Daily Tech News 24 February 2026

• Is age verification a trap? Yes. (IEEE Spectrum)
  
  Online age verification intrinsically damages user privacy, while failing to work in both directions:

  False positives are common. Platforms identify as minors adults with youthful faces, or adults who are sharing family devices, or have otherwise unusual usage. They lock accounts, sometimes for days. False negatives also persist. Teenagers learn quickly how to evade checks by borrowing IDs, cycling accounts, or using VPNs, and posting old Altered Images and Mental As Anything videos to their blogs that they've been running continuously since... 2003.

  Okay, I'm maybe not so young that I need to worry about that problem.

  The appeal process itself creates new privacy risks. Platforms must store biometric data, ID images, and verification logs long enough to defend their decisions to regulators. So if an adult who is tired of submitting selfies to verify their age finally uploads an ID, the system must now secure that stored ID. Each retained record becomes a potential breach target.

  One more quote:

  The age-verification trap is not a glitch. It is what you get when regulators treat age enforcement as mandatory and privacy as optional.

  This is not an accident.
  
  
  
• But how big is the problem really? Surely nobody is out there putting terabytes of age-verification data in unprotected databases accessible to anyone on the internet oh that just happened again. (Tech Radar)
  
  IDMerit, an AI-powered age-verification service, had three billion user records exposed in an unprotected MongoDB database.
  
  Hey, at least they weren't running Elasticsearch.

• Not so fast on that last story, says Technowize. (Technowize)
  
  This was clearly the work of black-hearted Russian hackers trying to extort money from a wise and noble age verification service, says an article that reads exactly like an AI press release put out by a desperate company that has just lost control of three billion user records.
  
  And down at the bottom of that page: ID Verification powered by IDMERIT.
  
  Huh.
  
  A very similar article appears at The HR Digest and again, down at the bottom: Powered by IDMERIT. Written - or "written" - by Diana Coker, whose work also features at... Technowize.
  
  
  
• A user who just wanted to control his DJI Romo vacuum cleaner inadvertently found himself in complete control over a global army of 7000 robots. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And the servers at DJI that store all the user data.
  
  Because there was no security enabled at all.
  
  You know how you sometimes scoff at film scenarios where people don't take the most basic common-sense security measures and the thieves (or the good guys, depending) just make off with everything?
  
  Yeah. I've stopped scoffing.
  
  
  
• The new CEO of Microsoft Gaming - formerly in charge of AI Slop at Microsoft - says she has no tolerance for AI Slop. (Variety)
  
  I have stopped scoffing in that one particular scenario.
  
  
  
• Why AI can't read PDF files. (The Verge)
  
  Because PDF is closer to an image format than a document file. All the words you read are in there, but they might be broken into individual letters depending on the precise layout of the document and the program that generated it.
  
  Solution: Render the PDF to a proper static image format and then use OCR to read it back.
  
  Does that actually work?
  
  No. Well, mostly, but as is so often the case it makes the easy parts easier and the hard parts explode.
  
  
  
• AI news app Particle listens to podcasts so you don't have to. (Tech Crunch)
  
  I don't know. Couldn't I just... Not listen to the podcast?

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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