#age-check — Public Fediverse posts

#Roblox shares dropped 18% after the company reported first-quarter earnings, citing new #childsafety measures as a factor. The company’s #agecheck feature, implemented in January, restricted communication and slowed #useracquisition, leading to a revised full-year 2026 bookings forecast. Despite the challenges, Roblox’s first-quarter results surpassed Wall Street estimates. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/01/roblox-rblx-stock-child-safety-earnings.html?eicker.news #tech #media #news

Brussels launched an age checking app. Hackers took 2 minutes to break it

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-brussels-launched-age-checking-app-hackers-say-took-them-2-minutes-break-it/

#HackerNews #Brussels #AgeCheck #Hackers #Security #TechNews #Vulnerabilities

Weekly output: Internet Archive, Roblox parental controls, Google travel-search tools, T-Mobile yanks free WiFi from United flights, Mark Vena podcast, talking to local user groups, AST SpaceMobile

LAS VEGAS–I’m typing this from a press room in the Las Vegas Convention Center barely three months after I spent too much time in that facility for CES. Credit or blame for this trip goes to a different Washington-area trade group, the National Association of Broadcasters. Tuesday, I will be moderating an NAB Show panel about the state of content creation that features two people who are better at Instagram than me: Juliana Broste and my fellow former USA Today columnist Jefferson Graham.

4/13/2026: Journalists Applaud the Internet Archive’s Role In Preserving the Public Record, Fight for the Future

A staffer with Public Knowledge e-mailed me a few weeks ago to ask if I would be willing to sign a letter supporting the Internet Archive’s efforts to preserve the history of the Web and possibly provide a quote about how I’d used the Archive. Having repeatedly relied on the Archive’s Wayback Machine to link back to my own past published work, I said I would be happy to do that–having already donated $100 to that San Francisco non-profit in January.

4/13/2026: Roblox Adds Account Restrictions for Younger Users, Expands Age Verification, PCMag

I attended a press roundtable Monday morning featuring some Roblox trust-and-safety executives, allowing me to enrich this writeup of the platform’s changes with quotes from that conversation.

4/15/2026: T-Mobile Grounds Free In-Flight Wi-Fi Benefit for United Airlines Passengers, PCMag

I had the dumb luck to see this change firsthand on a flight from Denver to San Jose Tuesday, then needed the rest of that day to get some responses from T-Mobile and United. The airline’s switch to free Starlink connectivity will fix this problem, but we are months away from that rollout reaching a significant fraction of United’s mainline fleet.

4/17/2026: Like It or Not, Google Wants to Be Your AI Travel Buddy This Summer, PCMag

I wrote up this post off an embargoed copy of Google’s announcement that we had to correct the next day because I had missed two of the finer points of this bundle of news. In my halfhearted defense, it is more work than you might realize keeping track of Google’s ongoing efforts to infuse AI into its existing services.

4/17/2026: How NTT Research’s Upgrade 2026 Helps Silicon Valley Get Ready for The Future, Mark Vena

My industry-analyst pal had do a quick video from NTT Research’s Upgrade conference in San Jose, Calif.–with that firm covering my travel costs–about some of its initiatives.

4/18/2026: 2026 Consumer Electronics Show and Lots More!, Potomac Area Technology and Computer Society/Osher Lifelong Learning Institute Personal Computer User Group/Washington Apple Pi

Despite that title–picked by the organizers at PATACS, pronounced “Pat-Aces”–I spent more time talking about other topics. Among them: my switch from Evernote to Obsidian just in time for CES, the sad state of tech policy in Washington, and my takes on self-driving cars and what’s befallen the Washington Post. As I have in previous appearances before these folks, I showed up with a bag of trade-show swag and gave away all of it.

4/19/2026: Blue Origin Rocket Launches, Then Loses AST SpaceMobile BlueBird Satellite, PCMag

I watched the third launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket on my phone as I was walking up to the security checkpoint at Dulles early Sunday morning, started writing up what I thought was a successful launch, then learned–via painfully slow inflight WiFi–that New Glenn’s second stage had failed to deliver AST’s mobile-broadband BlueBird satellite to the intended orbit. This is a real black eye for Blue that should outweigh its achievement in reflying a New Glenn booster and then landing it on a barge in the Atlantic.

