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•May 5, 2026
> 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•May 5, 2026
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•May 5, 2026
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•May 5, 2026
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•May 5, 2026
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.
bcjdjsndon•May 5, 2026
Even as an English speaker the Pokémon all sounded gibberish to me so it wouldn't have been much help
riffraff•May 5, 2026
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.
yazantapuz•May 5, 2026
I don't think that the larry games where to be released to the whole world.
cassianoleal•May 5, 2026
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!
Akasazh•May 5, 2026
> 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.
noufalibrahim•May 5, 2026
There were so many of these wink-wink things I wouldn't know about if not for trying to brute force LSL.
bko•May 5, 2026
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.
charcircuit•May 5, 2026
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•May 5, 2026
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?
croes•May 5, 2026
Parents who work fulltime, some even more than one job?
Dylan16807•May 5, 2026
It's possible to design something parents can control without using lots of their time to do so.
croes•May 5, 2026
So you are back to
> what if we didn't try to shoehorn a stupid and unworkable technological solution into this problem space
Dylan16807•May 5, 2026
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•May 5, 2026
> 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•May 5, 2026
So you could say the same for original echnical solution.
> make a good easy to use technical solution instead
crote•May 5, 2026
What if we...now hear me out....what if we paid people a living wage?
AnthonyMouse•May 5, 2026
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.
bandie91•May 5, 2026
well, everyone need to clarify their priorities.
croes•May 5, 2026
Food and shelter vs children?
jochem9•May 5, 2026
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•May 5, 2026
Oof. Now I has a sad. :(
marcus_holmes•May 5, 2026
ok, now you've identified the real problem, how can we solve that?
heavyset_go•May 5, 2026
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.
locao•May 5, 2026
I'm not saying you're wrong, but Apple's parental controls just don't work.
croes•May 5, 2026
Massive downvote because I don't want to blame hard working parents?
I get a hard tech-bro vibe who like to blame others to deflect from responsibilty of their technology
kakacik•May 5, 2026
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
bandie91•May 5, 2026
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•May 5, 2026
Right they didnt put enough panopticon in. Got it.
pjc50•May 5, 2026
> 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•May 5, 2026
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.
pjc50•May 5, 2026
> 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.
ben_w•May 5, 2026
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.
Time to go back to modems (over phone maybe) and BBSs?
interstice•May 5, 2026
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.
bcjdjsndon•May 5, 2026
> internet freedom
This "freedom" runs exactly inverse to how many normies know about the internet. The more accessible it's become, the worse it's got for freedom. They weren't regulating what they didn't know about back in the glory days
heavyset_go•May 5, 2026
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.
2ndorderthought•May 5, 2026
Vpns are really under attack this year. All the LLM providers desperately don't want to have the majority of users using them.
It's basically the leading reason why quantum computing is being funded. They gotta break your encryption to read your activity.
Pretty sad world.
Permit•May 5, 2026
> It's basically the leading reason why quantum computing is being funded.
What? Can you provide any evidence for this claim?
2ndorderthought•May 5, 2026
Why do you think Google, the world's largest ad company, is paying money out of its ears to research those topics? The sooner people realize all major us tech companies are contractors for the us department of war the better.
worldsavior•May 5, 2026
That's FUD.
2ndorderthought•May 5, 2026
Alright then.
Go ahead use metas verifier, give your biometrics to openai, type all your personal and financial information into copilot for advice, email your boss tell him anthropics boris was right you are now redundant, click on all of the ads you see, only engage with your peers on Facebook to let the algorithm decide how that goes, only drive in roads with flock cameras to stay safe, turn off your ad blocker, don't use vpns, etc. it's your life.
> Why do you think Google, the world's largest ad company, is paying money out of its ears to research those topics?
The numerous commercially viable applications of quantum computing. No conspiracy theory needed, you nutjob
2ndorderthought•May 5, 2026
First time I have been called a nut job. Nice
contubernio•May 5, 2026
The vpn ban movement also has support from powerful (and corrupt) entities like the Spanish football federation ...
Morromist•May 5, 2026
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.
bilekas•May 5, 2026
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•May 5, 2026
And that’s how the laws designed to protect children ended up producing the worlds largest collection of photos of naked children.
Someone•May 5, 2026
Mostly naked grownups, with a few fairly tall children who are naked, except for the fake pubic hair.
2ndorderthought•May 5, 2026
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.
cucumber3732842•May 5, 2026
>All this age verification stuff is pseudoscience and more importantly it isn't tested or standardized at all. It's just theater
<lightbulb moment>
Abdicating responsibility, standards and government enforcement are three of white collar America's favorite things.
Seems like an opportunity for someone to become a billionaire by creating a standardization and licensing agency and then paying for some shills to get the ball rolling. Give it 5yr and everyone will have to do business with you lest the feds kick in their door. Give it 10yr and the useful idiots will be in the comment section talking about how XYZ age verification mechanism must be good because it's "certified" by your garbage and that the sky will fall if we get rid of it.
