Age Verification Is Coming for the Whole Internet

Age Verification Is Coming for the Whole Corporate Internet

There, FTFY

Seems to me, there's no real way to age verify people. This is pointless.

Want ID? Kids can just upload a fake one.

The app wants access to your phone's camera, so it can use ai to assess your age? Well I don't know for certain, but I'm 99.9% there's probably a way to trick your phone into using a virtual camera, showing images of a middle-aged man.

What ever method of age verification, someone will figure out a way to trick it, and kids will be onto the trick very quickly.

What sucks is that once these laws are in place repealing them will probably never happen. There are far too many people who will benefit financially from this to allow that to happen.

There are far too many people who will benefit financially from this to allow that to happen.
Orly? Can you give me a couple of examples?
I'm opposed to this trend myself, btw. But I just interpreted as a bit of pointless over regulation by a bunch of populist nanny-statists. You're telling me there's financial interests involved as well?
- There are companies to store and process IDs on behalf on the sites. Also it will give a hell of a lot more information to marketers who will pay tons for it to sell you crap they think you need. They already have far too much information on everyone already, but this will give them even more.
They're making it so that vigilante justice is the only form of justice the ruling class can receive.

Gotta show me the relevant RFC for BGP first.

Yeah, probably not.

What a failure of an idea.

No it's not, maybe for some mainstream websites. Saying the "whole internet" is clickbait hyperbole.

For some people "the whole internet" is like half a dozen websites.
- I worked in tech support. For some people Facebook is the internet
- skill issue
It's the Internet. There are internets, but just one Internet.

It's fucking ironic that this article is asking me to register just to read it.

Can was please fucking stop needing accounts to exist online? So fucking dumb

https://web.archive.org/web/20250805143054/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/age-verification-is-coming-for-the-whole-internet.html
Way Back Machine is your friend. I don't visit sites directly anymore.

Remember guys, they cared about the kids and their online safety as soon as Israel started a genocide in Gaza and they lost control of the narrative. But they didn't care at all for the past 20 years when Epstein and his buddies were running rampant.

edit: clarity

I think we need to organise a massive campaign for people to cancel their entire Isp for at least a month, I'm betting all this would get reversed almost overnight.

Anything but that I fear they win and we all end up on the darknet.

I work from home. If I cancel my Internet connection, I can't work.
Hahaha
Good luck doing that.
People can't even delay their non-essential shinies to make a statement against price gouging/raising bullshit.. You think they're gonna willingly sacrifice something like internet? for a month?
I mean, wouldn't lemmy qualify as darknet because it isn't the top 10 websites? We should be growing the Federation anyways so I'm down for that. At least they won't ban me for making Trump jokes.
- No, Darknet is just a website that's not listed anywhere. Lemmy is listed in many places.
- If it doesnt show up on page 2 it doesnt exist lol
  I think thats more the deep web than the dark web 😄
Not sure about what the norms are where you live, but most people in the US have to sign 1-year agreements for Internet service, and those who don't typically either pay more or would pay before because they're on a cheaper, older rate that is grandfathered in and is no longer offered by the Internet service provider.
- I pay for mine in cash, they don't even know my name.
Nah the government would love for nobody to have access to the internet lol
- The US government created the internet
Uh huh. People are addicted. I'd bet even the people with petabyte home media systems will go into withdrawal within picoseconds after not being able to get more more more more more more
- Better would be to reject sites like reddit. Make them suffer instead.

this is backwards. why can't publishers mark pages as child-friendly and then browsers and operating systems can have a child-friendly mode that parents (or whoever the authoritarians are) can use. Laws can target people misusing the child-friendly mode.

It's not about actually protecting children. It's about data.
- This is the correct answer. Notice that they have no compunction about punishing parents who secure gender-affirming care for their trans kids, but there has been zero discussion of holding parents responsible for their kids' internet usage.
  Far-right groups in the US have been crying "Big Brother" about everything for years because their whole plan has been to create a surveillance state where to gather information about dissenters. Every accusation is a confession with these people.

Get your coat, we’re leaving.

