About a year ago I bypassed YouTube's facial recognition by using a YouTube video and just taking a photo of that. So many big youtubers just talk directly to the camera and that made it pretty easy
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I’m pretty sure my original Google account is over 18 years old. How is that not considered proof of age?
Yes let's send our id cards to an american big tech corporation, what could possibly go wrong there.
the way people are yawning at this -- including this community -- makes you wonder why the libertarians among us are cool w it.
There were more people that you'd expect who basically said the same thing about much of Linux (systemd) receiving age verification mechanics. To me, those arguments in favor of age verification seemed even louder because the change could be dismissed as "optional" and "open-source," although the layman cannot easily drop or replace a computer operating system, and it would take significant political capital to change the source of systemd back to its pre-age-verification state.
A static image doesn't bypass this. Vendors want a real-time selfie--access to a internet-connected camera responding to prompts in real-time, such as "turn your head to the right," or "open and close your mouth". It would be trivial on a libre-system to send it a simulated-feed of a puppet-ed prop in such a way that would be indistinguishable from a real human head--if you had capable hardware. This is what intelligence agencies do now, but it's possible on high-end consumer hardware too. For the modest computer user it would be viable to feed it a simplified--but still meeting the criteria of a "face" as deemed by the computer--puppet, akin to what vtubers use. That's on a libre-system. A system that obeys the user and that can not be tolerated, because users lie.
They give you a QR code to scan with a mobile-computer, because mobile-computers are the least free of all computers. The majority of mobile-computers are Google's Android mobile-computer. Google redirects you to a computer that is entirely controlled by... Google. Surprise!
The boot-licking continues. This isn't something forced on Google by authoritarian, nanny-state governments. This is Google's will. Google is an authoritarian corporation that profits via surveillance-capitalism. Keep licking their boots and defending them. How dumb can you be?
Google wants to verify your ID.
Google redirects you to a Google Android slave-computer via a QR code, precisely because there's too much freedom on traditional desktop-computers and outputs can be trivially simulated.
Oh, poor Google for...
...what? Collecting even more data about internet users? This is their bread and butter: surveillance-capitalism.
The unique thing about the Australian-context is that the liberal party began a project: to create a facial-recognition system that would underpin a virtual market of "identity providers". From my perspective this is fraud, because underneath each identity provider was this governmental-department that would send a "yes" or "no" in response to a query: does this face belong to Johe Bloe. Their system doesn't even deserve a critique because it's from the party of blatant grifters and looters, but it's now what we have and things don't just disappear, especially when it's a system that's been in the works for decades and with bipartisan 'support'.
Google is an upstanding corporate-citizen providing identity services in a free-market. It's just capitalism, folks.
Like usual the morons will loudly blame Labor when the fruits of the liberal party turn rotten. The wider, global context is rising fascism which creates an environment where obeying remote prompts to wiggle your tongue and open and close your mouth is deemed 'expected' behaviour when all you want to do is watch cat videos on the internet.
Liberate your computers. Hack your mobile-computers and send dummie feeds. It only gets harder from here on. Push back now. It's rather easy too: don't use Google. Actively avoid it.
You can trick it easily for now. I haven't because I worry it gives the system more legitimacy than it deserves. No, not doing it at all. Closing your site and going somewhere else.
I love when I get that final push to leave a garbage service behind.
I watch far more on Nebula than I do on YT anymore. I prefer the model without comments, upvotes/downvotes or any of that garbage. That and supporting creators much more directly is a super win. And no ads at all. And it's cheaper by far than YT premium.
I was a Nebula subscriber but the concentration of sinophobic content got too high I couldn’t stand that anymore… Now I watch the same content on GrayJay 🤷🏻♂️
Use a VPN with an exit node in Albania. Youtube cannot force a signin or ads due to Albanian laws.
I use it daily. Try it. It works
I did this one day just because Albania was the first country that showed up alphabetically after the exit node in my home country started requiring age verification in many places. Always thought it was dumb luck, not because of anything specific about Albania, TIL. Based 🇦🇱
Only location I use for YT
What happens when you send a selfie of Jeffrey Epstein?
Depends, does the camera point at him or the kids on his lap
Yeah, that de-anonymizes someone which is a transgression of their rights to privacy. I look forward to technical work-arounds, and I'll look to avoid services that require de-anonymizing verification. The next step is for Palantir to flag dissenters and ICE to go after alleged Antifa conspirators.
Also, my computer does not have a camera.
Everyone here shitting on YouTube, but the AU government is to blame here really. I'm really scared that we are next on this stupid privacy killing trend (we -> Europe). Without privacy there is no democracy.
I wish some hacker activitist would make their life goal to dox the christofascist associations' members and supporting politicians. And publish every fucking detail of them, so they would get to know what risks they are exposing people to on their own skin.
Here it's not that bad but it started to ask me to prove I'm not a bot by signing-in. Usually it was passable by when the IP changes by retstarting the modem but it's not for a couple days now.
Edit: This means the embedded videos are not public anymore. They finally did it. Great news for many sites! /s
Yeah, even embedded videos are asking me to prove I'm not a bot. Newpipe, Freetube, Grayjay, yt-dlp none of them works for some time too. They really locked down this time it seems.
I guess that's possible. Well, in the household only I have this problem because others have a Google account login. However every device asking the same if they logout. I wonder if this time it's country-level since IP change don't work anymore.
An update: Now all the videos say "Video unavailable". This is getting interesting.
Just an addition: I couldn't move around so I wanted to create a dummy account on an old Android device however it asked for a phone number to complete the creation so it didn't worked. Later I remembered that I already had one from years ago. Had to guess a password but finally found it. That account doesn't have a phone number or any other identification. Tried that with having yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser firefox --limit-rate 5M --sleep-requests 1 -f "bestvideo[height<=1080]+bestaudio/best[height<=1080] these parameters, basically tried to mimic a streaming here. Because if I continue as usual, they probably would ban this account as well. Will see I guess. Gotta go continue to download my educational videos.
Another addition: Embedded videos still don't work and say "video unavailable" even though my dummy account is logged in.
Heh, I forgot Skiff even existed, haven't heard that name for years.
I actually haven't tried signing up with a different provider but I suspect they still ask for a phone number? The device I tried it is an old phone so probably that didn't work because of it. I might try with an old Google tablet again if I need further. I created the one I'm using with that last time. Though it was at least 6 years ago.
That's what I though at first but after resetting my modem and got a new IP from a different range, the result was still the same. So now I'm not sure. Every digit is different in this new IP, not even close. Though maybe range thing works differently for IPs.
Temp bans did happen time to time but they usually lifted after 6-12 hours at most. This one is persistent for days now. I suspect they know the every device in the household too so they know it's me even though the IP has changed.
Edit: I tried private window on Firefox to see if this is about ad-blockers, they serve me two ads and then the video is still unavailable. :)
Just noticed the edit:
It's forcing me to login. I might go creating a dummy account using old Android devices just so I can download via yt-dlp if this doesn't go soon.
I used a sample id from the WA DoT that had a picture of Mr bean and the name "Sam s sample" on discord and it worked perfectly. Didn't work for Reddit, but I've stopped using Reddit anyways. VPN works for porn.

Here you go.
Just someone who's job is to fuck shit up and make a big fucking mess. (Viscera Cleanup Detail---game on steam). But he's a old wrestler lol


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