I added Twitter to my extension to bypass age verification!
Hi! If you don’t know me, I made an #opensource #browserextension for #firefox to skip age verification screens on many platforms!
Recently, #Twitter (yes, I’m not calling it X!) sent a cease and deceist letter to #Nitter that allowed you to browse privately. I think this sucks, so now if you want to see an age restricted post you can use my extension to show it! (Still needs to be logged in to an account however, otherwise twitter won’t return the tweet data)
🧩 Extension : https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/age-verification-bypass/
💻 Source : https://github.com/helloyanis/age-verification-bypass
Basically, it works by taking all the data from age restricted posts and re-arranging it in the way that regular posts do!
If you’re still on twitter (why!) feel free to give it a try, and give me some feedback! Thanks!! 🦊🧡
People who release tools, extensions, etc., to get around these measures… Do you actually realize that you’re part of the problem? Do you realize that by doing this, you’re pointing out where gaps need to be closed—and that governments are really interested in addressing them? Especially when it comes to tools and extensions that are widely used. Do you still realize that???
All you’re doing is helping the countries… by showing them where they need to improve, and the larger the user base, the more likely it is that this will happen!
People who downvote so much—use your heads for once… Not too long ago, people just like that were pointing out simpler options like VPNs so that more and more people would use them, and the result is that now they want to crack down on VPNs themselves…
By that logic than no solutions to any bullshit people don’t want to deal with shouldn’t be shared cause the government/company can just patch it. If it was so easy to patch these bypasses then why do ad blockers still exist and work?
Tools like these are always a cat and mouse game and open sourcing it gives you more resources than you can ever hope to have yourself.
Ad blockers… It’s not governments that are taking action against them, but companies. That’s a really big difference. Companies can’t pass laws on their own and can’t exert as much pressure on other companies or platforms as governments can.
You think government has speed to patch one hole before next discovered… you know how fast they are? One hole will take multiple year to even adress.
Governments simply need to establish the legal framework… This includes, for example, the EU Kids’ Act, which also targets platforms like Steam, etc. Such platforms, operating systems, websites, VPN providers, etc., will implement these measures to remain within the legal framework. Bypassing them will then be declared illegal. Don’t think it’ll be hard later on to track down the connections that bypass these measures… ISPs will have to cooperate as well. In Germany, for example, thanks to data retention laws, connection information such as IP addresses and their assignments is already being stored anyway. The current practice of bypassing these measures and making the tools public will actually accelerate the whole process of enacting laws, because it shows the general public—including children—just how easy it is to get around them and even provides the tools to do so… Oh well, it’s not as if they haven’t been working on the laws all along.
So here’s my counterquestion… do you know how fast the government and police can act? You should ask Grey Thats—they reported some security vulnerabilities and immediately faced the full force of the law for computer sabotage and the like, even though they were actually trying to help secure the systems… what do you think it’ll be like later on when it comes to bypassing those measures… Oh, in Germany, the police can show up the very next morning just because of a Pinocchio emoji… They’re extremely quick about that…
Other EU countries are also on board when it comes to legislation, etc… Oh, and America, too…
Oh, and companies act quickly in situations like this as soon as they start worrying about fines…
This is wrong. Vorratsdatenspeicherung was ruled unconstitutional multiple time already. They always try to put in law again, but court will just throw out again.
And i know about the SEK raid caused by Andy “Pimmel” Grote.
But this do a huge ton of lifting for you. There cannot be blanket ban on bypass because what if use but not actually follow service rule. For example require id verify. Ok i use other person id. What now? This what i mean, cannot close loophole fast enough because text can always interpret in different way.
@IceFoxX I’d rather have a tool that gets around this measures getting patched than not doing anything at all.
Standing still and taking it will certainly not encourage companies to back down. There’s always the option of using alternatives which we are both doing right now on the fediverse, but at least this shows people are fighting and unwilling to just scan their face and ID.
If it gets patched, I know I’ll stop using the services. Let’s bypass it while it’s still possible!