The ruling class is eager to make it so the only way to fight back against them is with bullets.
They don't know what they're in for.

If it comes to Lemmy, I quit. I'll go touch grass all day, I don't mind.

I don't see how anybody could come for lemmy. I feel this just attacks centralized services
- If they threaten server admins with legal action based on the global user count of lemmy rather than their local server user count I'm sure plenty of owners will fold.
I will move to freenet, i2p and tor
- Tor was a U.S. government supported service and guess who pulled the plug on it.

No one needs the internet outside of work. The moment I'm forced to show my ID or get my face scanned, I'm done for good.

No one needs the internet outside of work.
As someone with a disability (and no car), the internet has played a massive role in allowing me to live independently, which in turn has a profoundly positive impact on my mental health. There are a wide variety of circumstances in which the internet has enhanced life experience - let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
- I'm sorry. I suppose I should have said "I don't need the internet outside of work."

Hell no. Just use decentralized apps, fediverse etc. It's not about "protecting" children. It's about full control and power. So don't give up.

All it takes is one snapshot of legislator's IDs put online to poke a hole into this balloon.
- Back when the govt here started incentivizing people to ask for receipts the Prime Minister's fiscal ID was made public and the fucker starting having a lot of receipts in his name.
It’s about the information vacuum. Now every service will get your ID or photo, giving them both age and a whole sort of other metrics to build a profile on you. And yes, Lemmy.ca doesn’t know that about me.
- every service will get your ID or photo
  To be fair, that's not how it will work. The site and the identity verifier will be two different things, the verifier only attests that you are not underage and the site doesn't get your identity.
  Still harmful though, because you can be sure that there will be scamsites redirecting people to fake but real looking verifiers for blackmail and identity theft purposes.
  I for one will never put my ID or photo into any age verifier ever.
- I gotta be honest I thought I’d never be able to quit Reddit. But it was a lot easier when I just did it. If this shit becomes the norm, I’ll back out of a site first time they try that shit and block the site. Maybe I’ll just have to stop using the internet. Wouldn’t that be a net positive on my life. You made me do this, capitalism.
- Yeah so what could possibly go wrong when every site you want to use has your ID and passport etc.
- Sure but it would be trivial for a company to build profiles on people using public apps like Lemmy.
decentralized apps, fediverse
Those apps and / or the fediverse itself would get sued into the ground and shut down one app or server at a time. There's nothing stopping any Governments authorities from going after servers inside their borders and there's nothing stopping them from "harmonizing" identity verification restrictions among other countries. They've already done it once with Intellectual Property law.
This push to de-anonymize the Internet isn't new either. Microsoft started this back in the oughts with their Passport / Digital-ID program. Google and Meta, along with others, long ago launched their own versions and it's why you can sign into so many websites with a Google or Facebook account.
It's generally referred to as IdP and now that the Internet has been fully corporatized, with minor holdouts, you can bet your bippy that the days of anonymous access are ending.
- Those apps and / or the fediverse itself would get sued into the ground and shut down one app or server at a time.
  Time to self-host your own instances. Sites like yunohost try to make it easy.
- If only there was a non-commercial, decentralized way of doing the same thing we are already doing. Perhaps make it free too. Hmmm
- You'd need to decentralize the Internet itself. Good luck with that one...
- Last time I checked, the p!rate bay still exists. In fact there are many of them. Because the website itself is open source. The same could be done with any other site. If one gets taken down, two more pop up in it's place.
Also apps that don't need servers. Switched to this for staying in touch with family p2p, works surprisingly well https://keet.io/
- Do they publish their protocol or how it works anywhere? Their site didn't seem to have much technical info at first glance

If this happens they should check ID at church too seeing as how children are much more likely to be abused or groomed by someone there.

I don't know what they are thinking, but i protect my ID data more than i protect my credit card data.

Does anyone vaguely remember those internet licenses from that Star Trek DS9 episode when they went back in time but it was the near future from the 80s perspective meaning that it's actually today?

We're going to have internet licenses soon

We’re going to have internet licenses soon
They're called contracts with your ISP, they've been around for a while now.

