I’ve been having some weird issues over the last few days with not being able to search for things in YouTube when I’m logged in via SmartTube account.

So I decided to try accessing it directly. Well guess what? It looks like YouTube now requires age verification in AU.

Sorry Google… I’m not uploading my passport, drivers licence or govt id to watch your shit. I am however now very incentivized to use Tube archivist and Jellyfin, plus cron job to scrape your shit with gleeful abandon.
I used this for discord.
choose how to verify your age
use your credit card
huh? why credit card?
Why indeed.
Logically, because kids would be too young to have a credit card (In theory).
You can only get a credit card if your 18+, and therefore proves your age. A debit card does not do this since a minor can have a debit card
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.
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.
What happens when you send a selfie of Jeffrey Epstein?
Depends, does the camera point at him or the kids on his lap
Activation requires using a QR code, which requires access to live selfie cam
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
Lol - tell me you used Mr Beast or the like for that.
I used Evan edinger, he has high quality talking face videos. Hardest part was lining up the selfie camera on my phone with my laptop
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.
^ Exactly that.
Grayjay?
Last I checked that didn’t work so well on SmartTV. Will check again…though am tempted to get ChatGPT to generate a fake image for facial recognition. More delicious - make shit fight shit
I’d ditch YouTube entirely but it has some stuff I share with students on there, plus my kids like watching old duck tales cartoons. The latter can be neatly addressed with Stremio / CloudStream but the former is a pain in the ass to work around.
Try this thispersondoesnotexist.com






