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Comment by Muromec | Hacker News Reader

>It's a small, silly protest at the stupidity of the Online Safety Act that just came into force. The IDs actually work (for Reddit, Discord etc.) which highlights how terrible this implementation is.

Could you give a short TL;DR of how ids are constructed so we can all laugh here in comments?

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it's literally just the MPs name. It's a fake DoB (because their DoB's aren't public knowledge anymore) all the numbers and such are nonsense, the images wouldn't fool a human for one second. The AI tools don't let you generate an ID for any real human being (because that sounds like all sorts of fraud) so you can't upload a picture of the MP or anything like that - so I just let the model fill in whatever face it thinks is appropriate for the given name.

> because their DoB's aren't public knowledge anymore

Most are on Wikipedia, no?

Even if they weren't, most MPs will be old enough that their top level Birth Records are available, so if they don't have a common name or you know enough biographical details you can find them anyway. If they've got a weird name like Elon Musk you just go name -> DOB in one step, if they're a Sarah Black maybe you need to know approximate age, birth name, rough part of the country where they were born. For super common names like John Smith you will need to know the mother's name, year and specific location of birth at which point yeah you're closer to just knowing their DoB anyway.

where are these public birth records?

https://www.freebmd.org.uk/

I'm a bit out of the loop and not familiar with the whole thing. Do you just submit a plausibly real name and any DOB that is older than 18 and a picture? Does the thing crosscheck the name + dob with a demographic database (does UK has any)?

It's all just random third party shit with zero government oversight. There's no national ID in the UK because even the mildest mention of a voluntary national ID scheme leads to gnashing of teeth and wailing about how it's fascist and a violation of our civil liberties and everyone is happy pissing about with driving licenses or passports or utility bills to prove who you are.

The Online Safety Act is completely stupid - it just requires "age verification". Various sites have outsourced this to various providers, most of which are American. The age verifiers in turn just look at the image, generally algorithmically without human intervention, and go "seems legit". There is no single national UK ID database that could be used for this purpose - everything is either partial, doesn't include photos (e.g. electoral roll), or isn't public (passport DB).

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