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.
EDIT: Rather than bitching about it, I did something and made Smarttube work without a google account. If that floats your boat, have at it
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?
…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.