Time to buy Death Stranding 2 I guess

the simulatenous legislaiton from all countries seems very suspicious of a certain foreign adversary backing such motives. this isnt the first things like this happened. just a hunch.

"The horrible things being done to me by my own government must be the fault of evil foreigners."
- "We need to flood the zone, to overwhelm and burn out the activists!" - Steve Bannon
If by "foreign adversary" you mean the US, that might even be true.

Fuck that. The future fucken sucks.

I'm literally now playing ps2 games on my modbo chip ps2 slim.
- I played through Black for the first time this year on my old Fat with a sata hdd. How great was that game? It felt a generation ahead of its time, especially using the higher res display mode and the component video.
  If you don't already have a good controller solution, I highly recommend the Brook Wingman. I'm using mine with a Dual Shock 3 for the analog buttons (gotta have them for Ace Combat), but it supports so many controllers.
- Glad I got a decent Xbox 360 collection.

And as soon as that happens, I'm out. I'd rather just opt out of the modern internet. I already have to deal with my information getting leaked from various different services at least once every couple years it seems. I can change a credit card or a password, I can't change my ID.

We'll build our own Internet. With black jack and...
- We have already done that. It's called Dreddit and not even major governments can stop it.
  https://dark.fail/
- We already have gemini. A text based internet protocol like gopher.
- Black jack anddddd....
Only once every couple of years! Wow you've got it good!!
I'm literally going around trying out old school forum sites this week.
- Why do you assume that the old school forums are going to get exempted? They are going to get on the bus or get run over by it just like everywhere else. Government has already proven that they can, and will, regulate those forums.
- Car forums are still alive and well because they're a great repository of knowledge. There are plenty of computing forums too still.
- I am already browsing the "old way", since the mess with reddit...
  I found out there is a forum for everything. It's not centralized in one website, but it's not that different than browsing /r/whatever you know.
  More often than not, the discussions are more intelligent and on point too.
  For my doom-scrolling needs, Lemmy does the job.
- Let us know what you find. I'm ready to go back to the 90s/early 2000s internet. Golden era of the internet.
Sneakernet is gonna be back with a vengeance
- Among us nerds, I'm sure.

i2p lemmy is going to be great!

We're heading back to the dreams of the 90s with people running websites on non-standard ports and DNS (new rinky dink decentralized DNS?). Take a performance and usability hit for the return of a more decentralized Internet. Probably still more usable than the early internet with all the lessons learned and tools available to modern developers. We can also bring back the term: web master

There are already far more people in raw numbers on various federated/non-commercial/self-hosted/indie web stuff than there ever were on the early web- it just takes a little effort to find it.
- You can start here Marginalia - Indie Web Directory
- Yeah I find that so annoying.

See you guys in I2P.

Or ZeroNet
- Is that project still alive? Their git repo hasn't been updated in years.
- ZeroNet
  What's up on ZeroNet these days?
What's I2P?
- It's the name of the invisible Internet protocol.
  It's pretty much like tor, but more geared towards services hosted as hidden services. It doesn't have a proper way to hide you if you want to visit "normal" websites.
  But it has its own torrents and stuff :)

Good bye corporate internet. I won't miss you

Suppose true, then we'll reduce the use of "the whole Internet".

OK, we won't, no tools yet.

I really love Briar, except it's functionally not quite there yet, and the desktop kind of such application synchronized with neighboring ships, so to say, with a delay-tolerant Web alternative, would be good. Over various links and media.

Anyway, it's not a technical problem, it's a social problem. Not really different from ID checks on the streets and everywhere you go in the city, except much of the city got virtualized. And ID checks on the streets are automated by cameras everywhere and face recognition.

Social problems are resolved in the legal, social, protest, civil war fields.

ID checks on the streets and everywhere you go in the city, except much of the city got virtualized
Except on the internet, you can still create your own street with your own rules.
- If you buy\rent a house (suppose) intended as, well, housing, and make a family diner there without registration, you will break the law.
  They can easily do this with the Internet.