Another huge shitstorm thread from British security researchers on Twitter[^1] about how the reference implementation of #EUDigitalWallet #AgeCheck published on https://ageverification.dev is “insecure”, while ignoring the tiny details it’s a REFERENCE implementation whose documentation literally say:

Pre-configured hosted services that allow you to test the Age Verification App and its core components without the need for complex local setup.

A production version would be hooked up to a respective national id database and therefore require no selfies etc.[^2]

The funny part is that a national id database is something that we don’t have in the UK[^3] because we instead made a choice to use commercial services from a private company Experian for the same purpose 😁

Also, you can clearly see that #Brexit did not only happen thanks to some red necks, as it’s often portrayed - British elites are also have a strong knee jerk response to anything that comes from the EU and violated “established truths” of their generation, for example the axiom that anything designed by a shitty private company is 100x better than anything designed by the “government”. I would honestly expect better from the generation of people who had actually lots of interesting things to say about cryptography and computer security in the past.

[^1]: https://xcancel.com/Paul_Reviews/status/2044436001611801072?s=20

[^2]: https://ageverification.dev

[^3]: https://krvtz.net/en/posts/in-defense-of-the-national-id-and-digital-id.html

@EUCommission statement on the #EUDigitalWallet #AgeCheck mechanism that has been subject to tons of disinformation. I recommend the whole statement, but just will quote the critical fragment:

Our solution builds on zero-knowledge proof: this means that when users want to access an age-restricted service, you remain in full control of your data.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/statement_26_820

I’ve written more about its technical details here:

https://krvtz.net/en/posts/eu-digital-wallet.html

#Roblox is introducing new account types, #RobloxKids and #RobloxSelect, to provide age-appropriate access to games and chat. These accounts will use #agecheck technology to restrict access to content based on age, with #parents having the option to approve specific games. The changes come after lawsuits alleging child safety concerns. https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/13/roblox-introduces-kids-and-select-accounts-for-age-appropriate-access-to-games-and-chat/?eicker.news #tech #media #news

With some statist quislings hacking #agecheck into #linux distros and #foss software.

Is there anyone coding a tool to identify all the binaries as compromised?
#infosec #privacy #dataleak

I've read today that #SamAltman owns an #agecheck company and wants to implement it to #gatekeep access to #ChatGpt ...

...if this is true, Sam will singlehandedly do more to retard adoption of #Ai than millions of Neo- #luddites fighting #aislop with memes and literal nonsense.

But, I guess in one respect SOME neo-luddites were right, get you addicted to offloading cognitive load, then #monetise it hard.

#Meta L#obbied To Create The New #AgeCheck #Laws #Privacy #Security #Surveillance #AgeIDCheck #MetalOutlaw #FollowTheMoney #yt

https://youtu.be/4KyiLyOxux8

Ageless Linux Emerges to Protest OS-Level Age Verification Laws - OS-based age determination is a pretty bad idea https://itsfoss.com/news/ageless-linux/?ref=foss-weekly-newsletter #ageCheck #age_verification #linux

Fuck #ChatControl and #agecheck.

Today, March 17th, the ECA Digital (read: mandatory age verification online) takes effect in Brazil.

Sad day.

#brazil #eff #privacy #ageCheck #ageAttestation #digitalrights #surveillance

I see the #California #AB1043 law as a troyan horse for #OpenSource support.

All "OS providers" should have in their license that its use under California law should be prohibed...

...and offer a paid license to cover maintaining the API for #AgeCheck. Make Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Oracle pay for using #Linux.

I can fucking guarantee you they'll lobby the hell out of the law the moment they are forced to pay something out of their books.

#FOSS #Law #Bill

Illinois' latest brainwave is an OS-level age check that's as useful as a chocolate teapot 🍫☕. They're convinced that toggling #JavaScript and #cookies is a high-tech gateway to maturity 🍪🔞. Ah, the cutting-edge #innovation of 1998! 🙄
https://legiscan.com/IL/bill/SB3977/2025 #Illinois #AgeCheck #ChocolateTeapot #HackerNews #ngated

RE: https://mastodon.social/@eff/116201018123490758

Age checks on operating systems, which "pedophile America" wants to impose on all PCs, have a fundamental problem: the motive behind them. They claim these checks are necessary to protect children from predators, but when the state is the predator, how secure is a system that verifies a minor via facial recognition, only to collect their address, biometric data, and IP address?

All this to "protect" children from the same pedophiles the American pedophile government is shielding by hiding the Epstein files and the biggest predators within its walls.

They say that surveillance is necessary, they want to monitor our phones and computers to catch pedophiles, but they have millions of files full of pedophiles that they refuse to arrest...

