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Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

age-verifier.kibty.town

381–390 of 494 posts

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#381
post #256
post #185

Well, it’s a clever idea. Discord seems to have intentionally softened its age-verification steps so it can tell regulators, “we’re doing something to protect children,” while still leaving enough wiggle room that technically savvy users can work around it. But in practice, this only holds if regulators are either inattentive or satisfied with checkbox compliance. If a government is competent and motivated, this appr…

> Discord seems to have intentionally softened its age-verification steps so it can tell regulators, “we’re doing something to protect children,” while still leaving enough wiggle room that technically savvy users can work around it. ...source? I sincerely doubt that Discord's lawyers advocated for age verification that was hackable by tech savvy users. It seems more likely that they are trying to balance two things:…

Usually in cases like this, there is no source, there can’t be. Long long ago, long enough to be past the statute of limitations, I was involved in a similar regulatory compliance situation. We specifically communicated in such a way that “actual effectiveness” wasn’t talked about, and we set that up with a single, verbal only and without recording, meeting between the team and one of the lawyers.

Point is, these kinds of schemes where internal communication is deliberately hobbled to comply maliciously with requirements while still being completely in the clear as far as any actual recorded evidence goes. And there’s always at least one person piping in with a naïve “source?” as if people would keep recorded evidence of their criminal conspiracies.

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#382
post #376

Earlier 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?

The difference is the internet is forever. A one-time unrecorded transaction like showing your ID at the bar is not. It is a false equivalence. Not only is the internet forever, but what is on it grows like a cancer and gets aggregated, sold, bundled, cross-linked with red yarn, multiplied, and multiplexed. Why would you ever want cancer?

> It is a false equivalence

It's a false equivalence only if you decide to equate the two. My question wasn't worded that way. I'm curious to know if someone who oppose this type of laws is also for or against other laws that are dealing with similar issues in other contexts.

Also, as I said in another post, there are plenty of places, online, where you have to identify yourself. So this is already happening. But again, I'm personally interested in people's intuitions when it comes to this because I find it fascinating as a subject.

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

First, children also have a right to free speech. It is perhaps even more important than for adults, as children are not empowered to do anything but speak. Second, it's turn-key authoritarianism. E.g. "show me the IDs of everyone who has talked about being gay" or "show me a list of the 10,000 people who are part of that's embarrassing me politically" or "which of my enemies like to watch embarrassing pornography?".…

> First, children also have a right to free speech.

Maybe I'm wrong (not reading all the regulations that are coming up) but the scope of these regulations is not to ban speech but rather to prevent people under a certain age to access a narrow subset of the websites that exist on the web. That to me looks like a significant difference.

As for your other two points, I can't really argue against those because they are obviously valid but also very hypothetical and so in that context sure, everything is possible I suppose.

That said something has to be done at some point because it's obvious that these platforms are having profound impact on society as a whole. And I don't care about the kids, I'm talking in general.

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So VPN to the UK?

What?

Lots of websites assume you are located in the country where your IP address is, and thus apply the rules for that country. So perhaps if someone wanted to use heuristics instead of uploading an ID, they could pretend to be in the UK by using a VPN.

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What?

Lots of websites assume you are located in the country where your IP address is, and thus apply the rules for that country. So perhaps if someone wanted to use heuristics instead of uploading an ID, they could pretend to be in the UK by using a VPN.

Legislatively, the UK is among the stricter regimes wrt online age verification. It's a place you want to be VPNing out of. Discord is apparently rolling this out worldwide out of their own free will, not due to legislative pressures.

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#387

[flagged]

You forgot one (the sane one, which is coming soon anyway): Using a government issued eID system. The EU is going to rollout eID in a way that a site can just ask “is this person > age xy?”. The answer is cryptographically secure in the sense that this person really is this age, but no other information about you has to be known by the site owner. Which is the actual correct way to do it. I don’t understand why all t…

What I don't understand about this approach is if it's truly completely privacy preserving what stops me from making a service where anyone can use my ID to verify? If the site owner really learns nothing about me except for my age then they can't tell that it's the same id being used for every account. And if the government truly knows nothing about the sites I verify on they can't tell that I'm misusing the id either. So someone must know more then you are letting on.

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#388

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…

if you make smartphones an 18+ item like alcohol many of these problems would go away.

That would also spur the market to produce actually nice pure communication devices. Flip phones could stop being for people with AARP cards again and would give better options to adults who don't want the smart phone all the time.

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#389
post #342

The 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…

> HN users just don’t have friends.

So once you have friends all connected parties requires to install Discords. How does that work?

Are your parents friendless, do they use Discord?

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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?

The chilling effect of tying identity to speech means it directly effects free speech. The Founding Fathers of the US wrote under many pseudonyms. If you think you may be punished for your words, you might not speak out.

We know we cannot trust service providers on the internet to take care of our identifying data. We cannot ensure they won't turn that data over to a corrupt government entity.

Therefore, we can not guarantee free speech on these platforms if we have a looming threat of being punished for the speech. Yes these are private entities, but they have also taken advantage of the boom in tech to effectively replace certain infrastructure. If we need smart phones and apps to interact with public services, we should apply the same constitutional rights to those platforms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pseudonyms_used_in_the...

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