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Kids can bypass some age checks with a drawn-on mustache

theregister.com

41–50 of 203 posts

Re: Kids can bypass some age checks with a drawn-on mustache

#41
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> looking up who is the actual person "Fallacies programmers believe about people" (you can sort of do this in countries with national ID schemes if you don't care about foreigners; for example, various people have found this in China where random things are gated behind having a WeChat account which requires a Chinese ID. You can't do this in the US or UK, which are big pushers of the ""age verification"" scheme)

You don't need an Id. For example, you can crawl the internet for selfies and then try and tie that face with the person it belongs to. With enough datasets you can start to put together a database of relevant people enough that it's okay to do deeper validation for the people you did not collect a face for.

> you can crawl the internet for selfies and then try and tie that face with the person it belongs to

Yeeeah .. this is not the sort of thing that GDPR ought to allow, though.

Re: Kids can bypass some age checks with a drawn-on mustache

#42
post #2

Of course they do. Only fools expected anything else. Does else anyone remember the "age verification" on '80s video games? Some of them were hilarious. I think it was Leisure Suit Larry that asked multiple choice history questions that I guess were meant to be impossible for fifth graders to guess. I was the local history nerd, so I remember getting calls from classmates, like "we're trying to get into a game; when…

There were so many of these wink-wink things I wouldn't know about if not for trying to brute force LSL.

Re: Kids can bypass some age checks with a drawn-on mustache

#43
post #19

They also use VPNs, as anyone would have predicted within two seconds. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn72ydj70g5o Consequently, we're now discussing VPN bans for under 18 year olds . https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn438z3ejxyo

I've never seen efforts to make laws as damn bulletproof like this.

They must really be scared of the voice and power anonymity gives normal people who wouldn't normally have it.

Re: Kids can bypass some age checks with a drawn-on mustache

#45
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parents who work fulltime, some even more than one job?

It's possible to design something parents can control without using lots of their time to do so.

So you are back to

> what if we didn't try to shoehorn a stupid and unworkable technological solution into this problem space

Re: Kids can bypass some age checks with a drawn-on mustache

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the main hurdle was that we were 7-9 years old iirc and didn't know any English at all, beyond the memorized "knock knock" etc. So the topic of the questions wasn't on the table :-)

I love this story. I remember seeing two pre-literate kindergarten kids playing on a gameboy or similar handheld, one of them teaching the other strings of button presses for things like “save game” - just navigating through all the menus by memory.

I played through the entire Pokemon Yellow without understanding a lick of english. You just remembered what the commands did, and you learnt by experimenting.

Re: Kids can bypass some age checks with a drawn-on mustache

#48
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one idea. I have a different one. What if we...now hear me out....what if we didn't try to shoehorn a stupid and unworkable technological solution into this problem space and just...made parents responsible for their kids?

Parents who work fulltime, some even more than one job?

There are computing and communication devices designed for kids to use.

Stop handing your kids brand new iPads and complaining, especially if you aren't willing to use parental controls.

Re: Kids can bypass some age checks with a drawn-on mustache

#49
post #2

Of course they do. Only fools expected anything else. Does else anyone remember the "age verification" on '80s video games? Some of them were hilarious. I think it was Leisure Suit Larry that asked multiple choice history questions that I guess were meant to be impossible for fifth graders to guess. I was the local history nerd, so I remember getting calls from classmates, like "we're trying to get into a game; when…

> I think it was Leisure Suit Larry that asked multiple choice history questions that I guess were meant to be impossible for fifth graders to guess. I'm from a non-English-speaking country. We didn't understand the questions at all, but all us kids in the neighborhood got into the game just fine with some brute forcing. Also, coming up with the expected commands in the game was way beyond our skills so we'd only adv…

Same same!

My brother and I had a notepad with all the questions and possible answers, and we'd run the game several times until we got through, then make a note of the answers. Eventually we had all of them.

"Ken sent me" is buried in my brain for that same reason. :)

Thanks for bringing back the memories!

Re: Kids can bypass some age checks with a drawn-on mustache

#50
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible to design something parents can control without using lots of their time to do so.

So you are back to > what if we didn't try to shoehorn a stupid and unworkable technological solution into this problem space

Depends on how you end that sentence.

If you end it with "and make a good easy to use technical solution instead" then you found my stance.

If you end it with "and just...made parents responsible for their kids?" like GP then no that's not my stance at all.

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