Tool Becomes Available Devoted to Defeating Discord Age Verification

It didn’t take long, but a tool devoted to defeating the Discord age verification system has become available.

The other day, I mentioned that OfCom was considering upping the fines against 4Chan over age verification. For that headline, I mentioned that 4Chan was being “fined” for failing to implement imaginary age verification technology. This is because the law demands that online platforms implement “highly effective” age verification technology which, of course, doesn’t exist.

These comments weren’t made in a vacuum, either. We’ve seen how well age verification systems perform. While I knew that they would get completely owned by the public, I could not have predicted just how bad modern age verification technologies could possibly be. This is thanks to stories about how the “industry standard” and “AI powered” age verification systems were getting defeated by things like sharpies and golden retrievers. It’s really remarkable just how bad the technology truly is and puts into perspective just how badly flawed it was for lawmakers to just write in the law that the technology must be “highly effective”. In short, they are asking companies to implement something that clearly doesn’t exist.

That hasn’t stopped numerous companies from throwing users under the bus by voluntarily implementing the technology in the first place. One of those companies tripping over others to implement this fundamentally flawed technology is Discord. Last year, the company had their age verification system hacked and had at least 70,000 users exposed to unauthorized third parties. Some reports suggest the actual number was into the millions of users, but the point still stood that the company was hacked and users had highly sensitive information make their way into the hands of hackers.

So, within months, the company decided to just keep digging and roll out age verification globally. It has led some to wonder if the company was intentionally trying to destroy their own business. Regardless of intent, some might be thinking that in the few months in between that the system might have been improved. If you thought that, congratulations, you get people like me pointing and laughing at you.

Reports also surfaced that there is now tools out there devoted specifically to defeat the Discord age verification system. From PCGamer:

As posted to and then subsequently removed from the PCMR Reddit, a GitHub repository has popped up that creator PromptPirate calls a “verified tool that works on any potato computer that will let you bypass Discord verification”.

Effectively, it’s a browser-based tool that gives you access to a 3D avatar, which you can then rotate with a controller. To run it yourself, you have to download the index.html file, then open that file up in your browser, and import a model. Luckily, the Github also has a demo model you can use. From here, one could simply use a controller to move the model around to pass the age verification process.

PromptPirate has clarified that Discord might be adding a blinking test in the future, and if it does, they will add a blinking feature to continue to work around age verification checks. Even if this tool completely vanishes, it’s a sign that many simply do not want to give more of their data to Discord.

It is worth noting that most users won’t actually run into problems with the age verification process. You only need it to access adult servers or the adult sections of non-adult servers. If you typically use Discord simply to chat with friends, you likely won’t need to verify your age.

The hilarious thing in all of this is the fact that the models in question aren’t even remotely highly detailed. They are about on par with the characters from The Sims 4. The fact that models of that quality is defeating age verification systems is simply hilarious. Still, it shows just how poorly thought out age verification systems are in the first place.

Even if Discord fins some way of explicitly banning this app, though, there will be countless other ways of defeating the system. This along with the fact that people will also be rushing to other services once they receive these prompts. While there are promises that only a small numbers of people are being asked in the first place, there’s really no stopping lawmakers from ratcheting up the laws even further in some way to further depend on the technology in the first place. That’s when the backlash is going to greatly increase.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.