The criticism isn’t directed at the coding of such tools or extensions.
Do something and keep it to yourself… Don’t publish it on GitHub (or alternatives), where everything gets used to train AI anyway. Don’t post it publicly on the Fediverse because, trust me, it gets scoured too… Don’t try to build a large user base… Try to stay under the radar.
Instead, you’re helping to make things as bad as possible—for EVERYONE. You’re helping to get it patched, and in doing so, you’re preventing others who do it under the radar from exploiting those very same vulnerabilities later on, because people like you want to make it as public as possible.
@IceFoxX Doing something and keeping it to myself isn’t exactly the best way to show that people are against it.
This project is more of a proof of concept of why age verification is a bad idea.
To a non technical userw an extension like that is one of the easiest ways to bypass it. Privacy should not be kept a secret!
Age verification, eKYC are great ideas! And arrest people for speech too! Wrong speech? Well then you are fired and lose your license. Awesome! Please more of this!!
Until we get good and sick of those people and organize.
No, that’s the wrong approach—it just shows that you’re willing to support the surveillance apparatus without protest by voluntarily showing them ways to circumvent it.
The right approach is (to avoid using services like Twitter, etc., altogether) to educate the masses about the consequences. To encourage the masses to take to the streets. To put pressure on politicians!
People also wanted to show their displeasure by telling the masses to use a VPN to get around it… That move was bound to backfire, too. It’s foolish to draw the masses’ attention to this—while their privacy is just as important, it’s precisely because of the attention these issues attract that such actions ALWAYS backfire.
i like this Doctor Evil comment. Unappreciated talent. Don’t let me get in the way of enjoyment of this FUD mind virus.
btw AI is stupid af. Whatever fear you have of it is unfounded.
The reality is FOSS developers do the work that AI then quotes.
i’m the author of types-strictyaml, without referencing that package i triple dog dare you to have your AI agents create a stubs package for strictyaml.
The harsh reality is there is always that one guy. In this case, that one guy is me.
Why do you think I said you shouldn’t publish it on GitHub, etc.? Because AI is trained with it = because the code gets stolen right away… Yeah, it’s great that everything on GitHub and the like—all that OSS—is being misused for exactly that purpose. So you’re just bringing up what I already pointed out.
So if you write a tool and use it only for yourself to bypass age verification, that’s great. I’ve already said that too. As I also said, I’m not criticizing the tools or the act of bypassing age verification itself, but rather the fact that people make them public. Those are two completely different issues.
Children are already being used as a pretext for age verification… So if people now make such tools available to others, politicians and the like can exploit that as well and claim that we’re giving children the means to bypass age verification—while at the same time, improvements can be made since the source code is also made public…
Surely it should be all of our goal not to provide any reasons for all these laws to take effect even faster—and then have circumvention banned by law anyway, making it a criminal offense—because that’s exactly what’s coming our way… I’m against accelerating these processes even further and driving ourselves into the shit even faster, where there will be no turning back.
Pretend i know nothing about issues with github. Layout the issues. I consider you my peer and hold your opinion in higher regard. If you do this you’d influence my decision whether to seek another code repository site.
Don’t have any issues with AI reading the FOSS code i publish and even training on it. U do? Please state why.
However blocking the public from accessing the source code, I do have a problem with:
So i’m requesting you to please merely confirm these suspicions. One by one.
Govts always have an excuse. “Protecting the children” (while indoctrinating them) is their bullshit universal go to excuse. We don’t have to repeat this, this is obvious and should be treated as factual and never disputed. Don’t want anyone to have to jump thru compliance hoops to access my publicly published FOSS.
We are coders and should never ever have to put up with broken/jaded services.