Yes, the EU with their draconian and dystopian plans just go over our heads and do it.
All quiet and sneaky, no articles in the sold out press, only small specific outlets or sites that investigate privacy or tech.

They intend to tie a name to every keystroke

every ~~key~~stroke

will a headshot from thispersondoesnotexist.com work?

The first picture I got was a boy, so no, I don't think it'll work every time.

Maybe the whole corporate internet. Unless we're forced into aol style portals by the death of net neutrality i think most of the lemmy user base will be fine. Shout-out to /c/selfhosted for those looking to get ahead of the permission gate.

Google already changed logged out YouTube to a single row of recommendations and a button to login on roku and Android shield when it used to look like the logged in version just a couple weeks ago. Probably the kick I needed to get off, mostly just using it for a couple smaller call-in/debate streamers I can switch to a podcast or other version.

logged out YouTube to a single row of recommendations and a button to login
I got this update on my smart TV, and I don't think Google realizes how much of an improvement it is. It's unintentionally the best thing the app has ever done.
Finally, no more fucking clickbait clutter all over the screen. I already just search for the channels I want to watch anyway. I love it.

Tor, and mesh networks. Every article brings me closer to going hard just for the lulz.

I have personally never found tech articles arousing in that way
- Speak for yourself... 🥴
Ok, do any good mesh networks exist today that people actually use? I'd love to invest in some hardware and join some form of this.
- Well, the internet is a mesh network and is pretty good.

There's fucking off, then there's what the government can do. It'

Can you have age verification and still be anonymous on the Internet? (Fixed fukted typo)

the fuck happened to you at the end there
- Sounds like they're asking about anonymous amicable anuities, and the answer is no, those are regulated by the SEC (or whatever investment governing body in your area), so you can't legally buy an anuity anonymously, even if it's amicable.
- Ha ha ha, 🤣
No.
Well, technically yes, but that's not happening.
- And that kinda sucks, because that could actually be useful. For instance, you could set up a forum for people above the age of 40 or whatever while still letting everyone post pseudonymously. A third party public service that can blindly attest that a person is over a certain age could be a great and convenient thing. It's difficult to imagine such a thing happening, though.

Better start downloading the important documents now

Article is paywalled.

95% of the time reader mode bypasses the paywall and this is one of those times
- Thanks babe
https://archive.is/20250804134214/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/age-verification-is-coming-for-the-whole-internet.html
There we go again. The internet is already broken.
You must provide your age and DNA sample too
Yeah I tried to get archive.org working with it but no dice.
- https://archive.is/20250804134214/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/age-verification-is-coming-for-the-whole-internet.html

That won’t matter when everything becomes paywalled.

Who let the Trumper in?
- If Hating pedos = Trumper then consider me one. Mind your p3do self I'm not even from the USA
You’d be first in jail
- For what ? Opposing pedos.

oh no, the world will find out I'm 50. oh the shame, oh the horror.

Youngster, you don't know what you're saying
Yeah, I'm older than you.
50 and this naive?
- Plot twist: they're 17 and covering their tracks
And they will know what you look like. And with some data extrapolation where you are, where you go, your searches, what you're into, your payment methods, where you live, your schedule, who you interact with, and the list goes on.
This is one more data point for big brother to collect and share with the highest bidder, or to get leaked to people who do not have your best interests in mind.
- And when some data is leaked, your id will be with it.
And they know your medical conditions, your income, your likes and dislikes, your hobbies, your vices, your insecurities, your deepest desires. Fast forward 10 years and every page and site you visit will be AI generated on the spot to lead you around by the nose and which way they feel like.
"Your local team just won the championship! Buy one of their limited edition jerseys now for only one hour of your income! Act now and we won't send videos of you jerking it to your coworker your wife is super jealous of. If you pay for express shipping we'll disable your home security and quietly sneak in and hang it in your closet, even while you sleep! Just kidding! We bought all of this for you anyway, because we own your drug store and we would've just withheld your insulin until you bought a jersey... I mean TWO jerseys."
Dumbest possible response someone could’ve made. How have you made it to 50 without a handler?