Show HN: NextDNS Adds "Bypass Age Verification"

Hacker News Discussion ↗

How the “bypass age verification” likely works

  • Users report a new per‑profile setting under “Bypass Age Verification” in the dashboard.
  • Several commenters infer it’s DNS-based geolocation spoofing:
    • Either abusing EDNS Client Subnet to make requests appear to originate from countries without age-check laws.
    • Or resolving certain domains to NextDNS-controlled IPs that act as SNI/TCP proxies and forward traffic to the real site while presenting a foreign source IP.
  • Others note this only works for protocols where SNI/Host is visible and may break with QUIC or TLS 1.3 + ECH.

Privacy, IDs, and surveillance concerns

  • Strong sentiment that uploading government IDs or selfies to porn or “adult content” sites is a serious privacy and identity-theft risk, especially once widely mandated.
  • Several see porn rules as a wedge to deanonymize all online speech and expand censorship far beyond porn (violence, drugs, politics, LGBTQ topics, etc.).
  • Some argue showing ID is what IDs are for and that fears are overblown; opponents counter that online “presenting” equals copying and long-term storage.

Law, regulation, and liability

  • Debate over how the UK Online Safety Act applies:
    • Some think promoting circumvention may be illegal for regulated platforms but likely not for a DNS provider.
    • Others warn that regulators and juries could still target a company helping minors bypass age laws and urge legal counsel.
  • View that UK/EU tech will be reused globally, so people outside those regions should care.

Effectiveness and cat‑and‑mouse

  • Many expect the technique to be temporary: sites can move checks from DNS/geolocation to account or IP-level logic.
  • Some users report the feature doesn’t yet work on major adult sites.
  • Still, many welcome it as resistance that might raise political pressure against ID mandates.

Parents, censorship, and control

  • Some use NextDNS specifically to block porn for kids and worry about ethos drift; others say giving users both blocking and bypass options is consistent with user choice.
  • Noted that real-world parental control is fragmented (home vs school vs friends’ devices).

NextDNS product reputation

  • A number of users praise the service and pricing, calling it simpler than Pi‑hole and great on iOS.
  • Others describe it as effectively abandoned: outdated blocklists, broken iOS app, latency issues, and unresponsive support; several switched to competitors or self-hosted DNS.