The code repositories in play https://github.com/msftcangoblowm
At the beginning of the year, I was still hoping that the dystopian scenario would take another five years or so to unfold. Thanks to all of your efforts (not just yours) to undermine the systems instead of protesting and taking political action against them, things have long since shifted into high gear. By now, I think the dystopian scenario will be fully realized this year thanks to your efforts to constantly break the systems instead of addressing the real problems. The politicians are laughing because you keep giving them more and more reasons to do so, and since you’re not trying—politically or otherwise—to tackle the core problems, you’ll end up achieving the exact opposite. I’ve spent two decades advocating for data protection and privacy, only to now watch as you (and other) help tear it all down and destroy it by ridiculously offering temporary solutions that merely circumvent the systems instead of working to ensure these systems are ever actually implemented.
By the way, this also undermines the decades of hard work done by, for example, the entire CCC. Unlike you, they are truly politically active and genuinely want to do something about it.
But no one here will understand that anyway, and they’ll just keep claiming they’re doing something about it. Meanwhile, actions like this only undermine the efforts of those who really want to do something about it. But since people don’t even realize that when they hear it, all I’ll say is, let the downvotes rain down.
Correct me if i’m mistaken, the topic is specifically github (and age verification). Whether github and only github has implemented behaviors which have crossed our red lines. Listed the behaviors i suspect. I dismissed AI training. And you can bring up other behaviors.
Your advocacy activities are well known to yourself, but completely news to me. But this is off-topic. If you have one or more very specific accusations specifically against me, and only me, speak up and i’ll respond truthfully. But i’d want to know the relation of those accusations to the thread topic.
Sorry but I don’t follow, what is your conclussion then, just don’t get around the measures? You are saying that bypassing protections helps them fix the issues allowing the bypass by making them more visible, so what even is your concern if you are against tools to bypass them? You won’t be able to bypass anything without them in the first place, so what are you trying to say? That we should keep the tools to a select group of people and not make them as broadly accessible?
If so, I oppose this thought quite a lot, as I believe that anti-surveillance tools should be as widespread as possible, to make it completely impractical to crack them down due to the sheer volume of people using them. Build more Tor nodes, radical servers, open-source alternatives and such.
And while some of the hacks being well known makes them easier to notice and fix, there is also more people who finds them valuable and can help in making them work. I don’t ever see ads, and adblocking is very widely known and functional no matter how hard the baddies try. After the Nitter cease and desist I made my own instance at https://stopusingx.com/ to fight back, and I would never have done this if it wasn’t out of spite. So I also feel that spreading concern and conclict is useful to make people aware of the issues we face.
How do you know what I’m doing or how I’m protecting myself? You don’t even understand what I’m criticizing. My criticism isn’t directed at bypassing or tools like that… but at distributing them on GitHub and making them public here and everywhere else! That’s a huge difference. Once you understand that, we can discuss it.
The laws that will make all of this illegal are coming one way or another… But the more people get around them now, the faster those laws will come—just a side note…
For the EU, you can look up the EU Kids’ Act, for example. This is actually being accelerated by projects like the ones here that are meant to be widely publicized, because they give politicians more ammunition to hypocritically claim it’s all about protecting children, etc. You could also look into Omnibus, etc. … and the bigger projects like this one get and the more users there are, the faster the laws will come… So, pure dystopia.
Ok, I get you mean, but what is the point in waiting? You rightly said that the laws will come one way or another, so why even wait for them? The sooner the struggle begins and the more the public is aware, the bigger pur chance to fight back. If we wait until the thing is illegal to act, anyone trying to resist will have a harder time, because they will be doing it alone.
Here, people aren’t being educated about the laws and their consequences; instead, they’re actively being shown how to currently bypass age verification—which will result in the laws being enacted more quickly, because politicians can use the excuse that children are being actively helped to circumvent the restrictions using the advertised tools. Distributing such a tool is not the same as educating people about it or about what lies ahead for us.
As I said, if someone writes a tool like this for themselves, that’s great. But as soon as it’s published in any way, you may be helping others in the short term, but in return, the dystopia itself will arrive faster.
Educating people would mean truly informing them about the laws and their consequences so that people finally take to the streets to protest and really put pressure on politicians. That would be the only way to possibly still prevent it.
All this crap is going to happen soon enough anyway—we don’t need to give them any extra reasons to speed things up.