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 was JFK assassinated?" If I didn't know I'd ask my dad, who never knew he was contributing to the delinquency of (other) minors.
distances 4 hours ago [-]
> 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 advance to a point where someone had seen and memorized others play. Didn't matter, as it was one of the only games in the system so we'd play it anyway. I still remember how hard it was to type "ken sent me" in the allotted time window.
21asdffdsa12 4 hours ago [-]
Nowhere does the us "center of the universe" mindset shine more through, then when to expect the world to remember the presidential dogs name.
distances 3 hours ago [-]
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 :-)
lazyasciiart 2 hours ago [-]
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.
gambiting 54 minutes ago [-]
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.
yazantapuz 19 minutes ago [-]
I don't think that the larry games where to be released to the whole world.
riffraff 3 hours ago [-]
I think everybody does this to some extent.
Like, I remember someone telling me at one point that the thing in Head over Heels was a Dalek with prince Charles head. I didn't know either of those.
Akasazh 19 minutes ago [-]
> Ken sent me
I also remember the joke that was written on the same wall 'it takes leather balls to play rugby'.
I didn't get the joke till much later, but somehow it stuck with me.
cassianoleal 52 minutes ago [-]
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!
noufalibrahim 1 hours ago [-]
There were so many of these wink-wink things I wouldn't know about if not for trying to brute force LSL.
26 minutes ago [-]
bko 35 minutes ago [-]
Of course rules are circumvented. Maybe even frequently. But that doesn't mean on the margin none of this stuff has an impact and is not worth the effort.
It's the whole "kids are going to drink anyway so I may as well buy them booze" brain rot.
Morromist 3 hours ago [-]
The next age verification tech will involve checking tallness so we'll have kids standing on eachother's shoulders in a big trenchcoat to do the very adult act of installing linux.
2ndorderthought 4 minutes ago [-]
Lol. Or standing next to a dollhouse or something.
Let's be realistic here. All this age verification stuff is pseudoscience and more importantly it isn't tested or standardized at all. It's just theater so the creeps get all the data on your children they can.
Meta has made a killing, literally, exploiting children psychology. Social media is the orphan crunching machine for nonorphans or something.
bilekas 3 hours ago [-]
And when they need to find a way to circumvent this, they will ask for the full height picture without clothes on. Instead of addressing the problem of this entire idea and implementation they will continue to double down on it.
lazyasciiart 2 hours ago [-]
And that’s how the laws designed to protect children ended up producing the worlds largest collection of photos of naked children.
Someone 9 minutes ago [-]
Mostly naked grownups, with a few fairly tall children who are naked, except for the fake pubic hair.
7 minutes ago [-]
nick486 4 hours ago [-]
I guess thats one important upside of age verification systems I didn't think of. They encourage creativity and a healthy disregard for stupid rules.
zeec123 3 hours ago [-]
The result will be age verification with a passport or ID "to protect the children". Probably this was the goal all along.
riffraff 3 hours ago [-]
The EU age id app is this, with some extra privacy hurdles (the id is only on your phone not on the remote server).
thisislife2 7 minutes ago [-]
And this will then be used by the Apple and Google to make "security" on the OS "stronger" so that "we can protect the children" better (i.e. lock down the OS even more and take control away from us consumers). In this new idiocracy, this this is how corporates and government work together to take away our rights ...
Cthulhu_ 3 hours ago [-]
Already a thing for a lot of services (like financial), but still. There's better ways that don't involve sending your ID or facial scans to a first or third party.
pjc50 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I set up a trading212 account lately and they wanted ID scan + live video. I mind that a bit less for finance: identity theft is real, and there are significant disadvantages to me if someone can set up a bank account in my name without getting ID checked.
I'm not doing it for bloody discord or bsky DMs.
pkphilip 3 hours ago [-]
The governments know fully well that simple checks for age verification will be bypassed. So they will "fix" this issue by demanding a digital id.
