LogInA chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
Having grown up religiously watching bizarre pre-skibidi Garry's Mod content and still fondly remembering the masterpieces of RubberFruit, notna, and the like, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the beloved sandbox, associated by many exclusively with silly content, now has a more serious application and is being used to bypass the UK's draconian Online Safety Act – proof once again that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
Recently, a video has been making the rounds over on Twitter, showing someone using the facial model of Half-Life 2's Wallace Breen in Garry's Mod to circumvent Discord's face scan age verification, implemented due to the Online Safety Act. Despite being heavily distorted and looking more like the aforementioned RubberFruit's most iconic GMod monstrosity than an actual human being, the system still deemed it human enough to pass the verification, prompting a wave of hilarious comparisons in the comments:
Just before this video went viral, another Twitter user, @TheShootyGuy, showcased a similar use of the sandbox, sharing a screenshot of their friend successfully passing Reddit's face verification using a GMod model of what appears to be Zbigniew Stolarski from Arma III:
And prior to that, 21st-century Guy Fawkeses – who should probably be credited with the idea by virtue of being the first to realize the power of video games to combat censorship – were also using the model of Norman Reedus' Sam in Death Stranding's photo mode to bypass Discord's age verification:
If your pattern recognition works as it should, you've probably already realized that the models people use get progressively worse, leading some to question whether it's possible to pass face scans with models from the 1997 GoldenEye 007 video game.
Unfortunately, with all those examples going viral online, owners of sites like Discord and Reddit will likely see them and tighten their security measures in response. However, there's also a slim chance that the ability to pass as human using a decades-old game model isn't a bug, but a feature left out by developers who likely despise censorship as much as everyone else and deliberately made it so you don't have to share your own biometric data just to access a subreddit of all things. One can hope, right?
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