Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The solution is parents using the parental control feature on their children’s devices. This is a stopgap at best, and to be blunt, it's naive. They can go on their friends' phones, or go to a shop and buy a cheap smartphone to circumvent the parental controls. If the internet is locked down, they'll use one of many "free" VPN services, or just go to school / library / a friend's place for unrestricted network acce…
Age verification clearly does not work either. Teens will circumvent it, or use alternative technologies.
Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass
351–360 of 494 posts
Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s not how they work. They emit structured light in the form of an array of infrared dots and they measure the time of flight to where the dots strike something. Maybe new ones are different but that’s how they used to be. Little Kinect devices, really, for sensing faces instead of whole people.
You are exactly right. There's a description here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de... These cameras are considered a "secure biometric" device and AFAIK nobody has faked them. I've flagged the poster who said "try two flat images"
Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
They aren't comparable. Showing an ID to a staff member isn't stripping my anonymity. I know the retailer won't have that on file forever, tied to me on subsequent visits. Also they stop ID'ing you after a certain age ;) There isn't any way to achieve the same digitally.
Actually there is, various age verification systems exist where the party asking for it does not need to process their ID, like the Dutch iDIN ( https://www.idin.nl/en/ ) that works not unlike a digital payment - the bank knows your identity and age, just like they know your account balance, and can sign off on that kind of thing just like a payment. I hope this becomes more widespread / standardized; the precursor f…
I'm personally more interested in the intuition people have when it comes to squaring rejecting age verification online while also accepting it in a multitude of other situations (both online and offline)
Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious: are you ok with the other laws that are in place in the world to prevent underage people to engage with all sorts of activities? Like, for example, having to show an ID to being able to purchase alcohol?
I'm a lot more okay with that because alcohol purchasing doesn't have free speech implications. It's weird how radicalized people get about banning books compared to banning the internet.
I don't think asking for age verification is the same as banning something. Which connection do you see between requiring age and free speech?
Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass
#355The reaction to Discord age verification fiasco once again makes me believe that HN users just don’t have friends. There is no alternative for Discord for bigger groups. If there was, I still couldn’t move multiple social circles to it, no matter how much I evangelised. The “just don’t use the less morally aligned platform” argument has always been valid only for those without a strong need for it, whether it’s X or…
Well, someone has to start. It's ok if you use the alternative with a subset of your contacts.
Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass
#356Tangentially, it's kind of weird how most of the sites' systems to verify your age try to get you to do it on a phone. I've never used twitter on a phone, yet that's the only official way to go through the age verification process. Youtube too. I attempted to get through the youtube one on a new account to see an age-gated video, but couldn't finish the process and gave up. At the time, I remember thinking it would b…
Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They're designed for you to give up your online anonymity and make you accountable for your speech and actions online. They're designed destroy anonymity to give the in group pretext to persecute the out group . It will be propagandized as accountability but it will be anything but.
Is this serious or meant as satire about us-vs-them framing?
The US is repealing section 230, and it appears to be a pretext for shutting down platforms that don't block anti–Trump speech. Australia has an age verification law that seems to actually be about keeping kids off social media.
Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about just requiring browser, OS vendors, and phone makers to give parents real child accounts that are easy to use and keep kids off the Internet?
This would suddenly mean no more custom browsers, no more custom OSes, and I doubt they'd cater to the Linux and BSD crowds with this one. It's something the OSS community has been trying to fight for the last 4 decades. With a full-on government requirement this would lock you to the vetted platforms while letting anything other get in would be illegal for the site owners.
Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
>as a young preteen in the 90s and 00s, I made a lot of online friends As another 90s preteen, sure, but the internet today has a lot more pedos and groomers online than in the 90s, and preteens today easily share footage of themselves to those adult weirdos, which didn't happen in the 90s because mostly limitations of technology. BUt if you look at tiktok live it's full of preteen girls dancing, and creepy old men d…
> As another 90s preteen, sure, but the internet today has a lot more pedos and groomers online than in the 90s There were not fewer pedos and groomers online in the 90s, you were just lucky to have avoided it.
Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the thought of requiring others to show their faces never occurred to me at all I know you meant as a service provider, but as a avid IRC (and an online game that conventionally alt-tabbed into a irc-like chat window) chatter as a young preteen in the 90s and 00s, I made a lot of online friends that I would not discover what they looked like IRL for decades, some never. People I was gaming with in the 90s, for the…
>as a young preteen in the 90s and 00s, I made a lot of online friends As another 90s preteen, sure, but the internet today has a lot more pedos and groomers online than in the 90s, and preteens today easily share footage of themselves to those adult weirdos, which didn't happen in the 90s because mostly limitations of technology. BUt if you look at tiktok live it's full of preteen girls dancing, and creepy old men d…
Without some data analysis I honestly don't know. Even before Internet (ex: FidoNet) there was plenty of very bad stuff out there, I don't see any clear reason why the pedos and groomers would have avoided it.
> We have to separate kids from adults on the internet somehow
I think what is much worse than in other mediums is the actual lack of a community that observes. In real life, for many cases, you would have multiple people noticing interactions between kids and adults (sports, schools, parks, shops, etc.), so actions might be taken when/before things get strange. On some of the social networks on the internet it is too much one-to-one communication which avoids any oversight.
So, for me, the idea of "more separation" seems to generate on the long term even more problems, because of lack of (healthy) interactions and a community.