Literally every type of age verification ever put into place has been circumvented by children. EVERY SINGLE ONE.
this post was submitted on 04 May 2026
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Almost like it wasn’t about them in the first place.
I guess its a good thing that the point if this is just to tie a real human to their online presence and protecting kids never actually mattered.
You know, for a given value of "good" being "actually very very bad".
When I was little, my mom used to send me to the store with a note that said to sell me cigarettes, and that they were for her. When I started smoking, I used to reuse the notes to get my own smokes. I got my first fake ID at 13 so I could buy beer.
When I was 13 I could just buy beer, the trick was to make it look like you are helping your parents with groceries. So also pickup stuff like a carton of eggs, potatoes and milk. I never had any issue, but it was a different time and in Europe
Yeah, because it isn't about that. They don't give a fuck about kids seeing porn. Even when there are age checks, there will be plenty of free porn.
It's all about being able to connect an online post with the author.
Age verification bypass tool soon to be made illegal:
I can’t wait to email this to my MP
Canada Bill S209 needs to die. It’s bad legislation.
Fuck, didn’t realize this cancer had reached Canada
How about instead of trying every complicated stupid way to regulate users and especially children ..... you regulate and control companies and corporations instead.
They could've just bloody made social media safe for everyone, instead of making us jump through all these hoops.
Of course with porn it's a bit more complicated, being exposed to it at too young of an age has proven negative effects.
I'm in my mid thirties and I'd still buy a mask or something to trick these systems if and when this becomes a thing in my country.
Vincent Adultman
As someone who spent my formative days figuring out how to bypass early digital locks my school was putting in place to "protect us" ... The system loses this game. Every time. You are taking kids with nothing but time, no apparent drawbacks, and everything to gain... And placing them against "good enough" implemented by people who could give two shits about it.
This will continue to lose until they twist the knobs too tight and hit false positive central... And oops now the populace hates it. Control for thee is fine until its for me.
Tale as old as technology itself.
Mine was simple, but great. IE was hidden/removed in our typing class, maybe 5th grade. I guessed you could type a www.domain.tld in Word and when you pressed space, got a clickable URL that was still tied to IE. I knew about the URL, but learned it would still open with IE hidden. 🤣🤣
Good, good -- teach the children that authority is bullshit. This kind of thing is more effective than book learnin'.
I couldn't stop laughing when one of my kids showed me a picture of his 10 year old friend's effort with the texta. We are talking comical magician curly moustache. Roblox verified that account as 18 though and now that account can't talk to his school friends.
Is it legal to “verify” my age to be a minor? Would less of my information be collected?
…not that any of it is accurate anyway.
As I understand it, most adult content producers aren't actually interested in having minors using their sites. It seems like the easiest thing to do would be to have them add some "Adult Material" flag in their metadata, and let consumers respond as they wish to that tag - whether that's done through browser settings, router nannyware, or whatever.
Is there a technical reason this isn't what's being pushed for? I'm sure there's lobbying and "optics" reasons for not doing this, but is there any practical reason for not pursuing this, or something like it?
We already have multiple solutions for blocking children from websites that parents don't want them to access and the companies providing those situations maintain their own databases of different types of content tagged so that parents can have some control over what is blocked and what is not. This stuff has existed since the 90s it's nothing new. It requires parents taking the initiative though and really when we get down to it this is another, "but think of the children, " sort of situation where they are using child safety as cover for making it easier to collect biometric data of people online.
The hell are you talking about? Yes there are blocklists for adult domains, but that doesn’t actually block adult content since it leaves stuff like YouTube open. If you think there isn’t full on sex on there then you’ll be surprised.
The only thing that functions right now is whitelisting and it is super annoying since so many apps open a web container inside the app. All this id verification is nonsense, but providing an actually filtered internet is still nigh impossible for parents who aren’t tech savvy.
Pretty easy solution to that, don't let your kid have access to youtube without observing what they are watching. If a parent isn't willing to learn how to setup parental controls and/or web filtering and take the time to observe what their child is consuming then it shouldn't be shoved onto the government and made a problem for everyone else.
Anyone know the best way to fool these age verification tools? I've got some Discord servers with channels that are marked as NSFW mainly out of an abundance of caution, despite mainly just being open to rude language. And others where it's just slightly spicy memes.
I am old enough, I just don't want to give my real face or ID to Discord or their chosen third parties. I don't trust them. Have tried pointing OBS at videos of people staring straight at the screen, but those don't quite seem to work.
Don't use discord? Problem solved.
And I really am serious. We need to move away from platforms we have no control over and contribute to the problem.
Thanks, but that is a thoroughly unhelpful piece of advice.
So keep fighting the corporate entity and keep making things worse by supporting them?
I don't know what else to tell you. You have no control, so you get what you deserve by continuing to use it. And when you continue to use it, it keeps other people thinking they need to use it, and the pain continues. Its a classic it hurts when I do this, so the answer is "stop doing that".
Do you really need discord to be your chat server?
So to actually offer advice if you are determined to have a discord like experience: you could try Fluxer and if they implement the same restrictions you could try self hosting it.
Editing to add: Fluxer.app as the url.
I've already moved my gaming group to Matrix. But, and this might shock you, not every server I'm a member of consists entirely of myself and my close friends.
Probably the best advice you’ll get today
We probably shouldn't be using Discord but you've got to meet people where they're at. Telling someone to just drop a service when all of their connections are there is unhelpful at best.
What else are you supposed to tell them? Its like an abusive relationship, do we just tell them "oh well" you get something out of it so just stay in it?
I mean if you want to help someone in an abusive relationship, telling them to just leave doesn't really work there either, and for a lot of the same reasons. But you can support them in other ways until they're able to do what's necessary to leave.