TheServitor 2 hours ago [-]
I process the manual ID reviews for a small system. I don't get many, but I have seen some funny stuff. Last week a kid tried to use a still from a Spiderman movie.
phyzix5761 47 minutes ago [-]
What if politicians are creating these systems that are easy to bypass so they have an excuse for starting to officially ID everyone?
kleiba2 3 hours ago [-]
They also use VPNs, as anyone would have predicted within two seconds.
Collectively we have fought long and hard for internet freedom, it's depressing that all it takes is a generation and some bureaucratic idiocy for all that to be undone.
heavyset_go 1 hours ago [-]
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.
marcus_holmes 3 hours ago [-]
it's funny, but this is not going to end well.
silon42 15 minutes ago [-]
Time to go back to modems (over phone maybe) and BBSs?
raffael_de 1 hours ago [-]
I think the reverse Hanlon's Razor applies here:
"Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice."
The Helen Lovejoy argument "will somebody please think of the children" provided for the foot in the door. The intended outcome is that only iris scans will allow for full child protection ... and that was the plan all along.
jl6 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe age verification will encourage kids to be more social in person, because they’ll need to have at least two inside the trenchcoat.
sandeepkd 2 hours ago [-]
The only good justification of it can be that the companies can claim that the age verification was done as per Terms of Service, so in the future no parent or parent group can come after them for the content. Along with better targeted advertising by identifying the target audiences.
Logically parents are probably best suited to gate the content for their children how they see it fit.
heavyset_go 58 minutes ago [-]
Another step towards "Insert your verification probe to continue"
harladsinsteden 3 hours ago [-]
Life finds a way...
i_think_so 4 hours ago [-]
Well of course. What else did they expect kids were going to do? This whole idea was braindead from the start.
2 hours ago [-]
charcircuit 4 hours ago [-]
One big problem is that the verification is trying to estimate your age instead of looking up who is the actual person and then checking what the age is of that person. If the lookup returns that the face is that of a video game character it should reject as opposed to trying to estimate the age of that character.
i_think_so 4 hours ago [-]
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?
kakacik 4 hours ago [-]
Nono too radical, parents dont have time, they need it to scroll some shitty social media cash grab to feel themselves even more shitty about their lives.
... and we would like to call our generation 'smart'. While knowing deep inside very well what a failure as a parent many of our generation are. The proof for/against are our kids right in front of our eyes and there is no escaping from this basic truth, thats why its so crushing.
Sorry gotta go, need to check some shitty sites who spy on me and try to push in vain on me some primitive ads.
/s
croes 4 hours ago [-]
Parents who work fulltime, some even more than one job?
crote 4 hours ago [-]
What if we...now hear me out....what if we paid people a living wage?
AnthonyMouse 11 minutes ago [-]
Most of a "living wage" is from the cost of living. We make living space artificially scarce and then your rent is high but so is the rent on the small businesses that employ people. The restaurant can't pay the waitress more when their own costs have gone up, and the money is going to the landlords rather than the employers.
Likewise, when some megacorps capture the government and monopolize a market, the costs go up on both individuals and all the employers in other markets who are now paying monopoly rents with the money they could have otherwise used to hire more people (bidding up wages) or lower the prices workers pay when they buy their products.
Just asking them to pay more doesn't work when the party you want to pay more isn't the party which is extracting the money, and higher costs are just as much of a problem as lower wages.
jochem9 3 hours ago [-]
Says a lot about the state of society when parenting is outsourced to technology, so that the parents can be further enslaved (because almost no one chooses to work two jobs).
i_think_so 3 hours ago [-]
Oof. Now I has a sad. :(
heavyset_go 53 minutes ago [-]
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.
Dylan16807 4 hours ago [-]
It's possible to design something parents can control without using lots of their time to do so.
croes 55 minutes ago [-]
So you are back to
> what if we didn't try to shoehorn a stupid and unworkable technological solution into this problem space
Dylan16807 50 minutes ago [-]
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.
AnthonyMouse 5 minutes ago [-]
> If you end it with "and make a good easy to use technical solution instead" then you found my stance.
