on. And if you want to make new friends, say to play a particular game, it's incredibly easy to find the official game server and start talking to people and forming lobbies with them.

My main friend group in particular has a server that we've had running since we were teenagers (all in our mid-20s now) which is a central place for all of the conversations we've ever had, all of the pictures we've ever sent each other, all the videos we've ever shared, and so on. That's something I search back through frequently looking for stuff we talked about years ago.

So I'm not saying it's impossible to move, but understand that it would require:

- Intentionally separating from the entire gaming sphere, making it so, so much harder to make new friends or talk to people. - Getting every single one of your friends that you play games with to agree to downloading and signing up for this new service (in my case that would be approx. a dozen people) - Accepting that this huge repository of history will be wiped out when moving to the new service (I suppose you could always log back in and scroll through it, but it's at least _harder_ to access, and is separated from all your new history)

On top of this, every time I've looked for capable alternatives to Discord I've come up empty-handed. Nothing else, as far as I can tell supports free servers, the ability to be in multiple servers, text chat divided into separate channels, optional threaded communication, voice chat joinable at any time with customizable audio setup (voice gate, push-to-talk, etc), game streaming from the voice chat at any time, and some "friend" system so that DMs and private calls can be made with each other. And even if I found one, then again I can't express enough that in the gaming sphere effectively _zero_ people use it or even know what it is.

Anyways, I'm not saying that nothing could make me abandon Discord, I'm just saying that doing so is a tremendous effort, and the result at the end will be a significantly worse online social life. So not a mild inconvienence.

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