We should get all of our advice from little kids. They have not yet been bound by knowing what is or isn't possible. The meek shall inherit the earth.
this post was submitted on 04 May 2026
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We should get all of our advice from little kids.
These articles tend to lean on click-baity "One Neat Trick" headlines, while disguising the more practical hit-or-miss reality of facial recognition software. Sometimes you can outsmart the computer. Sometimes it just fouls the system and fails out. Sometimes the system works exactly as intended.
Little kids experiment around the edges of a system until they get bored or frustrated. In the aggregate, they can be very clever just through the number of permutations they try. Individually, your 12-year-old isn't going to Hack The Internet reliably.
Pff, maybe not your 12-year-old
People act as if it was a bug and not a feature. This was intended. After people sufficiently make fun of the current solution that everyone knows how easily it is broken, the next step is requiring both ID and face scan and comparing photo on ID with face scan. Congrats, privacy is removed completely. Every poster is now tied with real life identity.
The usual playbook.
There's always an analog loop to curb censorship. It's just a waste of money.
Not for the people pushing for this Orwellian shit.
Most people will just comply, and "most people" is who they want to spy on and control.
Oh no. All that's left now that the age veifications are bypassed are the extensive public surveillance. Better leave that running.
"Well, now that they found ways to bypass the checks, we need to introduce even more checks. Let's make them spit into a device every time they turn on a PC, then check their age based on their genetic markers." - Politicians
did anyone actually read the pdf?
here is the wikipedia article about the organisation doing the "research". read their partners list and see if your conclusion changes
Age checks are common and seen as easy to complete. About half of children (53%) say they have recently been asked to verify their age, most often when setting up new accounts. According to children, the following methods were described as easy: uploading a government ID document (88%), facial age estimation (89%) and using a third-party app (88%).
Wow, they are really teaching children to upload their government ID to random internet websites who ask for it. Identity theft heaven.
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.
Yeah, and get ready for those big platforms selectively leaking user data, sometimes with falsified stuff. Get ready for union leaders suddenly being outed for being into weird shit (often literally), all while they're clueless and disgusted, as part of online smear campaigns. Always said that "cancel culture"/purity testing is a dangerous weapon that can be astroturfed by the enemy, and there's already some precedent for that (most recently the whole Hasan dog thing). Even some leftists are trying really hard to cancel some "annoying" people among them.
Canceculture is naziism
it's not just the author, but the author's address, friends, family, employer, coworkers, shopping list, where they go and what they do in their spare time, what kind of health issues they have, who they're having affairs with--pretty much everything, wrapped up in a bow by AI, ready to be spreadsheeted/cross-referenced across all those data points.
what fascists do
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Blame to all who made such stupid software and then called it "age check"
It's not age check. It's 1984-style government invasion of privacy.
Same picture.
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.
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.
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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.
Sure. And so it doesnt really matter then.
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Agreed. We need to start moving communities away
Well, there's always the ancient method that teens used to get their hands on alcohol when I was that age: pay someone who's down on their luck for ten minutes of their time.
That feels kinda gross and exploitative. Because it's not like alcohol. This is something I very well could do myself, but refuse to do on principle, because I don't want to hand over personal data like that. Paying someone else to hand over their data feels gross.
Fair. Two wrongs don't make a right. (And to be honest? If it were me, I'd actually just drop out of those channels. I'm used to venues on the Internet being easy-come-easy-go.)
DM the mods to fix channels. If they refuse, you'll have to leave. Don't give Discord any info. A community I was in moved to an alternative and it's still there, right after Discord announced it would implement ID registrations.
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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.
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Literally every type of age verification ever put into place has been circumvented by children. EVERY SINGLE ONE.
Almost like it wasn’t about them in the first place.
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