That assumes a good easy to use technical solution is possible. What if classifying user-generated content as safe for kids is enormously subjective, and the labor required to accurately classify it even given a hypothetical objective standard would cost more than users are willing to pay to have it done?
croes 2 minutes ago [-]
So you could say the same for original echnical solution.
> make a good easy to use technical solution instead
marcus_holmes 3 hours ago [-]
ok, now you've identified the real problem, how can we solve that?
bandie91 4 hours ago [-]
well, everyone need to clarify their priorities.
croes 54 minutes ago [-]
Food and shelter vs children?
bandie91 4 hours ago [-]
whaaat? parents?? being responsible? let alone to their kids? what are you? some kind of backward medieval luddite?
btw, yes, we must not lose the skill of parenting. no any technology give it back to us.
protocolture 4 hours ago [-]
Right they didnt put enough panopticon in. Got it.
pjc50 2 hours ago [-]
> 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)
charcircuit 1 hours ago [-]
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.
ben_w 13 minutes ago [-]
In addition to being illegal under GDPR, that's not going to work very well.
I don't look like the other people whose name I share.
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 was JFK assassinated?" If I didn't know I'd ask my dad, who never knew he was contributing to the delinquency of (other) minors.
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 advance to a point where someone had seen and memorized others play. Didn't matter, as it was one of the only games in the system so we'd play it anyway. I still remember how hard it was to type "ken sent me" in the allotted time window.
Like, I remember someone telling me at one point that the thing in Head over Heels was a Dalek with prince Charles head. I didn't know either of those.
I also remember the joke that was written on the same wall 'it takes leather balls to play rugby'.
I didn't get the joke till much later, but somehow it stuck with me.
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!
It's the whole "kids are going to drink anyway so I may as well buy them booze" brain rot.
Let's be realistic here. All this age verification stuff is pseudoscience and more importantly it isn't tested or standardized at all. It's just theater so the creeps get all the data on your children they can.
Meta has made a killing, literally, exploiting children psychology. Social media is the orphan crunching machine for nonorphans or something.
I'm not doing it for bloody discord or bsky DMs.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn72ydj70g5o
Consequently, we're now discussing VPN bans for under 18 year olds <insert facepalm emoji>.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn438z3ejxyo
They must really be scared of the voice and power anonymity gives normal people who wouldn't normally have it.
"Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice."
The Helen Lovejoy argument "will somebody please think of the children" provided for the foot in the door. The intended outcome is that only iris scans will allow for full child protection ... and that was the plan all along.
Logically parents are probably best suited to gate the content for their children how they see it fit.
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?
... and we would like to call our generation 'smart'. While knowing deep inside very well what a failure as a parent many of our generation are. The proof for/against are our kids right in front of our eyes and there is no escaping from this basic truth, thats why its so crushing.
Sorry gotta go, need to check some shitty sites who spy on me and try to push in vain on me some primitive ads.
/s
Likewise, when some megacorps capture the government and monopolize a market, the costs go up on both individuals and all the employers in other markets who are now paying monopoly rents with the money they could have otherwise used to hire more people (bidding up wages) or lower the prices workers pay when they buy their products.
Just asking them to pay more doesn't work when the party you want to pay more isn't the party which is extracting the money, and higher costs are just as much of a problem as lower wages.
Stop handing your kids brand new iPads and complaining, especially if you aren't willing to use parental controls.
> what if we didn't try to shoehorn a stupid and unworkable technological solution into this problem space
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.
That assumes a good easy to use technical solution is possible. What if classifying user-generated content as safe for kids is enormously subjective, and the labor required to accurately classify it even given a hypothetical objective standard would cost more than users are willing to pay to have it done?
btw, yes, we must not lose the skill of parenting. no any technology give it back to us.
"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)
I don't look like the other people whose name I share.
Famously, neither does this guy: https://iammarkzuckerberg.com
Yeeeah .. this is not the sort of thing that GDPR ought to allow, though.