To be fair, the game's rated 18+ in the UK. In terms of the law, this probably doesn't suffice. But theoretically, there still is a kind of age-check in place :'D
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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Wasn't exactly this talked about a few years ago?
This age verification thing is so stupid but it's good to know it can be bypassed this easily!! not gonna dox myself I care about my privacy 🤘 hope enough people rebel against this measure gets overturned bc it shows this country doesn't care about people's privacy online which is ironic considering the name
This is a clever way to bypass. If they get wise and somehow filter out Sam Porter Bridges' face, you could always fire up any of the games of comparable visual realism which let you design your own character's appearance.
Just get an AI to generate a face. If it's prepared to accept photos from video games and it'll probably accept AI generated images.
Not really that I expected competence.
It’s not just the realistic appearance, it’s the fact you can make the character do the specific expressions required, like opening your mouth etc
The one thing AI might be good for
It's fun that one can use games for it, but it shouldn't be difficult to do the same through AI-generated imagery either, which isn't much more difficult.
Even though this method is flawed, one shouldn't really use ID-only verification either imho, as it's a security risk to upload any official document like that (ref. Tea app leaks).
The whole age verification that the UK wants to impose has been quite the impossible task from the beginning. Creating government-backed education for (future) parents about how to raise a kid and protect them in today's digital society would be more efficient than this, if we really are thinking of what is best for the kids. But alas, there are zero requirements to become a parent...
No it's okay they promise they definitely delete all photographs as soon as you're verified. They totally don't keep them around in an insecure format or anything like that. They promise.
The problem, as always, is that parents don't want to put the work into educating their children, they want the government to wave a magic wand and make the problem go away. And that's what gets you half assed solutions like this.
The OSA is nothing to do with kids or parenting and everything to do with further developing surveillance of the UK and controlling what we can access.
I guarantee you, at some point after this will come prohibiting content deemed terrorism such as mentions of the word 'palestine' and 'action' in the same paragraph for example.
Sooner or later we'll have our own pseudo or real great firewall. I expect them to come after VPN use at some point too.
VPNs are next.
People circumventing the OSA.
THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
VPNs banned
Tbh just take any stock photo from image search online
I think the issue there is the k-ID software asks you to do things like open your mouth, then close your mouth - so you'd need to find stock photos of the same person doing stuff like that. Which, now that I think about it, I imagine there will be an influx of selfies of people with closed and open mouths available on google images very soon.
These took 5 minutes to make
Honestly we should just move on to device based attestation and if parents want to protect their kids they set up child mode.
I’m not responsible for lazy parenting.
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I've seen this suggested elsewhere and it seems like the least intrusive suggestion to me - why not simply use the device as the age verification. Almost every phone/tablet/computer already knows your age through it's own sign-up/activation method, so why not allow the device to offer an API that provides age verification to sites that require it.
It could simply be a permissions-based answer where an adult site requests a yes/no answer to the question "is this user an adult" from the device and the user is prompted to provide the permissions for the site to have that data.
This would solve the problem for the vast majority of iphone/android/windows/macos consumers.
Great! Now everyone is identifiable through their Google or Apple account.
Also people like me where the phone has no clue about my age are out too.
No, the site wouldn't know the account, it's the device providing the verification.
I think it's worth remembering that this is a suggestion, and not even originally mine. If you're happier to use the current multitude of age verification services that differ on a per-site basis, with all the security vulnerabilities, risk, and inconvenience that entails, then feel free. Or bypass them using the methods suggested.
I'm literally just providing a better technical solution than has been implemented. What I'm not suggesting is "this is the answer to everyone's problem".
That works too. Then Google knows that you are using this porn site.
If only the phone itself does the verification, it is just like klicking yes with extra steps.
I'd recommend Googling "device-based age verification" to get more information. I'm not here to convince you of anything.
Spoiler alert- the point isn't to keep kids from looking at porn, it's to keep adults from looking at it too.
Do you actually believe the government care about people not watching porn? The whole point is mass surveillance and to extend ID verification to the internet.
Whether or not that's the case, I think the proposed technical implementation above is a better way of enforcing the actual law than what's been applied so far.
Yeah I do too, but so would anyone who was seriously thinking about this in terms of keeping kids from looking at porn rather than restricting access to "adult content" (whatever that means) more broadly. Any programmer worth their salt would have immediately suggested "hey this is a bad idea we should do it this other way" when asked about the viability of the current solution and yet this was ignored.
My entire experience as a software engineer for the last 15 years has been being ignored by the non-exprerts in charge. It goes like this:
MBA: I want to solve this problem using this solution
Me: that won't solve the problem well, how about-
MBA: I don't care for the laws of reality. Do it my way [or find another job]!
They say they want our expertise but really they want validation of their own terrible ideas and they think coercing experts with threats of unemployment is as valuable as actually listening to those experts.
This applies as much to the public sector and the absolute clowns we vote in to govern us as it does to the private sector where the clowns hold the purse strings. Frankly it makes me want to give up the subject I have a PhD in and grow potatoes on a remote island somewhere.
The goal is to introduce general surveillance and censorship mechanisms. Whether they be technical, legal precedence, tested boundaries, or changes in laws and government positions.
Porn age stuff is just a convenient entry point. Solving just that without the survellance mechamisms is pointless to these people.
Yeah, I'm not getting involved in the politics or reasoning of the assumed end goal, I'm just talking from a technical standpoint.
That is important. Pointing out sane alternatives helps make it clear this isn't an acceptable solution.
Except there is no ID/age verification when you create a Google or Microsoft account (no idea about Apple, don't use that crap), so you're suggesting that the "birthday" field where I can set whatever date I want should be a standard age verification method?
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The techies implementing it probably knew this, but hoped that people would just quietly do it and not blast the news all over the internet. Nope!
I guess soon there will be only the more intrusive/trackable options like credit card or bank details.
I don't think credit cards are more intrusive than forced selfies, to the contrary.
I think that credit cards are unambiguously tied to you, whereas a photo could be a bunch of people. I appreciate that having someone take a photo of you before you go to a porn site isn't exactly anyone's idea of a utopia.
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