Open your eyes, none of this makes any sense.

#PedoUSA #PedophileAmerica #PedophileUSA #PedoWhiteHouse #USAPedophileAllyOfFascistEuropeanGovernments #PedophileTrump #AgeCheck #ChatControl #Maga #PedoMAGA #MAGApedophileAssociation

History teaches us the FBI is pretty good tracing people running manual DDoS attacks. To actually pull this off without getting busted, you'd need some angry engineers

There are plenty right now. With Google forcing mandatory verification and closing AOSP, many open-source devs feel cornered. They'd be the perfect candidates to slip a 'Trojan horse' right into their apps on the stores, maybe hidden inside a compromised open-source library. Devs could claim they just 'imported a library' without knowing it was poisoned

It's a supply chain attack: plausible deniability for the coders too. Users would just be 'victims' of malware, so no one gets arrested and age check and chat control will be unusable

I'm not an engineer though, so maybe I'm missing something. Just a thought for more elevated minds..

#SupplyChainAttack #CyberResistance #TrojanHorse #DDosTrojanHorse #DataPoisoning #STASI #ChatControl #AgeCheck #Privacy #DDos
#DigitalDisobedience #KGB #VirusTrojanHorse #DDosTrojanHorse

I see people thinking Linux or GrapheneOS will bypass chat control or age check. As seen with Ubuntu&CA's AB 1043, laws target OS providers. An "illegal" OS won't work: apps and browsers will demand the mandatory age signal, or the OS itself might block access to avoid fines. VPNs? Useless when USA, EU, and Canada etc enforce agechecks globally
If this madness passes, let's fight back and turn every device into a weapon of digital disobedience. Imagine an 'outlaw' OS mod appending a 'payload of forbidden words' (hidden in metadata) to every message
If millions sent these 'poisoned' messages, Chat Control would collapse under false positives
Risk: Could they brick our phones? Yes. But if millions get blocked simultaneously? Instant economic blackout. It's Mutually Assured Destruction: they can't ban everyone.
If everything is suspicious, nothing is

They scan for pedophiles but ignore #EpsteinFiles

#DataPoisoning #ChatControl #AgeCheck #Privacy #DDos #DigitalDisobedience #STASI #KGB

@catsalad

I've got an alternative idea if this madness actually goes through and we can't find a solution to circumvent it legally or not....

Instead of just running, let's turn every single phone into a weapon of digital disobedience.Imagine if an 'outlaw' OS (or a simple mod) automatically appended a 'bag of forbidden words' to every message, hidden in metadata or invisible text, containing a random mix of terms guaranteed to trigger the system.
If millions of people sent billions of these 'poisoned' messages, Chat Control would collapse under the sheer weight of false positives. It would be the biggest DDoS attack in history, powered purely by civil disobedience......

If everything is suspicious, nothing is.

#DDoS #FalsePositives #DataPoisoning #ChatContol #AgeVerification #AgeCheck

😱 UK fines Reddit for not checking user ages aggressively enough
UK agency alleges “Reddit failed to apply any robust age assurance mechanism.” 😱

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/uk-fines-reddit-for-not-checking-user-ages-aggressively-enough/

#reddit #redditnews #redditfine #uk #uktech #facialid #ageverification #tech #technews #ukagency #privacy #apps #socialnetworks #agecheck

Fury over Discord’s age checks explodes after shady Persona test in UK
Persona confirmed all age-check data from Discord’s UK test was deleted. (big article)

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/discord-and-persona-end-partnership-after-shady-uk-age-test-sparks-outcry/

#discord #discordnews #discordagecheck #agecheck #tech #technews #persona #uk #uktech #privacy #techbacklash #discorduk #faceid #aicheck #unitedkingdom

Si ma l' #AgeCheck porcamadonna sennò il pupo si ammazza di seghe e la bambina si imputtanisce. Rovigo, foto intime rubate dai telefoni in riparazione e condivise in rete. www.zeusnews.it/n.php?c=31718

Si ma l' #AgeCheck porcamadonna sennò il pupo si ammazza di seghe e la bambina si imputtanisce.

Rovigo, foto intime rubate dai telefoni in riparazione e condivise in rete.
https://www.zeusnews.it/n.php?c=31718

Il gruppo Telegram, denominato "Suine Polesane", raccoglieva le foto intime di donne condivise dai tecnici dei centri di assistenza.