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!! 🦊🧡
@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.