I hope I'm too jaded, but frankly I don't think I'm jaded enough.
2ndorderthought•May 5, 2026
They are trying for it that's for sure. It reminds me of the us war on drugs for some reason. Obviously I don't want kids doing drugs but it had ludicrous takes that were terrible for society. I guess there aren't enough wars going on? Have to go to war against the Internet or something now.
christophilus•May 5, 2026
It reminds me of Tipper Gore and her righteous crusade against video games.
zeec123•May 5, 2026
The result will be age verification with a passport or ID "to protect the children". Probably this was the goal all along.
Cthulhu_•May 5, 2026
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•May 5, 2026
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.
echelon_musk•May 5, 2026
I'm paying Fidelity's fees instead of completing the verification process with Trading 212.
riffraff•May 5, 2026
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•May 5, 2026
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 ...
harladsinsteden•May 5, 2026
Life finds a way...
pkphilip•May 5, 2026
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.
sandeepkd•May 5, 2026
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.
TheServitor•May 5, 2026
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.
raffael_de•May 5, 2026
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.
heavyset_go•May 5, 2026
Another step towards "Insert your verification probe to continue"
phyzix5761•May 5, 2026
What if politicians are creating these systems that are easy to bypass so they have an excuse for starting to officially ID everyone?
gustavus•May 5, 2026
That was always the plan from day 1.
fhennig•May 5, 2026
I don't want to give my ID to every service I interact online. But I also don't think it's reasonable to ask of parents to ensure their children aren't accessing age restricted content online.
What about liquor shops or strip clubs? They ask for ID, which makes sense; we're not expecting parents to make sure their children don't go into these places. But the liquor shop takes a look at the ID and then doesn't collect the data.
Being entirely against age verification is not a good stance I think, but we should definitely have a hard stance on the privacy issue. There are systems that preserve privacy while still making it possible to verify you're old enough to use a service.
estimator7292•May 5, 2026
There's age verification and then there's "age verification" (mass surveillance dragnet)
One of these is clearly a very extremely bad thing
data-ottawa•May 5, 2026
If you’re in Canada please write your MP about bill S-209, which brings this nonsense here.
As someone on a tech forum, we’re the only people who can really articulate the issues with the age verification approach.
It’s really the worst solution to these problems with awful tradeoffs.
17 Comments
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.
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!
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.
It's the whole "kids are going to drink anyway so I may as well buy them booze" brain rot.
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?
> 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?
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.
I get a hard tech-bro vibe who like to blame others to deflect from responsibilty of their technology
... 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
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)
Yeeeah .. this is not the sort of thing that GDPR ought to allow, though.
I don't look like the other people whose name I share.
Famously, neither does this guy: https://iammarkzuckerberg.com
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
This "freedom" runs exactly inverse to how many normies know about the internet. The more accessible it's become, the worse it's got for freedom. They weren't regulating what they didn't know about back in the glory days
They must really be scared of the voice and power anonymity gives normal people who wouldn't normally have it.
It's basically the leading reason why quantum computing is being funded. They gotta break your encryption to read your activity.
Pretty sad world.
What? Can you provide any evidence for this claim?
Go ahead use metas verifier, give your biometrics to openai, type all your personal and financial information into copilot for advice, email your boss tell him anthropics boris was right you are now redundant, click on all of the ads you see, only engage with your peers on Facebook to let the algorithm decide how that goes, only drive in roads with flock cameras to stay safe, turn off your ad blocker, don't use vpns, etc. it's your life.
Or ... https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5752369/ice-surveillanc...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/02/27/us-go...
https://www.wired.com/story/dhs-surveillance-phone-tracking-...
The numerous commercially viable applications of quantum computing. No conspiracy theory needed, you nutjob
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.
<lightbulb moment>
Abdicating responsibility, standards and government enforcement are three of white collar America's favorite things.
Seems like an opportunity for someone to become a billionaire by creating a standardization and licensing agency and then paying for some shills to get the ball rolling. Give it 5yr and everyone will have to do business with you lest the feds kick in their door. Give it 10yr and the useful idiots will be in the comment section talking about how XYZ age verification mechanism must be good because it's "certified" by your garbage and that the sky will fall if we get rid of it.
I hope I'm too jaded, but frankly I don't think I'm jaded enough.
I'm not doing it for bloody discord or bsky DMs.
Logically parents are probably best suited to gate the content for their children how they see it fit.
"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.
What about liquor shops or strip clubs? They ask for ID, which makes sense; we're not expecting parents to make sure their children don't go into these places. But the liquor shop takes a look at the ID and then doesn't collect the data.
Being entirely against age verification is not a good stance I think, but we should definitely have a hard stance on the privacy issue. There are systems that preserve privacy while still making it possible to verify you're old enough to use a service.
One of these is clearly a very extremely bad thing
As someone on a tech forum, we’re the only people who can really articulate the issues with the age verification approach.
It’s really the worst solution to these problems with awful tradeoffs.