COPPAKIDS: blog of excuses kids make for getting around website age blocks
Boing Boing reader Arlo Rose points us to something beautiful:
It's a web site by someone that's a community manager at a very large website. They post the ridiculous pleas of kids under the legal age set forth by COPPA (thirteen). Pure hilarity.
"COPPAKIDS: Born too late. OMG YOU GUYS LET ME ON."
Update: Ryan Govostes sez,Just so you know, Arlo Rose isn't just a "Boing Boing reader". He invented Konfabulator, which started the whole widget fad that every search engine, operating system, and browser has duplicated. He's also notable for theming Mac OS (he write Kaleidoscope) and I think he might have worked at Apple on the design of Classic Mac OS but I don't recall entirely. His site is http://www.mouselabs.com.
the latest
latest episodes
That has to be a job that gives you lots of laughs all day long. :)
i wnat 2 comment but i'm only 12. i mean i put down my age as 12 - i'm 20 lol. pls let me comment on the story?
what IS the age limit here anyway?
At least children have an excuse.
"what IS the age limit here anyway?"
Do you mean in chronological years or emotional development?
Where's the blog for "I registered as being 43 years old, but am really 13, can you help please, or I'll tell everyone you suck!" [/PedoBear]
I mean the upper cut-off.
I thought COPPA was overturned?
I have a MySpace page that will only allow mail to be sent by people that are 18+.
You can pick out the age liars (almost always) by their writing.
I'm just wondering if their writing will auto-magically change on some magic birthday...
Me know what that like. Dont know how many times sign say "no shirt, no soul = no service".
c.f. OpenID, Microsoft CardSpace, Information Card, digital identity, Friend Of A Friend (FOAF)
I read a good lot of the kids' comments. Would it be a fair guess to say that they're mostly around 9 to 12 years old? In that case, it's quite shocking to see their level of education. A 12 year old should be able to string together a few proper sentences without spelling and grammatical errors. These are the people who are meant to work to pay off the debt this whole economic rescue plan is putting on their shoulders?
One kid had it right:
Why are liars rewarded with entry?
Who says these aren't legitimate requests anyway?
It's nearly a certainty that some people who are legitimately old enough accidentally picked the wrong birth year, web usability being the craphole that it currently is.
"retarded bitches" that shit cracked me up.
That one is my favorite.
On a related note, here is what pre-teens and teens wrote on NYCENET, a BBS that served public schools in the NYC region 20 years ago: http://www.kmoser.com/bbs/nycenet.php
Is our children learning?
In a few years these kids are going to feel very silly when they're shown how to clear the browser's cache and cookies. Of course, this knowledge will be gained for purposes relating to sites having more to do with poking than pokemon.
hey guys i herd that coppakids r retarded bitches y/n
Aw shit, I meant retarTed bitches.
modrn kidz spel lyk makez me feel lyk am reedin Riddley Walker
That's hillarious. It makes me kinda glad for age filtering. And it makes me feel old.
Netscape was dead by the time some of these kids were born.
It's amazing how many of these kids thought that threatening someone over the internet was going to get them a membership. And kind of sad too.
I suspect the ones who can spell are also smart enough to edit their age. I feel bad for the people who have to read this all day!
When i was twelve i had the brains to lie about my age online. I still do. Why would anyone ever give a website their real birthday?
And when i was 12 i had the ability to write in comprehensive sentences.
But whatever... stupid children deserve to fail.
Arlo Rose was indeed an Apple employee, working in the UI group as the "Theme" idea was produced (which thankfully never saw light of day in the shipping OS) -- he left after that concept was killed and moved on to help form Konfabulator.
Ah, the dark days of Mac OS 8.6.
Still running Kaleidoscope on my OS 9 machines. More for the ability to change the System font and size to something more readable than Espy, or whatever the hell Apple had as a default.
Also running Program Switcher and a bunch of Greg Landweber's little enhancements.
I'm all for youth having access to everything they should (snuff porn, maybe not, but a pokemon site, big deal), but I still laughed way too hard there. See, that's how easy it is to spot the kids too dumb to LIE.
(If my parents knew even 5% of the large amount of porn I browsed before I was legal, I think they'd have both had cardiac arrest by now. Or they'd have locked me up in the basement.)
You are almost the first one right on the ladies Superman costume.
The funniest part to me was the number of kids who claimed, "I walked away from the computer and then my stupid little brother/sister came in the room and entered their own age."
I saw at least four of them. I would have believed them if not for the fact that there are so many. It's practically a meme.