Posted by dreadsword 5 days ago
Logically parents are probably best suited to gate the content for their children how they see it fit.
They’ve wanted total surveillance for quite a while. Now politicians and billionaires are talking about making it happen.
Does else anyone remember the "age verification" on '80s video games? Some of them were hilarious. I think it was Leisure Suit Larry that asked multiple choice history questions that I guess were meant to be impossible for fifth graders to guess. I was the local history nerd, so I remember getting calls from classmates, like "we're trying to get into a game; when was JFK assassinated?" If I didn't know I'd ask my dad, who never knew he was contributing to the delinquency of (other) minors.
I'm from a non-English-speaking country. We didn't understand the questions at all, but all us kids in the neighborhood got into the game just fine with some brute forcing.
Also, coming up with the expected commands in the game was way beyond our skills so we'd only advance to a point where someone had seen and memorized others play. Didn't matter, as it was one of the only games in the system so we'd play it anyway. I still remember how hard it was to type "ken sent me" in the allotted time window.
I did this but inverted. When only pokemon red/blue were out in the US I downloaded a rom for pokemon yellow (discovered on whatever p2p I was using at the time) when searching for pokemon to play in an emulator. I didn't know it existed at the time and it was in Japanese. When I told my friends "pikachu follows you around!" None of them believed me.
Like, I remember someone telling me at one point that the thing in Head over Heels was a Dalek with prince Charles head. I didn't know either of those.
My brother and I had a notepad with all the questions and possible answers, and we'd run the game several times until we got through, then make a note of the answers. Eventually we had all of them.
"Ken sent me" is buried in my brain for that same reason. :)
Thanks for bringing back the memories!
I also remember the joke that was written on the same wall 'it takes leather balls to play rugby'.
I didn't get the joke till much later, but somehow it stuck with me.
Same, our solution was to pirate Softice, then step through the startup to find the checks and replace them with nops or point at the desired location. Sierra games were not that amenable to this though because of the interpreter.
And only then I realised that it was all in English :-).
It could be that that Leisure Suit Larry age verification was actually fairly good, if one put it in relation towards how much of their customer base and revenue came from selling the game to young children.
The vast majority of kids are stuck when you've blocked the first two returns for a google search for "Proxy"
HN is in a crazy bubble. The vast majority of kids live normal lives, and don't spend their time trying to get around filters and things because that's boring to them.
Most children don't have an ocean of free time. They are playing their video game or watching their shows or whatever.
offtopic, I would love remakes of all the old sierra games, with a local llm doing the text interface.
It's the whole "kids are going to drink anyway so I may as well buy them booze" brain rot.
As someone on a tech forum, we’re the only people who can really articulate the issues with the age verification approach.
It’s really the worst solution to these problems with awful tradeoffs.